A short text, written yesterday after a walk with Stephen Gill, and a visit to his studio. It is intended to accompany a series of photographs Stephen made of bricks and rocks picked up in the aftermath of the recent Hackney riots. I thought this was a fascinating angle of approach, which somehow shifted the context and moved the whole affair into plural time, rather than the neurotic heat of news reportage.
Iain

Walking home from Stephen Gill’s studio, with all those images and processed layers of light, those rescued objects and boxed archives, still playing in the sump of my crocodile brain, I washed up against a well-intended obstacle that I recognised as a public artwork. The level of collaboration between promoter and commissioned artisan achieves a spasm of frozen rhetoric, an over-signalled political correctness which cancels itself out, leaving a lump of generic gaucheness waiting for years of neglect to mulch it down to a condition where it is worthy of a second glance.

But in Weavers Field, as so often with these interventions, local school kids have been brought in on the act. They have been invited to make marks, to forge upbeat slogans, which would then be baked into interlocking bricks. The lovely red rectangles formed a chorus of voices around a spindly sculptural dance symbolising everything lost and implied in the park’s title. I transcribed some of the messages now immortalised on the rosy bricks. GIVE US MORE TO LIVE FOR THAN WAR. PEACE. ART. NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD INDEED IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER DOES.

We had been talking about bricks. This human relationship with baked clay and text goes back so far, to Mesopotamia,  to shards lovingly preserved and displayed in the great museums. Stephen is a committed scavenger. And what he finds and uses, carries back from his expeditions, is neatly boxed and labelled as future evidence. I think his practice is exemplary, the way he strives to allow place an equal share in every photographic project he undertakes. Before I left the studio, he showed me a box filled with pieces of brick, conglomerates, fossil-enhanced stones with chipped edges. We’ll return to that story. Everything in the new CGI London denies stone, mistreats wood, spurns the sloppy mud and silt of poisoned creeks. It is time, no doubt, for a period of pyschogeology, navigating by glacial erratics dropped behind municipal flats, the hunks of Cornish granite exposed in new parks made from demolished terraces. The stones are beginning to sing.  Thick lips of kerbs exert a powerful magnetism, twisting the blade of the compass, like that moment in Moby-Dick when lightning strikes and the ship sails against the direction of its fallible instruments. We are coming back, so misdirected by electronic gizmos and information overloads, to the stone within ourselves, the ice memories, the minerals in the blood.

At the end of a long walk in the footsteps of the poet John Clare, I found myself, as the light went, in Fotheringhay. I called on a local driver, one of those mysterious guides who appear just when you need them, to run me back to Stilton: where Clare confessed himself broken down and ‘foot-foundered’. This man creaked, he stamped the gears with a metal leg.

‘Had to retire after twenty years in the job,’ he said.

And what I had to ask was that.

‘London Brick Company, Whittlesey.’

He knew Bow, Bethnal Green, Hackney, all my haunts. He had driven there with loads of bricks, mile after mile, up and down the A1, Clare’s Great North Road. He collected the bricks from the gash of a quarry I had visited, early in my walk, and he conjured a phantom London as he drove, imagining bright new buildings taking shape from the cargoes he carried.

Stephen spoke of bricks made from the residue of the Beckton Sewage Works, human waste coming back, as at the start of everything, to shape the walls that contain us.

I remembered my own fetish for picking out tide-smoothed pieces of brick on the Thames foreshore, in Wapping or East Tilbury, bricks with fragments of lettering, broken alphabets. And, like a child again, making sentences from the traces of vanished architecture.

All of which is a long way around to arrive in the streets of Hackney at the time of the recent riots. Stephen Gill is so deeply embedded in the matter of this place, the mapping, recording, celebrating, that he felt obliged, as a moral duty, to make witness in some way. But he struggled to avoid the usual reflex responses. You could see in news reports such a relish for apocalypse. A delirious acknowledgement that the fires and trashed cars and supermarket sweeps were the perfect pre-Olympic promo. There was no need for further reportage, images were swallowing images in a self-cannibalising chain. The confused souls parachuted into these war zones stood stiffly at their posts, while all around them danced the children of the area tweeting and twittering and moving the action on. The flames seemed to run by some malicious instinct right down the new Overground Line, from Dalston Junction to the terminus of a long-established furniture store in Croydon.

