London, the night, the river...
All passing in their own time.
The great city - by day a vast tumult of activity,
By night the dark city; shadows and light; romance and mystery.
The river ebbs and flows beneath bridges, passing the old and the new; history and progress reflected.
The old water meanders sinuously back and forth, in time with the tide, in tune with the moon; gravity holds us all in thrall.
Time and the river pass by in perfect harmony; the river is never still, time never waits, the city only rests while the sun shines elsewhere.
The city was born in the arms of the river, suckled by the bounty it brought from afar; nurtured by merchants, enriched by their ships; the city and the river, like lovers entwined, move to their own rhythm, within their own time.
Passing time.
I walk by the river that shimmers with electric incandescence, the soul of the city for all time; glimmering beneath the elegant arches that span this slow, pulsing artery and anchor the two banks, holding the city together.
Behold the great dome of the Cathedral rising majestically into the misty night sky, joining this earth to the numinous beyond.
Passing time in a different sphere, between this realm and the next.
The river runs through me, the city is my heart; always they call me back home. In time I shall be returned to the ebb and flow motion of the river.
The night and the river; the heart of the city and me.
Midnight, and the sound of the sea.
Midnight...the sound of the sea, the sigh of the breeze.
Watching the dark distance, looking out across the shimmering skin of the ocean towards the edge of the world; no ships, no stars, just the moon behind the thin veil of clouds breathing silver down onto the vast, watery world.
Out there is the delphic night. Starless and bible black; no less than the slow black, sloe black, crow black of Dylan's dark universe.
He watched and waited.
In the dark, when vision begins to fail, when all that was red and yellow and green and magenta darkens into an abyss of cold blue, other senses become more acute. Sound becomes your guide. He listened to the sound of the sea washing slowly back and forth across the sand, licking the immovable black rocks, as serene and regular as the sound of breathing, each wave advancing and retreating with a sigh, the ocean inhaling and exhaling as if sleeping in the crepuscular calm. He could smell and taste the salt of the ocean's breath, the tang of the savory air clean and sharp in his nose and on his tongue. The taste of her tears when she left...
Turning away from the starless sea far below the towering cliff, he peered into the stygian darkness, disorientated at first, he waited while his eyes struggled to find some detail or shape that his brain could recognise. Gradually he could make out the curving outlines of meadows rolling away in folds of shadows. The rhythm of the land is never smooth or regular, there are no sharp lines or angles, the geometry is not mathematical, nor precise. Sometimes flat, smooth farmland divided into a quilt of fields, some ploughed into furrows, some green and some fallow, resting for the next season. Sometimes shaped by the force of nature in eons past, endowing her with voluptuous curves, this sensual Mother Earth upon whose benevolent body we are suckled and nurtured, this Mother Earth to whom we are Oedipus and Elektra incarnate. Such are the stories we tell.
All the darkness could not hide the passing time; to the west was yesterday's light, to the east a new dawn moved tomorrow ever closer, time and death working hand-in-hand. Time and words, time and silence, time forever changing, time forever leaving only memories behind. The sound of the sea at midnight, the taste of the sea on his lips, the memory of her tears when she left.
He walked back from the cliff edge towards the car, the breathing of the sea becoming fainter while the breeze from the land whispered louder in his ears. He could just make out the silhouette of the rough edges of distant hills dressed in pine trees that stood up along the ridges of the hills like the sharp teeth of a crosscut saw. Everything was inky blue-black; the darkness had swallowed all the colours. As he got into the car, it began to rain.
Inside the car he watched the rain falling softly onto the windscreen, almost as if the sky was crying in slow motion. The darkness beyond was a blur, a dissolving palette of dark blue ink and wheezing silver-grey moonlight. He turned on the radio, a voice was speaking about the weather. Tomorrow there would be rain. It was already raining; it was already tomorrow. He would greet no more tomorrows. The rain falling onto the windscreen made hardly a sound. The radio spoke but he didn't listen to the words, it was just a disembodied noise, a voice that made no sense. So many things made no sense in the dark, but he remembered the taste of her tears.
