Monday 26 October 2009

Visit

Many times it had been like that and I don’t know why. I’m munching around the outskirts and these various indentations that keep tripping me up. No it was not always that way for it to go. Because least-ways first the foot ways and it not leaning no other way, went a way forward and not exactly stopping but I met a bench. I sat down. Comfort. It was comfortable ‘gainst my back, head against the board. I could afford to lean back and out there in the sunshine it was nobody’s business but mine and nobody’s in particular so I lay down. Head against the board. And I stayed there. And creatures twinkling before my eyes. And I had to turn the other cheek. But I didn’t mind. No not at all. And the next day I came back, and again and again.

It kept existing there for me. I can’t tell why. It’s maybe something to do with the perambulator where shovel loads of dirt kept arriving and what could I do? I had to keep on sorting. To remove the dust from the rubble, the dirt from the straw. The tiny filaments of glass rubbed into a powder in the water-glands between the crinkling of my fingers making some kind of a delicious soup. So that was my job. And I did it well. At least that is what I am told by the bright-eyed passengers that cajole a lift off me and have a bowl or two. In the oven it came out fine and all warmed up whenever it got to be made even earlier in the day. So we bit into the soup and ground down too what had not already gone that way.

Because processes of heat make for leisure time. So we just stir, stir, stir and yes it all seemed to kind of mush together. But don’t take your eyes off of it. No don’t do that. Because the encrustations arrive from underneath and then you’re in trouble. So I could stir, stir, stir see and it was a torpedo of an exhibition rightly placed for me and the others who became the helpers that if truth be told offered me the helping hand that I could not have done it all alone.

Going home was a drag after the mixing up of all the stuff of the coming together. So we hung around and burnt stuff scorching the grass like the bald patch on so many people these days so that it got to be like the right kind of thing to do to even up the space between ground and sky.

Afterwards there were plenty nails that fell out the wood once it crinkled to powder itself from the very extent of that heat, chasing away the rain. And bouncing it back up into a sizzle. The nails that dropped out were rusty and brown stuff met with the finger when I rubbed it. I licked my finger and that was another kind of ingredient that I discovered. Can you imagine the surprise when it got dark?

And the mist making the rust had gone by the morning. Instead there was a fence maybe taller than you on top of me but it was not wobbling down. Never to fall that way because of the sticks made of metal were plunged deep into the earth. And thinking about it there had arrived many holes before. We had lost things in the holes, even got legs stuck and twisted in these holes. But the holes didn’t give in. They had been made by some serious minded people and they meant a business which then arrived in the form of the metal sticks.

Simply put and simply this way we were on the wrong side. We had parted the area in which they had put the sticks up under cover of darkness and there was no going back. I looked back through to where it was still that place and maybe some of the rusting nails that we had put there in the middle of the scorched earth were still there. We had forgotten to utilize everything to the best of our ability because we thought we had the time. But there was none left. It was not on our side. And we had given up and the fence was put up. And there was no more meetings and conversations and they said the fence was the final word. And we never went back, well I did go back but there was nothing much to see except for more greenery poking out between the sticks tickling my nostrils. And the bench was only partially visible in the middle of all that. And that is when it happened; and I sneezed. And I heard footsteps running, yes I did. And I ran.

Base

Two voices are bantering I think over at the other side of the lake. But no they are actually coming from high up above the lake. This I know because I see the orange reflector jacket high up above at the very top of the pylon that the man is very gradually descending. Towards the bottom of the pylon it seperates out into four splayed legs set far apart and sunk deep into the mud spanning right across a wide stretch of water.
I lose sight of the man where the trunk of the pylon seperates out. Even where he flickers in and out of view I miss him and his bit by bit progress and in the end I never locate which leg he is coming down. I continue to hear the voices for some time.

Later, on the train there's a girl in a light grey rain-coat. Her hands are plunged into her pockets at either side of her as she sits with legs crossed and raised up onto the seat opposite. She flaps open and closed the grey folds of the coat she is wearing to reveal a polka dotted T.shirt of many colours. She is talking across to her father who sits silently over on the other side facing the direction that the train is going in and glancing out the window. She is talking in searing crescendos that break apart into laughter which suddenly cut short. There is very little response, the man appearing monosylable and retreating further into himself as his daughter rises in tone. She is talking about where she sleeps on a metal-framed bed in a dormitary style room. About being marked down and only getting one merit unstead of five because she missed one day even though she is a good girl in class. She says, "One day, dad. I only missed one day". She is anxious as she lounges casually letting the grey coat flap open then drawing it around her body tightly and shivering. Her face is open, plastic, maleable and startled. Her father admonishes her for missing a day of school. She seizes at the response, draws it out, tests it until it too fades and retreats. She had wanted to leave the train one stop earlier to meet someone her father knew whom she hadn't yet met. His voice quickens when she mentions that name so that she knows the power of that word and uses it again and again. Until in the end the power fades and that dies.

In the end they didn't get off. The train rolled on. They leave the carriage and go onto the platform at the next stop. I notice as they go up the steps that the girl is leaning heavily on one side so that she needs to hold on to the railing. Her shoulder and upper back are rigid raised towards her ear as if caught and flattened in a vice. Her father walks next to her on her good side.

Later at another platform where I wait endlessly through anouncements and lists of train destinations which do not apply to me, amidst the crowd that spills out of the train but immediately seperates out, is a young man that many people rinse through before parting.

He is staking out the ground far ahead with a stick that is always planted at an angle. He leans into the stick and then releases one leg at a time rolling his hips through a circuit in order to meet with it. One hand alone wraps around the top-most curve of this stick so that his entire palm is in close contact with its` uneven wood. With the forefinger pressed so hard against the wood that it actually bends backwards his little finger strays outwards entirely on it`s own, tracing the air in parallel excursion that adds further breadth to his claimed passage. His other arm is loose and rolls inwards and outwards at the joint of the shoulder in free motion. In doing so it is continuously opening the chest, increasing his breathing capacity. That compensates for the compromised breathing on the other side. Everything is contained and under pressure here because of his need to create a rigid traction between hand and stick and along the length of his arm, down the outer perimeter of the body to the foot that plants firmly into the ground then pulls up as if from mud before locking down once again.

