Limbo (Aeris)

This is an upper Highbury—of the mind, of the imagination. Highbury of air, an ozone plateau of the ceiling of our human breath, only accessible by heart, or drugs, the rhythmic trance, the willing eye. Sun-gilded windows in the terrace, visionary shop-fronts, mantic light down conduit alleyways. Its freak arcades and lantern shows closed down, the swallowed suburb can no longer manifest its lurid fantasies on a material plain, is forced to generate its own transparent ether: a mirage, a tulpa, Highbury reflected in its own sky, a suspended phantom town, Fata Morgana.

Coleridge served his exile from the real world here, the limbo that he wrote of, made a spirit jail secure by the mere horror of blank naught at all. A future state, a positive negation. Crowley also knew this breathless altitude, the asthma's fist around his chest, could feel the Kanchenjunga terrors coming down upon him like the loud ghost of an avalanche, and had to get out of the district fast. Move on, towards his meeting with Raoul Loveday, towards Cefalu, and destiny. This astral Highbury is no picnic, and exacts it toll, this Tolentone, this higher town, its gasping lunar atmosphere.

This borderland, this borealis, will extend its territory as the actual borough that supports it is encroached upon, diminished.

Highbury's physical domain, its body, shrivels and grows weak, and will soon be eaten by it neighbouring townships. Everyone's already making out they live in Islington, the Blair Zone. Gradually, Holloway Road's hangover cafés are converted into cappuccino bars. Islington has its angel.

But where is the Angel Highbury?

If she exists it is not in the index of the A to Z. She is not of the Earth, the buried furlongs where Epona rides her boneyard horse. Nor is she of the Water, of the human torrents swilling in the streets. She is not to be found in Air, in Coleridge castles made of opium smoke.

If she exists, it is in Fire, the realm of burning and consuming spirit that the lower climes aspire to, when men fly too high, and graze against the sun, fall, in clouds of acrid cordite smoke.