Apocalypse tourism for the psyche

Stranded in the remotest hinterlands of Edinburgh, cut and torn by the razor edged winds, blinded by the unforgiving glare of the snow, I trudged back to my little cabin through that hell in order to broadcast this final message to a dying world. I write in the hope that at least one person may receive this message, one soul who will know of my final demise...this is my last will and testament:

Some selfish bastards have snaffled all the bread and spuds from the local Scot-Mid - we're AAALL DOOOOOMED!

Thankfully, for the moment at least, the collapse of the social/economic infrastructure of western society is still someway off (maybe the day after tomorrow), although there is a more serious note underlying my levity. As soon as the first heavy snows and rains descend, and the first power cut terminates your link to the global village, the selfish gene is expressed (yeah, I'd like a peep at Richard Dawkins freezer at times like this). From then on its open season for the darkest recesses of the human imagination - choose your narrative.


I remember reading 'The Stand' by Stephen King around Christmas time '82-'83 and was immediately gripped by the delicious warm bath of post-apocalyptic dystopia. I think now though, on reflection, this was one of the many literary/cinematic stepping stones that reinforced my addiction to the societal breakdown genre.

It began in childhood, being exposed to all those sci-fi movies in the 70's.
The wild hippie land of 'Sanctuary' in the movie Logan's Run, was so much more appealing than the domed city where anyone over thirty gets bumped off or has to go on the run. Charlton Heston's 'Omega Man' barricaded with his personal armoury in his apartment, taking pot shots at the virally contaminated denizens of a futuristic LA, was dark and bleak but totally thrilling to a young kid in rural England (The Will Smith remake just didn't hit the spot for me).

Re-runs of particular episodes of the Twilight Zone from the late '50's soaking into my still soft and virginal neuron's no doubt sedimented and seeded my (and many others) unconscious propensity for this type of stuff at an early age. Here's a particular favourite:



Other literature on this theme that has enriched my interest have been, virtually anything by J.G. Ballard, Christopher Priest's 1973 Fugue for a Darkening Island and the more recent Cormack McCarthy's The Road. Toss in a heavy pinch of Hollywood futuristic disaster movies, with a twist of the very British 24/28 Days later zombie flick, and you have a veritable banquet fit for armchair anarchists everywhere - plus the occasional dyed in the wool misanthropist.(Just remembered, I think I can include Planet of the apes in the pantheon too).

I guess there's something very primitive that this kind of stuff taps into. It tickles the synapses somewhere in the more primitive parts of the human brain. Its like men and bonfires: man with big stick stands legs apart in the back garden, poking at at his little pyre, protecting his kin and keeping the predatory hedgehogs and next doors Sabre-toothed tabby at bay.

Man and/or woman alone in the world, starting afresh, Adam and Eve, the Alpha and Omega point for the human race, if you can meet with triumph and disaster then yours is the earth and everything in it, and - which is more - you'll be a man, my son! (Or daughter).
This God-like status that you may unintentionally find yourself in - the ability to remake your life, survive outside the conventional societal/governmental structures that you have been born into - fascinates as much as it terrifies me, which goes for a lot of other folks considering the success of the genre for the past few decades in book and film.



As I wrote in another post about my interest as a boy in the Second World War after being exposed to my grandfathers war magazines - it was less the militaristic aspect that affected me, than the breakdown of 'normality', strange sci-fi landscapes and floating populations and tribes that were created by the conflict. The artist Francis Bacon wrote about his youth during the London Blitz, describing how the chilling proximity of sudden possible extinction every moment, enabled a freedom and authenticity that was almost intoxicating.

But, I suppose like most other people, I enjoy a touch of apocalypse/post-apocalypse tourism from the safety of the armchair now and then, an opportunity to travel, even if only in the imagination, away from the rigidity and banality of most of what constitutes modern life.
I think its healthy to ask 'What if?' on a regular basis, in fact I think it should be a duty to imagine starting the world off again, contemplating how different it all could be, how different we could think and behave, testing our Darwinian adaptive skills in a Ray Mears kind of way.
For the moment though, I hope the gritters are out tonight and the Scot-Mid has stocked up for the morrow.

