I'll bring the diamonds of my beauty to rest here on this table. I'll smash the fruits of my withering here, on the pale kitchen floor. I will watch you in a mirror, when your hair is down; I'll be a stranger, the best friend you ever had, tormentor, aid, your clown.
You're sitting on a black crate by the plant pots, in the aching ray of the sun. We are circling memory together, putting pieces back where they came from. You remember the old house, just like me. The cherry tree, the dark evenings, Grandma's boiled egg sandwiches with the yolk yellow and running. Dogs, haunting, daylight, and all that we wish we didn't remember, or remembered better.
I never felt as close to you as this, this moment, not in years. And suddenly you are ageless - seven or sixteen, new born, or nearing forty. My sister again, after years of barren yearning, cold shouldering, guilt.
How can I tell you the ways that I love you, that I understand, that I know you? How can I let you carry on pretending, when we both see the way the sky is falling? I wish I could hold you, I wish I were older, or that the sky were bluer. But wishes grow wings that bud and then wither, and I am only a child in this garden of ivy and azelea, and too much scent is wasted on dream and failure.
You stand up now, you say your hands are shaking and you don't understand why. And you love me, I can feel it, you are glad I am here, glad we are talking. As I am glad, for this is for what I was waiting.
But I cannot cross the grey wastes with you, I cannot tramp these marshes. I am tired of loss, but more tired of hoping for sunlight to filter through the cracks in the weather. For all that was pulled apart to be mended.
I can only mend myself, and watch you in the sun, beautiful as ever, soft as a grey mouse, tears like downy feathers. And hold your hand if you want it; and a hug means everything, a cup of tea means the world, when it is made by hands that are like your own, when the sun is leaping in the water, when family means blood; that is running through, circling, shedding, drying, flooding the arteries of our lives, apart and together, unstoppable, ferocious, simple, untethered, precious liquid metal, inexplicable.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Out Of The Fire, Into The Fire
Tonight, I am sad, and it seems that I'm not the only one. My shoulders are creaking with a tension that has remained undetected, but building up over the last month or so. It hurts to stretch, my tendons giving themselves up like wounded serpents uncurling, my heart is too tender.
I am off to Wales tomorrow morning, to see my Mum and my sister. My Mum is coming out of respite care tomorrow, where she has been for two weeks whilst some exciting renovations have been done on the house. So now my Mum will have her own specially adapted bathroom, so she doesn't have to go to the day centre for a bath or to get her hair washed. And her bedroom is bigger as well. So I am going to help my sister clean and put back all of Mum's bits and bobs, and make it all new and nice and homely for her.
I always have a lump in my throat and a tension in my heart when I know I am about to embark on a trip home. The last time, at Christmas was so terrible, I feel I'm only just about getting over it now. But without the strain of Christmas festivities and the brief return of my absent father, I am hoping for a much calmer time.
I shall be endeavouring to blog whilst I am there, now I am in ownership of a new swanky mobile phone with pen, keyboard and just about everything but the kitchen sink on there. It's just figuring the damn thing out, that'll be the interesting bit.
Yes, tonight I am sad, inconsolably so. The kind of sad that makes me wish I was a dog, so I could sit on someone's kitchen step whining mournfully at the moon. So someone would throw me a bone. But I'm not, and they aren't, and so in the morning, I'll finish packing my red Habitat trolley with partly clean, partly dirty washing, run through twenty to-do lists in my head simultaneously, make the train with just enough time to spare, and go back to the place of so much memory, so much loss, so much..muchness. And I'll become another Clare, I will be born again into a different world, one I feel so comfortable in, and one that is so alien.
So, see you at the other side, when England is but a mist following the back end of a train carriage, Brighton, a haze I left behind.
I am off to Wales tomorrow morning, to see my Mum and my sister. My Mum is coming out of respite care tomorrow, where she has been for two weeks whilst some exciting renovations have been done on the house. So now my Mum will have her own specially adapted bathroom, so she doesn't have to go to the day centre for a bath or to get her hair washed. And her bedroom is bigger as well. So I am going to help my sister clean and put back all of Mum's bits and bobs, and make it all new and nice and homely for her.
I always have a lump in my throat and a tension in my heart when I know I am about to embark on a trip home. The last time, at Christmas was so terrible, I feel I'm only just about getting over it now. But without the strain of Christmas festivities and the brief return of my absent father, I am hoping for a much calmer time.
I shall be endeavouring to blog whilst I am there, now I am in ownership of a new swanky mobile phone with pen, keyboard and just about everything but the kitchen sink on there. It's just figuring the damn thing out, that'll be the interesting bit.
