“I’ve got a big meeting in the City”
Noise/ crocodile season, new shoots in fluorescence walking
in line/ discipline, routine the backbone of our little island/ Pond side in
Springfield Park / the dog walkers / bounding Labradors chasing rotten tennis
balls / the lone harmonica player / old grey whistle test theme / the golden
hours on weekdays before noon / the dispossessed, the misfits, the ninjas, the
jazz talkers, the tops off the early drinkers the ducks and geese congregate.
Early in the post millennial
years ragged early adopters of online diatribe gathered close by these Edge-lands,
a loose collective of rabid poets, a Welsh intellectual, an old Etonian a now
deceased philosopher amongst others. The ‘zone’ had yet to be commodified,
reification was a looming spectre, just then it was still just a ‘bit of a
laugh’, no beards in sight, a non-career minded sortie through densely
overgrown canal side brush.
The
‘city’ as metonym for collective psychosis of money launderers and alpha male
members only club. The City as architectural neo ruin, a blast in the face,
enclave inside the ‘Ring of Steel’, the closed fist the bunch of fifties rolled
tightly bound inside pocket of quilted jacket; awaiting expungement in the Ten
Bells before moving onto the Golden Heart of maybe the pride of Spitalfields
for the more adventurous hedge funder.
The closed off gaze, the over confident swagger the poking gut if left
unchecked. Shirts by T.M Lewin, get a good deal if you spend more, always need
to spend more.
The question remains,
what relations bind us to this place?
How did we pitch up here?
What circuitous route
bore us east among these former ruins? We speculated and praised our ingenuity
to escape, but we were only just a few years ahead of the pack, the Olympiad
was our Utopia’s death knell. River banks exploding with upturned shopping carts,
rusty bicycles and giant hogweed would live on in our imaginations only; as
fading super 8mm memories of a pre-digital time of quest without gain, friendships’
without networks, simple anthropological vices, the first wave of Polish Lagers.
Rave culture transmogrified with the travellers’ scene and
swept across the south east like a wave of hysterical insurrection, the
sulphate swillers clashed matted locks with the loose limbed baggies; desperate
to forget the weeks’ work, for a short while a kind of symbiosis was achieved.
Sadly, it would not last.
Now washed ashore next to the swamplands of Walthamstow we
had time to reflect on a journey from Blackwater estuary flatlands, the tidal
saltmarsh of north Essex to this inner city ‘wild zone’, corralled by the lea
navigation and the dense urban conurbations of Newham and its leafier neighbour
Waltham Forest.
Here
come the steely eyed buggy pushers / trail blazing unwavering in self- belief/
the sense of entitlement is palpable / “We bought our belonging” / fully paid
up, now. Scions of a creative dynasty that forms its nexus beside new formations
of ley lines demarcated by high end delicatessens’ and all white Victorian yoga
spaces. If this is capitalist realism then these are its foot-soldiers, gliding
in unruffled organisation just below a level of passive aggression that is
serviceable enough to go largely unnoticed. These are the Passantes ‘of Baudelaire, these boulevards are stained with pigeon
crap and discarded nitrous oxide canisters, the hovering flanuer is an under employed autodidact. The
pineal eye refracts.
We are at Bankside amongst the company of poets.
‘The river sweats oil
and tar’
We have achieved divine inspiration in our alienation, the
wind wafts wood-smoke and the smell of freshly baking sourdough. All around the
city begins to reveal itself again, shapeshifting itself, re-formatting its
guise for another new generation. The city that you remember was never really there,
it hovers like a mirage in your memory, every year altered a little until any
semblance of reality has long been forgotten. You are Prufrock supine and past
your prime, you must go to the banks of the Thames and pray to the river gods,
you must submerge yourself in the muddy waters of this great river, this our
Ganges.
“You invented it, it
is a spectre”
