Innocence

II: Innocence

Out of eternity into one stinking moment, out of light and into history, its horseshit and its rags, the stuck-pig squeal of its machinery. Not born so much as ground like pigment from his times, a colour squeezed from fish-head, flag and fetor, pressed like perfume from a petrol century. A fog like pewter trickled in the wheel ruts and plague concertinas wheezed out their half-hearted wretched guts into the dark down Broad Street. Vomit sweet, the backyard breath of Soho, rancid with excuses, gin and stories, pours itself into the instant, into fleas and firelight and November. Slick with flame, the frog-eyed boy descends into the filth and splendour.

His skin is watercolour paper, soaks the world up and grows plump with pamphlet ink, drinks in the dirty rain, the streets, their slogans and their tipsy rhythms. The morning walk down Air Street, through its hyphen arches to the Strand and drawing school, the church-high shops and sagging faces, jeweled already into pencil line. The wine-stained cheeks, the reeking Thames, sick dogs and makers of perukes, the old man he saw dying once in Fountain’s Court, and never told a soul. Already certain that the lanes and clouds were nowhere save in his imagination, he redrew the city with his eyes, and collaged angels in amongst the harvesting. And he was twelve years old. He could knock together angels out of almost anything.

And once Emanuel Swedenborg called by upon his self-invented hovercraft, and took the boy aboard, off for adventures in the spirit world or far Americas. And drunk on Chatterton reeled ruddy-faced amongst the pale apprentices, where in the aqua fortis fug he squinted the sweet wings of tenderness. He beat himself from copper scraps of song, from the Freemason’s Tavern in Great Queen Street, from Westminster’s waxworks and tanned parchment kings revealed. From Durer’s scowling lion and Ossian’s phony spectres he distilled himself, and roamed, his fingers splashed with acid, sweet from field to fiord. And there were lamps in Drury Lane and Covent Garden, sots and actresses and schemers, where his innocent and angry angels knocked each other bloody on the cobbles, and London inhaled him, sucked him down her ancient beer-stained throat. In nimbus dream us.

Sex draped its hairy banners everywhere, the gutters slippy with its residues and its results. At Russell Court print traders, handshakes damp as gussets, the discreet nod, the unrolled tableau, human arrangements with more legs than banquet tables. Miniaturist frenzy of each split-nib orifice. He breathed an atmosphere of mattress sweats, pubic infusions, skirt dust; drank the pepper-freckled shoulders and the salty linen swing, women were undergrowth, best glimpsed across the common, once within that humid smother men were blinded, lost. Were tenderised by fawn. “Are you a fool?” she said, wet lips pursed hatefully about the sounds. He’d asked of other men, pig shadows grunting, squealing in the ale-yard’s corner dark. “Are you a fool?” she said, the flat slap of her incredulity like bromide sent him flinching down a street of nails. Rust puddles, stinging nettle jeers. Draws her shape on pink swept butcher’s paper, crumples it in anger, strokes it smooth. Outside the baby haulers are singing about holes to put poor Robin in, a night with Venus and a month with Mercury. The streets awash with grey suds from the back mews, chalk monsters aching on the midden wall, meat noises, smiles like open sores. He knew it by osmosis and grew turgid with its hurts, its sights, its language, with its heaviness upon his back, that bent his neck, his vision, to the loveless slabs, until at Battersea a woman pitied him and from the sodden fence and pawned caress, from chimney-rooted flowers and scabs and horse despair unfolded now sweet wings of tenderness.

And like his sister, like his mother, it was Catherine, the woman, always Catherine. With his ferocious signature there in the register beside her small neat cross. Their fledgling years together, first at Broom Street then, when business bettered, Poland Street. His brother Robert dying, coughing colours, only gouged the vision deeper, and in Lambeth, tangled steaming by the hearth, it seemed the century was also lit. Light on its flank, light in its eye. And heaven, sex, and insurrection swirled together through the blazing mills, and off in Paris beasts were leaping, hungry in the sparks, their faces striped with soot and fire. Those rocket nights delirious with ideas in the confetti flurry of sensation and event. The Songs of Innocence condensed to fragile crystal from the gangrene monk, from angry bonnets and blood skies reflected in the slop of Lambeth’s stare. He sizzles with his times, the wine of him moulded hiss[?] by Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, his boyhood’s jungle tigers prowl the Swedenborgian chapel in Eastcheap when over the stone arch it reads Now, Now it is Allowable. And so it seemed. What might not now be dreamed, be writ, be done? Now, surely fell the temple, fell the barrack and the gibbet, fell the counting house. Now rose mechanic saints, a tinker multitude, to found Jerusalem in brooms of joy. But then the word from Paris was tense. At home, dragoons and oaths of loyalty, through streets hung with tiger belts, there spreads the prison hush of dour authority.