Yes, tonight I am sad, inconsolably so. The kind of sad that makes me wish I was a dog, so I could sit on someone's kitchen step whining mournfully at the moon. So someone would throw me a bone. But I'm not, and they aren't, and so in the morning, I'll finish packing my red Habitat trolley with partly clean, partly dirty washing, run through twenty to-do lists in my head simultaneously, make the train with just enough time to spare, and go back to the place of so much memory, so much loss, so much..muchness. And I'll become another Clare, I will be born again into a different world, one I feel so comfortable in, and one that is so alien.
So, see you at the other side, when England is but a mist following the back end of a train carriage, Brighton, a haze I left behind.
Friday, March 24, 2006
The Elegant Universe
The rain is warm tonight. I didn't need much of an excuse to get me outside in it, or to the sea front, past the patch of green at the end of my road and the ornate shelter where two figures were standing side by side, their heads low, murmuring.
Still I took out the rubbish bag to sling in the huge plastic green tub behind my house, and held that as my excuse, despite the fact I've never before felt the need to empty my bin at seven thirty at night. And knowing that, it made me laugh out loud, because when I was nine, I never needed a reason to be in the rain.
And I am a signpost in the humid dark, white froth lapping at my toes. The sky is empty of stars. As I watch, several thousand layers all come falling, a series of images: birth and ceasing monuments and facts and figures, and timeless shadowing of this life line, and the line is interrupted by a bang that never stops flinging itself into unknowability. We are here. That is there. Uncompromising universe I could fit myself into, if it would only let me. But I am a signpost in the humid dark. The universe is gaping. Too many equations. We can never sew it up.
And the reason I am standing here isn't even because I want to feel this rain on my face, or on my back, or my hands. It isn't because of the way the sea is stretching into a black nothing, so that I feel infinite, travelling, unsung and triumphantly lost. It isn't even because of the way the liquid in the air mixes with the evening heat to give off a quiet radiance, a gentle buzz, a comfort...
Little reasons and big reasons fill our universe up, and maybe that's why it burst in the first place: too many reasons and not enough, all bickering inside a point as small as the end of the end of your nose. Too much certainty inside a void. Too much void inside certainty. Too much that is too little, swimming with what is never lost, but always going. The balloon fills the box, the box is always breaking.
And I'll try and tame what surrounds me. It will become a poetic universe, of dark matter and rainbow light. But this is still my equation, my lassoo, my very own reason. I bring my mother and my father to all creation, the kids at school who thought I wasn't too bright, a yearning for the sublime, the shock of existing.
Wah wah baby coming out the womb. Old man dying. People on the roadside, diseased, raw sewage sliding by. I will make it add up, I will make it all add up. I will bargain with an unfeeling universe, else, without reason, it all grows too cold, too cold for human habitation. An icy galaxy, deathly, alone, feeble, wandering. A crack in time is all we are for. A bang that lasts as long as the pieces are travelling... then, what?
The rain is warm tonight. And stars hum, distant and unseeable. Micro waves fill the furthest reaches of world, beyond air, reflecting the face of our immediate birth. It doesn't take that much to see them, if you turn in the right direction.
I need no reason to be here. I need to reason to love. No reason to die. I need no reason to book a cheap airline ticket and fly to New York next month, nor to come back again.
And I am a signpost in the humid dark, white froth lapping at my toes.
I never needed a reason to be in the rain.
Still I took out the rubbish bag to sling in the huge plastic green tub behind my house, and held that as my excuse, despite the fact I've never before felt the need to empty my bin at seven thirty at night. And knowing that, it made me laugh out loud, because when I was nine, I never needed a reason to be in the rain.
And I am a signpost in the humid dark, white froth lapping at my toes. The sky is empty of stars. As I watch, several thousand layers all come falling, a series of images: birth and ceasing monuments and facts and figures, and timeless shadowing of this life line, and the line is interrupted by a bang that never stops flinging itself into unknowability. We are here. That is there. Uncompromising universe I could fit myself into, if it would only let me. But I am a signpost in the humid dark. The universe is gaping. Too many equations. We can never sew it up.
And the reason I am standing here isn't even because I want to feel this rain on my face, or on my back, or my hands. It isn't because of the way the sea is stretching into a black nothing, so that I feel infinite, travelling, unsung and triumphantly lost. It isn't even because of the way the liquid in the air mixes with the evening heat to give off a quiet radiance, a gentle buzz, a comfort...
Little reasons and big reasons fill our universe up, and maybe that's why it burst in the first place: too many reasons and not enough, all bickering inside a point as small as the end of the end of your nose. Too much certainty inside a void. Too much void inside certainty. Too much that is too little, swimming with what is never lost, but always going. The balloon fills the box, the box is always breaking.
