White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

by Iain Sinclair

  Do not suppose I set such pursuits of science in comparison with moral aims. I don’t hold that man is an observing or reasoning animal, or that any amount of intellectual exertion or scientific attainment can be pleaded in excuse for the neglect of duty. The will is the man, not the intellect.

  Perhaps I over-reach, attempting to circumscribe and set limits on the unknowable; ‘unknowable’ because to know would be to go beyond self, beyond limits, dissolve boundaries, give voice to that which is forbidden, a blasphemy of the truth.

  But whatever fails, unseen ends are served; better ends than those which failed.

  Think what a work had to be done! The price of my vision and of the madness it brings will have to be paid. It must be. It was not possible to have the whole world turned round and be quite different, and to see the assurance of its being good and not evil any more, without being driven back on oneself, and the penalty will come, and not alone.

  Others can do in cold blood what genius does in pain and crucifixion. Genius is the inability to keep out Nature; it is the woman in man. The pivot in the turning world. It must be crushed. That is part of the work, its function. Uncrushed, the work were not done.

  Genius asks no questions, follows Nature blindly: to licence, or madness. Nature repudiates man’s goodness in so far as he is not one with her. Too much denial, too many restraints! Nature says, ‘That force you are wasting I want to use through you.’

  Genius sees the invisible. Men of genius are the women of the race. Genius is the positive denial of self, as asceticism is the negative. Genius-work has in it what cannot be done by will. It is the right leaving-off, abdication of control, inhibition of reflex. That is what heaven is called, a ceasing from labour.

  The act must be half unawares, on the spur, not deliberate. A new thing; no conscious repetition of a thing done before.

  I will do it. And I leave my justification to you.

  As always, your friend

  James

  When the light was clean they kept to the heights. Water table. Windmills. Grazing cattle. Hinton’s sleep took him out of the city by routes that could never be found. Hills lifted from Islington, sudden as icebergs; meadows, streams. The cavernous streets cracked and let him into a tainted Arcadia. He walked through dockyards and wharfs that became forests; sunlight shafted the clearings with an estranged symbolism. He dipped hand in clear fountains, but he never drank from them.

  Always, they returned. Their backs to the sentiment of open landscape; those fields were blank pages. They spun on their heels to face the excitement of the city’s unskinned heart, its glittering towers and monuments. The moment was postponed, the pleasure sharpened. But not prolonged. They plunged once more by Percival Street, by Goswell, St John, Farringdon; the same tracks, towards the known enclosures, the sanctuaries of power. The city was a museum of itself.

  Morning of blood and daffodils, a frenzy of small birds kicking the soot from an irregularly roof’d escarpment. Gull plods, calm, canonical, satisfied: a man who has made love to his wife minutes before setting out; unbathed, replete, extending his sense of well-being to the new day.

  He pokes, he prods; he trifles with a heavy cane.

  Hinton steams, drives like a piston, the nap of his hat brushed the wrong way, ungloved, stopping, staring wildly about, surprised, unsettled, strung up, a bundle of odd volumes under his arm. He is Holmes returned from the Falls, revenant, born again, ‘strange old book-collector, his sharp, wizened face’, clutching The Origins of Tree Worship.

  Fasting Hinton scorns the Quality Chop House; Gull’s juices bubble with disappointment. Hinton makes prophecy from the moisture on the moon of his fingernail. Onward! Blows back the scarf of cloud. Sir William contents himself with digging a splinter of dry mustard out from his raw one-day beard. Lags, noting his companion’s heel, ground down like a molar dieted on pebbles.

  ‘You are heart-dead now,’ said Gull, ‘I was summoned to give a second opinion; I informed them that my opinions were of necessity final. They were, in fact, not opinions at all – but judgments, made of long experience and observation. I am the ultimate court of appeal. It will cost you one hundred and fifty guineas, my dear sir, to learn that you are already a dead man. Arrange your affairs.

  ‘The shock finished him.

  ‘The creeping acolyte, who was in attendance, hovered like a dung fly, with his “Lord Arthur requires… Lord Arthur demands…” Damp-pitted student, scarcely in control of his own bowels. Couldn’t answer you the day of the week.

  ‘“I have done nothing, Sir William,” he bleated.

  ‘“Well, at least, you have done that right,” I told him. Before I sent him packing.

  ‘“Do not shelter me,” Lord Arthur mumbled, “I want the true state of things, Sir William.”