Stephen’s methodology was to gather the stone harvest, by pram and bicycle. To tour the aftermath of the riot zone, in Clarence Road and Narrow Way, Mare Street, and by broader sweeps through the territory, like an urban archaeologist, evaluating axe heads and grapeshot, picking up chunks of rock that had bounced off police cars and feeling them for damage. He did not news-assault or ravish the moment with his camera. Tenderly, he transported the stones, as relics, to his studio, where they could be afforded the dignity of forensic examination and logging by high-definition lenses.  At which point, the surface of the bricks and the chunks of projectile debris are revealed as landscapes, lunar surfaces seething with microscopic life, lichen clusters, blood shadows, stains and fissures. That which was thrown is now calmed, assessed, evaluated. The history of small wars is told through a consideration of the spent bullets and shells recovered from the battlefield. Every one of these bricks has a narrative. Some of them were recovered by Gill, after he had noted, from his laptop screen, the trajectory of flight picked up in a news report. Sections of garden wall, broken flag stones, they were pressed into service at this instant of social upheaval. The photographs restore gravitas, a stoic cataloguing of chaos. They are a truer portrait of the crowd broken down into individuals for judgement and retribution than that ugly parade of mugshots in the tabloids.

Cities can be mapped by missing cobblestones: Paris in ’68, London at the burning of Newgate Prison, Budapest, Belfast. Streets are dug up in reverse archaeology.  The stones redistribute themselves, flying through the air, like Magritte’s loaves, in the direction of Plexiglas shields and visored helmets. If you can’t trust the digital captures of women leaping from flaming buildings or street actors brandishing their swag, the bricks in a box are hard evidence, pure and unsponsored. Surface drama is bled from the story, so that we can witness the purity of abstraction. We can be grateful to Stephen Gill for finding a way to record this event, modestly, carefully, without hysteria or any boast that he alone has the solution. No recipes, only rocks.

John Minton’s 1951 cover drawing for Roland Camberton’s Hackney novel, Rain on the Pavements, takes the same high-angle view of Mare Street offered by the helicopter-eye coverage of the recent riots. But there is a striking difference. Minton’s aggrieved marchers, holding up political placards, are heading for the right place to lodge their protest, the Town Hall. The August consumerists head for JD Sports, betting shops, and places offering more white goods, plasma screens, handbags. Camberton’s ambition, like that of Stephen Gill, was to know every stick and stone of the borough. The 2011, pre-Olympic flash mobs, like the promoters and salaried bureaucrats and off-shore developers, wanted to tear the stones down, to remake the world as a heap of future ruins, a cave of glittering trophies. Gill’s portraits, grey and self-contained, are a telling record of this historic moment.

–Iain Sinclair

The following article and story should have been posted back in March 2010. Unfortunately these materials went missing in my mail client until today. Sarah Simblet’s drawings are still missing, I hope to find them. I apologize with Sarah, Iain and also with all readers. I hope you enjoy this unpublished materials. PS: see also this post for a video interview to Iain about the unpublished book Objects of Obscure Desire.

26-03-2010

There have been a number of projects lately focused on the idea of ‘the writer’s room’. A space that should never be exposed, until it’s done with, abandoned, ready for the junk dealer or recreation, as a fraud or freak, in a generously subsidised museum. At the time of a London anthology, ‘City of Disappearances’, that I edited for Hamish Hamilton, I assembled a private collection of things close at hand, but hidden from view, and called it ‘Objects of Obscure Desire’. Mr Goldmark (of Uppingham), print dealer, facilitator, sometime publisher, the man who had been mad enough to put out my first novel in a handset edition, was contemplating launching another series of collaborations, artist and writer. I was keen to work with Sarah Simblet, whose recent drawings of water I admired very much. There were conversations, walks, adventures of the usual kind. A young man, also fired up by Mike Goldmark, travelled to Hackney and made a film. ‘City of Disappearances’ came and went. The years rolled on. I produced other books, as did Sarah. The objects remained obscure, which is probably right; it’s their nature. The silver monkey, sneering at me, demanded some form of exorcism. So here is a revised fragment of a vanished property.         