I thought of starting off a blog group to narrate a story on this theme: a group of voices/blogs chronicling their everyday experiences of survival both nationally and internationally in a fictional, freshly apocalypsed Ballardian world. We'd better get a move on anyway, according to the Mayan Codices we've only got a year to go.

The intimacy of Strangers or bench culture

Whenever I'm in a city or town I will often gravitate to the nearest bench at every opportunity. Its that need for stillness, an island of reflection in the noisy flickering sea of bodies diving at me like a swarm of Messerschmidt's.
I like to imagine myself in one of those speedy stop-motion playbacks: the scurrying ants zipping about all around me, each following their strange arcane trajectories, the cars and buses stopping terrifyingly fast and then disappearing almost instantaneously as if by the speed of light, which I suppose they do in a way - its all about perception and scale anyway.

At the center of this spasmodic animation, is me, and many others like me, the watchers, the clockers, the searchers and the soul seekers.
To be a true participant and paid up member of the bench subculture, you have to be alone - sitting with a partner, friend or other familiar doesn't count - you have to be anonymous, a stranger, a part-time but relatively dedicated existentialist.

That bench becomes your station, your watchtower for a little while, a place to flop and expose yourself to the gaze of others while you gaze at them: you've made a statement, I'm getting off the merry-go-round, I'm not going anywhere or doing anything, I'm just watching the wheels go round.

Being a watcher, an apathetic bench-sitter can be mildly revolutionary in these go-getter, busy, busy, busy times. I must confess to feeling a twinge of guilt occasionally, a tickle of self-consciousness, a little scudding cloud of disapproval from the local human ecosystem. How truly terrible it is to stand and stare, well 'sit' and stare, well not stare - you know what I mean.

Today I was sitting in Princes St gardens in Edinburgh. Its like a natural amphitheater, ribbons of tarmac wind their way down to the bandstand below the famous Castle. These man made terraces are dotted with benches, and on the top tier just below the road there are a series of concrete 'huts', characterless but for the crude public art murals daubed on the rear walls...and of course, a 'fitted' communal bench.

They are surprisingly secluded,and may even be considered 'cosy' by some, a nice place for lovers to shelter from the rain and other, less savory phenomena, especially at night I should imagine.
The view is 'great', the expanse of the park and the foothills of the chocolate box castle, but this is not, and can never be true, pure Delta blues bench-sitting. Its too artificial and landscaped, your gaze is forcefully directed, nay yanked in the required direction - the view becomes a postcard, a prison window that you have no choice but look into, as you say 'oh ain't that sweet'.

To be a real man-of-the-bench you have to be somewhat exposed of course, like Jesus on the cross, whipped and berated by nature and the crowd. The still center of the urban tornado. I look at other lone sitters and feel a secret camaraderie, as if we possess some kind of esoteric code: a glance, a brief smile and the message has been communicated. We are lost in our own worlds but can recognise a fellow survivor on another island.

Sometimes I will attempt to reconstruct the lives of these sitters, write their biography, give a narrative to a face: where were they born? Were they the quiet one in class? Maybe she's an artist? Is he a man who never gets to see his kids anymore? Did they love or hate their mum/dad? What was their first sexual experience like? Have they watched someone they love die? And they in their turn are probably writing my story for me too.

Anyone can become a brother or sister, or 'person' of the Bench of course, its entirely democratic, but it only exists in a strange symbiotic relationship with the crowd. There is a kind of Flaneur aesthetic going on here, but without the sweat and pavement gymnastics.

One of my fantasies is one day meeting God on a park bench. I know its a cliche, but I'm still watching the candidates as they are watching me. Today an old guy around seventy, well dressed and somehow, 'possible God-material' in a wise, distinguished but world weary way, frowned at the passing throng and then smiled to himself while looking at his shoes. I like to think he was collapsing the wave function of probabilities and bringing reality into being everytime he blinked on his urban pew.

Hope springs eternal.

