Born unasked, their circumstantial sadness is their own fault, and is the agent of all of their problems.
I trip and fall towards the fire, burning a two-inch square area of skin off my wrist. A heavy bandage is worn with pride for months to come, teaching me all I shall ever need to know about attention and style.
All human activity is fruitless when pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television, for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question.
The crate in the basement contains a living poet who is burdened by an increasing sense of their own idiocy, with pride and self-pity securely as one. The will surrenders to the resolve and dignity of the written word, and I, the gentle self, step forward, pattering up the ramp, one half of an incomplete person, knowing with certainty that I cannot live – yet wondering if I could possibly write?
...suddenly I am in mortal danger of doing
something productive.
...for isn’t this at least partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental
all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are?
We would sit in sunless turn-of-the-century pubs and ponder the slowness of distant days – of bodies dumped by the Quality Street Gang, ghosts and outcasts and diseased lovers of 1888 – and how we too are part of the process of time frittering away.
читать дальшеThere is nothing obvious about Patti Smith, least of all any obvious biological conclusions, and this gives its own erotic reality in a shyness of arrogant pride.
James is a year my junior and digs down deep – Louis XIV wit gallops ahead without a word or gesture lost. Dunhill cigarette smoke blasts the atmosphere, and James lives a life of impotent rage. He is certain that words can be found to describe the entire mess, yet he is also convinced that life has been made difficult on purpose in order to squeeze out the greatness in those of us who flutter wildly at the bars. His look is James Dean midblizzard, with a tongue more free than welcome.He will utilize anything at all that might serve the purposeful quest for recognition. We are united.
...
"Am I even here?" James looks at himself far too closely to see anything, and every slice of hardboiled luck comes to him only as compensation for otherwise having nothing to do. ... His parents had urged him to never – under any circumstances – be himself. When his true self slipped out, he covered his face with his hands, as if scrubbing himself away. He sought a listener –preferably one who might accompany him on piano. Like an unappreciated wife, he became exclusively absorbed in his own reflection – not because he loved himself, but because he didn’t. The reflection was always the truth, the mirror had the last word, and James was too vigorous in his selfdoubt to ever be doubted. In the Bermondsey of 1977, such behavior registered as abnormality of the hormones, a sadness in a man that develops in construction quite like that of a woman. No aggressive sexual activity is allowed, and so the boy wilts away, timing all wrong. All wrong. The mind is overactive yet the body does nothing, and depression can only be conquered if wallowed in. James had no understanding of himself as flesh, and because his life had been so lonely he directs himself towards masculine support – because this is the one thing he’s never had. All he really wants is male friendships. When my life saves itself, James’s life falls in on top of him. We had become just close
enough to infect each other with our disappointments... James would annex anything that could be taken into his intellectually inexhaustible schemes, and he didn’t mind being beaten up because of it. In fact, a beating could be considered a good review.
I bored my own self into unconsciousness every single day, so how I could exert bad influence mystified me.
I am a puzzled child on the St Anne’s sands, shouting to sea-sounds of wave and gull. I am that stretch of sand that the sea never reaches.
This all could be a dream, yet it is not sad enough to be a dream.
I had no doubt that my life was ending, as much as I had no notion at all that it was just beginning. Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything? I had become a stretcher-case to my family, yet this made it easier for me to put them aside at those moments when the wretched either die or go mad. The water was now too muddy, and, being nowhere in view, I am not even known enough to be disliked. The wits had diminished, and I am sexually disinterested in either the male or the feel-male – yet I make this claim on knowing almost nothing about either. Horror lurked beneath horror, and I could only tolerate an afternoon if I took a triple amount of the stated dose of valium prescribed by my GP (who would soon take his own life). Life became a strange hallucination, and I would talk myself through each day as one would nurse a dying friend. The diminishment could go no further, and the face can only be slapped so many times before the slaps cannot be felt. I became too despondent for anyone to cope with, and only my mother would talk to me in understanding tones. Yet there comes the point where the suicidalist must shut it down if only in order to save face, otherwise you accidentally become a nightclub act minus the actual nightclub.
