Ramblings of a backwater visionary

Among the many wonderful objects my other half got me for Christmas was a copy of Billy Childish's Paintings of a Backwater Visionary'.
I was really pleased to have gotten a 'hard copy' of Childish's paintings to add to my collection of novels and poetry by Chatham's most inspired cultural attaché, confirmed amateur and Sunday painter.
The reviews on the back cover sum up perfectly the all encompassing genius of the man:

"It is incredible to meet somebody who has such an extraordinary understanding of what they are doing...I don't think it is unreasonable to align Billy with figures like William Blake."
Mathew Higgs, Director of White Columns Gallary, NY

"Nothing more than a Bayswater road-style dauber."
Sarah Kent, Time Out

"Billy Childish has sworn allegiance to proletarian art at it's rawest."
New York Times

"Some of the worst paintings I have ever seen on public show."
The East Anglian Times

‘The Dumb House’ by John Burnside

I finished ‘The Dumb House’ by John Burnside last night. I feel a bit in awe of his writing ability and imagination, but also somewhat spooked by the dark eeriness that Burnside conjures up in this bleak novel about scientific curiosity meets the serial killer.

The central character (the first person narrator) reminds me of Camus’ Meursault: he’s a cold, unemotional cipher of a human being, but unlike the French writer’s classic existentialist ‘Outsider’ he has a mission, or calling – he’s fascinated by the philosophical and social root and development of language acquisition and its relationship to the soul.

After the death of his mother and having the house to himself at last, the narrator finally has the opportunity to repeat an ‘experiment’ he had been fascinated by for most of his life. It was his mother herself who told him as a child the tale of the dyslexic Mughal emperor who found himself one day arguing with his counsellors that language was learned and the soul was innate, because otherwise why are there so many different languages?

And surely, the soul cannot belong to any one perceptual faculty?

His counsellors cited examples of children who had been raised by animals or survived and often thrived in harsh isolated environments, without any linguistic stimulation, but had, never the less, developed an idiosyncratic language of their own, often totally unintelligible to others.

As emperors tend to do, having unlimited funds and armies of ‘can-doers’ at their disposal, Akbar the Mughal built a lavish room with mute attendants and populated it with a group of new born babies to test his hypothesis in style.

The old tale ends with the children growing up and never uttering a word, lost and isolated in their surreal, soundless world.

The children’s home ever after becomes something of a tourist attraction, a stationary freak show, known as the Gang Mahal, or ‘The Dumb House’.

After Akbar’s example, Burnsides character embarks on a mission to procure a child or children to create a modern Dumb House, to satisfy his clinically scientific cravings, his insatiable (and inhuman) curiosity.

He meets a couple of women, one of whom has a strange autistic child (and is somewhat odd and dissociated herself), the other is a childless, disturbed young mute girl he first spots in the library. Both women are vulnerable and lonely.

As the narrative unfolds, Burnside’s ‘scientist’ betrays a totally cold and dispassionate violence towards anyone or anything that frustrates the purity of his experiment. The autistic child has his fingers broken when he irritates the ‘emperor’; the boyfriend of the mute girl is slashed, then later kicked to death because he threatens to steal her back.

Finally, the young girl begins sharing the scientist’s bed, and he begins constructing his lab or Gang Mahal in the basement. She becomes pregnant of course, and the narrator has two perfect test subjects. Conveniently, the woman dies soon after from complications from the birth.

As the story unwinds we learn more about the narrators life story, his fascination with animal dissection when still a child, his distant parents, his loneliness and isolation. Burnside gives him all the classic developmental attributes of the classic psychopath.

The central characters search for the soul, for voice and language in his experiment, is also the search to find the soul within himself, the ontology of real being in the world, to make sense of the terrifying nothingness and seemingly disordered nature of his own existence.

Burnside puts us inside the psychopaths head so perfectly by creating a floating poetic stillness to the narrative – the matter-of-factness is chilling in its banality.

The author knows his philosophy of language and perception. The story touches on Plato’s idea of the Logos: is there some kind of transcendent truth? The purity of the soul emitted by the spoken word over the artifice of writing?

Structuralism: is language transparent, can its grasp the essence of things in themselves? Or is it opaque, a system of crude algebraic shorthand, to help us navigate the ultimate senselessness of the world?

And Burnside himself references and deconstructs the genre of serial killers, existential literature and cinema by creating his own Hitchcockian ‘Psycho’, his own very British and very dark Meursault on a mission.

As his two angelic guinea pigs develop in the lab (male and female, Adam and Eve?) they begin…to sing. A strange unintelligible noise, that the experimenter is unable to decipher: is it communication or just an epiphenomenona - a side effect of their isolation – biological white noise emitted by a confused larynx? Or is it the ghost in the machine attempting speak?

The twins certainly have a bond, and the scientist decides the experiment has been contaminated – he should have had a single test subject – so he decides he can save the study somewhat by giving one twin a laryngotomy - the severing of the vocal chords.

Yeah, it’s not a tale for the squeamish.

