Reading with Ginsberg at the Six Gallery were Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, both registering in quieter, steadier voices, a poetry of place, of threatened birds and beasts, poisoned wheat, lifeless seas: of being in nature. Gnosticism, they called it. Ethnopoetics. Achieved works made from direct experience: and nothing like the dim pedantry of the copywriting on the explanatory cards at the Royal Academy ‘Earth’ show. Which concentrated, as if up before a war crimes tribunal, on explaining precisely what they were not doing and how we should take it.
Snyder read his ‘Berry Feast’, an invocation of the Native American first-fruits festival in Oregon. McClure’s poem, ‘For the Death of 100 Whales’, was inspired by an article in Time magazine, reporting on the activities of ‘seventy-nine bored GI’s’, armed with rifles and machine guns, taking to the ocean from their ‘lonely NATO airbase on a subarctic island’, to slaughter a pack of killer whales. Wounded mammals were attacked, and torn apart, by other members of the pod, deranged by the unremitting hail of fire, the lethal corralling of the Arctic cowboys. The West Coast poets, through forms of adapted shamanism and years of ethnographic study and practice, became figures of inspiration for an emerging generation with an interest in self-sufficiency, trail-walking, Buddhist communes: the original land, its gods and spirits.
It had not been a good year, the devastation of the ecology of the Lower Lea Valley, with the loss of allotments, unofficial orchards behind abandoned lock-keepers’ cottages, native shrubs, wildlife habitats, disturbed the balance of a substantial chunk of London. The corridor between the Thames and the orbital motorway. The folk memory of a broader and more vigorous tributary. But it was the betrayal of language that caused most pain: every pronouncement meant its opposite. Improving the image of construction. Creating a place where people want to live. Promoters spoke of the regeneration of a blasted wilderness, underscored by high-angle views of mud paddocks forested with cranes, but omitted to mention the fact that they had created the mess by demolishing everything that stood within the enclosure of the blue fence. They warned of the huge budgets and paranoid security measures required to counter the threat of terrorism: a threat they provoked by infiltrating this GP park under the smokescreen of a seventeen-day commercial frolic. And coshing the public with years of upbeat publicity. The product placement of those who are beyond criticism, wheelchair athletes (who will struggle to use the impossibly tight lifts of the Stratford International Station) and young black hopefuls funded to enthuse about training within the shadow of the emerging stadium.
Gregory Bateson, in his 1967 Roundhouse talk, ‘Conscious Purpose Versus Nature’, explained how Dr Goebbels believed he could control Germany, at the time of the 1936 Olympics, by creating a vast communications network, and by suppressing any unapproved alternative versions. If it is broadcast, it must be true. Here was the template for the imagineers and spinmasters of the present moment. You can buy a postcard of the Houses of Parliament, but you are no longer permitted to take a photograph. You face interrogation, forced deletion of images, under emergency powers: Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, the Public Order Act, the ‘Stop-And-Account’ legislation. There is a basic flaw in control-freak psychosis. As Bateson points out, the controller in his high tower, like Fritz Lang’s demonic Dr Mabuse, requires a network of spies and informers to report back on the efficacy of the propaganda. The entire agenda is about responding to what people are saying about the grandiose schemes. To strengthen his grip, the controller adjusts his pitch to deliver what he decides the voters want. Or what they should want. What they must be made to want. With police cells, camps, non-person status for those who favour another narrative.
2009: Xerox history. Bodies shipped back from war zones, resource-devouring invasions. Black propaganda. Floods. Washed-away bridges. Swollen, rushing rivers. A year of rogue viruses and viruses that failed to multiply. I needed the skies of the Thames Estuary, unpeopled tracks through the reed beds and salt marshes of the Isle of Grain. A healing walk before the bad thing took its definitive form.
A river expedition, mouth to source, would carry me away, so I hoped, from confusion and information overload. The Thames was a kind of empty scroll, a way of postponing engagement with China. Gary Snyder recorded in his journals how he sat writing, or drawing, Chinese characters, but said that the activity had no particular significance. It was a way of emptying the mind through reflex physical action. Like the rhythms of a day’s walk. At that period, Snyder laboured on the docks, and spoke of ‘the necessity to roam at wild’. He followed the cat-tracks of San Francisco, plotting the moment when he would be free to dive, once again, into the great void. Years later, an established man, an authority, he travelled with his son to the ocean’s edge and reported how the body of a river, when it approaches low ground, is ‘all one place and all one land’. This was the world-river I had been dreaming about. A mantle overspreading the wide earth.
While I was making my plans to quit Hackney, I checked the transcript of the Bateson speech. There was no mention of polar ice caps. That must have happened during one of the informal and frequently heated discussions that took place, between the main events, in odd corners of the Roundhouse. I had forgotten or misinterpreted much that Bateson said: he was focusing on the interplay of mind and its extension into the biological world. He explained how disturbing information can be processed to shine like a precious stone, so that it never makes a nuisance of itself, by forcing us to act. He used a phrase that perfectly described the liminality of the mouth of the Thames Estuary, where nothing is resolved and pearly sky leaks into grey sea. Bateson discovered a ‘semi-permeable’ membrane between consciousness and the natural world. By means of my projected walk, I wanted to erase that ‘semi’, and to allow total mind, with all its negative capacity, to wash away into a grander self: the thick-running river, London’s Thames.