And I'll try and tame what surrounds me. It will become a poetic universe, of dark matter and rainbow light. But this is still my equation, my lassoo, my very own reason. I bring my mother and my father to all creation, the kids at school who thought I wasn't too bright, a yearning for the sublime, the shock of existing.
Wah wah baby coming out the womb. Old man dying. People on the roadside, diseased, raw sewage sliding by. I will make it add up, I will make it all add up. I will bargain with an unfeeling universe, else, without reason, it all grows too cold, too cold for human habitation. An icy galaxy, deathly, alone, feeble, wandering. A crack in time is all we are for. A bang that lasts as long as the pieces are travelling... then, what?
The rain is warm tonight. And stars hum, distant and unseeable. Micro waves fill the furthest reaches of world, beyond air, reflecting the face of our immediate birth. It doesn't take that much to see them, if you turn in the right direction.
I need no reason to be here. I need to reason to love. No reason to die. I need no reason to book a cheap airline ticket and fly to New York next month, nor to come back again.
And I am a signpost in the humid dark, white froth lapping at my toes.
I never needed a reason to be in the rain.
Monday, March 20, 2006
from " Ravings II, Alchemy Of The Word" - Arthur Rimbaud
My turn. The history of one of my follies.
For a long time I boasted of possessing all possible landscapes, and I found the prestige accorded to modern painting and poetry ridiculous.
I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, backcloths for mummer's plays, inn-signs, cheap coloured prints; I loved unfashionable literature, church Latin, ill-spelt pornography, novels for old ladies, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.
I dreamed of crusades, of voyages of discovery never recorded, of republics without histories, suppressed religious wars, revolutions in manners, movements of races and of continents; I believed in all enchantments.
I invented the colours of the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green - I made the rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language which would one day be accessible to all senses. I reserved translation rights.
At first this was an academic study. I wrote of silences and nights, I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigoes.
Far away from the birds and herds and village girls, what was I drinking, on my knees in that heather surrounded by soft hazel copses in a warm green afternoon mist?
What could I be drinking in that young Oise - voiceless elms, flowerless turf, overcast sky!- drinking from those yellow gourds, far from my beloved cabin? Some golden liquor which causes sweating.
I made a cross-eyed inn-sign - A storm came and chased the sky away. In the evening the water in the woods trickled away into virgin sands, the wind of God threw sheets of ice across the ponds;
Weeping, I saw gold - and could not drink...
I accustomed myself to pure hallucination: I saw very clearly a mosque instead of a factory, a drummer's school consisting of angels, coaches on the roads of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a music-hall poster could conjure up terrors in front of me...
I ended up by regarding my mental disorder as sacred. I was idle, the prey of a heavy fever; I envied the happiness of beasts- caterpillars, who represent the innocence of limbo, and moles, the sleep of virginity..
..If I have any taste, it is for hardly anything but earth and stones. I breakfast always on air, on rock, on coal, iron.
Turn, my hungers. Feed, hungers, on the meadow of sounds. Suck the gaudy poison from the convolvuli.
Eat the broken stone; the old masonry of churches; boulders from old floods, loaves sown in the grey valleys.
The fox howled under the leaves, spitting out the bright feathers of his feast of fowl; like him, I consume myself.
Salads and fruits are only waiting to be picked; but the hedge spider eats nothing but violets.
Let me sleep! let me simmer on Solomon's altars. The scum runs down over the rust, and mingles with the Kedron.
At last, O happiness, O reason, I removed from the sky the azure, which is a blackness, and I lived, a spark of gold of the natural light. Out of joy, I took on the most clownish and exaggerated mode of expression possible:
It has been found again! What? eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
My immortal soul, keep your vow despite the lonely night and the day on fire.
Thus you detach yourself from human approval, from common impulses! You fly off as you may...
No hope, never; and no orietur. Knowledge and fortitude, torture is certain.
No more tomorrow, satiny embers, your own heat is the only duty.
It has been found again! What? - Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
For a long time I boasted of possessing all possible landscapes, and I found the prestige accorded to modern painting and poetry ridiculous.
I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, backcloths for mummer's plays, inn-signs, cheap coloured prints; I loved unfashionable literature, church Latin, ill-spelt pornography, novels for old ladies, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.
I dreamed of crusades, of voyages of discovery never recorded, of republics without histories, suppressed religious wars, revolutions in manners, movements of races and of continents; I believed in all enchantments.
I invented the colours of the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green - I made the rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language which would one day be accessible to all senses. I reserved translation rights.
At first this was an academic study. I wrote of silences and nights, I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigoes.
Far away from the birds and herds and village girls, what was I drinking, on my knees in that heather surrounded by soft hazel copses in a warm green afternoon mist?
