ELECTRICAL GHOSTS
Here be errors. Not the kind you could catalogue; but not the kind you could ignore. While Dalston is as filled as the next borough with derelict hearts and alcove pissers, beggars and the homeless, they orbit the perimeter of your vision with little effect. A numbness of experience comes about if you live somewhere for long enough, rendering you untouchable by events around you. In London this is more wearying than the cost of living.
But lately, indiscreet electrical ghosts abound; there have been four powercuts in six weeks. This gets attention. It brings familes to their doorsteps to look at the dark. Number fourteen lost power altogether for several days, until a generator was towed up to sit outside and thrum away. It takes up one parking-space and fills a whole street with it's noise. It rattles the skull like a wound-down alarm, set for something you can't remember. It's churning bowels go on and on, working for twenty four hours a day.
The Jamaican who always sits on the corner tells us it's a sign. Of what? That something is coming. New rumours travel quickly, and he knows them all. It's the rats, they're eating up all the cables. Or the Gillett Street development has sucked us dry of power, or maybe the Olympics or the war. He sits and drinks, speaks to all passers-by, asks them how their 'lectric's done'. He fires questions and offers tips. He pumps all grapevines for new bulletins. I told him that I was on Kingsland High Street when the last powercut happened. I described the wave of lights dimming, from south to north, and the security alarms all chiming up a clamour at once. And then about how last week the Barclays Bank started spitting out £20 notes whenever you asked for ten, and how someone called his friends down, and within an hour there was a queue of sixty or so, taking turns, until the machine was emptied at about 2 am.
'All signs,' he said, shaking his head, sadly. 'Bad signs. The Gods are speaking in furious alphabets that no-one can read.'
Who can know. Isn't there a film about aliens who manage to take over the Earth without any citizens noticing? Or more pertinently, without any citizens raising themselves from their langour to put up a fight? In that case, humans were the phenomena not alive in the inked world, and were involved only in the illegitamate business of being dead, without knowing. Apathy killed us before violence.
'You'll never bend neutrons; you'll never tame electrodes. They'll turn on you in a flash,' a friend's Dad used to say. 'The sinking of the Titanic proved that you can’t build a track over the North Atlantic, so we should never try. Man hasn’t the power to guide a machine down a set path. A train is actually pacing out the perimeters of nature’s power. Rome, for example, didn’t fall; it was pushed, by men who believed their petty transactions put them in Godly positions. Their folly was not ambition, but that that didn't listen to the land.' He was a man who did woodwork by candlelight and handwashed his clothes. His son was laughed at by the other kids for not having new trainers or a television.
When I was ten, we were without electricity for three days. This was when we lived in Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, and the snow that settled that week meant our pipes froze and we couldn't move our car from the driveway. We listened to a battery-powered radio and competed jigsaw puzzles by torchlight. The torch was a present we had bought for my Grandad for Christmas, and was carefully placed back in it's wrapping when illumination was restored. We'd take soup heated on our gas stove round to neighbours, and go to bed early for lack of better ideas.
When the weather settled, we went sledging round at the big park on the estate. Mike had a fight with Lloyd and his friends, and I can still picture Mike standing in the middle of a group of younger children, swinging the blue sledge round his head to ward them off. They threw snowballs at him.
That sledge sticks in my head, my psyche's own mini-Rosebud, but without the weight. You can trawl memories for more than just flickers of significance and find nothing. The past runs on dubious means. It is powered by self-indulgence and deceits. Mike's Dad worked for the Electricity Board; I could attempt to trace the importance of him being in my dream the night of the first powercut (beyond a pleasant symmetry), but it's a fools game, a hall of mirrors, a gibberish acrostic. Searching for nature's pattern, for reason in thoughts, is nigh futile. Yet it entrances, and it's all we have.
When people first saw projected film, they said wondered if it meant that death would no longer be the end. They supposed that film would offer a kind of immortality to those that appeared. Instead it has proved to be a medium that provides us with ghosts. Electrical spirits flutter around our consciousness and our cities, radio and television waves moan like prayers on the wind. They inhabit a deadzone of crackling film stars, rebounding police radio messages, the spectral fizz of aged broadcasts. They are evident only in the ringing in the ears after a loud sound or in the impression in the dark left by a lamp after it is turned off, that yellow echo, that brief recollection.