Remember a day...
...before today, a time before this time - the endless summer to which we said goodbye and slowly closed the door.
The afternoons were warm when we walked in fields of perfumed air, among the wild flowers. The drone of buzzing bees drunk with ambrosial pollen, the twittering of birds ascending the azure empyrean towards the infinite numinous neverland of our glowing universe. Those days of someone else's love song that we sang to a nameless tune. It was always summer, it was always you. There was a time, before today, when time was younger than it has become, when all we wanted was for the days to never end, to raise our voices to the sun and sing the songs we knew so well. Before the memory became a memory, before time passed into the past, before the summer's end and the coming of autumn's chill.
I remember the swishing sound of luscious grass caressing the fluttering fabric of your summer dress, long green lascivious fingers stroking your tanned legs; and then the splittering-splash of a nearby stream gushing over old stones polished shiny by the endless flow of crystal water, as we walked through the meadows of an imaginary landscape; all in a dream, all in a dream...how do we hang on to a dream?
Is it memory or illusion, was I really there?
I remember the day. The summer day and the lovely thunder of love.
Floating on the sound of summer air, warm and fragrant everywhere, you danced in the sunshine, trying to catch a butterfly in a field of poppies, cornflowers, ox-eye daisies and buttercups on a drowsy afternoon. For moment I was Monet in the fields of Argenteuil, before me a picture of melting colours and warm light.
You wanted to catch the sun but too much sun will burn.
Your golden hair - burnished by the light and teased by the breeze - waved at me as you danced. And then it rained, so we ran to hide beneath the trees, your wet dress flowed over your body, painting you translucent blue, an Arcadian nymph bathing in the dappled light beneath the succulent, dripping trees. You smiled and kissed my mouth while the sky's tears sighed, cascading down among the leaves before falling languidly to the ground. Then the sun returned, shafts of gold radiated through the green canopy, illuming every raindrop into a glittering jewelled firmament. Standing beneath the sparkling vault of liquid stars we listened to the sound of clouds dissolving far above the green canopy, the song of the rain and the river washing away the perfumed peace of the humid, languid air.
The summer of a distant time, lost but for memory.
Now, in time present, it is midsummer. The night will be short, the air is warm again. Somewhere in the distance I hear the voice of golden bells sing the passing time, time that never turns back see what its passing leaves behind. Time has no memory, time has neither future nor past.
We remember what we leave behind, nostalgic ghosts of life before death. Memory is for the living, remembrance of time past, these sometimes unreliable memoirs of what we think we saw but are never really sure. Only in time present can memory exist and be recalled, there will be no memory to remember when the endless river is crossed.
...remember a day.
The old year passes with the setting of the sun, the new year comes with the rising of the moon. We all turn together as the Earth spins around our star, half in darkness, half in light, for some the day, for some the night.
Wherever you may live and whoever you may be, may your God go with you and may you always be free.
Looking out at the sea between blue and me, the distance becomes infinite space.
The ship sets sail, the distance calls, I watch you gradually vanish into that vast beyond, on the way to another space - somewhere to the north they say, where the air is blue and the snow falls all day. Infinite space between you and me, again.
Here in this harbour I buy a postcard, a picture of a place I've never seen, from another space I cannot cross, the space between you and me, the deep, deep blue and me.
In the blue twilight of evening, I watch small boats etch white lines across the flat blue sheet of sea, writing letters on the water to some long-lost love in strange acheiropoieton hieroglyphs that soon disperse and disappear - white ink diluted by the quiescent, melancholy ocean, while squawking seagulls soar in spiralling circles on the cool breeze between the blue and blue of sea and sky while the distance to you stretches light into the inescapable invisibility of space...
All is blue.
Above - the sky
Below - the sea
Blue and blue and blue and you and...
Me.
Softness,
A sky full of clouds,
Above the beach, above the sea,
Whispering...
The sea on the shore,
Kissing the sand,
Whispering...
Breeze in your hair,
Distant birds float on the wind,
Softness...
