The Whirling Woman in Black

Several weeks after the closure of the last major film studio theme park, I encountered for the first time the prime product of the growth industry of the last two decades - disaster tourism. The theme park sites in Orlando, Los Angeles and Paris had suffered many years of decline despite new attractions being opened to reproduce the seemingly endless public appetite for re-living the greatest disasters of our era. The mock Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that had been built in Florida brought in less than 5% of the income of the real thing, despite the daily shows of earthquake, tsunami and hydrogen explosions that rocked the Everglades and annoyed the somnolent crocodiles. The real thing in Japan was much more potent to the imaginations of the global tourists who flew in from all over the world. The addition of the long closed Kennedy Space Center to the theme park empire and the recreations of the 1986 Challenger disaster and the explosive failure of the USA’s return to manned flight brought in many times the revenue of the major rides and attractions of the now defunct theme parks..

With this in mind I found myself at the Flood Disaster Experience near the region of what used to be called The Netherlands, before the sea overwhelmed the man made polders and inundated the seawater pumps. With the first country in the world to be sunk off the map, a whole culture and language had disappeared with it, the refugees of this country that were spread to all corners of the globe readily forgetting their native language with the impulse to trade at maximum efficiency.

I was part of a small group of people to attend the first week’s performances of the extreme flooding hydrodynamics experience. After two hours of promotional videos and technographic presentations, we were prepared for the highlight of the visit, a live recreation of the great breach of the Afsluitdijk. A scale recreation of the Netherlands had been created in a large expanse of flat land, and part of the experience was to get as close to the breach as possible by standing on large floating canvas-like material surfaces on top of the water. This way we could appreciate the complex and impressive hydrodynamic effects produced by this historical disaster.

The woman in charge of the demonstration distributed coloured mackintoshes - each one of us had a slightly different task to perform, a different part of the disaster to monitor. Later on we would debrief and share our experiences and observations. This debrief would be recorded on video and after being intercut with the recreated disaster footage, would be purchasable later on as a souvenir. I donned a yellow mac, to indicate that I would be stood some distance from the breach of the dam or dyke, a number of the group members wore red to monitor the moment the wall of water hit land, and a woman was given a black waterproof and asked to monitor the breach itself.

The woman controller stood back under a tree and ordered the simulation operative to start the show by unleashing the pent up risen seawaters behind the dyke. Almost immediately I felt a pulse under my feet as a shock-wave propagated forwards away from the breach. A jolt like a heartbeat under the water. I remained easily upright as the material surface I was standing on was large and sufficiently inflexible to provide a safe and firm footing. I watched as a wall of water surged forwards away from the dyke towards the scaled coastline, model trains and cars moving in the distance to indicate the normalcy of life on that fateful day when years of rising sea levels finally exposed a catastrophic manufacturing defect in the dyke’s construction. However as the water approached the model coastline and the group members in their red outfits, a hydraulic jump formed bringing the wall of water to a standstill. The instructor beckoned to the red team to come closer to the wall, knowing that the hydraulic jump at this point of the simulation would be stable for some time, the unique subsea topology of the IJsselmeer producing this impressive effect.

As more water poured through the breach in the damn, the hydraulic wall remained stable, increasing in size and I felt the platform I was stood on rising up on the increasing water levels. The red group stared in awe as the wall of water rose over 10 metres, like the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus.

Out of the corner of my eye, however, I noticed that an intense whirlpool was starting to form near the dyke’s breach. The woman in the black raincoat raised her hands in delight, as if she was conjuring up this eddy herself. I shouted to the group members in red who were now some distance below those of us above the hydraulic jump, trying to direct their attention to the developing malestrom. However they remained transfixed by the increasing size of the wall of water, dancing a merry jig hand in hand with evident joy.

I turned to look at the instructor. Seeing her reaction was calm and positive, I surmised this was all part of the script.