I won’t tell you the ending, its pretty bleak as you can imagine. Overall, what comes out of the book is how the narrator, the ‘psychotic-scientist’ has been inhabiting his own psychic Dumb House, a lonely alienated existence, without any real meaningful communication or love. He can only have ‘relationships’ with women who are as emotionally crippled and as disorientated by the seemingly weird ordering of reality as he is.

In the end it seems that the twins themselves are secretly mocking him, they at least have each other, and he is once again excluded, an outsider.

I found the book in a second-hand shop, and knew that Burnside was a poet, so thought I’d give it a go, not realising he’d written other novels which I am going to procure as soon as possible.

A very disturbing, but rewarding philosophical and poetic read.

John Burnside's Terrible beauty

'Leonard' the central character in John Burnside's last novel 'Glister' talks of two types of beauty: the kitsch chocolate box beauty that assaults our senses everyday - a sunset, a kiddies smile, a flower in bloom etc - and a more shocking, 'terrifying beauty', a beauty that is almost ugly or monstrous, surreal in its oddity and strangeness...but never-the-less, fascinatingly beautiful.

For example, I find Gunter Von Hagens 'skinned' cadavers terrifyingly beautiful because they reflect my own mortality and the taboo of death in our culture, while simultaneously exposing the inner workings of that baroque architecture that is our fragile anatomy.

To see what was once a living, loving, laughing human being 'peeled' and displayed to the world, is to some, perverse and voyeuristic - and I know that there's an element of voyeurism and 'rubber-necking' in my fascination with Von Hagens' work - but there is also that shocking beauty too, a poetry in the dark tangles of arteries, the blooming fractals of veins and glistening organs.
It is probably the only opportunity I and others will have, to see the ego/personality stripped creature (Me) behind the mask in all its animal, visceral glory.

Burnside is an anatomist too, like Von Hagens.
All the characters in his novels are somehow mere ghosts in their respective anatomical machines, subject to the attractions and repulsions of history and place. In his novel the 'Dumb House' he explored the anatomist riff in detail; the main characters self-taught surgical interventions were chilling in their matter-of-fact reasoning and performance - and all for one man's insatiable and perverse curiosity.

In Glister, Leonard and the other inhabitants of 'innertown' are the diseased casualties of a small, post-industrial Scottish coastal town. They have been used, infected and discarded when a large chemical plant (the towns main employer) finally closes down. Leonard, via his fathers illness and the general apathy and hopelessness that surrounds the town and its people, becomes another fallout victim of the plant, another mutant creature scurrying through the factory ruins on the headland.

Burnside's central character in the book ruminates on what the Roman's called the Genius Loci or the spirit of place. This is a feature in most of the Scottish writers work. The specific locale is the driver for emotion and experience, like there is an amoral, invisible force, a spectral gravity pressing and shaping the characters destinies, an inevitability of place from which they can never escape. (From reading his autobiography though, its seems like Burnside never really got over his spell in that other 'innertown' Corby in the north Midlands!)

The innertown and outertown of Glister though, are also literary microcosms of the very real and much larger social divisions within our society at the moment. The sickly, apathetic and discarded inhabitants of the innertown can be contrasted with the British 'underclass', depicted via the tabloid media as a benefit dependent, over-breeding, sickly, alien species, malnourished and malformed (obese) by their diet of processed food and telly watching lifestyles.

The 'outertowners' don't fair too well either in Burnside's estimation; a bunch of immoral, conniving opportunists with very cruel and black hearts.
But the genius of Burnside is that, despite the cruel vindictiveness, small mindedness, hate and huge physical violence that the inhabitants of innertown perpetrate upon each other, Burnside puts this in context, he makes their behaviour comprehensible in the quagmire of despair and deprivation they live through day by day.

The only glimmers of light in the writers bleak narratives are the small acts of tenderness that surface here and their - often between parents and offspring, or the pining of some lovelorn character over the kitchen sink at midnight, the thankless caring for some ill or elderly person by some tortured, sad loner.

That's another theme that I often see in Burnside's work, being a carer, looking after a loved one (or unloved one) through a sense of loyalty, habit, apathy, or just the terror of having no one else in the world. Its dark stuff, but at the risk of sounding pretentious, I think its important stuff and Burnside is an 'important writer'...as the literary critics often say about the wrong writers.

Burnside meticulously strips the skin off us all, and makes the terrible beauty of our innermost fears, compulsions and desires comprehensible and readable like a fantastic, medieval map.
Most of all he shows how we are all the same underneath.

The art and craft of Soul Mining #2 Munch

Christmas always gives me a heavy dose of melancholy.
It's the odd interzone between the old and the new, a stocktaking period for that 24-7 small business otherwise known as The Self - or big bad old ME. Profits and losses, net gains, write offs, tax breaks (serendipity), and of course, the possibility of downsizing or even - touch wood - expansion, are all factors that have to be crunched into the personality equation, to gauge the relative merits and demerits of this very peculiar body and soul brand.