Rain starts falling,
Sighing down to earth,
Filling the footsteps we made in the sand,
Slowly erasing where we have been,
Softness...
Wet sand soft beneath us,
White clouds soft above us,
We are vanishing into the air,
Our memories dissolved by the rain,
Softness...
Beyond the clouds,
Above the sky,
Sleep,
Dreams,
The City of Dreams.
Once again I walk in silent rooms and gloomy galleries. Dark portraits gaze from gilded frames at tragic ghosts who walk through walls in fruitless quest to escape this place of shuttered light and time forever stilled.
Where memory waits to be recalled by those who must forget, I saw you for a moment in that place, waiting for a sign, but once again these silent rooms took you back inside.
Last year - or was it before, somehow time removes the thread - I watched you in the golden room, the air ablaze with light from a thousand candles, tiny flickering tongues of flame and dancing shadows on the walls; the faded glamour of dusty crystal chandeliers and tarnished candelabra; a banquet for an unknown soul, a play performed behind closed doors in a room of memories never recalled.
Yes, I watched you glide among the crowds of laughing faces, clothed in clouds of chiffon and silk, shimmering wings of a beautiful angel not yet fallen; luminous, translucent, an aurora of golden light radiating from you like a Byzantine icon in that room of burning air. You moved among the swirl of bodies as they danced an eternal waltz, around and around and around...elegant men and beautiful women rotating so gracefully, as if they were planets orbiting a distant sun to the music of the cosmos. I took your hand and you whispered something I didn't hear in that golden salon of shadows and dance. The hours of the night passed by somewhere outside among the gardens and the fountains; we never saw the sunrise or daylight's brittle smile.
And then you were gone. The candles began to gutter and die, leaving only trails of aromatic smoke that gradually filled the darkening room with a veil of grey, masking the memories of this night you left behind in ghostly shadows that haunt me once again. Was it last year, or was it before? Did your whispered words evaporate into silence before you even spoke? I only remember the memory, while time escaped and left the room.
Now, once again, as I walk the gloomy galleries, I hear the banquet and the music and the play performed again.
Once more I see you standing by the gilded mirrors; your refelection gazes back at me from another place in time, bathed in the faded hues of golden memories. Do you remember what you whispered on the night I held your hand? Do you recall the lilting music and the phantoms of the dance? Do you remember floating through the salons of the night, among the shadows of the Chateau and the fountains of the park? Once again I watch you walk away from the tarnished, faded mirror in its decaying gilded frame that held your gaze for a moment of infinity. This memory is not yours to keep, it is not mine to lose; this memory is not lost in time, it is our time recalled.
Once again, I return to the dark corridors and silent rooms to perform the eternal waltz among the ghosts of tragic actors and faded mirrors of lost time.
The dream-life of an imaginary afternoon, in an imaginary garden.
Silent statues gaze at nobody, nobody returns their gaze.
We commune with twittering birds, a consort of insects buzz and click a glittering gavotte in the quiet garden,
Senses beguiled by the aroma of late summer roses and freshly cut grass,
Old fountains spill liquid and light into glittering pools,
Just the quiet hiss of the breeze in the leaves disturbs the imaginary silence.
Here, in England, in this dream of late summer,
I watch the afternoon sun dance in your hair,
Each strand iridescent, an effulgent glow;
Das gold so tief im abendrot!
Illusion, delusion, bending the sunlight,
Shadows and clouds bruising the sky;
When we are gone the garden will wait
Until another dream awakens it again.
The dream-life serene,
Undisturbed we sleep,
While Time waits in the waking hours,
Dreams have no clocks,
The song is all, we sing together, voices soar, spiralling ever-upwards into the cerulian infinite, across the universe. The song goes on forever.
I felt your hand - it was a memory, a moment when the electrons re-assembled those fragments of something, splinters of time regained from time past, chemically enhanced and re-imagined, perhaps. Was it like that? I don't know, I cannot remember everything, I am only remembering that which my electrical connections create from the fragments that lie around inside the repository of my life. Was it like that? Am I remembering or am I creating memories from a life that never happened?