River of No Return
On the rough lawn in front of the improved Haggerston flats, there is a chart, behind misted glass, in a wooden cabinet designed for community notices. The cabinet features an optimistic map of the Olympic legacy. The text is indecipherable. The blot representing a portion of the Lower Lea Valley, shrouded in folds of grey, reminds me of the Hoo Peninsula, a secretive landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. It is the only solution to the spiritual crisis: another walk. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage. I carried Ackroyd’s 2007 epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I plotted my expedition along the permitted path from mouth to source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’
Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: origin of the city, passage between the eternal verities of deep England and the world ocean. Drawing on the example of Hilaire Belloc’s The Historic Thames: A Portrait of England’s Great River (1914), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river underwrites an imperialist pageant of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. Ackroyd is quick to notice how time curdles in certain places, an eternal recurrence, a singularity in which dramas are fated to happen, with a different cast, time and again. Walking where there is nothing familiar, nothing to stimulate personal memory, we are not ourselves; we must begin afresh, and that is the excitement.
Much of the Thames bank was allowed to vegetate among the spectres of heritaged history, riverboat pilots peddling nursery myths, Traitors’ Gate to Houses of Parliament, until the land hunger of Thatcherism recognized this absence of narrative as the primary trigger for r
egeneration. In Peter Ackroyd’s philosophy of time as a vortex, the invention of ‘Docklands’ signalled a return to the old-fashioned values of piracy. Empty docks were reborn, by a process of internal colonization, as a new commercial empire: the Spanish Main on our doorstep. Planning regulations for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded to facilitate a shelf of Hong Kong towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of Fitzcarraldo, a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts: Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth, post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral.
But the reimagining of the Thames was not limited to East Greenwich, conceptual settlements were also imposed on vacant brownfield sites along the floodplain in Essex and Kent. Every act of demolition required a rebooting of history: as hospital or asylum vanishes, we thirst for stories of Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury or Pocahontas coming ashore, in her dying fever, at Gravesend. The documented records of the lives of those unfortunates shipped out to cholera hospitals on Dartford Marshes, or secure madhouses in the slipstream of the M25, can be dumped in a skip. Politicized history is a panacea, comforting the bereft, treating us, again and again, to the same consoling fables.
The tributaries of the Thames are the veins and arteries of a finely balanced ecosystem: this is another Ackroyd proposition. They are anthropomorphized, made into supplicants, handmaidens to the titular stream. The Lea quits its sylvan source to endure a penance of foul industries, travellers’ camps, waste-disposal plants, ‘until eventually it finds its surcease at Bow Creek’. Ackroyd responded positively to the regeneration of areas where deepwater docks lay idle and warehouses were occupied by artists and premature economic migrants.
London is unchanging. The golden-hour liveliness of Canary Wharf bankers, as they fan out through a chain of dockside bars, under the shelter of those ubiquitous patio-heater palm trees, is a revival of the riverbank life, at the time of the 1812 Ratcliffe Highway murders described by De Quincey: ‘manifold ruffianism’. Where the film-making poet Derek Jarman saw Silvertown with its abandoned flour mills as a site for dervish dances and the orgiastic rituals of a punk apocalypse, Ackroyd underwrote the rhetoric of regeneration with a post-historic parade of music-hall grotesques, satanic architects and angel-conversing alchemists. He provided political opportunism with a sympathetic mythology. Ripples of psychotic breakdown, financial and ecological catastrophe, located by J. G. Ballard in the hermetic towers of High-Rise (1975), were limned by Ackroyd, with characteristic generosity, as the first green shoots of recovery for a poisoned wasteland. Ballard’s dog-roasting balcony dwellers inhabit a premature version of the Thatcherite Docklands that Thames: Sacred River labours to re-enchant. By describing, in such cool forensic prose, the worst that can happen, Ballard purifies the ground, making the new estates inevitable, but devoid of spirit. Darkness has been experienced, and survived, in the act of writing. Conversely, Peter Ackroyd, with his heroic and uplifting attempt to neutralize the pains of history by suspending them in a cyclical charivari, ensures that the bad thing, the thing most feared, will return.
With his faith in London as an organic entity forever renewing itself, Ackroyd looks kindly on the official script for the 2012 Olympics. Torch-bearing processions, naked gladiators, flat-pack stadia, are right back in vogue. ‘The river,’ Ackroyd says, ‘will once more become the highway of the nation.’ Jarman is dead, leaving behind, as his testament, the film of a blank blue screen, the empty transcendence of the coming Olympic fence. A captured sky. Punks and anarchists expelled from their Hackney Wick warehouses, caravans, rubbish skips. Doctor Dee is not at home.