What could I be drinking in that young Oise - voiceless elms, flowerless turf, overcast sky!- drinking from those yellow gourds, far from my beloved cabin? Some golden liquor which causes sweating.
I made a cross-eyed inn-sign - A storm came and chased the sky away. In the evening the water in the woods trickled away into virgin sands, the wind of God threw sheets of ice across the ponds;
Weeping, I saw gold - and could not drink...
I accustomed myself to pure hallucination: I saw very clearly a mosque instead of a factory, a drummer's school consisting of angels, coaches on the roads of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a music-hall poster could conjure up terrors in front of me...
I ended up by regarding my mental disorder as sacred. I was idle, the prey of a heavy fever; I envied the happiness of beasts- caterpillars, who represent the innocence of limbo, and moles, the sleep of virginity..
..If I have any taste, it is for hardly anything but earth and stones. I breakfast always on air, on rock, on coal, iron.
Turn, my hungers. Feed, hungers, on the meadow of sounds. Suck the gaudy poison from the convolvuli.
Eat the broken stone; the old masonry of churches; boulders from old floods, loaves sown in the grey valleys.
The fox howled under the leaves, spitting out the bright feathers of his feast of fowl; like him, I consume myself.
Salads and fruits are only waiting to be picked; but the hedge spider eats nothing but violets.
Let me sleep! let me simmer on Solomon's altars. The scum runs down over the rust, and mingles with the Kedron.
At last, O happiness, O reason, I removed from the sky the azure, which is a blackness, and I lived, a spark of gold of the natural light. Out of joy, I took on the most clownish and exaggerated mode of expression possible:
It has been found again! What? eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
My immortal soul, keep your vow despite the lonely night and the day on fire.
Thus you detach yourself from human approval, from common impulses! You fly off as you may...
No hope, never; and no orietur. Knowledge and fortitude, torture is certain.
No more tomorrow, satiny embers, your own heat is the only duty.
It has been found again! What? - Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
I am terribly hung over. From tequila and gin, from life. I am shuffling around my flat with the grace of a dying dog, and I'm sure I have pulled a muscle in my neck from all the pogoing and head thrashing I did last night to White Riot and Common People and, oh dear,a bit of Jamiroquai as well ( thank god someone started to play The Clash as most of the guests drifted home, thank god for a dimly lit basement with only the hardcore or desperate left!).
I danced until my feet could no longer keep up, met some lovely men, mixed my drinks, wafted around in my bright red scarf, came home and howled like I did when I was 13 years old and found out The Smiths were breaking up forever. So today, I'm feeling like a cross between Gollum and .. well Gollum. And all my openness, my zeal to fly into the glorious impermanence of living, feels like a rather silly idea. Far better to hide under my duvet and not come out til Spring 2007, I think. I did feel like a warrior, now i feel like a bit of old paper, blowing down West Street, smelling of fish and chips.
Yes, it wasn't a straightforward jolly affair last night. W. drank 6 shots of tequila straight and fell out of the loft, spending the rest of the evening crawling around on his hands and knees. I narrowly avoided being persuaded into a table dancing show in M's kitchen, despite being given offers of cash for the privilege. There was this strange invisible stringy thing weaving it's way amongst certain people, of mixed boundaries, unrequited longings, tattered egos, fragile connections, sideways glances, battered hearts.
Today I wake up lost and confused. And you know the most annoying thing? I can't now very well announce to the world or myself that I am giving up on this life and love thing, banging on as I have recently about how it's what I want, and given it took such a toll on me over the last couple of years to not do so. But I ask you, how do we not burn ourselves out? How do we pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and charge ahead, knowing full well we are 90% sure to be heading towards:
a: certain disaster
b: almost certain disaster
c: disaster for someone else
d: mere disappointment.
One of my highest tantric practices for a while has been watching Eastenders ( you may scoff but I grew up in North Wales, we didn't have Bach or Bertollucci there). On Friday, Martin had to face the fact that his wife of several years was leaving him for her best (female) friend. I used to think he was an appalling actor, but as I watched his rejected expression, as he sat alone in Paulione Fowler's front room, his face creased with the direct knowledge that he was now alone, I thought, yeah, we all go through this don't we, every fucking human being. We have all been there, will continue to go there again, and still, we will be ok, carry on living, maybe even carry on keeping our souls alight. It was a comfort and an insight, in these times for me of quiet and not so quiet unrest and change, to know, though I may feel it, I am never alone, and, in the words of Paddy McAloon.. ' nothing is ever lost'.
