henrybrook.com

of a daylight drinker, have always preferred darkness as the backdrop to the Bacchus kiss. When I lived in old London, I’d pick coffee joints for afternoon assignations in the Soho and Covent Garden crossings of the city compass lines. One of my favourites was the Photographer’s Gallery backroom canteen off Leicester Square. I liked the prints glaring at you as you huddled over the Formica-fake benches, the gloom of the bookshop and the quiet spaces. I’m not so keen on the new gallery, off Oxford Street. There’s too much glass and too many people passing through. I joined the shuffling feet to look at the Burroughs pics there not so long ago, too distracted by all the brains ticking away around me to get into his gripes and scribbles and stark black and whites, all glass-cased and not much larger than a page torn from a book. He never touched my heart, Bill, not like Jack and Neal and Corso and Huncke and all the others, Bill just wasn’t a romantic figure, everything about him was sour and starched. That said, I wish I could have dropped by his villa for cocktails in Mexico City one of those sultry afternoons, when Jack was living in the back room writing Tristessa. All the books. All those snippets of dreams. And Bill’s cut-ups ideas are startling, the more time I spend on words the more chance meetings, splits, echoes, rebounds and bumps I spy in stories and art. All art moments – a music track, a short story, an image – they might all be cut-up escapes and diversions, snippets of dreams where we can hide and reflect for a few seconds, slipping loose from our reality boots. They might remind us of truths these cut-up shards, but I’m not sure they’re truths themselves. I feel this as I write my fantasy scenes and moments in make-believe lives for the story I’m working on, trying to anchor them to a narrative. What’s more true, the cut-up strangeness or the this-happened and so that-happened storytelling? Burroughs might get the last laugh.

there are no truly desperate situations, only desperate people. I’ve been floundering this week, dazed by a blow, a forever loss. But the Ridgeway woods move through their seasons mindless of my keening. That blow touches everyone I care about. Leave not a tender word unsaid.

a boy, Corey Young, to Planet Cassandra? What if he was taking the Xanadu Trail to start a new life with his family, riding in convoy in an ex-combat patrol vehicle they called Blaster? What if Corey was accompanied by a talking, alien bird and a robot head loaded with the personality chip of his old juve-school teacher, Mr. Kowalski, recently deceased? And what if I wove a story out of all that?

Would you buy that for a dollar?

into the built environment and might see nothing I want to photograph. Bar faces. But a pathway through the crops of a Ridgeway field draws my eye. What comes stomping towards us out the infinite?

So many mistakes…

But what’s around that turn? It might be a beach, was here, or it could be an ice cream, the best in Devon?, or even some fried gurnard and a jug of Otter. Guilty, guilty of everything. Addled and jaded and beat as I am it might always be worth running up that lane. Even with a stick or a mobility wagon.

All those treasures just around corners. And Riverman looking on, the curl of a smile.

(First two lines, with apologies to Esenin)

they lay them out themselves. Maybe it’s the same with words. I don’t believe many of the books I love grew out of a deadline, they were written for other desperate – if holy – reasons. I’ve started writing something new. And the words will fall into place and strike something true for people or they won’t, but I’ll keep tapping it. This was the light climbing out of Boggle Hole.

when I write I know that the best I can do is acting, guessing what words might be right, mask-wearing in myself and pretending to feel, pretending the words are true. Are all books deceptions, all writers cheats? I’d like to write words with no filter, no gap to jump between the spark in my head and the way it reads on the page. Words that are better than games and acting. Words that are as real and honest as the light.

and I missed old doors and worn, stone steps and all the dust and debris of the centuries passing. Like I missed pubs and London curry. A pang. These days flow like a river and I grew up in the shadow of their traces. I’m no fresh-minted coin, bear all the scrapes, dings and polishings of the cheap-seat pockets. Footsteps in footsteps in the ruts of the village path. Doors still swinging open from the last to cross the threshold, as I go to follow.

have nightmares, says Guy Sajer in his The Forgotten Soldier. Sleep is a refuge for the wretched and the miserable, somewhere to hide. Nightmares are a luxury? I guess they are if you’re always awake in one, pressing your face into the dirt at the bottom of a trench outside Kharkov. I’ve been digging trenches this week, trying to keep the water out of my house in the sticks. But nothing to compare with Sajer’s excavations. I don’t have Old Popov shooting at me, for one thing. And the house is just about dry and I only moved a few shovelfuls of sodden, chalky gunk before strolling off to chat with the neighbours. Even a few minutes of digging was enough to remind me of Celine and his bitching about having to show enthusiasm in his army days, staying chipper. I’ve never been much good at chipper. But, driving over the ridge from the village I saw the sky clear over the two trees that flank the high, lonely road and above that the blue haze that thins out to the stars and I glanced into the rear-view and caught myself smiling like a loon.

it’s a bane you’re born with. Out on the deck late at night and two gazers see the cabin light flicker of a faraway ship. One thinks, ‘there’s an uncovered window’ and turns to shipbound thoughts while the other begins to dream and stumble through all the chances and headings on the ocean, about the person that lit the lamp and where they’re due and the past and future tangle of who they might be. Are they like me, asks the watcher, drifting with the same jumbled fears and hopes or set on some great purpose? Do they carry the same longings, the same idleness, and what do they see when they look out at lights from distant ships? And how can I be sure of the truth of any of it, when the ship I’ve seen is still and static on the horizon as a wood block on a blue tabletop but I know it must be bucking and rolling on the waves like my own? That’s a trick of the eyes I know about, where are the tricks out of my reckoning? So, dreams of the other figure hunched over the cabin lamp are just as solid and real as the things you see with your own eyes. That’s how they come to be written down and still ring true.

Every light in a passing ship is a story. And the glimpse of a city bedroom from a train on the elevated track, that face flashing by in the back of a cab, the tunnel of green I step into on my weekend strolls.