  ‘“You are heart-dead,” I replied, “the rest follows. We have done our business.”

  ‘“Sir, I have burnt my boats. I listened to the councils of lesser men. They led me to hope that there might still be time. I have a wife, a young family,” he whined in my face.

  ‘“Lord Arthur, your time has been long overdrawn. I came upon a phrase in an essay promoting that grievously misguided poet, Thomas Chatterton, ‘You cannot burn your boats when you live inland.’ Certainly it’s not a trick for the living; but the coffin is the only craft that you will sail in. Good-day to you.”’

  The parable was spat at Hinton’s neck, wasted.

  They entered the old Templar enclosure by St John’s Gate; Gull, flushed and hieratic; Hinton, dragging his foot, trenching the dust.

  Cattle were driven in front of them, sullen, loose bowelled, within sight of the slaughter pens. The gaudy shop-signs promised tripe, offal, meat fresh from the hoof. Grinning butchers leant upon axes. Meat dressed like confectionery. The stench of fear. Sweet stink of guttered flesh. Pelt, horn and tail bubbling in the vat.

  But the high clear voices of young boys rehearse the blessings of this newly minted morning. From St Bartholomew-the-Great a wedding choir shapes its cone of glory: sea-gulls under twisted basalt columns.

  ‘Such purity of sound!’ cried Hinton, ‘such glimpses of the real in the apparent. They celebrate the woman in man. It is surely the heartless and unblemished song of the castrati. The true affinity of sacrifice is with rapture. But what a price! Can it be worth it? Manhood plundered!’

  ‘It can. We must eat.’

  Gull took Hinton by the elbow and drove him, the shortest course, down the central aisle of the great meat cathedral of Smithfield, under the sign of Absalom & Tribe Ltd, under the hooks and lanterns, through the beach of blooded sawdust.

  This night place; herds arriving, muffled in darkness, dressed for the table by morning; thick scent of fat clings to the clothes, buckets of dark ornaments, black and purple, glistening pebbles of skin. The animal inside-out. They walk into the stomach of an upended cow; they are lost in its iron ribs, milk turned by terror into acid.

  Gull’s fast is soon broken.

  They join the bloody-coated slaughtermen in Brown’s Restaurant; plain wood, long mirrors enshrining the market, forcing the doctors, the butchers, the priests into a single moulded frame; hot breath clouding the detail, a trellis of fruits and grains.

  Hinton takes no more than a mug of scalding coffee, his thoughts now so completely undressed that they spill, pus from an open sore.

  ‘I know it was those shrieks at night, like the baying of cattle, helpless, pointless, already dead, those hell shrieks, when I lived at Whitechapel, that banished the self from me. A horror came over me, which remains undiminished after all other experiences of horror: it was this above all that determined the shape of my life.

  ‘I am a Knight of the Holy Ghost: I felt it as we entered the gates of this city within a city. I am born of the water and the wind.’

  ‘A fool,’ replied Gull, lighting a cigar, black as lung blood, ‘is known by the littleness of his folly. You, my friend, swollen on excess, are like a dog so maggot-filled that
it seems to move of its own volition, to crawl on its belly. Every thought breeds three illegitimates, every illegitimate another nine. There will be so much of you that you will be altogether gone. You are the book, chapter and verse, of your own Apocalypse. I must forcibly restrain you – to keep you with me. I hear a voice crying, “Cover him, crush him, keep him down.”’

  Hinton is lost in a cope of blue smoke, beheaded, arms jerking; plaintive.

  Gull drops ash onto a wafer of white butter, admonishes, ‘Hurt not the oil and the wine!’

  Hinton slumping onto his arm; crushed in his pulpit.

  ‘We have come to the end. It was too much for my brain. I am so exhausted that I seem scarcely to believe in anything before me.’

  He is surrounded. Gull’s three-button coat curtains him, the power of lead, and behind, unseen, Gull’s full face, reversed, King of Pentacles, bull-heads upon his shoulders, rising, black and ferocious, from the rim of his chair.

  But still he cannot attain silence.

  ‘I am on the side of the bad. I hate the good with their meagre sympathy and their fermented intelligence. I acknowledge the woman in man, the meaning of the prophecy, that which has been spoken: we fulfil what we discover. We reinvent what has been, so that it becomes what is.

  ‘“The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written…”’

  ‘“MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS”.’

  Gull was leaning forward, his head resting upon his fists, dull mollusc eyes, unblinking, a stone.

