Monday, May 14, 2007

PSYCHIC PRECINCTS

'Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness"' Anonymous contributor, Wikipedia

'That was not only his oldest memory, but his only memory of childhood. The other one, that of an old man with an old-fashioned vest and a hat with a brim like a crow's wings who told him marvellous things framed in adazzling window, he was unable to place in any period. It was an uncertain memory, entirely devouid of lessons or nostalgia, the opposite of the memory of the executed man, which had really set the direction of his life and would return to his memory clearer and clearer as he grew older, as if the passage of time were bringing him closer to it.' Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

'All my lazy teenage boasts
are now high precision ghosts
And they're coming round the track
to haunt me'

Prefab Sprout, King of Rock'n'Roll

I had a premonition of my death, and I am relieved: It is as I had hoped. The moon can't come too soon. I always wanted to die like a man, in a Paris bordello from a sexual injury, while the angels and whores stand all around reading my poetry. They'll say 'He can't shake it anymore; He can't shake it anymore...'

I will be eighty-one years old.

It was confidently predicted by a family member that I would write a book. Now my family has seen off many a flighty pre-cog who, with 'funny feelings' and dour cardigans, has come to inform us of our destinies. We don't take rash forebodings lightly; our own future radars are subtle and wise, and our own keen acumen has always sufficed. My sisters' births were pre-empted by dreamy visions. Other presentiments have been delivered as promised. And yet, I still have not written a book. This prediction hangs like a curse, a curse of a particular kind of genius, and yet it is something that I am loathe to turn my back on, as it's possibility is a comfort. Only in seeing its effects repeated in younger siblings, predicted themselves to perform great feats, does it ring hard and cold.

Self-Savagery No. 1a: Pick your prophecies and stick to them.

Many of my own premonitions come as idle boasts, romantic promises that I made to myself and grimly stuck to: I predicted at sixteen that I would never be able to drive, and at the time of writing, I still cannot. Like Oskar in Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, who decided that he always wanted to be three years old, and so makes it happen. But unfulfilled promises loiter like spoiled ballots and screwed-up betting slips, panhandler's claims that are rotted and lost, or tales of buried Nazi booty that no-one remembers the geography of.

Often I don't know that my premontions are even premonitions until they come to pass, and I then experience them in a lucid deja-vu fashion: ah, yes, I remember now: I knew this would happen. The moments of bitter clairvoyance are often inseperable from the flimsy ideas and curiously possible futures that cloud my head at any point of the day. Most possibilities swim in my skull. This means that while it is tricky to pick the lock of the future (not in a fashion that would impress the gallery and have them crossing my palm with silver), most things that happen are not surprises.

When I dislocated and broke my arm, it felt like I thought it would. Being drunk did too. But also: I know, from the brain down through the stomach, what it feels like to fly in both a hot-air balloon and a helicopter, although I cannot remember if I have ever flown in either. I have vague childhood recollections of both: Summer days on Southsea Common or at a school fete, images bleached by the sun. These images move in tenuous delicate orbits, always just out of view, a haze of forgetful afternoons that rear up and show themselves in the most obtuse ways, and in the most unrelated places.

A notion to cling to: Inspiration, like individual and collective recall, is something that floats on the breeze, in some places tight and thin, in others hovering like huge bubbles ready to be walked through and busted without our knowledge. Invisible memorials psychically carved through the air by faceless gnomes working for years and years, yet only chipping a momentary impression into the ether for individuals to stumble through, quite unawares one day; Individuals who had been thinking of something else but who will suddenly recall the words to a school song long forgotten, or the name of a teacher, or a corner of some dowdy park visited sporadically in childhood.

A friend of mine will occasionally, in a variety of environments, smell the acrid sulphuric stench that came to his nose just moments before he fell off his bike and broke a collarbone, aged ten. Taking it as a warning, he proceeds through his days with petrified care. He cannot describe its taste; just take heed of it as a vague signpost of danger past and future.

London is a hubbub of experimental auras, waiting to smash urgent sons and their bucking and braying theorems. It can offer apparent verifications for impossible philosophies and withdraw them suddenly, like little deaths. But still, I find futures, presents and other districts to investigate, and I travel for my health, plotting geographical emotions among the sacred boroughs around me. Everything evokes something. Lush precincts do not necessarily recall lush precincts, as we know. Like a world imagined from past experiences, each new house seen is a composite of previous ones, each new face a Frankenstein of schoolmates now grown. (Even every house in a novel is based on houses I know. The house in Marquez's 100 years of Solitude is my Nan's bungalow.) My childhood is a patchwork of numerous homes, a dozen schools, several home towns dotted around England and all appear around my present, rebuilt and reconfigured in dream flashes: A newsagents on Essex Road is a replica of an Attleborough post office, a Chinese on King Henry's Walk is transplanted from a Lancing parade. The shopping centre on Kingsland Road is identical to one in Fareham, despite it's appearance. Whole swathes of Southsea have been borrowed to invent Farrringdon. Most pertinent for me is the portion of Hackney that evokes a particular subway in Nuneaton, Warwickshire that I spent many evenings loitering around when I was fourteen. It isn't anything physical or visual. Perhaps an alarm above human-hearing rings through both places, and twitches my skull. Either way, when I pass through a particular aspect of Dalston Lane I remember the feeling of romantic failure of my early teens.

The subway was magnetic, sopping with territorial graffiti and teenage excitement. It was also resolutely ordinary. There, I called a girl 'baby', and it rung so preposterously untrue from my lips, so horrifically false, that I felt the entire weighty history of love as it is rendered in lyric, poetry and prose fall in around my ears. I saw my efforts measured against other Valentinoes, against other totemic schoolboys, against anyone, and saw them to be weak. I was an imposter in love. I was fourteen.

When I later read the quote below, I realised that my moment of first comprehending this problem was then, at the subway, aged fourteen.

"The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose

I was hamstrung by these dizzying concepts, and didn't kiss her. Ever. And this is reminded to me every time I pass through a certain part of Dalston Lane in Hackney, like an epitaph written on the air: 'Don't be hamstrung by dizzying concepts.'

'It's been said I will write a great book,' I remember telling her, in lieu of a kiss. 'It will be an autobiography about how I am a genius.'
'Maybe you should write about something you know about instead,' she said.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

WEBBUS INTERUPTUS

I am currently enjoying a sabbatical from prolonged internet usage and abuse, enforced by a familiar modern situation, the slack internet-line supplier. Never attempt to communicate with a communications company. They are an inarticulate annexe. They are a hex. They are neglectfully cruel: Two months without broadband in the spoiled and fattened modern age is akin to growing up under strict rationing or wandering through childhood parentless in more robust times.

Anyway, I needed a break. Your sycophantic notices were making me horsesick and caused my head to swell giddily. Perfumed emails have stockpiled and expired in my absence, leaving me with an inbox of sweating olefactory unpromise and a headful of sexy rot. Thank you, all of you, I love you too.

In the interim, please see previous post, entitled 'THE COUNT' for a new story.