I guess I can say, quite justifiably really, that I have expanded the Biz this year: I have relocated and gone into partnership, 'amalgamated' with another. Scary stuff, having to share everything, exposing your bachelor anality (and bare arse) to another soul, opening all the books and letting it all hang out...or 'fall out' rather - like a cupboard where you've jammed in all the stuff you didn't really need, but thought you might use one day and now realize its just junk or an anchor holding you back.

I feel a bit empty at Christmas time like a lot of other people I suppose because of this accounting process. I really try let go and enjoy myself, but I'm all too often gripped by nostalgia and melancholy and a feeling of being trapped between worlds: wanting the new year to begin and the old to sink into the neat profit and loss spreadsheet without the messy number crunching bit.



For me, Edvard Munch's winter paintings always seem to capture this peculiar betwixt and between state of mind at this time of year. There's a yearning and hope in these images, but also a sense of great or even monumental loss. Munch's sketchy, scribbly textures, brushstrokes, and swirling lines illustrate the icy indeterminacy of 'Yule', its nocturnal bullying and enforced introspection.

Since moving to Scotland and spending these unseasonably severe last few weeks here, Munch's landscapes have taken on another dimension for me: I can genuinely appreciate the sense of Northern, Scandinavian isolation - both good and bad. 'Good' in the sense that I feel a coziness and peacefulness away from the post-industrial sprawl of the Midlands - or the hysterical buzz of greater London for example - and bad in that I am often forced deep into myself psychologically and physically too of course.

Munch's paintings depict a quietness and loneliness that I haven't truly felt before - and this isn't me feeling 'alone' with myself, I have a great relationship with my girlfriend and enjoy the Scots traditional approach to Chrimbo - its more the sense of being separated from the larger world, like everybody is being pulled apart at this time of year, freezing up into little islands until the thaw, the forced jollity just the multifaceted glimmer of ice. Millions of Dormice mentally hibernating.
I suppose we're all doing a bit of self-assessment and strategic planning for the new year.

Stalking Oxford on a cheap day return

I haven't been to Oxford for nearly 3 years now.
The train journey was a brief 40 minute jaunt from the borders of Brum (Birmingham): short enough for a grand day out, and as contrasting in architectural detail, cultural riches and social atmospherics, as to induce something approximating - on the sensory level at least - a sexual orgasm.
Yes I know, shocking isn't it, how a few antiquated educational establishments, museums and air conditioned buses can make the difference between spiritual life and death.

I used to take a small rucksack filled with sandwiches, camera, phone, pen and notebook - this was my kit for forging into the dark heart of middle England from the even darker liver and small colon of Birmingham.
(Brum's okay in small doses...I think.)

Oxford is the wanderer's or flâneur's paradise on earth.
There's so much stuff to see in a relatively small area and most of its free!
Some people have remarked that I'm a premature boring old fart, as I always make a beeline for the Oxford University museum of Natural History...I prefer to think that my enthusiasm betrays an inquisitive, ever vigilant, rapier-like mind.
The Pitt-Rivers Museum which is also housed in the same building is also a wonderful place too. Here's the facade of the natural history museum:


I'm just one of those people who prefers to weave in and out of the crowd, floating with the urban drift, cataloging the oddities and out of the way anomalies of the social and architectural landscape - the curios stalker of the inanimate.
Unfortunately, now I'm living in Edinburgh, the cheap Oxford day out's have been set aside for the moment, but the Scottish capital has many riches of its own of course.

Here are some of the reason's I enjoy Oxford:

The Mindscape of Alan Moore

I was in my late teens when I first came across the ideas of Carl Jung.
The Austrian psychoanalyst, anthropologist, archaeologist, mythographer, pal of Freud and general Renaissance man, appeared to have the answer or answers to life, the universe and everything.

His works, which were so rich and dense with symbolism, metaphor and hermetic undertones and overtones, genuinely opened my awareness up to so many new areas of human history and thought - areas that had earlier remained for me the province of stuffy scholars or anoraked geeks.

I remember reading a large, heavily illustrated 'coffee table' book of Jung's theories called 'Man and his Symbols' and experiencing the sensation of interconnection with everything, or what Freud called the "Oceanic feeling".

Reading that book was like floating in a warm amniotic fluid of my rightful inheritance, an inheritance that I felt had been stolen from me at an early age by chronic materialists, shit teachers and the blunted narrowness of my everyday existence for so many years before.

Above all - to paraphrase someone - Jung made me think much more deeply about who I am, where I came from, and where I'm going, physically, spiritually and psychologically. He also made me appreciate and understand a little more, how the culture I live in now is not privileged above those of the past, but is still controlled by a the same symbols and myths that shaped our ancestors.

It took me a while to understand Jung's theory of archetypes, and the idea that what the ancient alchemists were attempting to do by turning 'base metal into gold', was a spiritual transformation rather than a physical one.

In this documentary, Alan Moore, the Northampton Magus of the arcane and postmodern describes his own particular hermetic mindscape, which has more than an echo of Jungianism about it.
Moore specifically talks about the history of 'magic' as essentially being the artist's search for his/her deepest soul via the transformative properties of sign and symbol interpretation and integration through artworks.