I'm off now to the sea front to meet one of my closest friends, someone whom I have shared so much with and also been through hell and back with in some ways over the last two years. She's feeling shit too, we can sit and eat ice cream on the pebble beach, shiver a bit, and know that we understand, that we're there for each other, and that, we're ok, we really are. After all, it's an icy cold day today, but the sky is bluer than I've seen it in a long time, and the sun is definitely shining, even if I can't quite feel it.
I danced until my feet could no longer keep up, met some lovely men, mixed my drinks, wafted around in my bright red scarf, came home and howled like I did when I was 13 years old and found out The Smiths were breaking up forever. So today, I'm feeling like a cross between Gollum and .. well Gollum. And all my openness, my zeal to fly into the glorious impermanence of living, feels like a rather silly idea. Far better to hide under my duvet and not come out til Spring 2007, I think. I did feel like a warrior, now i feel like a bit of old paper, blowing down West Street, smelling of fish and chips.
Yes, it wasn't a straightforward jolly affair last night. W. drank 6 shots of tequila straight and fell out of the loft, spending the rest of the evening crawling around on his hands and knees. I narrowly avoided being persuaded into a table dancing show in M's kitchen, despite being given offers of cash for the privilege. There was this strange invisible stringy thing weaving it's way amongst certain people, of mixed boundaries, unrequited longings, tattered egos, fragile connections, sideways glances, battered hearts.
Today I wake up lost and confused. And you know the most annoying thing? I can't now very well announce to the world or myself that I am giving up on this life and love thing, banging on as I have recently about how it's what I want, and given it took such a toll on me over the last couple of years to not do so. But I ask you, how do we not burn ourselves out? How do we pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and charge ahead, knowing full well we are 90% sure to be heading towards:
a: certain disaster
b: almost certain disaster
c: disaster for someone else
d: mere disappointment.
One of my highest tantric practices for a while has been watching Eastenders ( you may scoff but I grew up in North Wales, we didn't have Bach or Bertollucci there). On Friday, Martin had to face the fact that his wife of several years was leaving him for her best (female) friend. I used to think he was an appalling actor, but as I watched his rejected expression, as he sat alone in Paulione Fowler's front room, his face creased with the direct knowledge that he was now alone, I thought, yeah, we all go through this don't we, every fucking human being. We have all been there, will continue to go there again, and still, we will be ok, carry on living, maybe even carry on keeping our souls alight. It was a comfort and an insight, in these times for me of quiet and not so quiet unrest and change, to know, though I may feel it, I am never alone, and, in the words of Paddy McAloon.. ' nothing is ever lost'.
I'm off now to the sea front to meet one of my closest friends, someone whom I have shared so much with and also been through hell and back with in some ways over the last two years. She's feeling shit too, we can sit and eat ice cream on the pebble beach, shiver a bit, and know that we understand, that we're there for each other, and that, we're ok, we really are. After all, it's an icy cold day today, but the sky is bluer than I've seen it in a long time, and the sun is definitely shining, even if I can't quite feel it.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
fridge magnet poem (2001)
sing
cry
of a thousand tongues
love rose
in the sky
like
blue over summer
dream
you fall into eternity,
void
one
ache
skin, shadow
place of no language,
sleep
recall my gift
and
worship
the bitter diamond
Monday, March 13, 2006
Eta Carinae
Throughout this blog I have made several oblique references to Pete Doherty. In case you aren't familiar with him, and haven't been reading the papers lately, he is the ex- founder member of The Libertines, frontman of the band Babyshambles, a musician, songwriter and poet. He has also been heavily under the eye of the media for some time now, his escapades are reported almost daily in our newspapers and on television. He has been likened to Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious, the new punk hope of this generation, a British icon, a genius with a death wish. He has also been again and again dragged through the eye of the gutter press, as "Potty Pete" or the "Druggie Boyfriend", due to his link with Kate Moss last year, and his infamous heroin and crack cocaine habits, numerous arrests, and spells in Pentonville prison.
In contrast, media attention for his music or his poetry has been slight, apart from within specialist music papers and magazines. Some would say that is because the 'phenomenon' of Pete Doherty is all just a whipped up media storm, and that at the eye of it, there isn't much of significance to tell, that he is overrated. It was even going round the internet recently that Pete Doherty was in fact an entirely media created fiction, and that he didn't exist in real life at all, but his part has in fact been played by an Elvis impersonator from Blackpool. But he continues to make records, play gigs, write for a poetry publication, and do the odd poetry reading.
The original catalyst that turned writing my own blog from an ambivalent idea into reality, was watching the "Killamangiro" video from Babyshambles, back in October last year. From that I felt inspired to write a piece ( which became in fact the first piece of writing on this blog) entitled "This Beautiful Hunger That Kills". I liked the title, drank some rum, and from there felt inspired to begin and name a blog after it.
