Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Even if I write about brothels in Baghdad,’ Bunting said, ‘they are brothels I’ve been in.’

  Beyond the train window, a field.

  I could learn from the poets, rigour, discipline, attack. Secret structures of rhythm (my ear was tin). But most I could appreciate how, by intense concentration, seizure of the moment, they moved ahead of time: to tell it as it should be. Read the Denver man, Ed Dorn, on the Bush boys, the sleazy politics of compromise, perpetual Balkanisation (trashing of memory). Poems are memory-systems. Dorn, on the cone of time, sees what is coming:

  … the curvature of the earth

  from the obscure Islet of Diego Garcia East of

  the Arabian Peninsula an experimental

  missile vibrates and then launches

  from the carrier, and Oh Good Lord, minutes later,

  … American dumb missile arrives with punity

  in the southern suburbs of Baghdad, ruined Cradle of Civilization,

  just north of the Garden of Eden which looks, I must say,

  rather abused and tacky now …

  Dorn was locked into the chemistry of the thing, from a hospital bed, years before it happened – seeing through walls, reading the future on TV. Destroyed topographies. Futile sacrifices. Abused language.

  I shouldn’t read newspapers, it’s not good for me (for you). Especially the concerned ones, the ones the hucksters and crooks are always suing for libel (career suicide). Newspapers don’t know what to do about poetry, they ignore it – unless there’s a prize attached, money, prestige, campus preferment. They might sponsor the other stuff, reflex verse, cheap war rhetoric: the easy way out. Anti-poetry. All too available. Nasty little satires and bleeding hearts. Language is a lump on the tongue. A tight throat. You can’t spit it out, unless you rip flesh. Drip blood on paper.

  I used to start with the back pages, in my sunny, geranium-on-sill, pigeon-watching, West London mornings: football, rugby, cricket scores. Then the art: book, film, theatre reviews. Junk the rest. One cup of coffee, finish. Get back to work. One chapter – off to the tube.

  I dropped the Guardian (never a love affair) when they shafted Jack Trevor Story and started using Andy Norton (pit bulls, gangsters’ suits, barbers, forgotten London literature). On the evidence of the copy picked up at the Bo-Peep Inn, Marina Fountain (leopard-skin pillbox hat, French cigarettes) was a new Guardian reader. It didn’t matter to her if the paper was out of date. This was an ironic gesture, a style statement. Life on the coast. Last-gasp Art Deco (1938) revamped for property supplements and second-home runaways: worst of both worlds. Marina had the look down pat, the apotheosis of transience. Blink and you miss her. Paint-blistering perfume in a seafront pasta joint.

  If, these days, a newspaper left its grubby traces on my hands, it would be in an optician’s waiting room, on a train. And I started with the obituaries. Moved on to New Age quackery: fruit for cancer, expensive trainers for ruined knees, torture chairs for wrecked backs.

  A book review caught my eye, the title. Madness: A Brief History. Wonderful! Like: Immortality: An Instant Sketch. Or Starvation: A Diet of Contemporary Views. The author of Madness was the prolific and respected Dr Roy Porter. His ‘eighty-somethingth’ book. His last. The delusions of the insane can stretch our definitions of the word,’ wrote the reviewer. Porter, London writer, broadcaster, raider of lost libraries, decamped to Hastings: a new life. He died, heart attack, cycling uphill to his allotment.

  Porter’s thesis, distillation of many years’ profound study, was troubling: treatment is pointless, madness cannot be defined. ‘Aetiology remains speculative, pathogenesis largely obscure, classifications predominantly symptomatic and hence arbitrary and possibly ephemeral and subject to fashion, and psychotherapies still only in their infancy and doctrinaire.’

  What point then in my consulting Hannah Wolf? What useful account could I give of my condition? What diagnosis could she form from a single consultation at the Travelodge? The world was the problem and the world the cure. The long march of the A13. The remorselessness of the sea.

  The big obit – poached face, candystripe jacket, badger beard, hair like Hokusai wave – was for an artist. A friend of poets. An ‘American film-maker who brought a unique eye to his craft’. Another Cyclops, evidently. James Stanley Brakhage (1933–2003). Born in Kansas City: as ‘Robert Sanders’. Adopted, two weeks later, by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage.