And still the generator throbs. Yesterday night a drunken passer-by took to it with his boots and missed. Our lights flicker repeatedly. The other day a cyclist threw a punch at me. It could all mean nothing, just dots that don't join like some complex drunken morse.
But lately, indiscreet electrical ghosts abound; there have been four powercuts in six weeks. This gets attention. It brings familes to their doorsteps to look at the dark. Number fourteen lost power altogether for several days, until a generator was towed up to sit outside and thrum away. It takes up one parking-space and fills a whole street with it's noise. It rattles the skull like a wound-down alarm, set for something you can't remember. It's churning bowels go on and on, working for twenty four hours a day.
The Jamaican who always sits on the corner tells us it's a sign. Of what? That something is coming. New rumours travel quickly, and he knows them all. It's the rats, they're eating up all the cables. Or the Gillett Street development has sucked us dry of power, or maybe the Olympics or the war. He sits and drinks, speaks to all passers-by, asks them how their 'lectric's done'. He fires questions and offers tips. He pumps all grapevines for new bulletins. I told him that I was on Kingsland High Street when the last powercut happened. I described the wave of lights dimming, from south to north, and the security alarms all chiming up a clamour at once. And then about how last week the Barclays Bank started spitting out £20 notes whenever you asked for ten, and how someone called his friends down, and within an hour there was a queue of sixty or so, taking turns, until the machine was emptied at about 2 am.
'All signs,' he said, shaking his head, sadly. 'Bad signs. The Gods are speaking in furious alphabets that no-one can read.'
Who can know. Isn't there a film about aliens who manage to take over the Earth without any citizens noticing? Or more pertinently, without any citizens raising themselves from their langour to put up a fight? In that case, humans were the phenomena not alive in the inked world, and were involved only in the illegitamate business of being dead, without knowing. Apathy killed us before violence.
'You'll never bend neutrons; you'll never tame electrodes. They'll turn on you in a flash,' a friend's Dad used to say. 'The sinking of the Titanic proved that you can’t build a track over the North Atlantic, so we should never try. Man hasn’t the power to guide a machine down a set path. A train is actually pacing out the perimeters of nature’s power. Rome, for example, didn’t fall; it was pushed, by men who believed their petty transactions put them in Godly positions. Their folly was not ambition, but that that didn't listen to the land.' He was a man who did woodwork by candlelight and handwashed his clothes. His son was laughed at by the other kids for not having new trainers or a television.
When I was ten, we were without electricity for three days. This was when we lived in Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, and the snow that settled that week meant our pipes froze and we couldn't move our car from the driveway. We listened to a battery-powered radio and competed jigsaw puzzles by torchlight. The torch was a present we had bought for my Grandad for Christmas, and was carefully placed back in it's wrapping when illumination was restored. We'd take soup heated on our gas stove round to neighbours, and go to bed early for lack of better ideas.
When the weather settled, we went sledging round at the big park on the estate. Mike had a fight with Lloyd and his friends, and I can still picture Mike standing in the middle of a group of younger children, swinging the blue sledge round his head to ward them off. They threw snowballs at him.
That sledge sticks in my head, my psyche's own mini-Rosebud, but without the weight. You can trawl memories for more than just flickers of significance and find nothing. The past runs on dubious means. It is powered by self-indulgence and deceits. Mike's Dad worked for the Electricity Board; I could attempt to trace the importance of him being in my dream the night of the first powercut (beyond a pleasant symmetry), but it's a fools game, a hall of mirrors, a gibberish acrostic. Searching for nature's pattern, for reason in thoughts, is nigh futile. Yet it entrances, and it's all we have.
When people first saw projected film, they said wondered if it meant that death would no longer be the end. They supposed that film would offer a kind of immortality to those that appeared. Instead it has proved to be a medium that provides us with ghosts. Electrical spirits flutter around our consciousness and our cities, radio and television waves moan like prayers on the wind. They inhabit a deadzone of crackling film stars, rebounding police radio messages, the spectral fizz of aged broadcasts. They are evident only in the ringing in the ears after a loud sound or in the impression in the dark left by a lamp after it is turned off, that yellow echo, that brief recollection.
And still the generator throbs. Yesterday night a drunken passer-by took to it with his boots and missed. Our lights flicker repeatedly. The other day a cyclist threw a punch at me. It could all mean nothing, just dots that don't join like some complex drunken morse.
posted by The Legendary Black Marquis at 4:50 pm
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