By now a second hydraulic jump was forming near the developing whirlpool, the limitless quantity of the ersatz North Sea providing a continuous supply of hydraulic energy. As the whirlpool gathered momentum and power I watched as the woman in black stepped onto the edge of the spinning water, entranced and hypnotized by the swiftly swirling waters. Sharing a good deal of her entrancement and delight, I remained at my place on the now faster rising canvas. Somehow by the uplifting flow of the clear water and the gyroscopic effects of the rotating cataract, the woman in black remained stable and upright, stood up on the whirling rim of water. With a wild and vivid expression on her face, the woman in black spun round and round on the rim of the whirlpool, black mackintosh flailing behind her, the lacework of her black dress free and flapping behind her in the wind, her black hair released and streaming around and around, about once per second. Instinctively, it seemed, she started dancing on her way around the edge, hands whirling and rotating in a fusion of flamenco, bollywood and belly dancing.

By now the instructor had left her tree, and was watching with some concern. Evidently there had been a departure from the script. The group members in red had stopped their jig and were now transfixed by the insane sight of the woman in black, rotating and gyrating in an expanding circle of water, a gesticulating black form moving faster and faster around the whirlpool.

The eddy deepened and moved closer to the second hydraulic jump that had formed nearer the compromised dyke. As the whirlpool approached the watery precipice, the edge of the spinning water bulged out of the hydraulic wall like the bowl of a wine glass, the conical base of the cup forming on the edge of the water wall, a spinning column of water below mimicking the stem of a wine glass. The upward pressure at the rim of the whirlpool broke down as the complex hydraulics reset themselves around the new structure. With this reconfiguration the woman in black slowly sank into the edge of the bowl of whirling water until she was below the level of the top of the whirlpool. Oblivious she continued her dance, faster and faster around the eddy. Now the coat, her clothes and her hair flowed in waves behind her as she continued her hand dance, visible though the edge of the water wall, around and around, now spinning past twice a second. The woman in black formed a bizarre moving form seen through the clear water as if through glass.

Clearly concerned now for the woman in black, the instructor instinctively shouted out to her to step out of the whirlpool. Suddenly the spell of the dance was broken and the woman in black’s trance dropped instantly. Panicked at finding herself deep in the vortex, she starting to try to turn, legs and arms flailing madly. She opened her mouth to scream but a silent bubble of air burst out. Her hands and legs broke through the edge of the water and air was sucked in around her, the water writhing and foaming in response to the mad spasmic jerkings of the woman’s arms and legs. As if ensconced in a chrysalis, she was surrounded by a tube of bubbles and foam, still spinning endlessly round the vortex.

The break in the edge of the water wall by the movement of the woman in black’s arms and legs sent ripples of instability up and down the hydraulic wall, and the surface began to break down. With a sickening whoosh the woman in black found herself on an ejection trajectory in the fast collapsing vortex, her flailing body emerging from the vertical water sheet and falling with some speed towards the hard floor that had opened up with the merging of the two hydraulic steps, now both oscillating with impending instability. I caught a glimpse of the hard ground exposed below the disintegrating wine glass shape and saw the water turn red.

Without thinking I took hold of the instructor, moved her back to the tree and comforted her as she sobbed. Looking over her shoulder I could see the red-dressed group members running to safety before the fast collapsing hydraulic wall. The model coast began its inondation, a tsunami picking up the model cars and trains and pushing them on, over the flat model landscape.

On the Death of Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong, the first man to step onto another celestial body, died at the age of 82 on the 25^th of August 2012. The obituaries talked about this historic, self-effacing man in their usual pre-written ways. At his burial the fact that the day coincided with the second full (and therefore “blue”) moon on the same month was mentioned. By the time I am writing this paragraph in early September 2012, and endless F5ing of the newspaper websites has consigned his story to the archives and life goes on as before, the moon landings of the late 60s and early 70s a strange historical oddity.

The Apollo program ended in December 1972. I have a memory of watching a moon landing live in the early 70s. Hard to say if it was the last one, which was reputedly not televised as people had got bored already with blurry images in black and white of these strange chubby dolls bouncing around a barren landscape as if on elastic. I am too young to recall the Apollo 11 landing of Amstrong and Aldrin, even if I was there.