Iain

MONKEY

Light from elsewhere inscribes a pewter sky. The cold relents by half a degree. And you notice it. As blisters soften.

I come less frequently to this musty room: no more papers, ledgers, manuscripts to evaluate. The only documents I write by hand are cheques to council officers and tax-gatherers. For unnoticed and unrequired services. Other debits are electronic and instantaneous. Credits are posthumous – and they arrive, if at all, after many months. Committees have to be convinced of my status, my desire to operate as a ‘casual lecturer’. I am forever making copies of my passport, but I no longer travel. The freelance gig is over, an anachronism. Poets are banished to out-of-season, sea-coal resorts, the backrooms of biker cafés closed for the northern winter. The books that still surround me, offering insulation, are sullen, eager to mutate back into money. Most of the authors are lost or forgotten. Friends, confederates, tutors. Their letters have been sold. Or folded among unopened pages. Creatures nest in the wall, chomping.

To the left of where I am sitting, above my eyeline, among a cluster of objects on the roof of a grey filing-cabinet: the monkey. Where I was sitting, twenty, thirty years ago. Where I ought to be sitting now, at my father’s desk: in his wooden swivel chair (inherited from his father). It creaks, it groans.  A small brass plate giving date and occasion. A consulting room chair with nothing to consult, beyond tightly-packed shelves of books. But he’s not here. They are not here, any of them, the old ones. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Sometimes they appear still, to my children, on underground trains, or in provincial hotels, sitting quietly, keeping themselves to themselves. I husband a familiar absence, the throb of a missing tooth. Anna thinks I’m following the Quentin Crisp recipe on dust. After the first three years it doesn’t get any worse. But they’re wrong, both of them. You could build an earthwork, Maiden Castle in miniature, in the feathery tilth that has accumulated on the roof of the cigar cabinet. Spectral fingerprints of people who never visited London. Brown flakes of Edwardian cigars. My father didn’t smoke cigars: Craven A in cellophane bricks. His indulgence. Abandoned after that first heart tremor.

PRESENTED TO

DR. H. SINCLAIR

BY THE

MAESTEG GWR AMBULANCE CLASS

- 1923 -

The Great Western Railway has gone. And the life that went with it. The landscape of a childhood that never happened. Less-remembered walks: the station as seen from the hill on which we lived,  the long street that approached it. Banks, butchers, drapers. Not many cars. A Belfast dentist up rubbery stairs. Mask over face, green gas. A pistol wrapped in an oily rag. A lidless cigar box with five bullets. A motorcycle. The General Strike: 1926. A mob on the street. Fables retold. The contradictory evidence of unlabelled photographs. Mute things outlive us. Their survival: a goad, a portal. Touch them, take them up, burn your skin on cold metal. Let flakes of silver paint lodge beneath your nails. Mythologize.

My father kept his better books in glass-fronted cases that must, after the  war,  have been a special newspaper offer:  austerity edging towards conspicuous consumption. They fascinated me, those spines. The colours, the shapes. The sliding panels of the bookcases were stiff to operate. Which only added to their charm.  The whole deal was as much a unit of display as a working library. Yellowback Austin Freeman crime mysteries. Edgar Wallace. Jack the Ripper. The blue-grey run of that frequently consulted oracle, Chambers’s Encyclopedia (in XV volumes with six supplements). And Sawdust Caesar with its fearsome portrait of Mussolini. The slim book on Cuba we both bought, at the same sale, and never read. A fat green Bodley Head Ulysses. With a very particular smell: rancid erudition, covert intelligence. Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (revised edition with monkey dustjacket).  Most of Conan Doyle in compendium form. And a single leatherbound volume, my great-grandfather’s Peruvian expedition (with fold-out map). Botanical drawings, dwarfish natives. Scottish humour making the best of its prejudices: slovenly, drunken, exploitative priests. Vultures on sweating middens. Earthenware drinking vessels with the teeth and ears of animals. They moved, they shuddered, they whistled.

On top of the bookcase was a collection of curious objects: grave goods from South America, a shrunken head (fake) and a silver monkey. All of these things, along with the random books, titles that caught my eye, solicited a linking narrative. If there had been time, perhaps, my father would have provided it. He worked long hours, weekends, night calls, a GP in a Welsh mining town. He limited himself to mealtime anecdotes, sinister comedies with the crafted shape of tales by W.W.Jacobs or Saki. Blood flowing down the stairs of a dark cottage. Hanged men. Hermits in bunkers. Improvised amputations deep underground by the light of a miner’s helmet.