Robert Anton Wilson

I do enjoy a bit of 'RAW' now and again.
This is a talk he gave in 1988 on the arrogance of classical science and its dumb dependence on materialistic logic and either/or thinking despite the avalanche of paradoxes generated by quantum mechanics.
Wilson is a bit of an intellectual anarchist and polymath, he loves the odd puzzles, synchronicity's, ironies and conspiracy theories that illustrate and highlight the essential weirdness and mystery of human life.
He's most famous for being the co-author of 'The Illuminatus Trilogy', that testament to the almost perverse ability of the human mind to find sinister and/or interesting relationships between the most unlikely and disparate of phenomena - animal, vegetable and mineral.
Here he talks of the materialistic 'reality tunnel' thinking that led to the burning of Wilhelm Reich's books, the incarceration of Timothy Leary, the Celtic legend of the giant Bunny, the 3 interpretations of quantum theory and lots of other stuff.
Entertaining and funny too, but underneath the sarcasm there's a clever mind with some interesting insights into the pantomime of existence.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life - Dig!

I’ve just finished a book by Emmett Grogan called ‘Ringolevio’ and it struck such a cord with me that I thought I’d write a post about it.
Grogan founded the Digger movement in San Francisco in the mid 60’s along with other Haight-Ashbury cultural ‘dissidents’ such as Peter Coyote and Abbie Hoffman.

The 60’s ‘Diggers’ were carrying on the tradition of their earlier 17th century counterparts also known as the ‘Levellers’: Reclaiming public spaces, free distribution of food, the ending of private property and the collapsing of the social class/caste system among many other things.
Grogan’s book, originally written in ’72, is a part factual, part fictional account of his harsh working-class upbringing in Brooklyn, his escapades across Europe and his increasing political radicalisation via the West Coast counterculture.

But Grogan’s recollection’s of Haight-Ashbury and ‘The Summer of Love’, Spiritual Guru’s and the dropping out and tuning in generation is not misty eyed, but very cynical and reveals a ‘hippie’ or urban guerrilla rather, with a real social conscience. He catalogues the back-stabbing, avarice, daft thinking, racism, violence, shallowness and class snobbery of a movement that supposedly prided itself on egalitarianism, transparency and, of course, universal LOVE.

None of this criticism is particularly new of course (neither was it back then) everyone knows there was a very dark side to that period – Vietnam, race riots, terrorism, the Manson murders etc – but Grogan focuses more on a specific problem or group who are the perpetuators of what he calls “The workable lie”.

Here’s a direct quote from the book with Grogan raging about the ‘persecution’ of hippies by the poor immigrant population on New York’s Lower east side:

“They were really upset, he said, because of the hippies’ readied willingness to pay the higher rents and whatever-the–market-will-bear prices fixed by slum landlords. This overcharging, coupled with the fact that the poor residents of the area knew damn well that most hippies came from wealthy white suburbs of their American Dream and therefore didn’t really have to live in their low-class poverty neighbourhood, aggravated their already deep dislike for the outgoing, jubilant hippie style, and ticked off a series of violent outbreaks to ‘wipe the smiles of their faces.’ because what he fuck were they so happy about anyway!
This spawned an attitude that the hippies could afford to be happy, paying the increased rents and inflated prices with ‘money from home,’ while the people who were really poor and not just ‘tripping’ suffered the ironical burden of their presence.
Thus they became fair-game targets of people who needed some quick money fast, which was nearly everyone. The sight of a pair of well-fed hippies walking through the neighbourhood, panhandling change against a backdrop of desperate bleakness, may have appeared farcical to strangers, but to the people who lived their entire lives in the area, grew up there, it was a mockery, a derisive imitation of their existence and it got them angry. Plenty angry.

“What I’m getting at is that their dreams of someday makin’ it out of what they regard as a sewer are very important to them, ‘n when hippies come along riffin’ about how unhip it is to make it into middle-class society ‘n how easy it would’ve been for them to make it, but they didn’t because it was insignificant, those low-money people get confused and upset because here are these creepy long-haired punks who grew up with meat at every meal and backyards to play in and the kind of education which is prayed to God for, and they threw it all away for what? To become junkies like at least one member of every family on the Lower East Side? To live with garbage and violence and rats and violence and no heat or hot water and violence and disease and violence? Is that what hippies thought was the hip thing to do with their lives?
Well to these people and their sons and daughters who’ve had no alternative but to live their lives in the disaster of the Lower East Side, there ain’t nothing hip about junk or poverty or violence, and they have nothing but contempt for young, educated fools who think it’s exciting to live in a world they really know nothing about, the kind of world these kids’ middle-class parents built the suburbs to protect them from.