  Stuck there, nowhere, in Kent on a stalled train, by that dull field, the news, not unexpected, was a blow. Stan Brakhage, author of the ultimate autopsy movie, Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, was himself dead: exposed to obituarists. Biography glossed. Achievements listed. Standing evaluated: ‘a kind of poetry written with light’. Brakhage taught seeing, fault, flaw, scratch, mark of hand. Layers and shifts. The living/loving family, its ground, at the centre of everything: childbirth, friendship, death. ‘An eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.’

  Brakhage wrote so tellingly about the moment when film-pioneer George Méliés watched a static image of waves projected on a screen, and how they suddenly began to move. To breathe.

  I was diminished by this loss. Marina Fountain, leaving her newspaper folded to the obituary page, had set me up. The catalogue of those who mattered in the world, by whose words and images I had navigated so long, was being rationalised, trimmed. A bad year for poets, now this. They put the bladder cancer down to the coal-tar dyes Brakhage used when he handpainted strips of film.

  You can, if you’re braver than I am, give your tumour a name -Rumsfeld, Cheyney, Perle – and live with it, reluctant companion in a white marriage, for the time that’s left; live with the knowledge that the lump, the cell cluster, is going to die when you die.

  Ed Dorn, visiting Rome, took an interest in ‘Keats’s struggle to die … almost visible through the window of his somber room’. The problem of separating ourself, in full consciousness, from the anchor of the body. Dorn’s tumour was female: ‘she detests who and what I detest’.

  The lesser obits didn’t hold me. I was running on empty, crocodile tears. The train seemed to have been chartered by Jehovah’s Witnesses, the grateful dead on an awayday, crawling towards heaven. Ghost Dance Sioux of the 1870s (courtesy of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, precursor to the tent show at Guantánamo Bay) saw the railroad as a ladder up which returning ancestors would climb. Justified corpses in the radiance of eternity.

  In the bottom-right corner of the newspaper, somewhere between an obituary notice and a news filler, were a few lines penned by a person called Johnson.

  ROAD WRITER DIES ON M25

  A.M. (Andrew) Norton, 60, bookseller and occasional author, died last Friday in a freakish accident on the road which was the subject of his best-known book, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. It is thought that he was intervening in a road rage incident when he was attacked with a machete. The site of the affray, the West Thurrock approach to the Queen Elizabeth II suspension bridge, had previously provided the climax to his pedestrian circuit – an over-complicated collision of antiquarian retrievals (Bram Stoker and Dracula) and hysterical satire (Purfleet oil storage facilities and Essex drug-dealers).

  Norton, recently unpublished and retired to the south coast, was revisiting Essex with an eye on turning his earlier documentary research into a novel or film.

  Born in Wales, educated in Gloucestershire, his work was largely set in East London. Standard figures from the Gothic catalogue – Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Jekyll – make frequent appearances. After some early success, as a latecomer to the school of Ackroyd and Moorcock, his adjective-heavy style with its verbless sentences passed into disfavour and critical neglect. He returned to his original occupation as a used bookdealer. Much of his material had the authentic musty tang of the book stacks and street markets. Norton, according to Calcutt and Shephard’s guide
to cult fiction, was ‘an archivist of omens and the occult past’.

  He was unmarried.

  When Norton – the other, living one – came out, booted and rucksacked, low morning sun over Hackney horizon, I was ready for him. I knew just how it went. There was a woman. I expected that. Andy never walked without a companion: he needed a stooge, someone to bear the brunt of his ‘humour’. She was strong-shouldered, tall as he was, long-striding. I pictured her, nude, in one of those photo-strip sequences by Eadweard Muybridge: Woman Sprinkling Water from a Basin. She had lovely thick red hair. She was, or rather she would be, the non-pregnant Pevensey woman, Track. The American. Jacky Roos’s former wife.

  They came down Queensbridge Road and into the Bethnal Green labyrinth, Brick Lane. He was snapping away. She, a proper artist, waited. He missed the plaque for Bud Flanagan (‘Leader of the Crazy Gang’), high on the wall, above Rosa’s café in Hanbury Street. They took tea, chatted to a rather natty schnorrer. An old Jewish feller who fed them a succession of tall stories – which they lapped up.

