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.
God knows I’ve missed those cobbles and arches. Hello old friend, they’ve spruced you up. But Raleigh’s ghost still tiptoes past a few wedged beer bottles and fag ends.
and I ride the muddy canalways, gaping at the atom weave washed clean by the rains.
I thought, here’s somewhere to run to. I don’t long for London’s cobbles, arches and corner pubs the way I once did, to be a wanderer in the mechanism. I’m crowd-shy and I don’t walk tall as I used to. In Devon, I liked the beer and the sea and the overwatching moor all silent and untenanted. We stayed in a stone-block farmhouse and you could hill-stumble down to the estuary, no sight of another, no sound but the lap and the leaf. And for a day or two I dreamed of running. But it’s the running he craves, you’re thinking, it’s the break and motion. Always another place that must be different, the endless swerving of here and now. But that’s why people fly away, change jobs, partners, brand of toothpaste, why they read and why they write, to keep running. I’m with the Greeks on this one, it’s all in motion from the first howl to the final, rasping suck when you’re out of puff and you’ve seen enough estuaries and rectories and ale and you’re ready to stop running. And I don’t get out enough these days.
in daylight, even when it has not seen you, causes a disturbance in the bloodstream.”
Jim Corbett’s a sanguine fella, suspended in a sagging tree with a man-eater tigress prowling the outer dark below his feet. I’ve been around the book track many times but I can still find narratives that dazzle and drag me away from the Oxford floods and the grindings of a booze-free January. Corbett’s tales of hunting rogue leopards and tigers in the Himalayan foothills are weirdly fresh and detailed enough to take you right into the jungle scrub. But it’s a life that’s long gone, back when the population of India was only at 200 million. These days the tiger national parks are throbbing with tours and Pentax snappers, what’s left of the wild is mapped and fenced. But I’ve still got my dreamings, my dog-eared, tea-stained library edition of Corbett and my Chiltern wanderings. That’s glimpse of the wild enough.
and logos too. Here’s a reader figure for the press that should start clacking and spitting ink early next year. I can’t decide if he’s more hep cat or poetry-drunk parson but either way he’s out there now, drawn and extant, roaming the id.
like century-stranded Lisbon or Valparaiso but it was damp and colourless on a visit last week. There were some giggles but no mirth. And the gluhwein crowds were stumbling and stolid and blank-eyed at the Christmas markets. The museums have sold all the decent Magrittes and the war fields you coast past to get there are as drab and boundless as war thoughts demand, part-hidden in mist. I sank a few Grimbergers and that made it better but there was no whiff of magic and I caught the night-morning cab to the Midi station feeling, “who the hell are you coming here, skipping the Menin Gate and dissing King Leopold?” Next time I’ll go straight to Ypres, pay my respects and head on south.
but it’s the high-hooch of distilled meaning. It bites deep. Here’s the line-mob from In Parenthesis, waiting to go over the top.
Last minute drums its taut millennium out
you can’t swallow your spit
and Captain Marlowe yawns a lot
and seconds now our measuring-rods with no Duke Josue
nor conniving God
to stay the Divisional Synchronisation
When it all settles down, internetization complete, I hope there are some people still reading David Jones.