The man wears a luminous blue jumper over his upper body. It is leant forward so that the centre of gravity is in an intended space just past the blue. Between a falling and a catching of that step the body runs towards the planted stick up ahead forcing an automatic swing and jump out of every placement. There is the staked out area for his manoevre which is entirely that of action. Every perterbation is thrown into play drifting beyond all seperate remittance in any one step. Unstead it becomes a hesitant severance. As something already escaped from itself it is only then recollected in a retrieval that is found in the bounce back up. The brightness grows. The play is there entirely in the jolts and stoppages of timed catchments that are almost always on the verge of being too late. There is spectacular travel in that timing and the man knows it.  He is no longer caught in each moment of self-containement but stretches out between various instances swerving into what he is not yet at, wrenching out of what he once was, in a slurr that possesses him.

He crosses the raised foot bridge over the tracks. A woman on the opposite platform holds a small table upside down to her chest as the train pulls in. Once the train pulls out most of the figures on the platform have been swept away and so has she. I am startled by her absence. Some time later I catch sight of the man in the luminous jumper who has just descended the stairs and is making his way in a circular motion, in the opposite direction against a crowd already forming across the tracks.

Many days later I have the rhythm of his movement playing out still in my body and thoughts.It seems to organise my own journey and the on-off premise between aggravation and loss of consciousness that I veer in and out of.

Earlier at the lake across the wooden make-shift bridge and past the notice pinned on the tree that read "Warning, Private Fishery. No Tresspassing by order of the Metropolitan Police" I stood for some time at the furthest extreme of the mud bank looking out across the water in the line of the sun interupted by thin clouds and the bright streaks across the water where a duck too far away to be visible carves a trail. I moved my arms around  trying to loosen my shoulder, relieve the tight sinews in my neck and face. Feeling like I was getting ill in any case and trying to ward off the inevitable in the soft light of the afternoon sun. Then just before darkness I made my way back across the wooden bridge and to the train station where I waited for a train to take me back towards London.

A flock of birds fly past against the flow of the train as it pulls out just after we have boarded.

Friday 16 October 2009

Over the edge

At the time I didn't realise how ill I had become. It was a slow process by degrees. And even those small shifts created a vanishing aspect between the joints. I no longer articulated in the same way as I supposed others did, in which a memory compares one phase with another and draws conclusions. The park had become my everything; a bowl in which small figures rose and fell, coming over a mound and disapearing over the edge of the hill down that stark descent towards the canal at the side of which I used to work in a gated Special Needs children's project. Here you had to ring the bell to be let in or out, though one time a crazy man climbed over, bare-footed, saying he was looking for his shoes, then made strange hieroglyphics on the wall in the corridor from the wet mud covering his hands. He sat in the office and it was dark outside in the park along the canal and up the sharply ascending hill. The children had gone home but the staff were there. Even my superiors were silent and nervous, sureptitiously trying to dial for the police. I remember that I was able to talk to the man and he struck me as a sensitive man. Months later I had lost my job after trying to siphon off the best workers from the Special Needs children's club for my own project up the hill. That project has now closed.

From where I sit there is only the patterns of the small mounds that cut in from one another, allowing the eye to drift freely. After the descent, trains seem to collide, absorb one another and then part. There is a slight breeze and the leaves of the mature trees are already rattling in the early autummn. Warmth comes from the direct sun, then is replaced by a sudden cool breeze as if from a different level of the stratosphere suddenly plunged down. Over in the distance is the white house and on the flat lawn in front is an arrangement of white plastic chairs and tables looped by a low level metal fence where the the ends are bent over and woven back through one another and which has a small child-high gate that swings open and closed at one end whenever anyone passes through it.

I am perfectly still trying to absorb the sun for one last time or however many times are left before the warmth is drained from the light. My eyes are closed and I seem to be far back from the face which the sun like on any other surface, is hitting. I need to give it some time for the effects to be absorbed. It is altogether more evasive and more easily scared away than in summer.

That scattering in itself seems to become a way of noticing and over time because I am not going anywhere, it creates it's own kind of arangement of which I am not directlly the author of. It is more like the intermittant sun that passes over me, is enveloped by a cloud, then re-inserts itself to strike a different aspect activating first this portion than that creating it's own jointing in the on-off of this continual surfacing and dismissal.
How to follow it? Simply by remaining still and waiting to be enlivened or not. And so, very gradually I begin to recover.

Into the park following at first the path, a man introduces a large object. There are actually at least two objects but the way he is pulling them over the ground, heaped on to the wooden trolley with a rope looped around one end of the wood base then around his lower trunk, they are treated as one. A sizeable weight that needs shifting. On the cart there is an empty Pepsi dispensing machine with a blue background in speckled lighter and darker shades that give the affect of bubbles. The Pepsi logo is written upside down upon this background in red. On top of this but sliding at an angle so that one end nearly touches the pavement is another dispenser this one in yellow whose logo because it faces upwards, is not at first clear to me. Then in the progress of time I see that it says Shwepps. Gradually as the man hauls and tugs his load, leaning far backwards against it's weight so that only the heels of his shoes are on the ground and if the taught rope should break it would send him with practically no distance to go flat on his back, the vehichle moves.
I feel the strain down his neck, across his shoulders, along his back, buttocks, calves and ankles. It is apparent in his thighs, stomach muscles, groin and the veins on the front of his neck which are under strain down either side of his red exposed gullet. The back of his head is leant far back so that the grey tangled hair pulls off his face and snakes downward at times blacker where it is winding in and around itself, appearing moist, and at times lighter, the grey-fly away tufts of an older man.

I have never heard this man speak a word though he is hauling around goods from street to street on a daily basis and lives in a ramshuckle house one street from mine, the last series before the park, the marshes, the canal. There's a large pine tree beside his house whose branches are beginning to poke into the windows where the glass is smashed, the longer branches beginning to lean down on the top of the roof where tiles are dislodged and scattering.