I often wonder how the present young generation see the moon landings. As the youngest man to have walked on the moon was born in 1935 (Charles Duke?), the moon shots were stuff of their grandparents’ generation, just as for me the Second World War was of my grandparents’ time.

Since the last Apollo flight, man has been restricted to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and somehow this is less thrilling than it should be. Perhaps it is because apart from repairing orbital telescopes, the LEO missions are of limited value. Perhaps it is because the altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) is between 330km and 410km, something like the distance between Brussels and London.

The dream of spaceflight has failed and I wonder why? At the death of Neil Armstrong I looked up a quote from the late author J.G. Ballard:

[I]n 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and became, I thought, the only human being from our millennium who would be remembered in 50,000 years' time. But after those first triumphs something began to go wrong. [The] great vision of galactic exploration had begun to fade. The suspicion dawned that outer space might be - dare one say it - boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn't very much to do there. [It was] the most hostile environment ever encountered. Besides, absolute zero was not a temperature at which anything very interesting ever happened. We began to realise that the most fascinating planet in the universe, and by far the strangest, was the one that the astronauts had left behind them. (J. G. Ballard, Observer 22 Dec 1996)

In a relatively short period of time, man has gone from cave dwelling hunter-gatherer to agricultural settler, to technological city dweller sending men to the stars. It’s an incredible feat in objective terms. But somehow our imaginations don’t play ball. Maybe Ballard is right that space in reality is boring – perhaps our ideas and dreams of science fiction and space travel are so far beyond our capability that we are deeply disappointed by the reality.

Ballard suggests that space travel offends our sense of evolutionary superiority, as it infantilises us in terms of our biological prowess in walking, running – all the things that gravity gives us.

But what if there had been a disaster in space? This question was floated by the Chilean surrealist artist Matta in 1966:

DIS-ASTRONAUTE

Disaster in space: an astronaut is dead. But is he dead? Closed in a perfect capsule, his body is intact. Is he alive? His voice is not heard by man, his thought is still. All that one knows is that his body – dead? alive? – turns in space around the earth at enormous speed. On a clear night, a luminous point crosses the sky from one horizon to the other. Sailors check their course against that point; on silent islands mothers show the miracle to their children: the miracle of something – a man – that moves amongst the stars and is distinguished from them by movement. He has a name. Russian? American? A common name, a sound like the sound of a star’s name, but a man’s name. Dead? Alive?

Perhaps we will never hear of such a thing, perhaps a disaster in space will never occur. But what would occur if it should occur? Perhaps nothing more than what is written in this brief hypothetical account. Or perhaps everything in the world would change because man could not support the idea of a perfect cadaver or a live man without voice and without thought turning in space, beyond contact and beyond understanding. But how many perfect cadavers and live men without voice and without thought surround us every day on earth? Why must we await – and fear – a disaster in space, in order to become aware of our world?

MATTA, Paris 1966

A Ballard character in The Atrocity Exhibition misquotes the last line as, "a disaster in space in order to understand our own time?"

There have been several disasters with the space program. From NASA there was the Apollo 1 fire during testing that killed Grissom, White, and Chaffee. This was a disaster on the ground. There were two fatal disasters with the Space Shuttle program, Challenger at launch in 1986 and Colombia during re-entry in 2003. In these cases the bodies of the brave astronauts fell to earth.

But what if Armstrong had crashed the Eagle module as he landed it manually on the moon’s surface in 1969? What if the explosion on Apollo 13 on its way to the moon had been fatal and the crew of Lovell, Swigert and Haise had crashed into the moon or ended up as an orbiting tomb around the moon? If these disasters had taken place, each time we looked at the moon we would think of the cadavers of these men in their cold airless coffins. Every clear night as the moon shone down we would feel the bodies of these pioneering men and wonder at their death. We would dream about going to the moon to see their final resting places, maybe talk with their ghosts.

If men had died on the moon, our concepts of time and space would have changed, I really believe that. The moon would have become an emotionally charged place and I am convinced we would have had a moon base by now.

The preserved and desiccated remains of these men would have spurred humanity on to deeper understandings.