What Jung called 'Individuation' is I think what Moore is talking about when he discusses magical practices as a medium by which the person may become fully whole and, thereby, themselves a magician.
Moore also discusses Rupert Sheldrake's theory of 'Morphic fields' - how animals and plants appear to manifest new developmental behaviours and ideas collectively at a certain point in time that defies physically causal relationships - which is similar to Jung's interpretation of what he called 'The Collective Unconscious'.
Moore develops Sheldrake's theory to propose 'idea fields' woven out of space time.

Its worth a watch for many reasons, even if for just a tiny glimpse into the wild Moorian imagination.

The Dark Trinity

Iggy and the Stooges 1973 album 'Raw Power' is rightly judged (in my humble opinion) to be one of the most powerful and influential recordings in the bizarre and wonderful pantheon of rock music history.

It sounds literally too 'raw' and edgy to have been made (never mind released) in an era that included the saccharine glam rock of 'T-Rextasy', the pretty 'gypsy boy' warbling of David Essex or the Sunday school Ned Flanders weirdness of The Carpenters.

But then again, when it was released I was only 6 years-old with an extremely limited and viciously parochial point of view. The mainstream media in the UK and US at the time were also quite oblivious to this counter cultural communique for the dispossessed.

I think I can be forgiven though for letting it pass me by in '73 - I was more interested in beheading my Action Man with the garden shears than listening to some weird little American guy deconstructing consumer alienation to the sound of an electric chainsaw guitar.

Since then of course, many others have dug out this post-Sixties-pre-Punk gem, citing its almost Biblical importance to the roots of British Punk and New Wave - even Johnny Marr of the Smith's rattles out a regular eulogy...'eulogy' being the operative word, as, like Iggy himself, the album appears to have risen from the dead in the last few years - in the popular consciousness at least.

Interesting it was recorded in London too.
The Beat writer William Burroughs had been living in the city for a number of years when the album was being made. 'El Hombre invisible' was haunting the streets with his camera and tape machine, cutting up the Reality Studio and spitting the fragments back at the agents of control at ear-splitting volume.

In between these hours of subversion and the dreaming up of fresh Boschian literary landscapes, Burroughs dined and reminisced about old Tangier's with the painter Francis Bacon - what a fabulous creative duo they make...much more darkly (and bleakly) charismatic than Picasso and Braque.

Bacon's contorted figures remind me of Iggy doing his on-stage death Yoga, or one of Burroughs' sinewy, psychotic and lethal 'lost boys' ready to cleave the flesh from the unwary with their copper knives.

I like to think that all those influences were feeding into the making of Raw Power, that the album is the auditory document for the more darker London Bohemia of those times.

Funny too that Brixton Boy Bowie re-mixed most of the tracks for the the album before release, in LA in a single day. Ziggy had to have a hand in it all too of course.
The whole thing for me has echoes of Donald Cammell's 1970 movie 'Performance'.
There's lots of potential there: 'Turner' the decadent Rock star played by Mick Jagger is Iggy. The Edward Fox gangster character is Bacon's ex-lover, the 'rough-trade', slightly dodgy George Dyer...I'm working on the rest.

P.S. There's a vid on You-tube on the making of the album, but last I looked Sony were taking parts off.

The velocity of the city

Today I felt like a ghost as I wondered through the city.
I sensed the pull and push of some invisible tide. The tide of my past maybe? Or just the vast dark ocean of the city, ebbing and flowing just below consciousness, licking at my awareness, reaching in and out to expose the stony beach beneath. The unforgiving beach was my body, being scoured and gouged by the surf.

It was one of those odd days when I sensed my normal awareness or attention had to take a back seat. I just rolled with the pavements and weaved down streets, felt that slight, breathy exhilaration as I descended down a narrow close, only to be immediately swept up again on the crest of a cobbled hill.

Walking in a town or a city is just as much a physical experience as a visual or auditory one of course. But I think we underplay the physical mapping of the city on our own bodies and how this shapes our perception and mood in very subtle ways. The yanks and tugs of gravity, the myriad muscle compensations, the accelerations and decelerations of nerve and sinew - the motor responses writing the maps of emotional awareness for our minds to follow.

When we are alone in the city (without a companion/s to divert and dilute attention) as I was today, when the mind lets the body take control, the architecture and geology of place take us with them and we become the city, breathing and beating with its own, and our own, unique urban rhythm.

Tales of the 70's: The Mythic Blue Mini

There is one particular automobile that seems to sum up my entire 70's childhood. It is a sign, a symbol, a metaphor, a semiotic deconstruction on wheels of everything that was good and bad about that decade for me.

There were a few pretenders for that crown, idling in the exhaust fume shrouded byways of memory - my paternal grandfathers caramel brown Rover 2000, my dad's navy blue Austin 1100, even his fiesta red Vauxhall Viva (with gold go-faster stripes) - but my mum's little secondhand airforce blue Mini has trumped them all for its supernatural ability to personally illustrate an entire decade...for me anyway.