I take a picture, a memory visible in captured light.
I felt your hand - it was real, it was warm, it was soft...
I remember, time is regained. In the morning of tomorrow will I remember it again?
Is it the same every time?
Is the memory of yesterday the same as the memory of today?
Is it you?
I felt your hand - I know it was you.
Memories are lost, these pictures fade, our light evaporates;
The light creates, the light destroys.
So much time passed, so much to remember, is it all true?
The fragments of time are falling apart, dispersing within the ever-expanding universe of my memory; the dust of what was, gradually drifting into glowing nebulae of uncertainty - the stars of memory slowly burn themselves into oblivion until all is black and cold. I remember things that never happened, I forget things that did. This uncertain seed of memory.
I felt your hand.
Standing on the beach on a spring afternoon, the sea is calm and caressess the pebbles that sigh gently as they roll back and forth in the soft white foam of the ocean's kiss. Between the sea and the sky there is another space. Invisible light. The sea wraps around the land, the sky wraps around all there is to see. You wrap your hand around mine. Will we remember?
I know your hand.
The river passes silently through the glittering city night,
We walk along the busy path, so many faceless people pass as if spirits filled the air,
A ceaseless flow of translucent shapes, a miasma of unholy ghosts,
Spirits dissipating into some unknown distant darkness, perhaps;
Or just dreams of something not remembered vanishing from view;
A memory re-assembled - fragments are all that remain of a day we may have known.
We walk on, hand-in-hand while the river sings for us.
When the night becomes another day, clocks turn us all to dust.
It was your hand.
Another charge of electricity, nanovolts, almost nothing at all, but enough to arouse the memory that waits, or perhaps create a memory of something from nothing. I don't know but I know that I know.
It is night, I feel tired, I am alone,
I watch the countless motes of dust dance in the lamp's dull glow,
It is time.
Every picture fades, light destroyed by light,
We shall melt into the air, we shall be our own dreams and we shall sleep,
We are shadows, we are dust, we are all there is to know.
And so it is.
I felt your hand, I heard your voice, we sang the song;
A song for you, a song for me, a song for us.
Breath of life, the light sighs, we dream.
She shines,
Translucent, ephemeral,
Appearing only to disappear into light,
Into thin air.
We sleep.
Today is now, time is present,
Memory waits...
Moments, minutes, infinite ever,
Always.
We remember, we forget, we dance in the night to the sound of the singing stars that drip from the black light in cascades of years that have passed so many times before. It is too late to look for their fire, it is already gone, those flames have died and those stars are cold but the light remains as a memory of their songs.
Your fire is eternal,
We remember, we forget, we kiss.
It is time.
I dance with you, I sing your song,
The Dream Girl Blues.
Breathe slowly,
excite the silence,
our still air shivers,
aroused by tongues.
Softly swollen Velvet lips,
Open slowly, fold on fold,
Cleave the juicy, sticky split,
Slide inside the slippery skin.
Oh, Luscious depths in Luskus Delph,
Amour aroma, perfumed pink.
Taste Desire's smoke,
Evanescing touch,
Spirits whisper,
captivating...
Music plays
on rising flesh,
pleasure sings
one song between us.
Hallelujah.
We are the true believers, we are the chosen ones,
We want your pretty children, your daughters and your sons,
Bring them to our party, let them drink our wine,
Tomorrow we will take them to work our deepest mine.
We are the source, we are the light, we are the truth you hear,
You want our benediction, we baptise you with fear.
Leave the weeping women with the thorns, the nails, the blood,
Turn back towards the coming storm, leave the hill and walk away,
Follow the path to the garden where the last words rose to the sky,
The stone rolls back, the cave is dark but no shrouded spirit lies.
So pray and offer everything,
Touch the hem and kiss the ring,
Bow your ragged head down low,
You have nowhere left to go.
Nothing left for you to touch,
No golden face to kiss,
The ghost of light
From a dying flame,
A shadow from a candle
Flickering on the wall.