The man is always walking backwards his back covered in sweat, his jeans halfway down his backside, dirt-covered pants digging into his flesh at the waist-line creating a red ribbon. On his upper body he has a mass of fragmented garments that compensate and stand-in for one another. Sometimes it is simply a mass of criss-crossing threads that he himself seems to have woven as a loose covering like a Cat's-Cradle around his tall and bony frame. He pauses often and at such times seems endlessly still because he neither gazes out nor in but simply waits for the exhuastion to take on a more workeable beat as his hard upper back heaves up and down. So he remains there until again he sets the momentum going and reverts to this pulling which he helps along by taking up the slack of the rope between the trolley and his trunk yanking it now and again, preventing the rope from chisseling into his waist as he turns just enough his two clenched hands inwards simultanously, so as to twist the rope around his hand joints. They cross at the lower width of his wrists revealing through that calculated double flexion the whiter undersides of his fleshy lower arms where his tattered jumper cuts out. The veins are blue and pumped up now all the way along from his wrists to his elbows. This part of him is the part where his technique is fully engaged and there is more expression, more placement of his on-going thought processes right here than in his face that is cast down in contrast to this opening out gesture that he performs with his two arms.

___

To begin again. I hear the rattle of the cart-wheels against the path. It does not go past me but over off in the corner at the far side by the hedgerow. No sooner do I look up than I notice the colours rising above the hedgerow, shifting. I do not see the man who blends in with the background and is not moving fast enough for me to notice a mis-match. In any case this mass of greenery is also moving. Being pushed and pulled this way and that, constantly re-aranged by the gusts of wind. That is nothing more really than an on-off breeze.

The sound cuts out. That is when I can pinpoint the vehicle. When again it starts up I see and recognise the man. No sooner have I done that and it stops again. I get used to it being stopped and gradually it fades out and that is when I skirt the low-level fencing where I detect another movement. The gate has just been swung open so that a small blond-haired child with scruffy hair has pushed his way through the opening on the other side of which there are the tables and chairs filled on this one last good day with people, children, prams and coloured balls, all crowded in amongst the food, the cups, the drinks.

Cutlery rattles and catches on the wind to reach even where I sit. The child who is wearing a pulled down over-stretchd blue sweat-shirt is probaby about five or six. He lurches one way while also seeming to gesture with his two arms the other way. That creates an opening in the stilted affect to any motion that allows it to remain even when it has gone. There's a kind of double-run. Something like seizure that than out of this hesitation and the missed moment of that vaccum, catapults action at incredible speed. The boy is being thrown around by the contradictions of his own body which at one moment wavers and at the next moment flies.
The man's cart starts up again, a sudden jerkiness that seizes and locks his back as a single surface and roots and twists the nerve muscles in the back of the neck. Then the thing is rolling according to it's own momentum. And the man and his part in it again fall out of significance. The colours-blue and yellow, the top colour slanted like a roof, begin to disaperar at first in part behind the growth then altogether. There is a pause and a suspension. This is filled, in part replaced, by the boys` lolliping manoeveres out into the middle of the field where he sinks behind a dip, rises again then sinks once more.

The boy then angles on to the weighed down almost crippled branches of a tree which is sprawling horizontally, shadowing the grass just at the point by the path where the man pulling the trolly a moment before disappeared. The boy begins to press down his feet to either side of the tree so that the entire trunk begins to move. All the leaves on that part of the tree are set in motion. He springs it up and down hard then as the momentum eases off, lies flat-wise on his chest against the bark of the tree, lulled for a moment by the movements he has set in motion that are gradually subsiding. I lose attention at the time when the tree motions smoothe out and the jolts becomes the more even swaying of the entire tree with the weight of the boy, length-wise, simply an add-on at a natural curve in the base of the tree.

I`m wondering when the colours will re-emerge. I`m trying to imagine how far along they are, cossetted in the folliage. Then just in front of the white house, on the path that travels inbetween that building and the small flat area where the tables and chairs are placed, the whole frame of the cart with it's load are suddenly visible. No one looks up from the chairs and tables many of whom have their back to the path. Then it is past and again only glinting through in part between cut-back foliage and incomplete hedgerows. There's an unevennness to the progress as the cart keeps grinding to a halt.

Then something unusual happens and unstead of the cart continuing along the path that rings around the small pond and eventually leads out to the main street, the man- though this is difficult-  pulls the cart across a final plateau which suddenly stops where seats with dense hedgerows grown as cover to wind turbulance are dotted at intervals before the descent; towards the canal, the marshes.

It is a lengthy process pulling the two soft drinks containers across that lawn which I happen to know is water-logged in the middle.

There is  a small dog that is ceaselessly running around the park it's legs and the lower half of it's short body thick with mud. It appears to have a routine because intermitantly it appears round from behind a tree, is swept past my bench to another tree which it circles, chasing squirrels before being eclipsed behind a mound or the shrubbery beside a path once again.

A boy with his dad bounces a ball hard against the stone path down over towards the benches with thick hedges. They come up along the path from the steep descent so as to suddenly appear. Each time the boy bounces the ball so that it jumps up high above his head his father snatches it out of the air then slams the ball down again and the boy runs ahead and catches it on the way back down for the second time or even several bounces later along the path where the father lags behind. As the father catches up, the boy whacks the ball against the pavement once again. Sometimes they both grab it from one another out of turn so that their steps weave in and out of one another even when they only snatch air in a state of seperation, catch up and clash. One thing always replaces another in this constant shuffling of elements.There is something spacious to their progress, along the path, in and out of step.

The man with the cart is travelling against the grain in which they move cutting over that lawn around which the path  loops. He pulls and stops. Pulls and stops. Finally the man is there at the edge of the descent and  having returned the cart to the path for one instance I see the containers outlined against the horizon, the slant of the yellow Shwepps dispenser suddenly catching the sun and making me blink. Then the angle changes and the colour fades out of the frame. It is a slow outline that I continue to watch until I am actually unsure wheter I am watching it or watching the space which it used to fill. But then suddenly like a last stuck piece that is suddenly sucked down a drain, there apears a marginal increase in glare just where the form has been sucked below the level of the horizen. There is this actual visceral sensation of a sudden absence which is known in that contrast- a kind of sudden exractor of substance in one simultaneous widening out.