Peace is reserved for the time beyond the moment of death. I have never kissed Nannie, and only on her deathbed do I hug her because our mutual hope is a heap of dirt. Death is alive in life. I cry at the fixity of Nannie lowered
alone into her grave; her very first time alone. She needs us still. The soul is not everything. Her face, her arms, her hands, they need us still, and they are what we know of someone, and all of these have gone. The soul is said to be somewhere, but the soul has only ever been visible through the eyes. It is the body that we know of someone, yet the body is the husk lowered into the earth of tatty Southern Cemetery when we are told that the body is ‘not really’ or ‘no longer’ Nannie. But it is. In some ways Nannie had always remained a child. She never knew Paris and she never sat behind the steering wheel, although she laughed with friends and managed many sunlit jaunts to America.
The Queen Mother dies with debts of six million pounds, whereas my own grandmother would not be allowed to run up a debt of six solitary pounds without the threat of public dishonor. Nannie only ever received when someone placed a child in her arms, and the drudgery of moral codes clouded Dublin like a thousand zeppelins. Nursing destroys the body, ends the freedom, and no one gives any thought to the tenth month beyond the impregnated ninth. But, what about the sixteenth month – or the maternal madness beyond? Nannie’s final request was that she be buried with her dentures in, but at the final open-coffin inspection, her request had not been followed through, and she looks in death as she had
never looked in life.
...he quite luckily managed a lengthy and slow decline which some thought was actually an ongoing career.
Our searching flashlights scan the immediate area, lighting upon nothing but a pathetically vandalized public waste bin – a monument to what is oddly known as civilization. Not vandals as such, but more than likely to be those blandly smiling families, out for the day, restless and careless, the earth belonging only to them and their smelly children as they advance decay wherever they go.
Here, the bleak moor has seen them all out: the determined fell-walker, the pot-holers – eager to fall in and call for rescue and, more importantly, to appear on the nightly news announcing how they will certainly be back on the moors as soon as their leg heals and their dentures are found – the revolting students, the wild and the visionary, the restless minds, the child-killers who murder and smile, the black hounds of literature, the girls who would be Jane Eyre, the spirits of centuries, the cowardlyhunters who must shoot and kill in order to soothe the wretched agonies of their own souls, the cattle and deer who live their lives out in persecution; with no God to save them, the moor has seen them all out.
Mick had been naive in the past, but it was not for me to comment since I continued to be naive in the present.
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Once inside the house, the doorbell rings. It is Jake. He obviously understood my sudden exit, and he had been curious enough to follow me home. He steps inside and he stays for two years. Conversation is the bond of companionship (according to the Wildean scripture), and Jake and I neither sought nor needed company other than our own for the whirlwind stretch to come, and for the first time in my life the eternal ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, as, finally, I can get on with someone.
‘Why did you mention Battersea in that song?’ is his opening gambit.
‘Because it rhymed with Fatty,’ I reply with magnanimous Philip Larkin don’t-trouble-me-nowchild eminence. Jake pulls down his lower lip with two fingers and the word BATTERSEA is tattooed into the painfully fragile skin inside the mouth. Suddenly life becomes a world without hours.
Jake is stubbornly macho and has lived a colorful twenty-nine years as no stranger to fearlessness. He has no interest in being nice, therefore his leap towards me is as new and uncharted as mine to him. An ex-schoolboy sadist with a flair for complicity, Jake is the perfect buffer, lacking only what I have in abundance – and vice versa. He lived where he had been born, in the only detached house on Battersea High Street, where his sculptor father remained. Non-surrendering, Jake is a profiteer with a certain confidence of wit.
‘What are your parents’ names?’ he asks on that first night.
‘Barbara and Candy,’ I lie.
‘Your father’s name is Barbara?’ he snips, foolishly attempting humor.
It’s horse-hockey claptrap, and every minute has the high drama of first love, only far more exhilarating, and at last I have someone to answer the telephone.