“However, these parents never figured their children would attempt suicide by scaling the fortress walls of suburbia and running to the ghettos which had become part of their generations fantasies – fantasy ghettos like the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side where sidewalks were more real than the lawns of Westchester and where people were red-blooded human beings, instead of blanched, bloodless, cardboard automatons.
The poor have no sympathy for these young whites who’re searching out what was kept hidden from them. They have none at all because of the hippies’ arrogance, an arrogance they wear on their sleeves, an arrogance which mocks the poor for wanting what they’ve rejected, and insolently pities them for nor comprehending or understanding the reasons why they left the ‘American Dream’ behind.

“So, you better face the straight goods, brothers an’ sisters, you ain’t the new niggers or spics, ‘n you’re never gonna be. You have too much to fall back on whenever you want to or have to – good education, a home, family, the colour of your skin – ‘n the people in the neighbourhood know that, an’ also that your still the children of the ruling classes, whether you like it or not. As far as they’re concerned, you’re just having an adventure – an adventure in poverty which, if you aren’t careful, may prove more real than you’re ready to deal with.

“…they had to jettison the self-satisfying impression that they were the ‘new niggers’ – which was going to be difficult. It was very comfortable on the bottom of the social heap where you could lie back, stay doped up and not accept any individual or community responsibilities, feeling perfectly hip about having been classed the new losers and doing everything by doing nothing to justify the classification.
If they could get past that, Emmett continued, then they could apply their ‘fortunate’ backgrounds in serving the needs of the neighbourhood, not as ‘hip social workers,’ but as members of the community who wanted to develop it for themselves as a place where they could enjoy life and where their children could grow without being forced to attend the stifling institutions run by the city government.”

Grogan was found dead on at the age of 35 of a heart attack (thought to be related to a heroin addiction) on a New York Subway train in 1978, – his corpse had been travelling up and down the line for a number of days before anybody realised he was actually dead. Although there are many conspiracy theories surrounding the circumstances of his sad demise. Maybe the Hippies got him in the end?

Ringolevio is a great read though: sometimes sociological, sometimes pure thriller, and always entertaining. Oh and to know what ‘Ringolevio’ means you’ll have to just read the book…or Google it.
Should be read in conjunction with Penny Rimbaud’s autobiography ‘Shibboleth’ to compare and contrast Anglo-American perspectives on urban guerrilla warfare past and present.

The real me...for now anyway...I think

Its just over 2 months since I moved from the grim post-defunct industrial miasma that is more popularly known as ‘The Midlands’ to the somewhat more genteel, Harry Potteresque, cobbled stoned confection of Edinburgh.
As I’ve written in a previous blog, Edinburgh is really beautiful…well, most of it is. I’ve been working as a note-taker and personal tutor for an HNC student at a further education college in the Granton/Ferry road district of the city since early September.
I’m enjoying it a lot, but the early morning starts and bus travel has become a bit of a drag now that the honeymoon period is over and the damp Scottish winter is drawing in.

My girlfriend lives in a small village just on the outskirts of Edinburgh in West Lothian, I found lodgings in an adjacent village a couple of miles away and decided to make the move ‘up North’ because I was in love and knew that I would die lonely and regretful if I didn’t grab this opportunity (I am a bit indecisive sometimes – well a lot) and attempt to make a fresh start.

I have hardly any family left, just one sister and a very strange and deranged father: no kids, parents, ex-wives etc, I felt so incredibly free – thanks to my girlfriend though, who gave me a well needed kick up the arse to remind me of this on several occasions. Having both lived alone for a number of years we thought it wise to live within easy reach of each other while we got to know each other better on the more day-to-day domestic level (living in the same country really has improved our relationship as you can probably imagine).

All I took to Scotland were a few clothes, my favourite old battered guitar, about twenty of my most cherished books, laptop, passport, birth certificate, a wad of photo’s, paintbrushes and various other odds and ends. I sold everything else – white goods, furniture, most of my books, CD/DVD’s, electronic stuff – It was old anyway and I was glad to have a purge and make a few quid. All this moving lark was done courtesy of cheap online train bookings.

It is amazing though, when you finally think: okay what do I really need? What is essentially me? What can I live without? The answer for me was quite a lot really.
I used to be a bit of a hoarder in the past; stuff accumulated which I came to feel had a kind of psychic-organic quality, it had grown to be part of me, who I was, my essence - or so I thought.

