Around Churchill Gardens and boiler towers, Thistle lost at sea as he searched for predictive birds, Terukuni Marut, to the flattening of Beirut, bad omens are simply misplaced futures, three thousand year old Elephant tusks, suitably small even frail. Donald Hamilton the architect of Arcades for blackout shoppers designed the Internet, “a continuous covered market”. On cue his hand short-circuited, faded in and out like two eighties movies overlaid, but badly.
On Grosvener Rd a London Gannet circled at a height of about one hundred feet. It rose soaring and circling slowly to a great height until it was almost invisible. This was the first time… he thought, then voices… “the Cuckoo Clock” “You’re worse than sums” “a fairy land “cuckoo” who gave her a lovely feather cloak and took her into the house of the Mandarins in an ivory palanquin… he had seen a gannet, yes, in London finally after twenty one years. Twenty-One years, twenty-one knarred knotted nodes, that the tree shape suggested could only have been designed to conduct electricity, like a teslacoil he felt its salubrious destruction. He took a mid-stride photograph.
He understood acid as a counter balance to intoxication, and following vast hermetic networks of interlinked travel as a comparable technique. Bombsites are potentially infinite. He took photographs of the names of the housing estates that lined his pace: space. Coleridge House, Chaucer House, Shelly House, Keats House, and Darwin House. Intoxication and evolution, copulating skylarks fluttering at strange angles of complicity, what political energy either one had was drained out by the incorporation into the signed housing block; confessionals.
A fork down the evolutionary road of Romanticism. Of course he hated evolution: evolution as sand timer, evolution as glass storied building. He disliked the over-arching narrative; he preferred the process, the mutation. He saw mutation as end point, as goal in its self, evolution as fashion statement. Being open to possibility wasn’t enough, the situation had to be set up, excited.
He felt the ground swell, dead matter screeched from a husk, Crud Lake glue fluke, as he came across Ripley House. Copper burnt back reveals immolated tracks of speak spark, a silent writing forced onto flat plain which takes your fingerprints if you let it. And interior became exterior and exterior became interior and he had to start the process again. Films: he took a photograph of the inners of the boiler house in search of the site. He did not find anything.
Twenty minutes earlier that day tomorrow he found a plot of land suspected to hold a ghost. His iron filing head was drawn across the concrete and fixed once more onto the power station, which had been watching him all the time. Now he was a girl called Sophie in a yellow search of absence, having been found out and sorely wanting by a Venice distilled in monochrome, and Rome perhaps, watching Keats live between Battersea bricks.
A future: where roads become poetic nodes leading to websites of continuous revolution, where administration becomes a position of responsibility not censorship, an activity that each individual is engaged within. Future as: I can talk to you face to face whilst simultaneously experiencing another country in ways far more bodily than Google maps, and democracy emerges from localities and voting is as instantaneous as the stock market without the violent exclusions.
And now he was an elephant and now a young woman with a ponytail to her waist and now a bowl of goldfish all six rendered in black and white and now he lifts off and fixes onto a clock the time reading 1:45 pm and now he is a film reel filled with food and bombs and now he is Patrick… and now he is a table and now he is a ghost that emerges right off the screen and actually soars into the audience.
Richard Barrett tagged