The bell speaks in lugubrious voice
Trembling sepulchral shadows,
A censer swings in perfumed arcs
On clinking golden chains,
Dark shapes murmur arcane chants
Wrapped In swirling incense cloaks,
Candles burn in lamps above
The shroud of deathly smoke.
As darkness falls
In the vaulted hall
Carving shadows
On the faces
Of long-dead stones,
A faint voice sings
The final hymn
Somewhere behind the sun,
We are the true believers, we are the chosen ones.
On the road to somewhere from the road that leads to nowhere,
You find the hidden bridge that takes you to the razor's edge.
You take one step, you take another, you walk a different walk,
In the field of lost time's distance the path appears in view.
A light, a shadow, the dazzling sun, the insects click and hiss,
The last rose waits for frozen night and death from first frost's kiss.
All is quiet on the carusel of the ever-turning world,
Night and light, the line between the unfixed darkness edge,
The ceaseless, shifting dark horizon, always only ever half,
This sempiternal, everlasting line of bright partition.
Inexorably turns this pleasant land from dark to light and back again,
We are Adorned and held in thrall within time's lambent girdle.
All time and no time, no time to find the time that never ends,
Time to leave and close the door before time's door is closed.
We walk the road to somewhere, many turning footsteps tread,
Towards the inevitably closing door and the glittering razor's edge.
This is the foundation of western civilisation, this is the foundation of all western art, music and literature.
This is the sign that created western culture from which grew knowledge, science, philosophy, education and power.
This is the symbol upon which democracy laid its truth.
No other culture has ever advanced so far as that which this symbol represents.
In western culture we have created beauty from the meaning of this simple symbol.
This is the source of the light.
Those who created the faceless prophet - which in itself is nothing more than a neutered copy of Christianity - created a culture of nothing and which seeks to overwhelm all other cultures by sheer force of numbers. There is no beauty or truth in the repeated patterns and swirls of their world, their world of unquestioning servility to a cult of personality. A culture of submission to a faceless pretender, a dictatorship of unrelenting hate for anything and everything that refuses to bend the knee to its bellicose bellowing.
We have Christmas.
In the misty light of a November afternoon the planet spins slowly towards another day, leaving the sun's light behind. Colours vanish into the ethereal blue of twilight, there is nothing in sight except the birds flocking home to roost. The darkling thrush, the gloaming bird, dark wings in the sky; the chittering chatter of beak and crop the glooming grey light fills. Silence descends across the fields, silence in the air, except for those few winged shadows twittering across my view. November's light is soft and rare, sometimes it evaporates into thin air - we are shadows, we are mist, we are nought but a fading bloom in someone else's garden - we float on the evanescent vapour of our dreams, we disappear into the ether of another day. We fade every day, we fade to grey. We are and will always be someone else's memory.
Now is the winter and everyone is discontent, made worse by the global elite who hoard trillions of money, like so many Ebeneezers. It will do them no good in the end because they can't eat it. They can, of course, burn it to keep the freezing fingers of winter from squeezing their bloated testicles. Or they could build castles to keep the grasping fingers of the filthy rabble from grabbing their golden geese and cooking them. But whatever they do, their geese will, sooner or later, be cooked. I like a bit of goose, don't you? We are in a global prison of our own design - although, to be fair, I wasn't consulted about the design, it was merely presented to me as the best thing since the previous best thing...whatever that was. I can't keep track of all the best things that politicians and so-called "experts" have laid before me with the promise of eternal benefits for which should be eternally grateful. I can't think of one, off the top of my head, that has actually delivered much, but we live in hope because without hope, where would we be? Anyway, I'm confident that whatever my government tells me, it must be right and I have every one of these hopes for the future carefully stashed away in a large box under the sink. They'll come in handy one day. It reminds of the time I met a wizened old lady on the way to the market who offered me a handful of beans for a quick fuck, but I declined because I've already been fucked by the government and sundry other agencies. Anyway, I didn't fall for that old story about beanstalks and golden showers...or something. So, here we are again, up to our ears in misery and fear - the torture never stops, does it? Perhaps revolution might be unleashed as the only way to share the loot between us all, but that doesn't really work either because for all their fine words and heartfelt polemics, the erstwhile leaders of revolutions always seem to end up with a somewhat larger slice of the cake and more cherries than the rest of us, because they're really just the same as the global elite, except without the cash. But aren't we all? Having taken my fair share of abuse and been forced to watch the board of governors stuffing their faces with fois gras, steak and christmas pudding while my nose is pressed against the window of the workhouse and the economic snowstorm gradually buries me, I'm not averse to the prospect of changing places with one of the fat bastards, 'arter all, ve all need a bit 'o good wittles an' a drop 'o good cheer t' keep us 'appy guvnor! Merry Christmas and Gawd bless us, every one!
