The marooned moment -

New York dreams -

a performance piece entitled 'You Are Apathetic' went down a storm at parties but got Hugo beaten up on more than one occassion at weddings -

the sad, sorry idea of a trench round a city -

briefly he heard a chanson; some trilling French male crooner lounging beyond the wicker chairs, his head moving inside and making him feel nauseous -

Waking daily around 4.30 these are the things that have entered my thoughts whilst I lie awake listening to the milkman on his round before dawn

Hairdressers and early drinkers share space –
In a thick red raincoat with the hood up a woman talks to Norman her invisible friend –
Some kids beat up a tramp who they nicknamed ‘Train Head’; they watched him, then followed him all the way down streets as he foraged in rubbish bins. Left him for dead.

The runic administration of potatoes –
Businessman in pink-striped suit with only one hand –
‘Best not look back’ another man says to a woman; said with affection but meant as an order, in reality he can’t wait to be rid of her –
The rise and fall of a drunken hand attempting to snatch my book from me; a hawkish cackle and then the man is gone –
Star skin –
Civil war –
My father’s world is an ordered one; so much so it often clashes with reality for he loves clarity and precision, anything else approximating chaos is there to make life difficult in his eyes; there is little room for the inexact, that would be a perceived failing of the world, there are rules that exist and they are ones that life is lived by and anything else just wouldn’t be correct –
Never seen so many young hooded face red eye freaks singing to iPod, iStreet than in this town -

The Book List – recently read:
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (pub. Picador)
I Am Alive And You Are Dead by Emmanuel Carrere (pub. Bloomsbury)
Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast (pub. Allen Lane)
We’re In Trouble by Christopher Coake (pub. Penguin)
If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor (pub.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (pub. Cannongate)
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (pub. Harvill)
Millennium People by J.G. Ballard (pub. Vintage)
Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi (pub. Faber & Faber)
Nature Cure by Richard Mabey (pub. Pimlico)
A Dead Man In Deptford by Anthony Burgess (pub. Vintage)
GB84 by David Peace (pub. Faber & Faber)
Snow by Orhan Pamuk (pub. Faber & Faber)
The Stand by Stephen King (pub. NEL)
On Literature by Umberto Eco (pub. Vintage)
Infidels by Andrew Wheatcroft (pub. Penguin)

Some visceral/visual mementos of the ex-capital of England (sunny Winchester):

Saturday morning – large splashes of dried vomit, like bomb blasts on the pavement, or some deliberate (?) mirror of the big bang scattering debris throughout;

Piles of freshly fallen apples, windfall, in the garden at Lyndon Road – small vivid green pyramids – others become forming the sweet brown rot that the birds love –

The crescent and bell-shaped red flowers blooming on the foliage outside my bedroom window, catching the early sun coming in from over the recently harvested fields –

The Polish lady with her high, perfect accent sat each morning in the coffee shop reading her paper, chatting amiably with other regulars –

My early vision of the stars, formative learning of them, happening – intrigued, awakenings – terms like planisphere, corona –

Then, perhaps through the long end of a telescope (?) I see the word ‘exile’ once again. What is that about? Am I ‘away’ from home? Yes, perhaps away from two homes even – the Lakes where the woman I love is, and Italy – artists in exile can be interesting: Carravaggio, Brecht – how did their situation reveal itself as an inspiration or influence? Allowing the critical eye to appear. The observer status, the outsider?

The world now is smaller – yet even so one can still feel akin to it rather than placed within.

The bent and buckled reflection of a blind man with his white stick walking down the High Street, along a cobbled alleyway, but shining back in refracted light via the pane of glass I spot him in.

Grounding in reality.

But with exile a certain freedom comes, an absolution from some responsibilities, fewer loyalties – an awareness of dubious patriotism, nationalism, or organization of any kind – on the flip side there is the curse of rootlessness, internal unrest, that persistent sense of motion, the call of the horizon – maybe it could be called something like ‘the pilgrimage complex’ –

Recall – the Martins gathering over Winchester Cathedral night before last; hundreds collecting before their migration, a cloud of activity. Golden backlight of sundown. The birds seem to be attempting to fly through the ancient mortar of the building itself, as if they’d be bale to pass directly through it to their destination -

Acceptance and exile – see, I have this nagging doubt the former is not meant to be my due and the latter is a primary state of being – even despite the phases of the moon being potential allies – I suspect my cross-cultural ancestry places me as an outsider, feels that way at times – an observer, seen as a stereotype –

To be an exile within one’s own life is an odd place to find yourself –

Others say you are getting too used to the comfort of failure. I ask, is there one? Theorists say there is, but that’s because they do not have the same legacy or this vicious stooge walking beside them, the shadow-man on their back always in the process of letting you know how shite he thinks you are – I’ve never been able to identify him but he governs many breaths -

6/9/06

Early morning, I saw Suze Rotolo (reincarnation?) - 4th time around walking some back street here and rolling a cigarette wearing brown smock dress, a butterfly pin in her hair – I wondered where Dylan was? And how come Suze remained as young as she was in the picture on his eponymous first album cover?