In a November 16, 2009 editorial, The New York Times opined:

[T]here’s something terribly wistful about these photographs of the Apollo landing sites. The detail is such that if Neil Armstrong were walking there now, we could make him out, make out his footsteps even, like the astronaut footpath clearly visible in the photos of the Apollo 14 site. Perhaps the wistfulness is caused by the sense of simple grandeur in those Apollo missions. Perhaps, too, it’s a reminder of the risk we all felt after the Eagle had landed – the possibility that it might be unable to lift off again and the astronauts would be stranded on the Moon. But it may also be that a photograph like this one is as close as we’re able to come to looking directly back into the human past.

"We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth." –Eugene Cernan

The original video tapes of the Apollo 11 mission are believed to have been wiped. What a comment…

Kerstmis in Engeland

In Engeland gaat het kerstfeest een beetje anders dan in België. Bijvoorbeeld, we vieren niet Sint Niklaas. Kinderen krijgen geen cadeautjes op 6 december en niemand kent Zwarte Piet. Engelse kinderen krijgen hun cadeautjes op kerstochtend, 25 december.

In België wordt de grootste familiemaaltijd op 24 december ‘s avonds gevierd, maar in Engeland is deze avond gewoonlijk om naar jouw familie te rijden.  

De grootste kerstmaaltijd wordt in Engeland op 25 december s’ middags gegeten. Het is de belangrijkste maaltijd omdat je die met jouw familie viert.

Een gewoonte en traditionele kerstschotel is geroosterde kalkoen met aardappelen, wortelen, brusselse spruiten, hesp en andere lekker eten. Na de hoofdschotel eet je een zoet nagerecht.

Daarna mag je niet in slaap vallen omdat je om 3 uur 's middags naar de toespraak van de koningin moet kijken! De toespraak van de koningin is een heel belangrijke traditie.

In Engeland is kerstmis een heel belangrijk familiefeest zoals in België, maar het rooster is een beetje veranderd.

Common Sense and Clothes Drying

We are all brought up with ideas learned from our parents and from society - things that are held to be true, are common sense. When these ideas are totally wrong it is always an uphill struggle to try and convince people of the failure of common wisdom.

At the moment it is mid-March and it is snowing. Because of this fact, I am doing as much laundry as I can. What? Are you crazy? Drying clothes in sub-zero temperatures! The best day for drying clothes is when it is baking hot, as hot as possible!

Er, no.

Ever since I put thermometers around my apartment, I've also been watching the humidity levels - the humidity measurements of these electronic thermometers was something I had no interest in previously. However, logic tells me the lower the humidity the faster clothes will dry. And guess what, when it is freezing outside, inside the heating is on and the humidity levels in my apartment at 25% are drier than the Atacama Desert. So clothes dry in a couple of hours! When it's mid summer and hot, the humidity here is over 50%, and clothes often take a couple of days to dry...

So when the snow falls, I get as much clothes washing done as possible. Illogical heh?

Brideshead Revisited (2008) mini review

To my mind the 1980’s TV series of the Evelyn Waugh book is unsurpassable, and indeed I found it impossible not to compare this film adaptation (I watched the director’s cut) with the superior 11 hour miniseries.

The TV series, adapted by Jon Mortimer was probably the easiest adaptation ever made, as the words from the book were quite literally transferred directly to the small screen. What I saw with the TV series were the words and ideas of Waugh translated to images and the actors’ mouths.

The film however made all sorts of changes - some due to compression, exposition of the narrative had to be stated explicitly in many cases, whereas the TV series would take maybe half an hour to develop a plot point. Of course when you are compressing a book into a 2+ hour movie, these things need to be done. But some of the words from the mouths of the characters were just not Waugh - and to me they jarred.

More and more I find that a movie is not a good vehicle for a complex and idea-intense novel like Brideshead Revisited. I mourn the age of the serious TV serial where ideas and feelings and atmospheres can be developed over hours - or weeks, given the way the TV format was used in the early 80s - no VCRs or DVRs... For this reason I am anxious about watching this year’s adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - the late 70s BBC adaptation was magisterial - how can a 2 hour film be magisterial?