Globalism. This is what it means: close down all your manufacturing industries and give them to an impoverished developing nation like...just off the top of my head...China. Invest in their industrial revolution and educate them so that they can sell us cheap products. So we get cheap t-shirts and shoes and they get...very, very RICH! What a great idea, huh? No need for us to soil our hands with filthy machinery and all the pollution that goes hand-in-hand with industry, we can buy everything much more cheaply from the Chinese without worrying about the shit. Hang on, you might reasonably ask, how do we keep our own economic boat afloat if we have nothing - or in the vernacular, fuck-all - to trade with? Ah, well now, here's the miracle ingredient - we become a service economy! Yes folks, that's right, we sell services! Oh, right, you may say, so we're going to transition from making and trading stuff, like clothes, cars, bikes, steel etc, in other words, real things that have a use, to trading services that have no intrinsic value as such because there isn't anything that is useful...like a washing machine. Hold on my little doubting Thomas, don't worry about the intrinsic stuff for now, just go with it. Selling services means that we sell financial services, banking and money orientated stuff, as well as other things like...err, hospitality and tourism and shopping...which is also part of money, as is everything else. So you buy a cup of coffee with a debit card and that comes with a cost to the business because the banks who use electronic financial transfer systems levy a charge for each transaction...which of course is added to the cost of your cup of coffee. Thus, a service has been provided and a trade has taken place. In short, an economic cycle is in motion. All well and good. Except, when things go wrong - or in the vernacular, tits-up - the service economy rapidly collapses into a smouldering heap. Meanwhile, the Chinese are still selling their stuff to the rest of us. Now, it may well be the case that eventually the entire global ediface crumbles into a heap of rusty nails because those who can't sell services can't pay their employees, who can't buy Chinese washing machines, so the washing machine industry goes pop. But people will always buy stuff and as most of it is made in China, the Chinese are pretty well safe. Be that as it may, we are all in it together - 'it' being a big hole that is gradually filling up with mucho unpleasant and toxic global effluent in the form of abject poverty and despair. But it's ok, I still have a box full of hope under the sink. See? I said it would come in handy!
Drifting in a small boat on a silent lake, the rain began to fall and the herons flew away as the wind blew the rain into in my face and scratched at the dark surface of the water in the faint greenish light of the autumn afternoon. Floating, floating…I sang a song for you on another day, in another life we lived.
All the moments, all the days we had, all the time I looked at you. I breathed the air of your departing words as you disappeared from view, your long hair swaying from side to side waving goodbye. You turned and smiled as the curtain closed and I lost you once again.
In time past.
Another time…
Waking up before the sun, laughing at the sky, summer days lost in a haze of red wine and cigarettes. We sang the blues in the afternoon until we cried like Robert Johnson’s keening guitar and Sonny Boy’s moaning harp. The burnished sun, diffused through the window’s translucent silk veil that shivered in the warm air, painted you in soft focus light like Leonardo’s sfumato brush. The contours of your naked body clothed in diaphanous pastel shades and limpid mystery – you smiled as the ecstatic light caressed your shadows and touched your lips. Now, we are shadows together in the second circle, never lost but never found – and gradually now, like yesterday, the disappearing room fades from view, I fade into you – we are gone.