The Hong Kong Chinese lodger goes missing last evening – wanders off from the digs and no-one knows where she is – I guess she is feeling homesick and maybe bored already – thing is she did it again tonight - I think she's looking for a small piece of home - a Bodhi tree to sit under perhaps?

a suited man - business type - brown-sheen suit, clean patent shoes, Brylcream or Vittel applied hair, lightly tanned - striding up Winchester High Street with a small leather trunk on wheels, a bit battered, spray painted with gold stars and crescent moons like a magicians gown in kid's books - who is he? why does he have that case? where is he going?

he notes the fact that my acclimatization to recent cooler northern climes means I am wandering around down here in just my shirt sleeves, feeling warmer than others who complain of the cold -

he smiles, winks and crosses at a red light

4/9/06

Throwing thoughts – now I’m a long way from home; loved one a day away – pigeons cry the morning in (for help?) outside my window – the eradication of doubt and the day has begun – our tired landlady is up already, starting her labours: breakfast ready, curtains pulled all round the house – I am trying to find a routine but I am out of place – the harvest is in and we are risible on demand – looking homeward to:

adventures on the road and the sweet caesura of Caerlaverock where time stood still for 24 hours – and Watendlath with it’s heavy storm water churning the becks and filling cascades all the way down to the swelling river hundreds of feet below. Surely a package of bliss for the overwhelmed?

The icon rocks on his wedding day in the desert – his marriage is to a similar being; the sun and moon combined – and it is a wedding of words and shared beliefs, a laying down of history and moments of found philosophy before the punchline – by the end of the ‘service’ he is a changed man, but even that is nothing new –

meanwhile some damn yankee fool wants to build an elevator shaft to the stars -

- - - - - -

The Independent gives us theses figures under the headline ‘The war on terror, five years on’:

2001 Al-Qaida (?) attacks on WTC kill 2819. US unleashes ‘war on terror’.
2006 No deaths from terrorism within US since. Worldwide, up to 72,265 have died. UK ‘fighting homegrown’ terrorism. Bombers kill 52 in London, July 2005. In Iraq 41,639 estimated dead since US backed coalition invades in 2003.

The list goes on.

What was I saying about some damn yankee fool?

3/9/06

Leaving Keswick – double rainbow at road’s edge to Penrith station appearing to chase the bus I’m in – then the sun breaks through the rain torrents and the thing fades –

She wears gold lame ankle boots, tight jeans and a baseball cap – he is in a pale blue shell-suit – they chain smoke Camels –

The first announcement at the station is for the Glasgow train, stopping at Carlisle, Lockerbie and on to Glasgow – in a Sunday supplement there is an essay on a Saudi terrorist, one of the pilots of one of the jets that destroyed the World Trade Centre – the face in a printed in day-glo yellow and black stares back preserved for all time – How come the one is more famous than the many?

Another woman, younger than the first, stretches and rolls her head to relieve stress; she is pretty flagrant with her exercising there on the platform, revealing her midriff. I almost expect her to encourage the rest of us around her to start pumping the air with a sequence of aerobics – but lame boot woman lights up another fag and butts it up with the man, one drag each -

The Loft – a night club in the centre of a Cumbrian frontier small-town, tourist magnet for the Western Lakes – tonight, up on the mezzanine, DJ Frank Clapp is, as always, in his Perspex-shroud music booth – most of which is a mock nod to the ancestry of his job, a turntable that doesn’t work, headphones he never uses – the whole playlist now copied to a laptop snuck away in the corner; with one click he can let the whole evening run without lifting a finger further (unless its Friday or Saturday when he offers up the odd request slot, at which point he will have to trace tracks with the cursor and double click after a brief announcement of name and reason for celebration or didicatee, who will of course whoop it up down below on the dance-floor) –

Tonight however, Frank will see something that will open his weary eyes, something he never thought imaginable here in this backwater – this hill prison – but that’ll come later, for now let’s take a look at Frank’s home -

Opposite his booth, on the far wall, next to the (tonight unopened) lounge bar and above the leather smooth sofa where the VIPs (if ever they come) get first choice, is the huge picture of naked Ophelia (or as bouncer Mickey Mick calls her ‘I’d feel ya’) – it’s a gilded frame photograph blown up to 6x5 of an auburn tressed sylph, lying on her back, breasts exposed and partially garlanded with laurel leaves, one leg bent to just hide her pussy and her face turned slightly to the right where her parted lips almost kiss her own fingertips in a kind of pseudo-orgasmic moan – all this through a soft-porn soft-focus fog – it’s the only picture on any wall (there are two plasma screens, one next to Frank’s booth, the other (bizarrely) over the podium at the dark edge of the dance floor) –

Our Ophelia was once the girlfriend of ex-club owner Max Silloth – both killed themselves in a suicide pact by jumping off Ladies Edge and breaking almost every bone in their beautiful bodies on the way down – the police told local reporters that when they found them they ‘looked like puppets who’d had the strings cut’- Max had made it fundamentally clear in both a letter to all his staff and in his will that he wanted Ophelia to stay on the wall and she had asked the same in her own missive – found, incidentally, with them at the bottom of the Edge – this was meant to be seen as a symbol of her eternal beauty and a triumph of goodness over evil, at least that was how Max had put it -