Took a flight-footed cinematic
pilgrimage tonight to the space-time intersection of two Leos Carax
films – Pont Neuf and La Samaritaine department store, empty and
haunted. I miss l'ange de la fenetre ouest, of course, but we so
intensely vibrate each other's hearts and minds that perhaps this
space, despite borne of sadness and unfortunate dissent, is renewing;
it certainly seems to be a part of the beat to which we blaze our
tarantella. I sketched a configuration of buildings just west of Gare
De Lyon and while I'm not my fathers peerless draughtsman there's an
expressivity seeping into the my cross-hatching, texture and line.
It's satisfying and something I'll watch and nurture as I do a sketch
a day for the duration of my time over here. The backspace on my
keyboard doesn't work – there's literally no going back – only
forwards. I know on my purposeful bit intuitive navigating about
Paris earlier that I passed Burroughs' old hotel; knowing on this
occasion was sufficient - and as I think on it, the textural freeness
I'm allowing my sketches does resemble Gysin's roller works. Flirted
a lighter from a hot Algerian boy in an over-lit late-opening
convenience store as part of my mission was to break off from the
parents and apply my self to some serious chainsmoking while a breath
could be seized, and swiftly poisoned. Marlborough Reds – the first
brand I ever smoked, at eleven years, courtesy of that speedfreak,
mother-beating scamp who used to grope and punch me in a steady
volley as he gave me a blowback from his cigarette. Reds still taste
of that time and that time alone. I can clock why people consciously
seek out echoes of what might be termed early abusive experiences –
we didnt know it was wrong then and we're climbing the rope ladder
back to 'innocent' times, the halcyon days of babysitters who used to
fasten your six-year-old hand to their moistened teenage vagina after
pushing you down the stairs, or the putrid crematorium yawn of a
Marlborough Red kiss from the boy who'd stir your cock for the first
time whilst depositing bruises like blossom on a pavement you'd
rewalk for years to come. The walk was good; I shed the husk of the
devil that's clung to my shoulders like a backpack the last few days;
threw him in The Seine with the Victorian shoes, the shopping
trolleys from La Samaritaine, a cache of Burroughs' used needles, the
mudguards from Alain Delon's Lambretta and an unpublished Leos Carax
script that when retrieved will tidily complete the Pont Neuf
trilogy, once Kylie is scraped from the floor and pumped full of
Gunther Von Hagen's elixir of eternal still life. This ongoing battle
of tensions between the devil, which one might call the ego, i.e. he
that makes all the worst decisions, and the pure spirit of being, who
if listened to with humble and respectful attention rarely fails to
guide with the kindest and softest hand, seems to become more
manageable when externalised into such forked-path emblems – a god
is a convenient name for a force, and this whole pantheon to whose
broken family we give many names dependent on our culture and
nurture, is little more than a prismatic externalising of all the
colliding, colluding, high-fiving, cage-fighting, love-making
energies at play within the burbling magma of our being.
M
Her fat Italian hands nudge a
calculator through the hatch to illustrate the price to a non-Italian
speaker. Her fingers swollen and creased like the gnarled tree roots
I'd fearfully hop over on the banks of the broadwater when I was a
wide-eyed child dreamer in a smaller, chubbier body. I'm still
fearful not to trip over my roots. I thought at that point that all
kids had kingfishers in their back garden when in fact they had
snapped plastic shovels and useless trampolines. While I was
communing with these slender, iridescent darts – imperious hunters
in bejewelled plumage, other kids smashed franchised toys over each
other's heads in an unconscious precursor to the abuse they'd come to
unload onto their wives in an unbroken programme of repression and
inarticulable rage.
I boarded the boat to Isola Madre,
wishing as the brisk wind across the lake kicked at my cheeks that
I'd brought the hoodie I inherited from my junkie ex. Hoods and
cowels are the uniform of cults, of secret societies and there are
few more secretive or cultish sorts than junkies. The lies of an
addict spin out into a web like a stained glass window the colour of
blood on the wall of their sad, warmthless chapel. The hoodie at once
anonymises and announces them – a cocoon and corset to darken their
brow and make their wired eyes and yellow skin less visible as they
ghost through the streets in thrall to their solitary faith. There's
only one way to join this cult and it's a blood ritual of initiation
to be repeated slavishly along a parabolic curve of greater need
whereupon peaking, you either overdoes, die, enter rehab or simply
cease to exist beyond the demands of the cult. If you're not in the
cult, communication is impossible – like a car trying to decode
Rilke to a pineapple. A pineapple in a hoodie that nods, smiles, its
mind constantly navigating other plans while appearing to engage you
in the present with attentive ears and eyes.
My Italian is poor and threadbare at
current. I said to mother yesteerday, offering to share the table
refreshment 'my water is your house' and as I pulled towards Isola
Madre, part of me, the unpricked, ageless, innocent vault at my core
hoped that stepping onto the island might be like re-entering the
womb to be nourished and renewed with the amniotic fluid of our first
supper; to be thrown out in my renaissance with fresh-polished armour
and organs that don't flap or pulse fatigued with anxiety or gentle
desolation.
Sometimes when I see a mountain I want
to embrace it for not being temporary. Flesh whithers, emotions die,
opinions invert via the slalom of experience, but iron and rock,
plugged into the magma of the earth don't bend or shift or fail.