The boy with blonde hair is circling the outer perimeter of the low-lying black fence in counter-direction to before. His finger runs along the looped top-end of the brocade work.  He slows. Stops. Then continues to the other end opposite to that tree he had once sat on.

The father and son with the ball get around to the part of the path just beyond the bench where I sit. Here at this point where the path drops off, the boy places the ball on the pavement and suddenly lets go.
It rolls away just as the father runs to catch up.

The small dirty dog which I know belongs to a woman with neat dyed fair hair stylishly layered whom I have not seen for many days and who often comes to the park to meet with elderly dog-owners continues to circle madly unable to stop even when I call  it.

Friday 9 October 2009

The growth of things

The lace curtains are shifting - billowing in and sucking back out again so that they intermittantly, like the drawing of breath, stick to the pains of glass. All this in an unhurried way. It is not of the human hand. But where is the opening for that through-breeze? The top and bottom of each window on this second floor balconied flat, one of several that I can see from the metal cold black bench across the street where I sit in the sunlight, is level to the upper and to the lower beading. I continue to fix my attention to the sway and patterning of the curtain. I want to follow it for some time to see what it is about and really I have no choice because it has got to be that I must know what is making the curtain shift. It is strange, soothing and mesmerising after my long walk.

Just before coming here I had turned a corner having finally got past a dawdling group with a miniature brown dog with three legs hopping and counteracting a tendency to fall over into the road by leaning heavily towards the other side. That side is the side nearest to the wall of  the building where one back leg is missing and which is therefore much lighter and so apt to flip up. Not even a stub is there. What remained is the curvature of the back end of the small furry dog as if it had been rounded off as a carpenter rounds off the edge of a tabletop.

After getting past them and turning a corner where a curved glass window follows the curvature of the street to display period furniture inside the shop, I sit down outside on a fabric dipped chair which has been put there especially. I am aware that there is a well dresssed man in a dark suit inside the shop behind a wooden desk on the phone. I have been carrying shoes in a bag for a long while. I wait; remain where I am as the dawdling group followed by the three legged dog catch up and cross the road at the corner. Then I go into the shop- because I feel a compulsion to-  and it is full of polished stained oak cabinets and curved metal braided setteees with puff leather covers punched and stretched with leather buttons rivetted into place intermittantly. The prices are phenomenal running into thousands. The man is still on the phone, feighning absorbtion. I go out and cross the road over to the bench in the sunshine which is a small enclave nestled into a small fenced and gated square, overflowing with growth. It is as if the area where that bench sits on the pavement side has been cut out and pruned away from the overwhelming growth which has simply been corralled into a slightly smaller area at that point, squeezed in and barricaded there. It is pushing against the outer perimeters now. There is no more give way.

A rotound  man with a mass of dark hair on his chest and shoulders and a large belly completely exposed which is slightly glowing and looks tender, comes out on to one of  the verandas. He is holding a can of beer. I am distracted for a moment from looking at the billowing curtains and following their actions There are many plants climbing up the walls on his veranda all by now with large rubbery leaves and  thick rope-like stalks growing out of giant pots and empty catering tins poking through the frames of the metal brocade work on the veranda railing. He looks both across the road to where I sit and down into the street directly below which is really not that far from him so that people could probably actually smell his breath or perspiration if the wind was travelling in the right direction. Down below in the street running along the length of the balconies people are walking past with bunches of colourful flowers some held upright in front of them like torch beacons and some who are swinging them back and forth from the stems and the scrunched in plastic and paper wrapping like an umbrella loosely folded. Others have them slung over their shoulders as if it were meat brought from the kill. The rotound bald man addresses everyone who passes as he slugs his beer. Some look up, smile, pass a word or two -though two chinese women particulary are quite alarmed and do not now what is expected of them- others simply keep going with a steady stride, never wavering. Certainly not looking. He seems to stand back and witness this, half waving them on with a flick of the wrist that holds the beer can.

Now I see what is making that curtain move in that flat, adjacent to the veranda of the balding man; there's a tiny gap between the upper and lower window panes at first unnoticeable, where they would usually meet in the middle. I do not understand how that gap is ever closed without then creating a compensatory draft at top or bottom. I take out one of my shoes from the bag and turn it over in my hand. A good shoe if a little large. One shoe is always bound to be too large or too small because of a discrepancy in foot size that I have to live with. I put the shoe back in the bag and get up reluctantly. I pass the straight back of a sleek grey cat sitting on its hind legs with it's head bolt upright on top of its erect spine, vertebra on top of vertebra, staring into the piles of undergrowth at the other side of the locked gate. When I move it leaps into that undergrowth between the the metal struts and ceases to be there without missing a beat.