Really I was just very insecure, and virtually all my collective shit was a patchwork armour to hold me back, protect me from the seemingly alien larger world, and of course it acted like a set of mirrors or idiot boards reminding me that I’m ME,
That’s the problem of course, I’d grown out of THAT ME many years before and my stuff was keeping me anchored to the spot - I was drowning. I’m 44 but was starting to feel 64 or 74 back in the Heart of Darkness of the midlands.

I’m naturally a bit of a miserable bastard and not a gushing everybody’s mate type of person, but my ‘new life’ does seem a hell of a lot better: more interesting, stimulating, sociable, loving and creative than it was before, so 8 out of ten so far.
But really, anybody’s life is about ‘Experience’: the sensation of living through interesting perceptions and stimulations, seeing other perspectives and meeting new people.

I feel more comfortable in myself since I’ve learned to embrace the chaos and not to resist change, not to be scared shitless by the thought of different ME’s, morphing into different lives and pathways. Hope this doesn’t sound like esoteric hippie jive talk, its just me attempting to articulate and comprehend the newness and change in my life.
(incidentally, if you’ve always felt there is more than a grain of salt in the Punk adage “Never trust a hippie”, I’ve been reading Emmett Grogan’s account of the 60’s Haight-Ashbury/Summer of love thing called ‘Ringolevio’, and its fascinating to read such an intelligent social/economic/hilarious deconstruction of the ‘tune in-drop out’ aesthetic by someone who was at the centre of it all. Anyway I digress too much, and shall review it at length at a later date).

Calling the Spirits of my Ancestors!

Last night was the first Halloween me and my girlfriend had actually physically spent together (last year was a disembodied table tapping seance thingy on MSN...which I suppose is somewhat more appropriate considering the occasion.)

Anyway, after eating too many salt and vinegar Hoola-Hoops with an ice cream chaser and howling like a werewolf at Vincent 'Mr Camp' Price in 'The House on Haunted Hill' I stepped out into the frigid Scottish air to consult my personal oracle.
Said oracle is in fact a hand rolled cigarette with an extra-slim filter and the...eer night sky.

It goes like this: I take deep draws on the ciggy, watching the ember glow like the flaming hearth of Valhalla, then I expel the smoke violently into the Stygian depths of the cosmos above me. I see it as the breath of life, the fiery spirit attempting to connect to the cosmos - its a bit Shamanistic I like to think and paradoxically brilliant: I feel closer to life when smoking while all the time its speeding me closer to death (for some reason at this point in the ceremony I'm always reminded of that scene from 'Roots' where Chicken George holds up his offspring to the full moon?)

Anyway,summoning to awareness in abridged form everything I've learned about the possibility of 'life after death' - Terence Mckenna, Graham Hancock, Everett's 'Many worlds theory', Bohm's Holographic universe, Schrodinger's moggy, 'The Matrix' 3-disc set, Kant's noumenal/phenomenal dichotomy and Colin Wilson (when I'm desperate) - I silently raged at the threadbare veil that separates this world from the other/s on Halloween and called on my ancestors for some kind of communion.

My departed grandparents, my mother, my aunts and uncles were crowding the sky, their faces huge and shimmering in the scudding clouds like Hindu gods, monumental and timeless and beyond all knowing and understanding by simple living things - they were just there in the darkness with the rest of the dead and I could feel them.

When you're dead you become a myth for others, eternal and vast, you transcend space and time and spread out into shimmering waves of probability, coalescing here and then there, like exotic schools of fish, playful and finally free. The dead are poetic and have no roles to perform anymore, they are just essence, source, and essentially THEM as they always were in themselves unknown even by their closest lovers, friends and family.

This is something of a Halloween ritual for me this communion with my personal dead, I guess a lot of people do it this time of year too - our communal Day of the Dead. It becomes more poignant as I get older and more of my kin and friends become timeless apparitions and I am still so embodied and animated by earthly desires and petty concerns.

I just like to speak to them for a while, give them an update on my life, tell my mum I finally met a great girl and am okay and not to worry - its only life after all. Then I wave goodnight, stub my ciggy out and hurry indoors, leaving all the friendly ghosts whispering at my back.