Time passed.
Once again…
I close my eyes before the thorns and nails, the spirit and the bell; I look up before the thunder comes, waiting for the miracle. In the garden I see clouds among the flowers, I feel a song that I can’t hear. Now you speak to me in waves of light, you speak to me of then, you sing to me in shadows, you take my breath away among the roses and the perfume of the garden that we lost. Now I follow the smoke of your fire across the endless fields, dancing with autumn spirits to the rhythm of your rhymes, while between the silent stones the violet evening glows and John Barleycorn lies dying. Standing alone on a hillside, all is quiet in the English sky, save for the twittering swallows catching insects on the wing, swooping high and low in the twilight’s glimmering gold and Giotto’s starry blue. The night is time’s companion, time took all the nights I sang to you. And yet, in this crepuscular empyrean solitude, I feel no dread.
Time passing.
In memory…
Memories of cold fire burn the bridges of our time,
Still I follow the sound of the longing song,
Back to the time I have forgotten.
You open the gate of your garden, you let your perfume fill my mouth,
Just a taste is all I need, one more taste of your afterglow;
Another kiss, another smile, another touch before you go.
I remember everything – the memory of your light,
And watching the sun’s dark moment cross the great divide.
I will not die before the storm, I will not watch the dark,
All the light will one day fade and that one day will be the last,
In time and time before past time, in time before time passed.
Send a postcard, send a letter, send a souvenir.
It is time.
After the day…
Now – in this uncertain time – when only ghosts are free to fly, when churning oceans hurl their foaming flesh onto those shores that ships can never reach, when winter’s breath brings frosty death to every leaf and flower – yes now, in this uncertain time – we meet again. In our cold sky pricked by cold stars, distant suns are dying, other worlds are burning, but not in our time. It is not our time that lights our way, it is time past in time present and this is all that we can ever know. We meet again in this uncertain time, helpless in the ceaseless turning world. There is no still point for this turning world, no moment when time blinks, quiescent at that point where all is still; for time can never be still until the absolute point of stillness, when nothing turns, the fire is cold and the final point of light blinks off – there the still point will be.
I heard a voice coming from an open window, a voice I thought I knew, a song I had heard so long ago. I had forgotten the song but I remembered looking into the sun.
Time passes, we forget.
Memory waits…
From an open window somewhere above me, the song came again. The memory of you fell into this crowded street of blinding light, carried to me on the song I couldn’t see, by words I barely remembered. It was you, it was me, I remembered the song. Crowds of unknown people passed by, jostling and nudging as I looked into the sun and looked for the song. I could not see you, only shapes and shadows, dark moving across light. I remembered the light in your long hair as the breeze lifted it away from your face…your face…your face. The memory of a day, a time – it was always summer. I wanted to remember the light, the sun in your hair, the warmth of the afternoon on those days when we walked in the noise of the hot crowded city and lay down beneath the infinite blue empyrean in fields of summer gold so long ago – you in that pale yellow dress and your hair so long, strands of dark molten gold glowing in the radiant sunlight, a banner of flame fluttering in the breeze that kissed your face like you kissed my face…the afterglow still warms the memory.
But we had to let it go, we never sang again and so the song faded to silence as time passed and slipped away. The song of a memory, the memory of a fragment of time, of time past and time passed and time passing…we forget. The song sang a picture of that time so long ago. It was always summer – or so it seemed. It’s hard to remember once we forget, but memory waits… and so I remembered the song, the words and the music – the memory of then. Always summer.
We were other people then, we are other memories now; we were young and beautiful, we had time. It was summer and when we sang – sad with the song – we looked into the sun.
But time passes and we forget. I try to remember fragments of time past, before time passed. I have faded pictures that flicker across the walls in the moonlight, I have songs I can barely hear that I can’t remember. What I want to remember is not certain and not always clear. We try to see what we want the memory to be and so often we forget. The memory has its own memory. I want to see but the window is cracked and covered with time’s dust.
