two london walks
Tyburn 14/02/2001 To Kensington Gore. Solitary stroll through the Regent's Park, full of Breakfast from the Parma. Lakes, roses, uncharted pleasure gardens. El Pigeone, fat-breasted master of deception, squirrels squirrelling, ducks ducking. White-headed moorhens, couples, courting pigeons. Dogs, geese, sunlight on alabaster, gilded compasses. Ripples.
Over Clarence Bridge form murderous impulses. Knot together necks of swans. Force heart shapes. Tear Valentine red auguries from their fat breasts. On, quickly, to Baker Street.
Morass of Holmes. Red fire engines attend the station. Draw their water from the Tyburn. Red buses, vans and cars. Cohesion.
Paddington Street Gardens. Calm, effaced by tower blocks. Mausoleum, small boy statue. This is consecrated ground - 80,000 of St Marylebone's dead.
Down James Street, feeling the river rush beneath, around my feet, scouting for telltale sounds, signs, manhole covers, curvatures. Across Oxford Street at the junction we had paused at ten days before, unconsciously dowsing water energies, Nepthys aureoles. Inside the Cavendish buildings, a shopping centre, gateway to the Underworld. Heartless contrast of inside and Outside.
To Duke Street / Brown Hart Gardens. Classical stone and little pieces of St Pancras in Mayfair - concealing what? Some darkened citadel of power, sunk into the earth, vast energies, rails, cacophonies of steps, all silent, classical. No outward signs remain save "Use deadbolt on exit". Musk of mystery. Craning against wired windows, spring-loaded extractor shafts. Ash Wednesday blur of dust on my forehead. The antiquarian's puja.
South Molton Lane is busy with the stink of the riverdamp. Figures, sigils of the city, caper on the walls, vanish, sight unseen, from doorways. Mixture. Composition. The ebb and flow of unseen currents. Culverts, ditches, sounds of rushing waters. Chill zephyrs. Over-arching lamps. Contempt for conquered gods. Chalk the pavement with a river sign.
Brook's Mews - a phallic pavement curve at River's edge. Embankments cast up at either side. The city protecting itself from the river. The river represents the endless time, continual flow, that the city-virus - progress - seeks to infect. The river is cauterised, inoculated, Medicinal defences are built up around it - eminent men seek cures in the workshops of bricklayers, engineers. The flow is diverted. Cityscape creeps over and up, gorging on victory and water, bulbous, swelling with saturation, hydration, water intoxication, ecstatic brainstem burster.
Berkeley square. A canopy of blue framed in treeline. Infiltrated by cancers of dead branches. I must turn to the wall to write or else be drawn upwards into sunlight, skylight, tree light, brightness. Once more to the the river.
Bruton Lane has again the stink of the river. Crossing Berkeley Street into Lansdowne Row I confront again the tramp from the steps of the Ukrainian Church on James Street. Fellow river pilot, wanderer, no sense of time or place but the contours of the Tyburn's banks - a river spirit, boatman, apparition. Charon's emanation, ex-statesman of the Marylebone ferry.
The way is crowded - no space for chalking sigils here. Hyde Park and the last desperate dogleg through Knightsbridge - outside the sphere of interest, the city's village satellites. Steady the nerves with a final cigarette for Exhibition Road and the descent into the flood plain.
Calvi 9/3/01
Camden breathes heavy out of Camden Street - the heavy rush of cop cars over water. The air smells of burning - floodlights shine in smoke over the mortuary. The full-mooned sky is tethered to the rooftops like a circus tent and I walk under it. I can barely think - I am the magus of the city - the Elf King's emissary abroad. The pavement ruptures in my footsteps and my flailing arms reveal the arcs of chaos. This is my space - I am alive.
Tonight to trace the arc of Calvi, the eroded teardrop of his flight and swing - images of beautiful young boys slipping through trapdoors on the roof - to stop on silken orange rope. Too many images, I burst.On Blackfriars Bridge I feel the pull of Calvi's plunge - perfect alignment of power and Fascist sex/death fantasies. Grand mal, the petit mort, onus of the living, quivering on nylon ligatures erotic.
Surrounds me with the epic obelisks of London - George Scott's chimney, Wren's Parthenon, the glinting fire-bowl of his Monument - the blue halo of the sheathed metal tower, and, far in the distance beyond the river-bend, the mocking trinity of Docklands, rampant, laughing at the city. Attributed to who these towers - obscene degradations, ultimate debasement - life's long dream - the latest and the greatest of all human dreams. Betrayal.
The train trailing into Embankment, sinuous curvature of track as it emerges, stinking of the river. The air it breathes is underwater, the trademark hump of the design decelerating like the slow-motion furling of a dolphin's tail. The underground, once threatening, subversive, lacking air, is now my home - the dark passages cut out, cut back by Royal Bentoknights - man's final synergy with machine - apotheosis of monastic knowledge and the infinite - human time meets geological time - the water-bearing gravels and the clay sublime ceramics, lunar plastics - alchemical marriage of the elements.
The child on the Paris Metro is mirrored in the lonely figure of South Kentish Town - commuter Crusoe - warming his hands on bonfires of ticket stubs and faded posters. The analogue of place names, literal prime - an entire linguistics of the line. From Temple to the Mound is scant five stops and in reverse we see the Stone returning to its physic home and westward airs.
Hold up the baton sinister and sign me hone - I have had enough of night's cramped carriage. Time for Camden, and the church, and, glimpsed briefly from the Viaduct, the darkling waters of the Regent.
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