After his death the monkey came with me to London. To the Hackney room where it remains -  and where I wrote my first books. It’s heavy, cold, this creature.  Dipped in a layer of  silver that is wearing away. A Rodin parody, a melancholy beast contemplating a human skull.  Hamlet in a gorilla suit, it sits, cross-legged, on three books (of diminishing thickness). The Bible, undoubtedly. Then, I would guess, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. And one other, uncredited, yet to be written. The book I’ve been working on all my life. And whose title I’ve forgotten.

The inherited monkey is a Punch cartoon ridiculing  evolutionism. The hair, centre-parted, makes this ape of god look pathetically fin de siècle: It took me years to understand the metaphor. I was providing houseroom for the physical manifestation of a ‘monkey on the back’.  I would stare at that book stack until it turned into a model of the Empire State Building. With the monkey as King Kong  (hauling itself up from the dark swamp of my fantasies).

Poor Jacko is doomed to wait until the skull becomes a clock of fate, a Viking drinking vessel. In the curve of the polished memento mori, I saw my own reflection, hammering away at a typewriter. A Faustian contract: heredity. Write or die. Write and die. Grow into the cup of bone the monkey fixes with its knowing eye.

The jaw is broken, a hinge. You can lift the monkey’s cranium and reveal a metal stub, a cylinder like a bullet.  It’s a cigarette lighter, but it doesn’t light. Not for me. It sits alongside the cigar cabinet in which there are no cigars. Dust on black-bordered visiting cards. A tartan-bound address book for demolished houses in countries with new names. While I am walled in, warped, bent over, lost in the dislocation of trying to uncover the elements of a story, the monkey scratches his silver to become an illustration by the Spaniard, David Vierge, for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Very black, this Congo ape, ravishing a woman in white on a tumble of Parisian bedclothes. While a bug-eyed voyeur stares from the outer darkness, hooked over the sill. The monkey’s paw drips a rosary of blood. Aubrey Beardsley, in his version of this tale, gives the albino chimp a Pat Butcher earring. The predator carries its limp victim from behind. Its hairless condition is justified by Poe’s text.

Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet.

Now that monkey and books are brought together, I have a sense of how my squatting silver trophy is not so much weighing the three volumes down as climbing out of them: escaping. Remember Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘Green Tea’? A Dublin improvisation on the classic Edinburgh doppelgänger tale: a tight-buttoned clergyman called Jennings, working late into the night, keeps himself alert with quantities of green tea. Until his suppressed imagination, dark juice, takes the form of a visible attendant. A red-eyed monkey. Trapped by the exhausting study of ‘odd old books’, the compulsion to produce more of them, Jennings conjures up an incubus, in the form of a monkey. Who itches lasciviously at Hyde-like crimes: ‘satanic captivity’.

My inherited toy had a candle in its head. The monkey-fiend whispered of bonfires. Pyres of redundant words. Fire censorship on a German scale. The belief that libraries are premature ash. Green tea visions. Insomnia.  Green monkey disease. Sharp yellow teeth. Infected blood. Fever, rash, diarrhea. Vomiting, gastro-intestinal bleeding. A lingering death.

Jennings trembles, suffers the word virus:

The thing exhibited an atrocious determination to thwart me. It was with me in church – in the reading desk – in the pulpit – within the communion rails. At last, it reached the extremity, that while I was reading to the congregation, it would spring upon the book and squat there, so that I was unable to see the page. This happened  more than once.

It happens still. The monkey is not buried inside the book. It takes different forms. If you won’t write, it says, you must do the other thing: read until your eyes bleed.  In the W.W. Jacobs story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, a man wills his dead son back to life. Part of the psychic outwash that followed the First War. There is a scratching sound at the door of my room. Squirrels in the eaves? What shapes and shadows should I see by the yellow flame in the monkey’s brain? The winter-dead creep to my threshold to listen. They  hear the clatter of that ventriloquised jaw as I retell a story the old ones have gifted me.