The Mini always had two essential accessories, each corresponding to that particular half yearly period when their specific abilities would be called into service: A tin of anti-freeze and an old squash bottle of distilled water for an overheated engine. In my memory (albeit a trifle dramatic) these two objects are for me symptomatic of the 70's: it was either bloody freezing because of a power cut, or me and my sis and friends were jumping in little plastic paddling pools and spraying each other with the garden hose (until the scorching brown grass summer of '76 and the hose-pipe ban...of course).

The anti-freeze and water could always be found in one of the deep box-like pockets of the car, along with empty crisp packets, sweet wrappers, sunglasses, plastic toy soldier, box of tissues, a single glove, and the inevitable lining of crumbs and dried, melted vanilla ice cream...oh, and sticky Cola stains of course.

If I remember correctly, my mum had that car for around seven or eight years - from around '74 and my parents divorce and the leaving of the childhood family home, to around 1982, my school leaving and entry into the 'adult world' in the decade of Thatcherism.

'The Mini' as it was always referred to (no nicknames for this one) was an honest to god trooper. There truly was no river deep enough or mountain high enough to resist its dogged persistence in the face of almost insurmountable odds on the roads to freedom. Although, the Llanberis pass in Snowdonia and a rather sticky 'conk-out' moment at West Midlands Safari Park (bastard baboons), were a tad perplexing.

Yes, the great blue chariot navigated the heathen byways of the land of the dragon as it chugged its way to some Belsen-like caravan site in North Wales. Its younger occupants - me, my mum and sister - climbing the sheet metal walls in automotive cabin-fever, while my Gran sat in the back tittering at some person/oddity she'd spotted through the window.
I can still hear the screams and smell the hot, blue vinyl interior now.

Toilets.
Always, always there was the 'hyper-vigilance competition' to be the first to spot a public toilet. In this kind of rarefied atmosphere and the advancing years of one of the car's passengers, this challenge was taken very seriously indeed.

Over the years, and because of its many escapades, the Mini became something of an affectionate figure of fun - like an eccentric but reliable relative, or faithful old dog (underdog) that wouldn't lie down. 'It' was definitely a 'she' of course, anthropomorphizing worked in this case, it was blessed by the Shaman's, of that I'm sure.

The single, most abiding memory I have of that car, is driving back home to Shropshire from my Gran's house in Wolverhampton on Sunday nights in deepest winter. It was a distance of around 15 or so miles, but more like an ancient Greek odyssey on those long unlit roads, the only illumination from the dashboard light and the mesmeric winking of the cats eyes, the headlights turning back at the advance of another motorist, and then reaching out again to grab at the darkness.

Around Christmas time, me and my mum and sister would play 'spot the Christmas tree' from the Mini...which was a little bit more fun than 'Spot the bog' lets face it.
I-Spy was a traditional favourite too, although because of the Stygian darkness beyond the windows, the answers were usually something to do with the car itself, like 'D' for door handle,'S' for seat and 'W' for wheel - yeah, we were that visually deprived.

But when the heater was blowing and the car was purring along, I felt like I was connected to something secret and special. Like our wee trio were blessed in some way, singled out in the darkness, privy to something that was yet unknown but was absolutely good and right. Its difficult to put into words. We were all lost in our own interior worlds at times like this, free to roam and imagine in the warm little box.

The rain was ''interesting' sometimes too, but a little monotonous, the squeak, squeak of the wipers tapping out a different rhythm - the Mini revealed its fragility when exposed to a more physical attack; still connected to the mundane world rather than flying to the edge of it.

My mum would sometimes sing, but the only tune - or rather line - I still remember is "...There's a kind of hush...all over the world tonight..."
Its a New Seekers track I think. Maybe my mother only sang it once, I can't recall, but its now embedded in my psyche forever, along with the night, those people and that mythical blue Mini.

May you both rest in peace.

The art and craft of soul mining #1: Miro

Whenever I'm 'really' moved by a painting, drawing or photograph my first sensation is a warm numbness, like sinking into a hot bath, time freezes and I forget myself - its as if all boundaries between self and world seem to dissolve. The second sensation is the generation of a memory, an association with something from the past, a childhood tableau, a scene or emotion that tattooed itself on my still forming subconscious all those years ago. These two sensations occur in a matter of seconds.

I may not have been particularly happy or self aware when that initial memory trace was selected for storage - presumably because some part of my mind thought it important - but never-the-less, it appears to have lain dormant until it spots a 'friend', an image or a precise sensation in the present that tickles it back into wakefulness once again. Makes it stronger.

The third thing that happens to me is the smile. Not just the smile on my face but a deep smile that goes right through my body like a wave. I think its the smile of recognition, two aspects of myself, old and new, making me feel whole again, glad to be me. Because that's the overriding emotion that my favourite art leaves me with: I'm glad to be me with my old neuronal photo album, but I also realise that I'm linked with something much bigger.

Its a variety of Proustian epiphany, a romantic recall, but more vague and all encompassing, like the blowing of a horn somewhere in the darkness of the back brain - the imagination opens up and the world of now and then seems so much bigger and full of exciting possibilities. I suppose that's what art is supposed to do - the genuine article - making the seemingly individual and particular vast and timeless.