What really shocked me about this film adaptation is that, for me, it totally missed the point of the book. By that I mean the fundamental story was not resolved or really hinted at. This seems to me a terrible omission.

For me the book and the TV series is about one man’s conversion to the catholic faith.

This was totally ignored in the film! At the death of Lord Marchmain, the scales did not fall from Charles Ryder’s eyes, and the final scene in the chapel was not his conversion but a kind of sentimental gesture, of not snuffing out the candle in the Brideshead chapel. I cannot understand how what for me is the fundamental story of the book can be ignored. Evelyn Waugh was himself a convert to the Roman Church. The film therefore becomes a bisexual love story, or at most a three way between Sebastian, Julia and the catholic faith.

My last complaint is to do with the colour palette used in the movie - this fashionable and rather odious Teal and Orange which I find very distracting and unnatural. I of course prefer the duller but more natural shades from the TV series.

On the positive side, there was a good showing of English thespian talent - Sir Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson were their usual fine selves. I was shocked at the final credits to learn that Greta Scacchi had played the middle aged and rather frumpy Cara. At least her Italian accent was relatively genuine. It made me smile to see Niall Buggy as the priest who gives the last rites to Lord Marchmain. The younger cast members were good but not in the same league.

Finally, I wonder why this film needed to be made when the 80s TV series was so definitive - perhaps in this age we cannot expect people to follow 11 hours of slow story telling any more. TV series these days means Desperate Housewives, True Blood and Six Feet Under - none of which are to my taste...

Wings of Desire

I first saw this film in the winter of 1988-89 at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, near the BBC studios at Pebble Mill. As I left the cinema, which was situated in Cannon Hill Park, I saw a police car waiting in the car park, headlights on. As I left the cinema, I felt a guardian angel watching over me. As I left the park and started walking home, I heard running behind me. Next thing I knew someone had kicked me in the back and a group of 5 or 6 or 7 mid-teenagers were around me punching and kicking me.

Somehow I managed to escape the melee and had the presence of mind to run up the drive of a large detached house and pretend to ring the doorbell. The group of teenagers decided to flee...

The most direct association I have with this film is having a guardian angel who totally failed to protect me.

And then there is Berlin - which I had visited the previous summer in 1988 - and all the impressions I had from the then-divided city. In fact all the impressions I had from the inter-railing tour of France, Italy and Germany from that summer 23 years ago are associated with this film.

Apart from several day-trips to Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer, and two Mediterranean package holidays, I had not left the British Isles till then. Waking up in a night train on the railway bridge across the Rhine in Cologne was the germination of all my dreams of Europe, dreams that led me inevitably to Brussels.

And so to the film, which is about mortality, time, history, desire and the heaven over Berlin. The film has a certain kind of melancholic serenity. Footage is mixed in black and white (angel vision) and colour (just like in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (or Stairway to Heaven in the US)) and film shot in the 80s and the 40s. The footage from the 40s is also mixed black and white, and colour.

I haven’t wanted to face my dreams of Berlin since my last visit 18 years ago, in 1993. As I write this text, I fly there tomorrow, flightpath Tegel. In a month where my life’s structure has been partially broken, it seemed time to face the dreams of a city divided, the witness I made to the cold war, the fractured city partly coalescing in 1993, the empty wasteland of Potsdamer Platz. Time to recall the memories of the nazi swastika showing through the faded East German paintwork in Potsdam near Sans-souci. Also time to face the reputation of wild debauchery that echoes the Wiemar Republic times, times maybe not so dissimilar to our own in 2011.

Tomorrow I leave Brussels and descend from the Himmel über Berlin.

Westvleteren - Happy new year!

From over two years ago. Better late than never...

Film Review : Empire of the Sun (1987)

Against my philosophy of life, Spielberg's films always seem so dead and uninteresting; watching one is like viewing coloured patterns on the screen and nothing much more. When this process is made on the semi-autobiographical book of one of my most seminal authors, the effect is quite seriously disorientating.