As I lie in the bath, Jake serves me tea.
Life’s sharpest corners are turned, and Jake finally allows someone to sap his vitality.
‘You’ve met your match for the first time,’ his close friend Josie tells him.
Masculinity is marked out by a million intolerably exhaustive guidelines – defined by a sea of should-nots, must-nots, do-nots – and male friendships are bogged down by a welter of touch-me-not rules. With this it is assumed that the world is saved.
Yet Jake and I fell together in deep collusion whereby the thorough and personal could be the only possible way, and we ate up each minute of the day. Socially, we harmonize with the intuitive intimacy that fully communicates across the crowd by a series of secretive blinks and winks and raised eyebrows; a concurrent widening of the eyes and Jake would suddenly be outside with the engine running whilst I delicately take leave. There will be no secrets of flesh or fantasy; he is me and I am he.
‘Well,’ said the woman in the British Airways lounge, ‘you’re either very close brothers or lovers.’
‘Can’t brothers be lovers?’ I impudently reply – always ready with the pointlessly pert, whether sensible or not.
‘Well,’she now talks very softly, ‘I always envied that confidential friendship thing because ...’ and now her voice wobbles quietly, ‘I just never had it in my life.’
Indulgently Jake and I test how far each of us can go before ‘being dwelt in’ causes cries of intolerable struggle, but our closeness transcends such visitations. I had bought a black Saab from a Wapping showroom, and this serves for many adventures around England’s south-west when the intolerable becomes absolutely intolerable.
I am photographed for Creem magazine with my head resting on Jake’s exposed belly.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ asks new manager Arnold Stiefel.
‘No?’ I say in a small voice.
‘Well, that’s a very intimate shot.’
‘Oh?’ I say, baffled.
‘A man doesn’t rest his head on another man’s stomach,’ Arnold goes on.
‘No?’ I answer, all adrift on the cruel sea.
Jake and I are both lying in the afternoon Dublin sun. Exactly where the sun has come from and how it ends up in Dublin is an environmental mystery. Everyone is darting about, trying to stop the day from slipping away, yet we are still and composed and constantly on the edge of bursts of private laughter.
I have just been to see eminent Irish psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare in his drab consulting room. ‘Remember, he’s only a man,’ Sinead O’Connor had cautioned me before I had entered his sunless bastille. He is indeed only a man, and not a very interesting one at that. He disapproves of everything I say without a speck of tender perception.
‘I find it very dif icult to accept almost anything in life,’ I tell him, and he huffs as if about to take somebody’s name in vain. Minutes later, with 1945 all around us, Jake and I are down by the sea.
‘I spoke to the doctor about human suf ering,’ I squint.
‘I feel sorry for the doctor,’ says Jake.
‘I said I agreed that suf ering wasn’t much of a price to pay if your life eventually sorts itself out, but he –’
‘Oh shut UP,’ says Jake. So I shut up.
An abandoned school is an eerie place – a worn-out husk of sadness that throws the mind in several directions. Walk through the cold corridors and all sorts of things test the memory. I stand on the school stage where James Dean attempted his first recitals, my mental vision revolving, banging as it goes. I sit in the old classrooms where desks and chairs remain since the 1940s prime of Fairmount High. I fold two chairs away with their Fairmount School badges still attached, and I will later ship them back to England. This can hardly be considered theft since nobody wants this junk anyway, and the poet within sighs at the likelihood that Dean himself once occupied these chairs with a wide sprawl of the legs – the stuck pupil awaiting the final bell so that he might be free to become eternal.
I shake like a ship in a storm. It is a fact that even warming moments overwhelm me with despair, and this is why I am I.
Johnny tunneled his way towards Weeks, a child again, wanting anything at all except the disapproval of complete strangers.
Take it as it is. I am no more unhappy than anyone else, and most humans are wretched creatures – cursed by the sadness of being. The world created me and I am here – never realizing that I am in love until it gets me into trouble.