Not all so called 'Great art' does the triple whammy on me of course. I can appreciate the technical virtuosity of Rembrandt, the draftsmanship of Durer, understand their paintings as beautiful objects, but still they don't "reach the parts..." in the latter case, its more like: 'This is a Rembrandt, he's apparently a genius, I'm looking back into the 17th century, it feels weird, but somehow good, and I can feel some kind of shared humanity over time and culture', but still, it doesn't fire off an epiphany for me personally - one of us still remains an alien creature.

The Spanish Modernist Joan Miro's Gouache, 'People at night guided by the phosphorescent tracks of snails' (one of the Constellation series), stirred something deep within me when I first saw a reproduction of it around ten or twelve years ago.
The deep nocturnal blue background with the bizarre, black totemic figures swimming around the surface under a bone white crescent moon, triggered an involuntary memory from my teenage years which has now, over time, become a fixed relationship between my remembrance of things past and Miro's imagination - two lovers locked together.

The title too, so surrealist and poetic, just added resonance to my memory and charged it with a deeper symbolism.

For about two years after leaving school in '82, me and a few friends discovered a welcoming little ale house called 'The Crown'.
To sample its unique atmosphere you had to walk about a mile down a quiet country lane, flanked by fields and small copses. The place was always quiet, out of the way, perfect for a few jars in peace. The landlord 'Bill' was a friend of a friend and turned a blind eye to official 'drinking age' regulations, he never said much, just smiled and let it be. I think he was grateful of the custom on the quiet weekdays - we usually did Tuesdays and Thursdays if I remember correctly.

For me and my mates, this was our apprenticeship into adult pub culture: the real world of choking fag smoke, over-spilling brewery stamped ashtrays, soggy beermats, chiming and flashing one armed bandits, soft chairs, roaring fires...and something else, being a grown man at last.
Gone was the childishness of illicit cider swigging on park benches, the Snakebite challenge in a friends bedroom (actually that sounds pervy), noisy 'yoof' parties where everybody was pretending to be more drunk than they were (or just genuinely and embarrassingly paralytic, no inbetweens).
Being able to sit in a pub with a pint and a fag was mature and civilized!

But what I remember with the most affection about these evenings of Yore, was walking back in the dark, or near dark in the summer months, down that winding lane home, being half pissed and happy in the gloom.

Sometimes you could hardly see your hand in front of your face in the winter time, you had to look up at the track of sky, dodge the black looming shapes of vegetation and careening companions, their voices disembodied and freaky and always too loud. Often I imagined my mates had shape-shifted, changed into strange exotic creatures in the void (or does Miro make me think this in retrospect? Does it matter?)
The freezing night skies were fantastic ebony blankets, studied with constellations of stars and strange lights that would be the trigger for tall tales and urban myths. It was just great being young and anticipating the bigness of the future and your destiny within it.

I'd just like to thank Mr Miro and his painting for reactivating, strengthening and enriching this memory for me.

When self-serving stereotypes fail to deliver

I've now been off work for over a week, and my armchair philosophizing about the romantic Sturm and Drang of post-apocalyptic landscapes is wearing thinner than the seat of my underpants.

I'm now sick and tired of this snow.
At first I had the camera out and was snapping away like a Japanese tourist on Speed. I was desperate to capture the melancholy, the vengeful Banshee's, the exquisite architecture and the 'timeless, arrogant beauty' of Edinburgh in Wintertime.

But after uploading an endless sea of what looked like badly shot tat shop snow globes, I made the executive decision to try and grasp the essence of the 'Athens of the North' through alternative creative mediums...Papier-mâché seems the best bet at the time of writing: Grey and white flecked soggy lump of nothing.

The college where I work has been 'officially closed' again today, and forecasts for the morrow are looking a bit iffy too. There were supposed to be exams last week and this, but it looks like everything will be 're-scheduled' - in other words it will be chaos in the last week before the Christmas break on the 17th with everybody running round like headless chickens, turning up at the wrong exams etc (this college has the worst admin and staff/student communication I've ever seen...compared to the entire 3 other educational establishments I've experienced in my lifetime).

Its not a paid holiday for me either, I'm self employed, so if I don't go in and Scribe and tutor I don't get paid. Public transport has been hit really hard too in the Edinburgh/West Lothian area, buses are virtually non-existent - not that you'll hear much about it on the national (London based) news of course. The soft southern bastards.

I'm probably just being a miserable, self-pitying, narcissistic, materialistic, whining shit...but I'm starting to question the traditional rugged hardiness of your average Scot.

Its snowing and its Scotland.
I expected to see armies of kilted, knickerless Celts laughing in the face of the howling snow storm, shovelling the roads clean with their bare hands while tanked up on the best single malt - and that was just the women!
Instead their all tucked by the fireplace with their peppermint tea watching re-runs of 'Dr Quinn Medicine woman' or 'Celebrity Come dine with me'...