  I caught the name ‘Litvinoff’, the mention of Rainham. They were headed east. I anticipated every move, every move he made on her: an oblique advance on the golden wolf of Aldgate Pump. They were following, like sniffer dogs, a trail: pre-tarmac, post-development. The soul of the A13. And I was right with them, dictating the script. If I imagined a turn, a halt, a digression, they made it.

  I don’t think Norton spotted me. Maybe once. In Whitechapel, on Vallance Road. Or a reflection among nautical charts in a shop-window in the Minories. If he did, it was a bad dream, footsteps on his grave. He was dragged forward by the epic gravity of the fallen standing stone, on that bald patch of grass, behind Commercial Road. Who should I throw in to greet them, a dowser? A dowser who just happens to have worked for Ford’s in Dagenham. Would you believe it?

  Norton had no choice. I invented a bit of business to hold him back, while I scooted ahead to the Travelodge. My tryst with Hannah Wolf, lover and therapist. It was her story, really. The disentanglement of dream, reverie, landscape. Freud, Hannah said, was the first great novelist of the twentieth century.

  Travelodge

  It was in the car park of the Docklands Travelodge, as I paced, restlessly, waiting for Hannah, that I developed my notion of composite landscape (leading to composite time): skies from one exposure (Hastings) laid over another shore (Bow Creek). Characters from a deleted narrative could be given a second chance, revived in order to ‘rescue’ a dull passage of prose. The entropy of the road, the A13, invited this multilayered approach: documentation, in its absolute form, as pure fiction.

  Give me a pen and a pad of paper and I would be totally incapable of sketching Hannah Wolf. My Identikit portrait was blank. She existed, if at all, in random memories: pouring water in a doll’s cup for her sister, the way she clung, even now, to the rituals of childhood; her unlooked-for liveliness at the seaside, the rush, screaming, at the waves. And how she bristled, clicked her tongue, when she opened an official letter.

  Hannah wasn’t happy about this meeting. She had problems of her own. There was no question of letting me into the high tower, Goldfinger’s flats with the view over the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. A quick drink at the Travelodge would have to suffice. We would meet, at twilight, in the car park (neither of us had cars). Hannah didn’t want to listen to my dreary confessions. She wasn’t a priest and she had no intention of dressing up, for my benefit, in a cassock. Or any other kind of frock. Of course she would recognise me: the one whose eyes shone in the dark like a photoflash vampire.

  A procession of reps in grey suits (carrying other grey suits in protective wrappers), all going out, quitting the place, looking for action, gave way to nothing. Baffled road noise. Gritty breezes. A felt, but largely unheard, hum of bad electricity. Boredom would have to be redefined for the A13: it was no longer the precursor to retail terrorism, the void. Something worse. Shadows etched into tarmac. Hours and hours of CCTV footage rippling into orgasmic excitement: with the arrival of a crew of transients carrying black bags.

  Like the Keystone Kops invading Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’. The confirmation of my landscape thesis.

  I ducked behind a car, a Nissan Primera. I had time to read, by braille, the letters in their circle, before this distracted man, his family, followers, children, hauled themselves into the lobby of the hotel.

  He looked quite like the hyper-realist painter Jimmy Seed – about whose work I had once written a few thousand undistinguished words. We spent a long afternoon in his Hackney studio wrestling over a bottle. I wasn’t much of a drinker, up until then. And he was trying to quit. Most of his recent work was predicated on the absence of booze.

  When Jimmy went dry, so he told me, he started leaving people out of his paintings: neck-biters, slags, dog lovers, derelicts. Women with fat legs, visible pantylines and rucksacks. Men pissing on fires. He was right on the money. Out of Hackney and Limehouse and onwards to the A13. Cinemas, bingo halls, drinking clubs: waiting for demolition. His canvases were too big for the studio. They belonged on hoardings, advertising things that had already been sold.

  Jimmy was the death of narrative. If you saw a photograph of the painter, hands in pockets of raincoat, up against the wall, towpath of canal, white shirt buttoned to the collar, he resembled a political prisoner. A man in the wrong place, Belfast. Waiting for a bullet. Friendly fire.