I am walking up the street on the other side of the road from the flats with the verandas and the road seems impossibly long. I am dragging my feet. I am walking in the shadow, passing more people now hurrying in the opposite direction with cut flowers. I feel out of sync. And there is something of the sense of dread in relation to the direction I am taking. I am not wanting to go that way but I am going that way. The numbers of people are thickening. The flowers linger in my view. They are hiding faces, standing in for them. Cutting out large sections of the body which simply are disapearing behind the displays. People are triumphant. They are brandishing their flowers before them, clearing the way with them. Sitting on walls with them. Who would crush flowers? They are wearing them against their chest, heaving bossoms and chest cavities with the  weight and sheer effort of keeping the flowers from crushing one anther; of crushing them. The flowers are rising and sinking with every breath, snatching away the free Co2 from their new hosts. I`m at the begining of the market and it is only going to get worse. I have the feeling that the colours will  be particulary painful today. Right away everything I have just explained doubles and redoubles in thickness. There is a slow motion parade of people in both directions rinsing through one another with elbows and smiles. The stall holders are holding forth their pitches, voices rising and careening like a navigational alarm which pops a figure out of a certain lingering outside of their sphere of operation with an exalted siren sound coming between piped lips that only offers closure like the descent from an abyss when that figure has beeen nudged and primed by this remote vocal sensore into the range of their own stall. Everything is on offer right now. "All that for a fiver". Stalks are slammed and wedged together in one fist then another portion unplugged from the one of many neck to neck brimming vases. Pink pressing in on pink- petals deformed from one another, folded like toilet paper. Rows and rows of plastic high rise pots each with a growth farmed into a simultaneous existance of exactly so high with no recorder information on where it will go next. A woman looks at the stallholder with a bunch of blooming rhodedendrums in every colour imaginable including sea blue, violet and deep sea blue-black at least three months past the time when they should be all dead. Here they are today punched out into mute life- startled and startling- aggresively alive, brushed back and forwards under the noses of the same dazed passers-by as they go one way and then the other way. I am ricochetting from one colour to another, each colour magnified by the sheer excess in numbers. Getting away from one means having to rest in another until I have to get away from that one. So it goes on. They all start to merge in on one another and that's when I know I'm in real difficulty because they appear to be yelping like mad dogs. People are carting around armfulls, forgetting to hold on to loved ones, children, essential groceries. Forging ahead; driven. The crackwhip voices of the stall holders coax and bend that luxurious swath of bodies who are serving the flowers now- overwhelmed by the excess of smell that masks and replaces their own slightly salty smell, making everyone disorientated and apt to bouts of amnesia where they forget the people they know and love. These are heady days and everyone is glorified on this Sunday by these sun adornments. I would like a part of this fierce finger up to the recession by buying something that strictly speaking you don't need (though it may need you) but I can't do it. For one thing the boots in the bag are too heavy and the intoxication is already making me stare blankly into each flower with no ability to speak or formulate requests. That would be o.k because the stall-holders are good at reading between the lines and pressing bunches in on the nooks and crannies of people. But they can sense that I`m in no position to reach for my purse. Deal with money. So they don't even try. A couple pass a stall where I am stopped, not actively persuing choices. More simply given up on the act of walking. "We could buy the tulips for the bathroom. Let's do it . Let's do it now. We can come back and do it." I pass a little further down the market, stop as the crowd thickens to a standstill, and turn around. I walk back through and out, passing the stall and noticing the tulips that the couple were eyeing have gone. I feel a failure not having got anything but I`m already walking too far for there to be anything much to get. Unstead I go into a crockery shop and on a whim buy four white bowls, then four of the same in a smaller size. Everything is loaded down, pulling me down whereas everyone around has these heavy bunches of flowers which leap upwards, the colours giving the impression of vacating the very framework of that plant. There is a certain drugginess to the whole event. I slope off down the road, evicted from the festival. A spoil-sport.

On my way down the road which I travel along with despondancy I pass again the flats. On one veranda, abit further down from where I was sitting earlier opposite the place with billowing curtains, I look up at a flat swathed in vegetation with small tentacles suckering directly in to the brick work and whole rooting systems travelling along the innard grooves where the heavily indented concrete between bricks has created small underhangs between each layering of brick-work. It seems possible too that the root endings and suckers are actually operating like tools to lever away fragments of putty first by draining off excess liquid and then, as the crumbling begins, edging in to a more and more contained location. Clever plants. In the next door veranda there are pots of dry earth with shrivelled stalks sticking up and some spindly leaves turned to carbon.

Again I pass by the rotound balding man still on the balcony. He nods to me with his can and says, I saw you across the road earlier sitting there on that bench but you were too far away to talk to. His belly is wobbling above his tightened trousers and it's then I notice that the hair on his chest grows powerfully around each nipple outwards and in opposite whirlpools. He beams down at me from head to toe. Suddenly I feel a whole lot better.
____


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Thursday 8 October 2009

Headhunter

I chain the bike to the metal railings on the other side of the concrete slope. The slope leads to a door-way fastened shut upon which black sacs spilling their contents - like sick- create wet patches. These have partly been absorbed into the concrete, leakeng out over the floor surface, creating dark areas. I smell the rubbish and food on the other side of the ramp where I am in the already chilling autumn air. It is the first day that I've worn my coat. A japanese woman stands outside a doorway partially bending down at the other end of the terrace, hesitating and glancing before re-crossing her threshold. The ramp is not steep enough for those bags to topple over but they are clearly tilting; unstable in their tendency to slide down towards the door.

I go inside the thick set doors on my side of the ramp which are flung open into a carpetted interior which picks up and holds smells of human bodies. I am entering the doors of the Salvation Army, a dark red-brick sixties building on a single level where the same red-brick is apparent on the outside and the inside. Only the inner red-brick is of a darker hue- the bricks are polished or maybe varnished, not chalky. I enter through another door off from the reception area with reinforced glass pannelled doors that swing open and closed when I push them. People sit around in groups of twos and threes on low level fabric soft chairs with tilted backs and no arm rest. Otherwise they sit around small wooden tables of pale wood on kitchen chairs around cups of tea and sandwiches.

I am heading to the display at the back of the hall where on dark fabric brown boards, made from the same material as the chairs, there is a photo exhibition underway. It is a leap of colour that makes it hard to get close to. Magnified insects and the internal apparatus of flowers force a distance. Each colour for the petals, stamen, pollen particles, has been summoned and implemented from a range of options, than ratchetted up by many degrees until it burns the thoat. I choke away and veer towards the book-rack, where a small stout woman with static features is holding the hand of a much taller woman. Because of their height difference they are involved with different shelves of the book rack. I go to the corner rack that sticks out at a right angle along the turn of the wall. There is a paper sign that is attached to one shelf so that it actually inhibits the view of the first few books. It reads Paperbacks, 30p against that stark white background of  standard white printer paper.

I actually have to peer behind the piece of paper in order to read the titles of the first few books and just as I am reading off the first one, I hear the tall woman say "Headhunters". At the same moment I am reading the word Headhunters as I look at the book cover behind the printer paper sign. It doesn't make sense that the tall woman could see past the piece of paper to the title. Does she have special vision?  But no, she is not even looking in that direction or showing an interest here but is unstead passing down a book she has lifted from the higher shelf so that it is in eye-view of the smaller stouter woman who never says a word.

Moments later the tall woman slots the book back into the shelving and, still holding the hand of the short woman, they go. I break off from my area and go over to the high shelf where I think that book was returned to. After scanning back and forth I read on the cover of a book, Headhunter. The author is different and the lay-out is not the same. I pick up another book called breathe- a nighmare scenario where the air facility of a large corporation is infected and making everyone go mad.