Maybe the genes have degenerated or something, too much Buckfast and deep fried Mars Bars. One thing you can say about William Wallace, he got the trains to run on time and wasn't scared of a bit of snow - I can just see him driving a bus through the blizzard shouting 'FREEEEDOM!'.

Anyway, 'Braveheart' is on Film Four so I can dissolve in my armchair and take emotional refuge in the stereotype once again.

(Please note: my girlfriend is Scottish, so this post is just a tease...sort of.)

The Pooka

My girlfriend has seen the the 'Pooka'.

It was the mid 1980's in a wee Scottish village and she was around 10 years old at the time. It was the Easter school holiday (of course), so it could be said her otherworldly sensitivity was primed and the veils between worlds had worn a bit thin.

She was absently gazing out of the lounge window, her head full of impatience at the anticipation of rushing outside to play after she'd had her Weetabix, when she noticed a figure on the pavement of the main road across the end of her street.

"There it stood, bold as brass!"

'It' apparently was a rather large rabbit, pale in colour, and definitely NOT some party animal or charity fundraiser donning a suit. She says the creature was human-like, standing on its hind legs, and sort of "looking around". After so many years she can't remember if the giant Easter Bunny had a basket of eggs or not, although, in retrospect, she believes it probably did.

On further investigation, and being informed of the somewhat austere financial predicament of her large family at that time, she believes the Bunny may have been an hallucination, or rather a 'mirage' brought on by chocolate egg deprivation.

But when all is said and done, rather than seeing my girlfriends vision as an appearance of the Easter Bunny I prefer to interpret her experience as a physical manifestation of the mythical 'Pooka'.

This shape-shifting pagan deity of Celtic folklore has various spellings and legends that surround it according to region and dialect. It is often seen as a large rabbit, but often manifests itself as a horse, a dog or a goat. It is generally thought to be a relatively benign creature, more cuddly and laid back than the Nordic 'trickster' Loki, and without the ability to re-shape mountains like the Native American 'Coyote' character. The Pooka is more like Bugs Bunny after a couple of Guinness'. Hmmm, another naughty anthropomorphized rabbit.

Our particular mischievous creature is associated with the Irish harvest festival and the pagan knees-up called Samhain that is known more popularly as 'Halloween'. His/her/its annual day of celebration is the 1st of November - officially Pooka Day. So remember to put that in your calendar - lack of respect for the creature may cause it to spit and shat on your tom's and tators, never mind the wild fruit!
Diss the Pooka at your peril.

Some farmers and growers still leave a bit of the harvest aside as an appeasement or gift for the Pooka, others believe that the residue of the harvest in the fields has become 'Faery blasted' or otherwise made inedible by contamination by the Pooka. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

The most famous manifestation of the Pooka in popular culture has been through the medium of film. The 1950 Hollywood movie called 'Harvey' starring James Stewart portrays a man, Elwood Dowd (Stewart) becoming increasingly desperate as friends and family refuse to see or believe in the reality of his friend 'Harvey' - a six foot three and a half inch white rabbit. Reference to the Pooka of folklore is actually made in one of the early scenes of the movie.

After the plot thickens and thins a few times and Elwood wades through ridicule and a few dark nights of the soul, and a couple of other characters have actually seen the rabbit, he finally manages to walk out of the sanatorium in which he has been held. We as viewers (and over thinkers) are then left with an interesting deconstruction of the psychology of myth and belief (am I reading too much into this?).
The film has the inevitable up-beat Stewartesque happy ending, with the audience realising that Harvey is in fact 'real' and Elwood is just a harmless everyman who hasn't entirely lost his childhood sense of wonder - is not yet gripped by that adult compulsion to disbelief.

The other much darker and more recent cinematic appropriation of the Pooka myth was writer/director Richard Kelly's 2001 movie 'Donnie Darko'.
Here we have the mischievous anthropomorphic rabbit from hell, macabre and eerie, a time travelling messenger who is literally a man in a suit...but somehow inhuman and all the more terrifying than a genuine six foot rabbit.
In this movie the 'veil between worlds' is a quantum cloud of probabilities, where the wormholes have let the supernatural light seep through between primary and tangent universes. Science and myth slowly coming together maybe.

Its nice to see that the Pooka was given a more contemporary, psychedelic/Sci-fi makeover for the new Millennium, who knows when and in what form he'll pop up next.
I know which bunny I prefer.

The Masque of the White Death

The last vestiges of my humanity have almost been stripped from me. Centuries of cultural conditioning, empathy, sympathy and basic compassion have all but solidified like flies in amber in my frozen body and mind.

All I am left with is one single desire, a need that is so terrifying in its domination, its rabid animation of this fevered flesh...I am but an automaton, a beaten prisoner of its most perverse and sickening fancies.
I am very, very hungry.

But for all this, I am not yet one of THEM. Even the most subjugated of creatures, from the humble lab rat to the kiddies domesticated hamster may violate the probability tables of convention now and then.

I call them 'Snowmen', these small snow shrouded bumps that pepper the village streets like milky fungi. In my naivety I often stepped into them with the expectation of sinking into a soft drift of powdery snow, only to be gripped by an almost atavistic repulsion as my foot sank into what can only be described as a large rubbery foetus.