I don't quite know what happened to me in those minutes watching that video, but I felt like I was staring into something profound, something I could not quite locate as either being inside or outside myself, something mysterious. A theme that has figured in my life in a major way ever since I can remember, a riddle, a coan, a bitter sweet truth, an inspiration, a thorn in my side. Something to do with creativity and something to do with destruction, and the line between them. In a sense, though I have many storylines and subplots running through my life experience, this is one of the biggies, one I am continuing to work out, despite knowing, on some level, that to work it out is ultimately impossible.
Lester Bangs tells a story of going to see his therapist. The therapist says to Bangs that the reason he thinks he is so obsessed with the sound of rock and roll music, the likes of Iggy and The Velvets, is because when Bangs was little, his Dad died in a factory fire. And he tells Bangs that he thinks that the feedback noise on all those songs reminds him of the sound of his father burning to death in that fire.
Somewhere, rock and roll, whether the spirit of it, or the music of it, has always figured big in my life. I grew up listening to punk and mod music from the age of seven, my tearaway sisters blasting it out at top volume every day and night without respite. I became fascinated and obsessed with 'alternative' music, heard The Velvet Underground's "Heroin" and "Waiting For The Man" when I was twelve, and nothing was ever the same again.
Family life was always dysfuntional. Violent outbursts, an absent bullying father, self destructive and aggressive sisters, no boundaries or stability. I became the little voice of sanity and order in my family from as young as i remember, dodging flying tea cups and holding my mother's desperate head while she wailed, was as common a part of my life as going to school. As was going to gigs, clubs, experimenting with drugs, from an early age. I lived with the motto that I wanted to try everything illegal before the age of sixteen. I did pretty well.
So I think when I hear certain music, I feel a sense of coming home, and the rock and roll life, with it's mixture of brilliance, blindness, genius, mess, rawness, chaos and addiction, reminds me of how I grew up.
But there is always more. The myth of the tortured poet, and the link between creativity and self-destruction, genius and madness, and my fascination with those themes, is not something I can simply boil down to my upbringing nor to some general psychological model, even if all those elements are there. It is a more mysterious thing, like duende, (something i have also alluded to in this blog), it can't ultimately be rationalised or explained, but has a life and a force of it's own, in fact is the force of life itself, and the wish for death, together, in battle or in union, in dangerous, glorious tension. Not everybody needs the stick of suffering to propel them to create, but most of the artists and poets and songwriters that I love, come from such a breed. And maybe I can say this - the more sensitivity and pain you have in your soul, the more, if you direct that away from destruction and towards creation, it can burn and become a fire of insight and power and beauty. And it's a double edged sword, and that edge is always a slippery one.
Pete Doherty's talents have largely been missed in the mass hysterial exposure. But the 'craziness' of his life, and it's witnessing by thousands of people, seems somehow a part of the picture. He has lurched from being utterly down on his backside, knocking, as it were, at death's door, to the utmost heights of success and brilliance, and back again. You couldn't make up a more impossible tale of highs and lows. And through it all, he has continued to make music, to inhabit that realm of the senses, in that which he himself calls a "complete infection with music and melody". And to me, that constitutes a rare found integrity and purity, amidst all the clear delusion and addiction that seems to be part and parcel of the story.
So this blog entry I am writing here, is partly to explore and explain to you, invisible reader, and to the mysterious universe as a whole (and possibly myself), more of what makes me tick, as a writer, an artist, a human. It is also because I want to, in some way, honour this person who has inspired me, my creativity, and this blog, as someone, who, whatever the rest of the stories and myths around him, is committed to writing and playing music, to breaking creative boundaries and conventions, and who has artistic integrity and spirit. Or to put it another way, to be true to being an artist, you really have to not give a fuck, to be utterly guided by your own drive of genius and not by what other people think. And whatever else, whatever drama and self delusion and evasion, whether or not you like his music even, somewhere I know this guy can walk the walk, and that he's for real. And that inspires me.
And for me, rock and roll is a love, a passion, not my only one, but a significant one. And I believe that when Pete Doherty sings "...I believe in love..", that he means it. Just as in my family, amid the flying cups and broken records, there was always music and singing and dancing and life, and a love so strong it could knock you off your chair.
some video clips:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4106249.stmnews.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4692166.stm
Thursday, March 09, 2006
A Sad Affair
Apparently it's Friday, and it's a damp day today, sunlight intermittent on the horizon, a swell of sea mist ebbing up my road.
I am restless, feeling heartless, but that probably just means I'm feeling too much of something I don't want to, and so it turns around into nothing at all, except a quiet sense of outrage. The worst kind.
