If you follow me, I will follow you into the unknown
Like Apollo, like Apollo 13 we’ll fly to the Moon
London Piccadilly winter night and neon fight for the pleasure of my eyes. Like a softly-filtered dream I struggle to make shapes. It’s all rather seamless – Piccadilly neon blends with purple-blue winter sky. Purple blue-winter sky blends with the soundtrack of my ears ‘If you follow me, I will follow you into the unknown...’. I skid through London's Piccadilly Circus (the galactic centre - the ultimate people circus of the united boroughs of LondonTown). I espie with my little eye black eye-liner girl of the Soho gutter. Did you see me? Your lazy eye-liner eyes were vacantly searching the night as I watched you. You were as sad as a song, a child of the street, a leaf of the fall. Oh eye-liner girl. If only you’d allow me – I’d take you to the unknown and like Apollo13 we’d explode. You don’t belong to the world that I’m from. I don’t belong either. Together unbetrothed are we.
And what about you 'newspaper man' wrapped in yesterday’s news? Homeless Man of the World, oxymoron if ever. I think of oxymoron's as the real morons invade the purple night. I espie with my little eye a black-stocking girl chain smoking cigarettes to keep herself warm. I see diners seated inside the ‘Aberdeen Steak House’ forcing themselves to enjoy their over-priced (a la miniature/petite) steaks. The lonely girl sitting in Piccadilly’s Waterstones bookstore at 9:30pm on a Friday night reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. And then...the heart-wrenching moment when she has to clear out. Forced into the cold purple night shivering and loveless – the sublime Sonnets still very much fluttering like butterflies through her miniature glass heart. Where will you go to Sonnet girl? Another to disappear into the night? My heart whimpers. There is something delicious here. Something to write about. The grating of opposite surfaces. In short: the stuff of life.
To feel alive one must jump
From Uttermost pebble to Outermost pebble
‘Cross the river Chaos
That’ threatens to engulf thee
I make fists in my pockets to keep me warm. Ears tingle me cold. Breath freezes. I have a drink at the warm cosy bar to escape the chill. The drink warms my stomach and my sleepiness is slaked off. I like it here. So out comes my bible. My, by now, tattered copy of Paradise Lost:
A globe far off it seemed
Now seems a boundless continent
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of night
Starless exposed, and ever threatening storms
Of chaos blustering round, inclement sky
The lines make me shiver as soon as sound gives them form. The hair follicles on my neck stand erect. Potent words like drugs these, that increaseth the blood-flow coursing through my veins. Thy pupils open, thee endorphins make me happy-some. I chuggeth another stiff drink. The giddiness allows me to melt into the soul of the words. The font suddenly enlarged and throbbing. I drink em' in. It feels good to be indoors, away from the cold, reading Milton, and watching the world from afar - from a distance - from the stratosphere! It seems; to me at least, that the whole gamut of the human condition, is described somewhere within these pages. There is not a line somewhere in Paradise Lost, that cannot describe exactly how you are feeling, at any given moment in your life. That’s quite an achievement. Particularly considering that Milton was utterly blind when he wrote his masterpiece – dictating it to his amanuensis. The legend goes that it took Milton five solid years of hard graft to complete it. He would awaken early in the morning and be ready with a dozen or so lines that he would dictate to his amanuensis before breakfast. And thus his contribution for the day over. Also, bear in mind that Milton only wrote in the winter months. Winter being more conducive to the writing mind. Paradise Lost is by far the greatest prose poem in the English Language. And its scenes are as universal as the tapestries of life. Truth, sin, redemption, love, and the nature of good and evil. What makes the work so special is that it is Satan who is the protagonist. And it is He who one roots for in the end. The archaic language transports you to a bygone age smelling of sandalwood and dusty tomes and Aristotelian imagery. You learn how erstwhile peoples thought. We always see the world thorough the lens of Our Times. But are Our Times nearer clearer to the truth? Do Homer or Sophocles or Xenophon not speak the truth? Or are Our Times just merely different?
The idea is to strip off all that makes you you. To be someone else:
In Egypt I recall the prostitute I slept with. Her firm buttocks and her bronze tits, glazed with the taste of honey-suckle. And the Dance of the Bee she did for me. I recall the carcass of the dead dog, it's rotting flesh being pecked clean by vultures, entrails hanging out, blackened. They always go for the soft parts first. The eyes, the anus, the stomach – the harder parts are eaten later. I watched the creatures eating the dead dog. Life passing from dead to living. The old woman begging me to fuck her – her breasts sagging to her belly button. The man who massaged me and grabbed my balls between his fingers proceeding to stroke them and then whispered in my ears: 'baksheesh! baksheesh!'. No thanks – and I laughed a crazy laugh. Why kid ourselves? We may look noble in outer countenance and make-up, and clothes, and affected manners, and minds that stretch to the concave heights to contemplate the inner workings of the universe – and yet, yet inside, in our secret moments, in our deepest chambers, we just want to fuck, and fart and fornicate. Ha! hold a mirror to yourselves. The same mind that gave us Paradise Lost also gave us the Killing Fields of Pol Pot, the Trenches and the Concentration Camps. The same mind also gives us love:
Black eye liner girl, you’re not the one
You don’t belong to the world that I’m from
Your lazy words flow like confetti, in the wind
In the wind
But,
I will follow you, if you follow me to the unknown
Like Apollo, like Apollo 13, we’ll fly to the Moon...
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