We were young, time was the future that we didn’t look for; we only did whatever made us happy. We sang songs that made us cry and we looked into the sun. Now you are here again and I remember; in the song drifting from an unseen window above the blinding light of the street, I remember but I can’t see you. I remember a memory. I remember the sun. Now the forgotten song is over – as it was so long ago; but I remembered what I had forgotten while I looked into the sun. The memory is enough. Time passes, we forget.
Memory waits.
For you who I remembered and all those I forgot,
We who sang the song and looked into the sun.
The sky above the Essex earth, light of passing moments that illuminates the fertile land.
The light, the light, the glorious clouds that sail across the sea of sky,
The sky that shimmered through Constable's hand and Gainsborough's flashing brush.
We are a nation bound by sea but unbound by the urge to look beyond this tiny sceptered isle,
We are a nation of ships and men who sail the mighty oceans that wash, exhausted, upon the shores of mysterious distant lands.
The ships of men and vaporous clouds, the heroic men that sail the world, through sea and sky they navigate the glittering emerald globe.
This land, this sky where the lark ascends in spirals ever-rising, higher and higher into the light until his trilling song does fade into silver'd silence,
and the light that passes overhead casts dark shadows that march across the rolling fields;
augurs, perhaps, of the time and tide that waits, unknown, beyond the far horizon.
Sail on, sail on, oh mighty clouds, sail on for ever more.
Lockdown, hibernation, false dawns, abandoned plans and lost time. The dark despair of the endless nothing; and yet the glimmer of a tiny light far, far away in the dark distant future will always be visible regardless of how much the black void tries to swallow it. This is hope and where there is life, there will always be hope. This is not the same as faith, which relies on a different part of the consciousness and the soul. Hope is predicated on the will to live, as opposed to the belief in something intangible. Hope is the light, faith is the belief in the possibility that the light is merely a sign leading to somewhere else.
The light, of course, may not be light at all. The relationship between mind and material reality is a deeply personal consciousness, the metaphysical identity. The metaphor and the metaphysical conceit are our friends.
And so is Prokofiev.
I saw the light on the night when we went to the ballet recently and hope embraced me in its gorgeous arms, sweeping me up and swirling me higher, higher, higher into the vaulted dome of the majestic Royal Albert Hall, as Sergei Polunin and Alina Cojocaru danced their duet from Romeo and Juliet to Prokofiev’s oh-so-beautiful score. I watched the lissom bodies of the dancers entwine around each other in sensuous and erotic movements while Prokofiev’s achingly gorgeous melody wrapped itself around me and impregnated my ears. Aural sex. Or perhaps aural concupiscence. Either way, it was orgasmic, man. And so it should be. If music be the food of love, then starvation would be unknown, unless all you listen to is rap music, which has little to do with either music or love. But that’s a story for another day.
It was dark in the streets of London apres ballet and we were subsumed into the romance of the night. We hid in the shadows and danced in the light, we sang in gutter and kissed in the doorway of an old mansion with a thousand secrets hidden behind its shuttered windows. We walked to the river and watched lights of the city reflected in the shimmering ribbon of liquid silver upon which the city was born and built and developed into the greatest city on earth. This is the lifeblood of the metropolis, the ebb and flow of the river is the pulse of the city’s heart. Now we ran for the No.11 bus to carry us through the quiet streets, past Westminster, past Trafalgar Square, along the busy Strand and Aldwych to the Law Courts, we pass the Dragon where the old Temple Bar once stood, the gate to the medieval City of London. As we pass along Fleet Street, where newspapers were once printed, the glorious dome of Wren’s utterly magnificent baroque masterpiece St. Pauls cathedral rises before us at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point of the City of London. Is there a more beautiful church anywhere in the world? No, I think not. And so the journey takes us past the City’s financial heart, the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House, here is wealth and power, here is the heart of Empire. We disembark at Liverpool Street to catch the train. It begins to rain. Night in the city with rain falling down and we found ourselves in the dark. Here is romance.