  So here they all are, the unpainted of lost London. I watch them stagger across the car park, my cancelled fictions: the American woman, Track, kid in one hand, black bags in the other – and sullen Andy Norton (fink, liar, thief). He fancies his chances. A new location, a road for the morning. Troop of bohemian vagrants (artfully introduced). A strong woman to temper his culpable misogyny. He can’t believe his luck. It’s almost as if somebody is pulling the strings. He talks about ‘tapping territory’, mediumship, ley lines, possession. He’s even come up with a tame dowser.

  Hannah caught me by surprise. I think she’d been spying on me for some time. She kissed me full on the mouth. I tasted her. Then she broke away, skittering off towards the picture window, the bar.

  It went well, the evening. I thought so. A place nobody would ever find us, dark alcoves, soft Muzak. We drank steadily. I learnt, with gritted teeth, how to listen. Hannah had access to material I knew nothing about: communal life, post-Laingian politics, Poland. Poplar.

  The more she talked, the happier she was. Between fugues, we necked. I let her run. I was beginning to enjoy it, being an audience. Freud, she announced, was an artist, a myth-maker, a proto-novelist fixated on sexual drama (place him alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, Bergman). Jung was a premature Californian. She had a postcard of a rather wonderful painting, Freud and Jung Leaving New York, by one of her clients (don’t call them patients, nutters). A beard called Rhab Adnam. Wild seas, off Manhattan, the great psychologists hand in hand on a slippery deck: tall towers trembling. Impossible not to read this naif apocalypse, painted thirty years ago, as prophetic (all good art begins there).

  ‘Either you make reality an object of pleasure, if you are powerful enough already.’ She quoted Jung. ‘Or you make it an object of your desire to grab or to possess.’

  There was no difficulty in avoiding Jimmy Seed’s gang (it was him), they were getting loud and plastered. Jimmy was back on the booze, stress had driven him to it; taste and warmth on tongue and throat, glow in belly, welcomed him like an old friend.

  I liked Hannah’s voice, disparate elements of race and place had come together to form her disguise: Whitechapel, Hackney, Bow and the real east, Kraków, Kishinev, Kurdistan. Her eyes shone and her hands moved. Enthusiasm (too light a word): possession. The yielding up of self. Touch. Her hand alighting on my thigh. My arm closing, quite accidentally, around her shoulder.

  In the long mirror above the bar I caught the other Norton’s eye: mean-spirited, voyeuristic. You looking at me? Another round: Kummel, lemonade and ice for Hannah, while I stayed with the whi
skey. Norton pretended to be absorbed in the TV film – The American Friend? Betrayal. Double-dealing, trains, sickness, borders. Fellow director Nicholas Ray guesting in an eye-patch. Avatars of death everywhere.

  I asked the barman, a man who looked like an air steward who’d been found out, if I could get a room for the night. It was going to work with Hannah. She couldn’t, at this hour, walk back, alone, across the A13 into that estate. Talking made her affectionate. It might have happened too – but for Norton, the smirk with which he watched Dennis Hopper’s exploitation of Bruno Ganz. America and Europe. Revenge, I suppose, for the adaptation of an American original by a German: the disapproval of Patricia Highsmith. Her crooked mouth.

  Wait for him in the Gents, then finish it, stuff his fat head down the bowl. Repossess my own story, clear the road. A night of love with Hannah – then, unbathed, a walk to the limits of the A13, Southend, the sea. Beautiful shifts of energy: fresh images, fresh prose.

  Meanwhile, to pass the time, I told Hannah one of my dreams. Do you ever read the same book twice? And wonder at the changes? Hannah was always asking, if a film came on, late in the evening: ‘Have I seen this before?’ The answer is always ‘no’. You redirect, respond to trigger images, throwaway gestures, the clothes they wear. Dreams should never be recounted – because you shape them, smooth out glitches, apply logic, search for the kindest camera angles.

  Hannah broke away, detached my arm. Took fierce spectacles out of her bag. She swept the room, as if seeing it for the first time. She noticed other drinkers, pulled down her skirt.

  ‘I dreamt that I cut off the little finger of my left hand.’

  ‘Please,’ Hannah said.

  It did sound gross, banal. The first fascination of dream-revelation, like seeing yourself on television, soon fades.

  ‘And next morning, cutting bread, I really did slice the thing, to the bone. Here, look.’