I vowed as usual to stay off this damn computer tonight, coming down, as it feels I am, with some strain of cold. And I am far from full of grace, resenting, a slight taste of malice in my mouth. I feel miserly and miserable, calculatedly fucked off with the whole caboodle, though I can't quite tell what that caboodle exactly is.
Tonight I want to be to be a raging child, telling you all what I think of you, whoever you are, slamming doors, stamping my foot until it hurts all the way up through my shocking little body. I want to jump up and down, and if anyone dares tell me, "go ahead then" in a therapeutic kind of way, I'll knee them in the bollocks, or if they don't have bollocks, some other suitably soft and tender part of their anatomy. I also want sex. Not the kind that filters through my entire body like sunlight through the droplets of rain on an open glass window. No. I want the kind that is like an engine charging up, where you can hear the revs as he turns the handlebars again and again. Vroom vroom. I want hot steel on tarmac sex, burning rubber with no trail left behind in the distance. The kind that hurts my head, and makes laughter come demonic from our throats, the kind that is acute fever.
But enough of what is elsewhere. I realise the symptoms. That desire to wear a tight red dress, one size too small, slightly vulgar. The dark sideways glance I give at nothing in particular across the room, reflected in my mirror. That longing for anything illicit, anything with the word 'Affair' in it, for anything that burns deep and scarring. That mild hatred of humanity, the simultaneous loathing and utter desire for MEN.
It's hormone time, it's a blood red moon filling up on death and chaos time. It's a particular place in my cycle where the devils come out to play, and wreak havoc on decency and upstanding citizenship. It's 'leave me the fuck alone unless it's to play The Stooges top volume non stop till collapse, or read Baudelaire until we drown in a jagged union of sorts, burned up on all manner of death and fire' kind of time. Shit.
Not the kind of time you want to be caught at your computer, alone, 9.53 at night, dressed in a green woolly jumper, the nearest dionysiac pleasure at hand being Roget's Thesaurus and a bar of raspberry chocolate. The edges of the walls are too polite and my neighbours won't appreciate the screaming. So what do I do?
I must send out a search party to the wanton overlords to save me, from my pink spotted curtains, from the tedium of pleasantry. Come on, I'm waiting.
And oh, it's Thursday.
I am restless, feeling heartless, but that probably just means I'm feeling too much of something I don't want to, and so it turns around into nothing at all, except a quiet sense of outrage. The worst kind.
I vowed as usual to stay off this damn computer tonight, coming down, as it feels I am, with some strain of cold. And I am far from full of grace, resenting, a slight taste of malice in my mouth. I feel miserly and miserable, calculatedly fucked off with the whole caboodle, though I can't quite tell what that caboodle exactly is.
Tonight I want to be to be a raging child, telling you all what I think of you, whoever you are, slamming doors, stamping my foot until it hurts all the way up through my shocking little body. I want to jump up and down, and if anyone dares tell me, "go ahead then" in a therapeutic kind of way, I'll knee them in the bollocks, or if they don't have bollocks, some other suitably soft and tender part of their anatomy. I also want sex. Not the kind that filters through my entire body like sunlight through the droplets of rain on an open glass window. No. I want the kind that is like an engine charging up, where you can hear the revs as he turns the handlebars again and again. Vroom vroom. I want hot steel on tarmac sex, burning rubber with no trail left behind in the distance. The kind that hurts my head, and makes laughter come demonic from our throats, the kind that is acute fever.
But enough of what is elsewhere. I realise the symptoms. That desire to wear a tight red dress, one size too small, slightly vulgar. The dark sideways glance I give at nothing in particular across the room, reflected in my mirror. That longing for anything illicit, anything with the word 'Affair' in it, for anything that burns deep and scarring. That mild hatred of humanity, the simultaneous loathing and utter desire for MEN.
It's hormone time, it's a blood red moon filling up on death and chaos time. It's a particular place in my cycle where the devils come out to play, and wreak havoc on decency and upstanding citizenship. It's 'leave me the fuck alone unless it's to play The Stooges top volume non stop till collapse, or read Baudelaire until we drown in a jagged union of sorts, burned up on all manner of death and fire' kind of time. Shit.
Not the kind of time you want to be caught at your computer, alone, 9.53 at night, dressed in a green woolly jumper, the nearest dionysiac pleasure at hand being Roget's Thesaurus and a bar of raspberry chocolate. The edges of the walls are too polite and my neighbours won't appreciate the screaming. So what do I do?
I must send out a search party to the wanton overlords to save me, from my pink spotted curtains, from the tedium of pleasantry. Come on, I'm waiting.
And oh, it's Thursday.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
TELL THE STARS I'M COMING, MAKE THEM LEAVE A SPACE FOR ME...