After buying the book at the counter by the door for 50p I go back into the hallway and peer through the reinforced glass doors into another room. This is the main hall where stacks and stacks of chairs are put on top of one another along the red brick wall onto which has been stapled a small cross.

In the middle of the hallway, on a square of mats that are pieced to gether end to end and side by side, there are an array of brightly coloured soft foam, plastic units  of varying shapes and sizes. They too can be pressed into a correspondance so that bridges, walkways, doorways and seats are all possible fabrications. There are also a few hard plastic objects cast into the shape of a duck, a frog and one which is a small slide and ladder in lime green. These miniature pieces crowd in on one another  in the small defined centre-space. The lights are not on in the hall and what light enters, enters from the door reinforced with metal ribbing every inch or two and from the large curved and clear glass windows at the far left backend  corner of the hall. I can look throught eh hall and out onto a portion of street runing off paralel to the side of that building. There is no one in the hall and no one in the side street in that portion which is visible form where I stand.

I turn and walk back out past the leaflet stand and down the three steps that extend down to the gravel. When I am unlocking my bike a woman comes up to me and unclasps her hands which are full of pennies and two penny coins. I think she is going to give me some. Then she asks me for money and I give her some. She says, do they still serve food in the main hall and I say, yes, there's a counter and a kitchen and people are drinking tea and eating sandwiches. Then she goes in and I get on the bike. I hear the rain against the window when I get home.

Tuesday 6 October 2009

I pointed with my forefinger

In the mess of everything one thing is certain. That is that the building is coming down. It is behind a wall that cordons off the market and I am drawn to it I don't know why. I have always been drawn to falling and crumbling buildings. They remind me of this one point in time that has already gone. It is a manageable disruption that speaks in that body coming undone. You either go with it or go against the flow. I decide this time to go with it. There's that fascination in the slanted colliding scales of a punctured roof, like a hole in the top of the scalp, irrigating everything. There's that sense of a breeze even on the muggiest of days. Something building up even before it is amongst us. Some kind of brew that has yet to ferment. But we know it takes patience even to become intoxicated. We have to put ourselves into a certain atmosphere for starters. Which is why even the most vacant drunk is filled with ideas and plans; expectations and hopes for the future even if it is only how to place themselves between a bottle and it's emptying contents. There is a mastery of the forefinger. How it exerts pressure and lessons it. That state is one of perpetual movement-constant improvisation. A shift in scale - of up/down, left/right and in that swerve something begins to spin. They remain as ever on the green by the side of the road but the everyday actions of getting the bottle to the lips is staggered, off-set, contained or leaked out to a wider environment which momentarily may share in that special kind of intimacy; between lip and bottle. There is a transferance before that batch of on-lookers is shuttled away on the top of a double-decker bus. Or not. Because some get out and disapear below the surface of the earth, shuttled further afield on the underground with only the snap-second image of the bottle, the hand , the lip to play out through endless tunnels. That moment captured- impossible to disengage from-in the very instance that they looked away.

I`m making my way to the moss-covered fraying surface that is a patch-work of plastic stapled together on to corners and sides, shoved up by scaffolding- that too already rusting- barely glinting in the sun, when I too am shoved up as figures scruff past me, banging me, scraping my breast. My eye follows the running figure that is now up ahead where the crowd is even thicker the stalls with tumbling goods stacked one on top of the other.
A voice behind me says, "I see what  happen, I see it". He overtakes; a tall thin man who drifts over to a stall up ahead. I stop, ponder over things on a table and he filters back through to stand for a moment closely behind me before moving off again now in counter-flow. Everything stops in that moment before I continue. A man lifts up an old coffee maker, runs his fingers over the curved surfaces of that alluminium container with the transparent glass moulding for a lid. I watch as he gages through the finger-tips it's worth; the passing of life. I become immersed in his movements. I leaf through a book on runes- strange shapes that are meant to mean one thing or another and that were once carved on top of stones in order to attract various tendencies and dispositons both  in the human emotion and in the natural tendencies of how things move, come together and affect one another. Two women who own the stall talk about a woman who bought an old second-hand camera, took pictures and got back a whole load of pictures of her eye because she was pointing it the wrong way. One of the women has just been given a bag full of empty used plastic bags that she hooks on the end of the stall right next to me on my right. They do not expect me to buy the book which I continue to brows as if in a library. We are in the shadow of that building which I have forgotten in the mess of objects, which conjures up meanings as we touch them. A woman strokes a bag with a furry surface striped like a tiger. The man with her says, you do that every time we come here. I`m sure it was that bag you looked at last week. No it wasn't this one the woman says. Well it was one like it. We all linger around one another, touching objects and then making room for another person to touch it or to touch a nearby one. Nobody ever buys anything- the clutter remains. It is a kind of veneration, not for the objects but for one another and the objects pass through our hands like a chain reaction that the warmth of our flesh powers. We give to it that because anything else without that kind of intermediary is an afront.

I am in a shop underneath an arch like a cave with stuff everywhere. Chairs with punched out rafia seats strung up like meat at a butchers, trinkets and chains, buckets of spoons and tarnished vessels. Some people up a head say, we don't have anything to sit on. There are absolutely no chairs in the house. We need some chairs to sit on. A woman whose movements jolt so there is a leap between objects where the body seems to enter amnesia, before honing in on another item that takes it a little further like a stepping stone, suddenly drops something. I pick it up and hand it to her. It is an ebony figure- very smooth and quite heavy though it is small. Her eyes seem to part like hands splayed apart but in that hesitation there is the jolt like a clap that is both her hope and her coming undone.  Her eyes are a mass of sparks piercing through grey skin. A carved ebony head is passed between us.