The main theme of the Spielberg-led story of this film is of a boy losing his parents, losing his innocence, then finding his parents again. The parental bond comes totally to the fore, and this is so, so wrong in terms of the book. The parents in the book are the typical 1930s upper middle class family where the offspring are brought up by the nanny. There is considerable distance between the parents and the offspring, that to make this bond the central part of the film is just totally out of context of the period. Spielberg just didn't get this English cultural fact.

Right at the start of the film things depart from reality - the nanny for the boy is a chinese woman. This again is just so wrong and it made me spend the first ten minutes annoyed by this fact. In the book the nanny is a Belarussian, Olga. It is important that there is a separate layer of staff coming between the Chinese and the English. A Chinese woman would never have been allowed to have such direct and important contact with an English boy. I felt annoyed as this simplifying move was clearly made to dumb-down the story for an American audience.

The secondary theme of the loss of innocence is out of place here also. The narration of the book clearly indicates that this is an adult recounting his childhood through adult eyes. There is no rite of passage or moment when the narrator loses his innocence. The entire narrative is made from the point of view of an adult, and this 'journey' does not form part of the story.

Other annoyances include the waste of a good many decent actors' parts. Miranda Richardson just drifts around the screen looking wan, Robert Stephens gets very little screen time, Leslie Phillips is there but only occasionally. Only John Malkovich and Nigel Havers have anything interesting to do, and they do it well - a surprise for Nigel Havers who has had most of his career on the small UK screen.

Spielberg of course cannot resist an occasional descent into the mawkish - the Japanese teenager in the adjoining airfield and his subsequent death being the worst example.

Christian Bale's performace I have no problem with. The talent he has shown later on in his adult career is there to be seen. One can almost imagine the lead character in American Psycho being an adult version of the boy in the internment camp.

For the things that I did enjoy - one moment gave me goosebumps, and that was the attack on the airfield by Mustangs, and the realisation of the part of the book when the boy is standing on a building and sees an American pilot wave at him as he flies past. It almost got the hallucinatory feeling that J.G. Ballard described in his book. The scene set in the abandoned stadium where the Japanese had stored all the valuable furniture and cars from the westerners was suitably surreal, as was the sequence set in this arena where the flash of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki is depicted. In this book this is clearly figurative rather than factual, but the hallucinatory rendering of this event and the tieing of it to the death of Miranda Richardson's character worked.

The final scene of the reunification of boy and parents, and the closing of the boy's eyes in the arms of his mother is the required happy end to the story. What I really missed from the end of this story as was described in the book was the torture and death of the young chinese youth by the four bored Japanses soldiers - an event that clearly changed the life of the real J.G.Ballard and an event that resonates through all of his writing. This is the most likely event that caused the loss of innocence in the book's author, though the actual moment when he loses innocence is probably many years later, after his children have left home. Anyway, this is the sequel of the book which I am sure will never be made into a Hollywood movie. These days it would be staggering for the BBC to make a mini-series out of it, even.

Billy

To see your face
As it tells me how many men in this place
Would be foolish not to want me.
And after we have kissed
I can smell impressive aftershave
On my lips
For hours afterwards.

Rest Assured

Best - Gestern. Abend verlassen.
Thinking, being, doing good.
Timeshare compartments of my body.
My telephone seems a stranger to passions
Once past through its eager ear,
Its moulded mouthpiece.

Gravel - grains on the track.
The noise that fed that dream
About the daisy chain and
Oven-ready chips. Slips into a hairline fracture.
Traps in the door to the next view.
Hidden from sullen light, but no darkness.

Greying skies like Russia or the Fens.
Pale trees and make-amends of yours.
Pastures soggy, coffee-black earth.
And the ditches and drains
Pass by the dykes of my countenance.
These words are for your reference.

Well meant, well healed.
The working day has ended.
Reeled in now, I must go out to drink
For moments lost, for times too far to think
Of. Parametric decoupling of my sensibilities.
Wife swapping would be more fun than this.

I must go now.
I don't want to go out.
What gain, what interest
Can I get from my further humiliation?

No Rheum at the Inn?

"I don't think I can quite stand it,"
He said, as he looked askance in the mirror.
Hairs in his nose protruding again - hankers
After a safe but effective method.
He then thinks of spermicidal jelly
And how the mouth yawns.