To get back to the Thames I had to follow one of the less celebrated streams, the Northern Sewage Outfall, now rebranded as the Olympic Park Greenway. It seemed appropriate to visit the Beckton dispersal area, in part as a walk dedicated to Ballard, to whom I would report, and in part as an investigation of an emerging topography of sheds, retail parks and landscaped gardens made from decommissioned industrial sites. A zone whose defining structure was ExCel London, a green-glazed slab on the Royal Docks, alongside the City Airport; a spacious and secure hangar in which to stage arms fairs and conferences that bewail, at shameless expense, the collapsing money metaphor. The bill for the G20 dinner for 200 VIPs, their assorted interpreters and security operatives, came to £500,000. It was calculated that each diner glugged through £140 of fine wine.
These lavish gatherings, behind closed doors, have their uses. Tony Blair, it was later revealed, had secured the Olympics for London, by jetting off to Sardinia to kiss the ring of the Italian prime minister and media magnate, at the villa where he had enjoyed so much hospitality. Signor Berlusconi, piratical bandana protecting his latest scalp rethink, took a breather from a round of hectic entertaining, to listen sympathetically to Blair’s petition. It was a scene straight from The Godfather. ‘You are my friend. I promise nothing but I see if I can help.’
Colourful block-buildings hunkered into naked escarpments. Shiny boulevards going nowhere. Virgin developments whose balconies are teased by incoming air traffic. They fan out from the sinister ExCel aquarium. The bombed gasworks in which Stanley Kubrick restaged the Vietnam War have been overlaid with off-highway shopping colonies that can be read as a pop-up catalogue of our consumer habits and addictions: an archaeological trawl from the ruins of the Woolworths barn alongside the arsenic-poisoned hump of Beckton Alp to the superstores of Gallions Reach. Some of these enterprises disappear before they can be mapped. The aisles are broader than the lanes of the adjacent A13. Breakfast substitutes are available at any hour of day or night. When you are allowed to walk freely, without challenge, along the flank of ExCel London, there is nothing happening. Nobody at home. No flame-throwers or manacles on display. A cliff of glass, like frozen rain, filtering interior palm forests. ExCel is unexplained: like a plant house teleported from Kew Gardens. No point in sending the postcard to Ballard, he did it for New Worlds in the 1960s.
The sacredness of the Thames beyond Beckton is not easy to quantify. It is a territory where the gravitas of the river excuses layer after layer of botched political initiatives, strategic malfunctions, half-completed or newly abandoned developments. The scheme for a bridge that would have connected the North and South Circular roads, and given London a second orbital motorway, was aborted by Boris Johnson: it was too closely associated with the former mayor, Ken Livingstone. Thames Gateway is a geographical area and a philosophy for which Johnson has no enthusiasm. Boris champions the Eagle- comic wheeze of an airstrip-island at the mouth of the river, out beyond Sheppey. Where wind farms compete in weirdness with sea forts, those platforms on stilts, deserted by radio pirates, hippie communes and the secret state.
I reported to Ballard on how the retail parks give way, after a strip of tolerated wilderness, to an unfinished road guarded by off-watch police cars, whose edgy occupants are hiding their faces in the jaws of jumbo burgers. Near the river, secure buildings disguise their identity and purpose, they are indistinguishable from outer-rim universities or open prisons. One of these sleek sheds confesses to dealing in Logistics and Management. The motivation behind all this clamour is Olympic overspill. ‘Thames Gateway: The Shape of Things to Come.’
The cover of the brochure is a split-screen illustration. A female athlete, arms raised aloft in a triumphalist V. And on the facing page, three tower blocks ramping from a riverside marina. Here, in CGI hyperreality, is the promised legacy. ‘World-class sporting facilities will be available for use
by the local public. The largest new park in London since the Victorian Era – the size of Hyde Park – will provide a delightful new local facility.’ Meanwhile: you can buy into Gladedale’s waterside apartments, where double-glazing keeps out the roar of planes bellying in over the Thames, before skidding on to tarmac at the City Airport. ‘Get the Buzz’ is the unfortunate strap-line. The bridge on which you stand, keeping your head down to watch jets banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, has been named in honour of Sir Steve Redgrave.
After hacking through brambles, detouring around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey monolith of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts with identity badges were lunching beside the river, dipping lethargically into yellow cartons. ‘It’s all we can find,’ one of them said. ‘We have to go to Gallions Reach, there is nothing within five miles.’ They elected to take the air, looking across at Woolwich and Thamesmead, where new estates grow like bindweed: near-neighbours to HM Prison Belmarsh, that upgrading of the Dickensian convict hulks. Buhler Sortex, so they told me, make food-processing machines. They render meat. The original factory was in Stratford, where they enjoyed pubs, cafés, some life. It was compulsorily purchased as part of the initial Olympic push. They were relocated to this empty quarter, between the sewage works and Royal Albert Dock.
After the buddleia and butterflies of the permitted riverside strip, I headed west towards Silvertown and the Thames Barrier. If you travel, thinking about a particular writer, he will provide the chart for the mental landscape through which you pass. Even the photographs I was taking came from another era, a roll of outdated black-and-white film had been sitting on my desk for years. Out of nowhere, on a stretch of defunct nautical enterprises and blind-windowed dockers’ pubs, a Chinese arch appeared. Decorative and newly painted, the gateway to a secret city.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 18