I see a mobile hanging up that arrests me. It is a series of metal hexagonals that are linked together by wooden painted red and blue beads. It hangs down on the end of a dirty piece of fraying string. I reach up and spin it. The way it moves compels me to do it again. The man comes up and says, Mind the string doesn't break. Later,  making my way through the furniture and junk I get to the the front of the arch. I locate another man whom I think is also involved in the circulaton of goods in the shop and, pointing with my forefinger, through the length of that tunnel shrunk by the number of goods coming in from every surface- dark now and very busy, I ask, how much is it? He says it's not for sale. I say, no I mean that mobile hanging up. He says, yes I know, nothing that is hanging up is for sale. I say but most things are hanging  up off the ceiling in some way or other even if they are only attached to something else that is hanging up. He says yes I know, but then they`re not for sale. He is not unpleasant about it, just matter of fact. The light is incredibly bright outside and even has a washed out affect as I stand  amidst the alluminium counters and panels of industrial catering units. I stop to buy a packet of coffee from a stall just to have something to touch.  As I approach, a man behind the stall cautions another man. Take it out your pocket, I saw you do it. How could you do that when I know you and you come around here every sunday?
Later in a coffee shop where I sit in the window seat facing the continuous stream of people slowed by the number of bagel shops at this end of the market, an Ethiopean man is dancing silently and drunkenly to a CD of Ethiopean world music that is playing on a stall outside and proving to be really popular with the public. Inside the cafe I cannot hear this music. I see the man moving in slow motion at the side of the street where rows and rows of desks and school chairs have been put on display. A woman dressed in a black tight short skirt with a black bomber jacket has the zip half undone. A second head pokes out- that of a small poodle like an alien with tightly cropped jet back hair and pin staring eyes. It mirrors the hair of the woman which is cut short and savagely along the contours of her thin mature face. A small child looks up at the poodle, guided by the hand of her mother, who hesitates there, sensing the child's interest, as the child cranes upwards, then steers the child on.

A woman sits at a table outside with the open switched on screen of her lap-top flipped open She is scanning and selecting, itemising and saving, with the skill of a surgeon making an exploratory diagnosis. There are choices to be made from moment to moment about this window or that text operated through incredibly sensitized finger-tips placed very lightly on the white flourescent panel under the keyboard so that the fingers almost hover there, alternating between the panel and the key board,  each key seeming to be hit almost instantaneously with a kind of rocking motion levered and energised by the trunk and torso that is learning to become the torsion of indian rubber- through minute levels of give, distortion, hesitation and retraction.
She sails into the depth of moving and stopping one display panel after another that cascades in upon one another in and out of view. As she does this her little finger on the right hand is stretched out  far beyond the flourescent panel, floating in counter-balance like the winged arm of a tight-rope walker hundreds of feet above the ground.
       We are all involved in these various activities, creating out of our own endings guy-ropes that delve into areas far away from where we are now. No one ever goes in a straight line. We just veer one way and then the other and in the self-correcting, providing the speed is up, we cobble together the semblance of the straight line, out of all these little splinters. We mostly steer in fact with the little stuck out bone on the outer end of each wrist which we tilt and  re-orientate in a completely different dimension from where we are set to be,  in order to steer the remainder. Actually the whole little finger is just a trailer; a flag really that you might find at the end of a kite blowing freely and mostly untethered. Sometimes, we in total, seem to become that trailer for limited excursions that maybe seem to be or actually are, pointless. Now she has brought up a map and I can see clearly the land and the coast line; the different demarcations of coloured patches of light pink, light yellow,  ligtht blue and green on the body surface of that map that may indicate land mass, depth or territorial rights. No way can I read the writing on the surface ofthe screen from the other side of the glass where I sit. Though I follow the intricate wavering coastline -the slants and falls of where sea meets land and changes it, I do not know the name or earthly location of that place.

Outside amidst the bric a brac a man with a long beard and a colourful jacket aged around the fifty mark shakes the hand of another man over the rubble of his saleable items. Two women with Ostrich feathers and foreign accents enter the coffee shop from the street outside and ask about a nearby popular English cafe where you can get a big fry-up. They are given directions but come back later having failed to locate it and are given directions all over again.

Saturday 3 October 2009

Rudder

The red dot comes into position at the penultimate point of the swing. That is the highest point. Where it stops, marks itself, then swings back down and through. But there is no streak. I take the red point and keep it there as a marker from which to leave and return. All the rest is only the getting there. A kind of letting go.

I am lying on the grass amongst the rose bushes some of which are crumpled like a paper bag with sweets that are way too old, others which are still soft and downy, one petal layering upon another, barely touching one another, kept whole by the air and dew between. And in these the redness seems that much redder. They invite touching. There's alot of earth between the rose bushes. And it looks like it's been raked and sorted, only the finest allowed to stay. Like a sprinkling. Other people come and lie at varying angles on the grass.
It is still warm and we become light traps while we still can be. I raise my head over my prostrate body. There's a little girl piling up the pink and red petals in a heap which she tears from the flowers next to a figure which is a mound rising out of the ground covered in loose clothing, face nestling in the grass. A woman sits upright next to the child twisting this way and that way past the child and her play, looking into this and that scene.

Suddenly there is a searing sound as if the road outside were being torn in two. Smoke begins to rise over the trees that demarcate the edge of the park. Having sat bolt upright, I lie down again. Everyone else continues doing what they were doing before. That sound does not let up. It grows in intensity like an industrial process really getting involved in whatever the contact is that engines that friction. Then shutting off like a water jet suddeny ended. And then the searing re-application as it is turned back to full blast. It feels like being inside the drum of a dry-cleaning facility. Smoke continues to rise and thicken. White layer on white layer, bellowing and buffooning in on one another. Small powerful jets and blasts that make a path by parting what is already there. One thing muscling in on the other. The outline of the trees is beginning to soften and now the body itself seems to be more stretchy- invaded and prized apart. I get up by the volition of that sound alone, like an expiration of another jet blast. A dog runs into the area from the path adjoining, between the loose hedges, sniffs around, runs and leaps ahead and exits up front in the cut in the hedge where I too head. I am passing the girl with the heaped up pile of red petals. She turns wide still eyes on me. They flicker and go. A boy making a graphic rendering of the building past the rose garden, with his back to the searing noise and smoke of what is now going on, continues with his rendering but breaks off for one moment to pat the dog. The dog stops in the gap. I stop. Also pat the dog and nudge him on then make it to the road.