Yes, the village has become a graveyard, a necropolis, a city of the dead...and the almost dead.
One week of heavy snow and this once vibrant community is reduced to this. The social contract was spun out like piece of gum from the broken yellowed teeth of a madman... until it finally snapped like cheap twine. There are no rules anymore, everything is permitted, because when all is said and done, a man has got to eat.

The lollipop lady was still standing in the centre of the road when I turned into the main street. Like a silent surrealist sculpture: day-glo yellow and horrifically absurd, she stood sentinel and implacable, her once benign 'lollipop' like an ancient spear at her side.

My first instinct was to hail her with a friendly 'hello', an inquiry as to her well being maybe, something to break the ice, to let her know that I meant her no harm.
But there was something wrong.

I could physically feel the spurt of adrenaline flood my veins, my muscles tensed and the urge to fight or flee turned me into a simple animal. I shivered, but not from the cold, there was something so grotesque about this once human figure, something so malignant, that I felt my sphincter tremble like cold trifle.
It was her eyes.
The once familiar, ruddy and puffy dinner plate face of Joan Norris was no longer set with the kind, wise cornflower blue orbs that had guided so many generations of children across that street.

No, the eyes had lost all their life spirit, all their humanity and comprehension of this world. Joan was already in hell. Something deep inside me, some little flame of compassion had kindled my muscles into action, I was actually walking towards her. What I was going to say or do, I had no idea, but my compulsion to go on was beyond the reason of reasonable (and well fed) men, I was insane with hunger now and unsure where my delirium began and my logic ended.

Still she stood there, silent, immovable and expressionless in the searingly cold, metallic atmosphere. The snow had trapped and baffled all the normal ambient sounds, sensitizing the air - the village was now a giant sound-stage awaiting the big performance, the final act for the two players.

Inch by inch I crept onwards, the soft crunch of the snow like the mastication of some small invisible creature, my breath billowing into the still air - smokey tendrils misting the glass of my window onto this hideous vision.

I was perhaps ten yards away from the fluorescent monster when I first saw the blood.

A small glistening crimson pool was steaming and beginning to congeal in the low, late afternoon sun. The blood puddle had formed under the round head of Joan's lollipop has its edge lay still in the snow. Her hand was bone white as she gripped the handle of the unlikely weapon.

I froze, literally and metaphorically. Time stopped and my befuddled head grasped blindly hither and thither for some clue, a link, attempting to nudge the chain of associations that would necessitate a decision. I needed a light bulb to flash so I could act, but everything was in slow motion.

I could now see the bloodied corpses of unfortunate shoppers who had fought for the last scrap of sustenance from the dark, gutted interior of the Scot-Mid general store. Poor bastards I thought - the quick and the dead. That brief glimpse was enough to register the torn empty packet of Cheesy Whotsits gripped in the chubby death claw of one of the more rotund members of our little village.

But my brief distraction was all the lollipop creature needed, and I felt rather than saw the scything blade of her safety wand swish past my ear with the gentlest kiss of my lank, greasy hair.
I instinctively raised my hand in a futile gesture to ward off the next blow, and turning on my heel launched myself like a missile out of that gladiatorial arena for the furiously famished.

I managed to get about a hundred yards before I tripped, quite spectacularly over one of the macabre 'Snowmen'. I skidded through the snow, choked and blinded by the icy powder, coming to rest by the rear wheel of an abandoned and trashed Asda home delivery van.
I twisted onto my back, heart hammering, electrified by that strange current of rage and fear.
There she, or rather 'it' stood, five paces away with an ungodly grin spreading over those sickly marble features. Please god, I silently wept, don't let me die like this... skewered like a pig by a lollipop lady, an Asda van my pathetic tombstone!

At that precise moment, the sun was released by the dusky clouds and I was warmly embraced by an almost Blakeian epiphany.
I fumbled furiously for the half eaten CurlyWurly in my inside coat pocket that I was saving for when things got really bad.

I waved the little stick of chocolate coated toffee at the terrifying apparition, while I grinned insanely, emitting small childlike giggles, tears of shame coursing down my frozen cheeks at my pathetic predicament.

The soft thump of the lollipop in the snow hardly registered, I was all eye's as I saw the dribbling monstrosity move towards my prone figure, its hands in prayer-like supplication, the once dulled eyes now illuminated by some inner supernatural light.

I tossed the milk choc coated ambrosia into the snow a few yards to my left, and then watched horrified but fascinated as the foul gibbering cretin drunkenly staggered towards this unforeseen bounty.

As the thing stooped to retrieve the pathetic morsel, I jumped to my feet and seized the discarded lollipop...and without a moments hesitation, brought the improvised axe down upon the things capped skull.

The last thing I remember is running.
Where I found the energy from I can't imagine, but I ran and ran, skidding and sliding, knees riding high in the deep snow as I fled that accursed place, torn by hunger and a terrible guilt...a guilt that would never be assuaged, even by my interminable screams that released the crows in great black clouds into twilight's last gleamings.