I know you know, we can fall in love to lose ourselves, or we can fall in love to find ourselves. And what we think we are seeking is not always what we are seeking, and the unexpected always turns up, just in time. And permanence is never lasting.
I am a watt in a bulb that lights up at that time of night when eyes start to strain, and faces appear in walls, the cat lets itself out, and the kettle is empty. It is 3 o clock and the day is not yet up.
I am also afraid. I don’t want to go alone in the sea tonight. I don’t want to be swallowed up by the forest. To stand my ground makes all the chandeliers shake, and the plaster come down off the walls.
I am breaking the spell of a lifetime and I can see no further than the end of my nose, yet my vision stretches out past the sea clouds on the dainty horizon, to a turquoise place of nothing special, only dust and filament and a quiet spectre of brilliance.
I strum electric tunes in time to long forgotten rhythms, and ache to Van Morrison and smile and cry at the man who loved bears, and the bears who ate him.
I will reach you in a gaze, then you are in a haze of cloud again, eaten up by past and future, the present hanging, a diamond in our midst.
This is the realest thing I can mention… the curve of your head on the pillow, your fingers stroking my nose, and a very distant image, blurred, cold seeping in, fading out…of an outline of your figure, on a ridge, by a freezing river, enveloped by the winter’s day.
He wants to die in the cold.
I become an immense wave born of infinite tragedy. And yet, I am travelling out beyond the stories of old, into places yet unborn, crashing through the ether, through a tunnel of light and a blank white crowd, glinting together, teeming. This is anew.
And I am still seeing angels in cocaine powder – they are ageless, divine, they speak the blues, sink death into sunlight, bring terrible beauty home to a hearth that is welcoming and climbing with moss and roses and ivy. The profound illusion of God, a shot at glory, at life, a moment of purity.
And that never came without a price, without the devil’s face in profile. No redemption without a fall, no fall without redemption.
At the same time, the story is reversing at the same speed as it is accelerating, and new pictures creep their way into burdened filing cabinets of hundreds of thousands of tired equations of living and loving.
Years ago, I found a Dharma, it was strong, it blinked with an eyelid that was laughing. And I am once again remembering that eye, and hearing the song, the drum beat that thuds so fierce, the Yogi down from the hills chopping himself to pieces with a damaru, the crystalline ancient wonder, perfect sea of change, a soft earth life, as delicate as the scent of a single flower from across the length of an open garden gate, from across hedges and spring lawns touched with wetness.
I can feel an ending and a beginning, a membrane in space locking me in frozen silence, a reaching out towards you, a pulling away, deep wells of understanding, unfathomable shades of unknowing and losing and we throw it all away but somewhere keep it precious, here, under heart strings and memories and hopefulness and decay… living, breathing, alive this day.
Life turns us over like a car on a speedway, but we are always only one step away from hope, and the words run out... but the writing is never finished
Journal Entry, 6th March 2004
and I am all these things…
a hall of mirrors, or a silent beast moving through the black night, a tangle, a spinning top, an empty space, a flight downstairs, a gypsy’s kiss, the unthreaded needle, untrodden snow, whispering, chatter, a pair of closed eyes, simple rest, wretched prayer, tumbling, tattered, born anew, pretty girl, small boy-woman, two shoes in the hallway, wrinkled brow, belly-ache, song, dream, failing will, shocking, true, terrible, false, little and soaring, scorching all the pathways, brave, a picture in your mind, blessed, cursed, holding a blanket, naked, tossed around, asleep, sparkling, dazed, drowning, helping, bewitched, summer in my veins, filled with dread, steeped in sorrow, red, flame red…white like the devil’s kiss…
I am you. I am nothing you think I am. I wear scarves and I cry from my stomach when I lose the ones I love. Charming, fumbling, alive, driven, silly, cowardly, blaming, idiotic. I don’t remember colours or directions. I don’t notice moved furniture. I like soup and old films because they remind me of when I was little and watched them with Mum. I try to regret nothing. I probably regret a lot. I resent people. I can be scary. I generally feel inadequate in the world. I always thought I’d fallen from a far off planet. I used to run in the rain. I wish I could drive. I feel the loss of my mother, of what she was. I adapt and like to hear her laugh. I love dancing. Most of all I want to sing songs that have burst from beyond. I am an insomniac in temperament, born with fear. I dislike loud people. I wish I could drink Earl Grey tea all day long. The sight of cakes makes me light up like a Christmas tree. I am touched by the erotic. I hate logical description. I feel things a lot. I dwell on details of horror in the world. I am obsessive. I fall, fall, fall, I am full of blood and yearning. I mourn the loss of the romantic dream and I will never give in to the crippling numbness that sometimes beckons me… I try…try again...lose...win… and I am all these things….
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