The Map Drawn On Vapor (I)

Hallucinated rain in a mirage of gutter. Conjured by its sound, the summer downpour frying in the puddles rinsed between the teeth of drains. This insubstantial torrent, sluicing a cholesterol Of Styrofoam and dog-end from the city's dead, grey veins. A phantom, speculated city, somewhere else, that had its night voice netted once, then chloroformed, pinned to a specimen board of magnetic tape, revived to flutter weakly herе tonight. Who knows how long since it was captured, or how far away? Wherе do the Yarmouth breakers detonate, a distant Semtex, when we are away from Yarmouth? Where do the lights of London flare when we are not here? What non-Euclidean map includes the places we are gone from? Say its name, the absent town, the city in remove and there it rises in the backyard of our eyes, some common landmark, snapshot first, and then, specific street, and house, and room, specific chair. Say "Birmingham,” and the Rotunda rears within us, our imagination squinting in the traveller’s fair glare of Newstreet Station. Or say "Folkestone,” and recall the quayside’s sudden still beneath our feet. These are the towns of light, built from remembered brick, conjectured beam, that stand in Hilbert space, a plane of concept and idea where thought is form. Where the recalled smell of fresh paint upon forgotten stairs is an event in place and time. These detailed weightless urban sprawls we carry in our fragile skull, that teem with reminiscent traffics, populous with bias, opinion, rumour, legend, lie. Locations we shall never visit that yet have their hearsay substance in our lives, and so are never far from us. They rest in occult Mercators where distance is not marked from point to solid point, but calibrated there between the spark-gaps of our free associations, yielding geographies with Land's End next to John O' Groats, an Earth with poles adjacent. Continent, nation, mapped outside of matter, state of mind. Metropolis erected out of nothing, only metaphor, and ringed with slums of dream. Mnemonic highways made from smears of field glimpsed once through glass at speed, or from the jaundiced strobe of gone-by sodium lamps, hot amber necklace on the night's bare throat, monoxide dabbed upon her pulse-points. Strung between the shimmering fabricated towns, inroads of anecdote, synaptic rails to bear the trains of thought, a beaded web across our gazetteer of the interior. Seen from above, the glittering threads of meaning run like mercury, converge on the imaginary capital, a shadow London, our idea of London, flickering in the forebrain. When we are not here, this apparition is our only London. Enter from the east, by Bromley, Poplar, Wapping, and already filaments of recognition start to hum and glower. Rupert Murdoch, with hereditary convict eyes, leers through a vague phantasmal rubble of old pie and mash stands, Mosley pamphlets, pearly kings and queens, a residue of mind junk-heaped since childhood. Pure subjective incident. By Wapping Wall, I watched a human pelvis bob downriver, old, plaque-coloured, flecked with algae in a fierce viridian rash, and there was nothing to be done. It looked like any other pelvis I have seen, a calcious outlined sketch of Mickey Mouse's head. It turned and ducked and drifted then, drifts now in memory, mine, and your imagination. Twisting slowly through the cold suspensions at the river's edge, where pirates hung in chains until the tides stuffed their repenting throats with silt. The bone was tumbling like a dice at the conclusion of a long and rattling throw commenced with birth. Crapped out. Snake's eyes. The clumped weed clings to it, nostalgia for a lost pudenda. Swerves now, sinks, is gone. Leave it behind us, almost buried, jutting from the beds of sleep and recollection. Move on to the city hypothetical, the virtual London scaped from essence, where past schemes and mildewed visions show, old wallpaper behind a peeling present. Down the Ratcliffe highway, or our notion of it, faint ghosts, old stains and patterns blotch the woodchip. George's-in-the-East, that great, dead battery of a Hawksmoor church, part of his stifling symbol-net, his Tesla grid of terror and magnificence. Timothy Marr, the draper and his wife, their infant child and their apprentice died near here, dispatched with maul and ripping chisel in the small hours of the nineteenth century. Convenient atrocity, necessitating the origination of a police force, one much imitated since throughout the Western World. Those things that breed in this idea space have their consequence, heavy as churches, they themselves the fossil dreams of architects. Move on. Whitechapel, Spitalfields, streets filthy with mythology as if there'd been a refuse strike amongst the urban myth collectors. Stories left to rot and swelter in their bags outside Bengali lockups. Here, amongst conceptual terraces, past violence thrusts, a black insistent grass between the flags. Here is the serial killer's dreamtime, murder Mecca, Saucy Jack and the Masonic songlines, bloodlines, scabbed now, faint with age, their power all but exhausted by our need to pick, to touch. Here too is Princelet Street, a house unoccupied save for a brace of tailors on the third floor where the Channel 4 "Without Walls" oddity "The Cardinal and the Corpse" was shot in part. In company with poets Brian Catling, Aaron Williamson and Iain Sinclair (eminence gris behind the project and according to the schedule notes, "freak wrangler"), I crouched there in an upper room and clutched a first edition of The Magus, an alchemical text penned by Francis Barrett in the eighteenth century. This was my final scene; typecast as an occult fanatic by the mordant Sinclair, raving and obsessed by the geometries of Whitechapel, I find myself alone, condemned to spend eternity in a bare attic overlooking Christchurch Spitalfields. The Barrett book is open at a page of illustrations that depict the fallen angels, or the "Vessels of Iniquity and Wrath." It strikes me that the picture of Apollyon, a vessel of iniquity, bears an unsettling resemblance to the photograph of me that's on the back of Watchmen. Through the window looms the spire of Hawkmoor's awful church. I look up from the book and gaze in panic at the empty room in which I am to spend forever as a prisoner of my own obsessions. It's a wrap. Downstairs, I watch while former soldier of the Kray twins, Tony Lambrianou, is interrogated on the finer points of gangster chic by Driffield, Exit shareholder, maniacal book-finder. The spell, the glamour of the twins, hangs like an Old Spice fog about the edge of the production. Lambrianou, on whom any moral judgement would be simply too elaborate, recalls the strange still of his predawn drive through Hackney, Jack McVitie calling, folded in the boot. The mystery of David Litvinoff is raised, dialogue consultant on Nic Roeg's Performance, sometime paramour of Ronnie Kray. Was there a book he worked upon, an expose that vanished with his murder? Hoax and allegation, graveyard gossip, cobbling the less inviting metaphysic alleys of this fictive, phantom, London.