The operation going on outside in the road involves a yellow open deck transit van with the words CAUTION written in red on the back. White smoke is belching all around partly putting into obscurity the van. The smell is cloying, hanging off my skin and entering my nostrils. I clamp my hand over my mouth and eyes, spreading it flat and extending the fingers up into my hairline. A woman on a bike passes, disapearing for a moment then reapperaing through the other side. She wobbles, catches herself, throws out a line to any passer-by as a stabiliser where normally she might appear self-contained. That enables a smile. Round the other side of the van, the noise is relentless. Jets of high pressure as a young man in floursecent yellow vest points like a wand a red hot poker which glows and fires up as it touches like a reverse marker pen on to the yellow lines that occur at intervals all along the edge of that road. And that one by one he is blowing off, burned out; erased like a tatoo no longer of any use to the owner. I see each portion turning to liquid, then being sucked up, compulsed by the heat and evaporating. That screaching erasure is getting close to the backend exhaust pipes of the parked cars which are still in place and which he is working his way around. When the cars one by one drive off there will be broken lines that demarcate the carriage of those absent cars. The lines which right now are unreachable will show. There must be contactable engine fuel nearby that poker.
Everytime the man with the poker raises it off from the contact of the burning, melting dark tar of the road it rears up, fed by the sudden surge of oxygen up above and it is that which creates these gusts of high wind like the funnel on a hoze turned to spray. It begins actually to hurt me and I walk on with my head wrapped in my hands, bent from multiple sabotage.

The girl on the swing continues to rise and fall. I am on a bench gathered around a tree like a necklace around it`s trunk. The old man is on the tyre swing, straddling it and rocking back and forwards with the heels and then the tips of his white plimsoles tracking the tarmac lightly. He wears a cap over his grey short hair which has a green seam where the rim of the cap is turned up to reveal the inner lining which  must continue over the shape of his head. A baby in a pram watches him rocking to and fro. He is half-turned away from the girl on the swing, somehow adjacent to these two figures without taking up completely either with one or the other. There is a rotational freedom to his slant- his bucketting to and fro on and off of that tilting tire that he levels and lets go of with his body weight. He disengages, wheels the baby round and round at a fast trot sectioning off an area of swings that includes the rocking child in the red dress within that scope. Finally he brings the pram to a halt levelling it up with the tyre circle which the baby now peers through because it is at eye-level. The old man rocks the tyre back and forth and it is a mobile distorting and transforming like an
open/closed window that lets in and inhibits a portion of light becoming all the more arresting
for this negation. There's a spaciousness in the operations. The man gathers up the body of the baby, presses it casually into his shoulder then hoists himself back on to the tyre where he dozily rocks with the carbuncle of the additive child secured to his body mass and becoming part of the overall weight.
          I am far away under that tree but these intimacies are immediate. I look up into the complexity of the tree, leaves curling between the light, already dislodging and about to go. Buses circle the green, swerving the corner at the far end and building up speed out of that turn. There is a folding back and forth enabling me to stay there as I chew on the piece of liquarice that I suddenly craved for on the way down, my stomach in knots so that I could hardly walk and had to stop. The little girl gets off the swing, takes the now vacated pram and walks it around the swings to encompass the old man and the baby in her scope.

I press the buzzer. Almost immediately a woman who seems drowsy and speaks with a heavy accent comes to the door. I want to hire a space I tell her. She says that Dana is not in but her number is on the front of the door. It is quite faint, blown out by the constant light on the outside of the building. I question her on a couple of digits that at this point in time could be one thing or another, but would make all the difference to getting through. Suddenly she reconsiders, invites me in to take a leaflet. And so I enter that space that smells like burning rubber because the floor is covered from wall to wall with some kind of black plastic that is wrinkled in places and continues roughly up the side of the wall in other places. There are high voltage hallogen lights heating up an area here or there. Apart from that the feeling is dark. There is some kind of spacy music occuring from a sound system which seems to have no attack or fade but just a continuous smoky presence. Ther are some coloured bundles of knitwear here and there on the floor and a sectioned off glass unit to the back inside of which piled one on top of the other are blue inflatable balls jostling against one another with one occasionally held in levitation with maybe one surface like a cheek smashed against that glass window, deformed and made flat by the pressure of all the other pouches crowding in. The woman has an intense and sinking kind of constitution as if she is powered strongly from below in order to escape total collapse.  There is a large mole on her face that I look at more than her eyes. Through it we seem to communnicate well. As a I leave I say, "Oh there are mats as well" as I pass a pile of blue mats by the door. Someone else comes in as I go out. That is the person she was expecting when she opened the door to me.

Outside the light bites. I make it down the road walking slowly the detours and corraled off areas so that I am stepping in and out of the road between the sand and piles of cut stone where the pavement , piece by piece is being layed on a thick helping of fine sand. Water is used to cut down the sparks and dust of the stone under the rotating blade of the stone-cutter. People gather around the coralled off areas to watch, leaning on the orange plastic safety barriers, relieving some of the upper body weight. I am incredibly tired and can barely drag my feet so I stop too.

In a cafe, an old black car with gold trimming rides past. A dog hops on and off of a log in the park past the road so that one moment it is visible and then hidden. A man on a mobile phone stares through the glass of the cafe front as he speaks into the phone. Two white plastic work hats lie like rounded buckets on top of the slated wooden table outside. They turn and swivel this way and that as the wind catches them from underneath. A woman in a black gown that covers her head and most of her face walks past. A man on a bike with a bag full of offal turns at the corner, leaning far out in order to counter balance the weight of those fatted cuts of red meat and bone that he bunches together in the transparent heavy plastic sack that he holds off of the handelbar at the same time as he steers the bike with that hand. There's a boy of about fifteen whom I pass on my way out a little further down the pavement. He puts equal weight on either foot as if each foot were for the first time making a kind of contact and had no knowledge of what just took place in the one before. He seems to actually make it forward by a kind of falling or letting go of the upper body . A certian heavinness in his head and a dark and shiny mop of falling hair that is thrown out and down above the light shuffle of those even feet. The memory of that circuit of up and down is cut. There is an impossible contraction in his chest. Nevertheless he has taken to breathing through his large open-palmed hands that spread out to either side of him. People part like water hitting the rudder of a boat.

All this happens before the winds of today.