The grey marks on his collar and cuffs
Remind him of his lazy iron.
And half eaten apples rot
In terrifying unison
On the bedside cabinet.

Path to past, hashish to thrushes.
Madness, anger at his life's rushes.

Motorway Madness

Do I exchange my MG Metro
For some rusting, coughing metal
From "Fabbrica Italiano Automobile Torino?" -
FIAT as a formal command. But rather
Than blow my wanda on a Panda,
I really do feel I should go for a Lada.

Buy a Russian car? Some'd say I'd be batty.
But I like the image of the car from Togliatti.

And if Italian Communists are beyond perimeter
I could ease myself into a red Reliant Scimitar
And head for the hill in a ragtop retro.
But my aunt would rather see me in a Rover Metro.

I guess I'll keep the cash in the bank - moreover
Anything's better than being seen in a Skoda.

Thursday Night

Thursday night. Too tired to think.
Spilling patterns over the carpet.
Room a mess now, cold too.
Wasted and spaced without a drink.
It's already gone midnight.
Weary and uptight,
It rains on the outside.
This is the downside.

Cambs

We only see the city incomplete.
Snatches of architecture, a table
In a favourite cafe. Trees in the
Mist. Some half-unseen, as if a
Crowded station passes by.
The great mass of knowledge, lent
By my few friends. Usury, small
Portion of the common entirety of
This City. I cycle my streets,
Drink at my pubs. And in a
Blink, a speck in the eye, we
See something unrecognisible and
Our Mind forgets - peripheral amnesia.
In my mind's eye, a shrub, just by
The Cam, halfway between Magdalen
And that disused barge, that
Used to be a gallery.
You've been there?

Crossing the Field

All of a sudden we were volleying,
Batting, bowling, aiming and Rallying.
I turned to look at my friend
In some disbelief and worry
That I may be overcompensating,
Overacting in a hurry
And forcing the game's end.

But the food came, and more beer.
The company, alcohol and Stilton cheering
Me on. Then off we were, walking
Through fields flat and immense.
The conversation diverting, diverse.
Worries then at the current expense
Subdued by the joys of talking, talking.

A junction. the line of conversation stalls.
Disorientation, skipping through fields.
Lagoons of doubts, drones of engines.
Back to the path as it greys, rains.

Home in the car and a breakdown.
Coffee and conviviality with Viv and velvet.
The rest of the day in tiredness.
Damp walk home, food and the down
Train to London, home of the restless.
Looking back, then being glad we met.

I, as ever, the fool
Asking more questions
Than getting answers.
Mixed feelings
But positive about the chances.
The fool dances.

Consummate Durables

More books for breakfast.
Sometimes I wonder if I,
As in my times past,
Will ever have the time to buy
Enough time to scan these words,
These shards of thoughts,
Ideas, quests that have been fought
For, for me to stack and waste.
My only contact with these books, my dust.

What of my plastic coated aluminium disks?
I never seem to have the time to study,
Examine or even risk
Disliking them. Somebody
Should stop me buying CDs.
I should apportion cash to needs
And stop these dirty transactions and deeds.
I must now amortize my waste
Before my mind and chattels turn to dust.

Meditation on a Cambridge Past

I fell asleep at three this afternoon
And woke at seven. It was dusk
At seven, in this late August in my room,
In this late year, ninety-three.
And I felt a feint unease
At the thought of summer
Suddenly coming to an end;
The morning nip, the browning trees.
The night before briefly reeled
Before my eyes. Dancing, sweating
To music of twenty years ago. High-heeled
Boots, collars, nylon, dacron, polyester -
The camp burlesque of "Year-yester,"
Boogie nights, nineteen-seventy-three.

Cambridge, I believe you are
My first real home. The first place
I have throughly inhabited, more
Than anywhere in years past.
I've become comfortable with your face,
As one does of routine beauty.
I kick against your perpendicular,
Renaissance, Gothic less now, now I
Am older. In the present, in particular
An aspect of your past days
To me acts as an indicator of the malaise
Of this society, England in
The inevitable 20C fin de siecle.
My vital lifetime lies herein.

It's almost as if I am sixty not twenty
Years back. Europe, cradle of all we have
As we dizzily spin into the next millenium,
My Europe is in war again. Plenty
Of times this century, peace's tedium
Has been shattered by Europe's clamour.
Amongst the Cambridge I know now,
Touristed, jail-bait-thronged, no glamour,
Ghosts of nineteen-thirty-three speak
In what we laughingly now call innocence.
Speak to me now ghosts. I'm tired of our
Cynicism of your patronage of communism.
Tell me of the facist atrocities in Spain.
Illustrate to me Picasso's canvases of pain.

Tell me now, who is the despised hero?
Tell me of your thoughts on the appeasement
Of the Czechs; the Jews and Queers and
Intellects under Stalin, Hitler. Sarajevo,
What of it? Tell me soldiers, tell me Owen,
Butterworth and Brooke of the games at hand
From the time you died with Ferdinand.
Tell me all you ghosts of this horrific century,
Tell me what is wrong with us? Bosnia
Exhibits it's demon's wares on our TV screen.
Papers sell and the publishers get rich.
In Cambridge, the tourist trade is seen
As a necessary evil, for local prosperity.
Moral bankruptcy, forgetting our legacy.


Where is the Cambridge of thirty-three?
Are we now really so wise, so superior, so happy
That we cannot be idealistic, innocent again?
Men from this town fought and died in Spain.
Now Cambridge men drink, play laser-quest,
Trampoline onto velcro walls in velcro vests.
I'm angry and upset, that in this media
Saturated world, Bosnia is not cause for avid
Action, what-must-be-done; now tedium
Is our collective response. War in the Balkans
Makes us middle-classed think more of
Emma Thompson, blue stockings. And how to avoid
The queue at Branagh's "Much Ado."
Mostar has fallen. Barbarity. But who

Cares now? The IRA bomb the past away.
Great architecture of our civilisations blasted
Into obscure dust. Twyford Down, for example.
Even British Rail is being dissected, drowned
In the loch of noble privitisation. For the first
Time in my life, I really feel that society
Has run it's course, as it embraces all pretence
Of knowing where it's going and what it's doing.
I was frisked last night, This never
Happens at a socially unacceptable queer event.
On gay nights, the bouncers are there to keep
The violence out. So this is my life. Society
Accepts hate and despises love. My
Hands sweat. I exhale. I cry quietly.

Thursday Night

Second book of poems.

Copyright Benjamin Barrier (c)1993

Thought on falling asleep.

Between the paper clips and discarded cups of tea,
In the moment caught between the pain and memory,
After the curtains' close on the dreary day,
Behind that screen, erected to try and make it go away,

Before me, now, in this reflective twilight, sits
A man, who impresses me yet, all the more
Because we, who from him benefit,
Can now more clearly understand the score -

The how, the what, the ways and wherefore
We do this; all preconceived thoughts made forlorn
And small. I find a word I kick against
Time to time. This word invokes defence

So strong - reactionary. In the mess of my room
I berate myself for hating this thought, this dove
That you have freed in me in this gloom.
This answer, bird and revelation? This love.

Cambridge, 31st May 1993 - to Billy Scott

Dream Man

In the darkened spheres of eyes,
In the doughnuts of the corpuscles of blood
Exists a space that is beyond time
And the temporal word.

A man walks down the street in early May,
In his head Chopin can be heard to play.
He's fighting his way to school
Through a muddied pool of thought.

The events in his life have all but superseded
The child. The recollections of a 'fifties house
Send shards of shattered past to the gutter.
The yellow lines blur his line of sight.

Aghast from spirits drunk in false glee,
Reeling against the tumult of the skies,
The man falls over, falls again.
His mother's arms waste sickly as he slides.

Home again for half-past-six and news
Of rain or murder or tales of whose is whose.
Flesh yields to fork, flesh fields of pain.
The whole damn business repeated once again.

Who is this man? more than half his life already lived.
A dream I had, I guess.

Cambridge, May 1993