  ‘Just so. Mystery, Babylon, The Mother. The shriek at night. The midnight harlot’s curse…

  ‘And what does God accept as a sacrifice? See what He has accepted from the harlots! See the enormous power…

  ‘The great sacrifice must be made to cast out prostitution. The cure is in a woman-sacrifice, nothing else or less. For what is prostitution but a stupendous woman-sacrifice? Shall there be less sacrifice in the world when prostitution is no more? Not till heaven and hell change places!

  ‘Prostitution protects and maintains the prudery of respectable women. This is too high a price for virtue. Women cease to be women while they maintain prostitutes to lie with the beast in man, to milk the poison from our desperate sense of mortality. Man cries out, in fear and shame, “I must die!” He shrieks aloud even as he bucks and rears upon his harlot-lamb, dies as he spends.’

  ‘No woman,’ remarked Gull, ‘is a duchess a hundred yards from a carriage.’

  Hinton stared at his hands, seeing claws, knotted, sweating.

  ‘How little comes of this rancid philosophy, from the softening influence of literature. How little is known of prostitution. We must break Satan’s subtle chains – the self-life. Roll back the heaviest stone from the sepulchre. And who shall perform this? An angel clad in white with heavenly lustre on his wings.’

  ‘His?’ enquired Gull. ‘An angel with an interest in moral philosophy, with a shovel beard, and a nose like a stallion’s bulb?’

  ‘Prostitution is dead. I have slain it. A woman has possessed the talisman. But I am the Saviour. I have found it out. It will be two hundred years before my work is understood.’

  ‘My friend,’ replied Gull, ‘you are overmodest. You think of death as a purely human idea. Death is a dimension, like time. Only time can redeem it. You have circumnavigated the theory but you cannot describe the action. The act is to be acted. Or it is nothing.

  ‘The sacrifice will only be complete with the willing assent of the victim. That time is almost upon us, the time beyond words. If we mistake it – it will not return.’

  He breathed: a moist cloud upon the mirror, an eye of breath that slowly contracted, revealing the face of a young woman, floating in the silver; a woman standing behind them, with no hat or bonnet. They did not turn. Red knitted cross-over around her shoulders, dark hair, very young, linsey frock, black velvet body.

  A smell of violets, left too long in water.

  Gull wiped the glass clean with the back of his sleeve. The outline of his hand, framed in a shield, remaining. A trowel of earth.

  ‘The days of the Antichrist are come. Know now that I am appointed time’s abortionist.’

  17

  Midsummer: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.

  Birds spin into hats, they disguise themselves. We suffer the resilience of the silver-workers, lion spirited, boisterous, loud upon pavements: the Hat & Feathers, corner of Goswell and Clerkenwell Roads. Broad challenging frontage, fresh paint and pillars of red Peterhead granite, gravestone.

  Naturally, we do not talk of these things, the things ahead. Does the unspoken, for the first time, put a tremor in Joblard’s hand? Hardly. Rolling a cigarette, damaged finger in a leather stall.

  Pints first, begin slowly. Change on the table-top. Joblard running three coins between his fingers. Blackmail the ferryman. Ungrounded bribes. Don’t say it! Take all the time because there is so much coming at a rush, more than the short night will hold.

  Without preamble, I plunge.

  ‘Accepting the notion of “presence” – I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account – the presences that they created, or “figures” if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew’s Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.

  ‘The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic.

  ‘Doyle encodes the coming sacrifices, Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, in that predetermined calvinist language, describes what is almost at hand – the escape of the other, the necessary annihilation of self. The Whitechapel Golem, unsouled. There were so many figures, conjured essences, loose among the traps – unfocused, undirected. I don’t know whether they reported them or created them.’

  I fumble for a notebook. Not sure if I’ve lost it. The urge towards saying; knowing that what is said is false, thickens the line of truth. The ill-shaped sentence bruises the past. I need a quote from Francis Crick.

  ‘“If, for long periods of time, one could prevent the two sections of the brain communicating with each other, one could perhaps convince one brain that it was in the same body as another brain – in other words, one could make two people where there was one before. An area of research that is likely to lead to interesting consequences.”’

  ‘Hymie Beaker,’ Joblard replied, sliding across the first chaser.

  ‘Also,’ I couldn’t stop now, ‘on Radio 4, February 19, 1969, he predicted the creation of man/animal hybrids.’

  ‘Too late. We’ve already got those,’ said Joblard, as his mate Jack hovered over us. ‘The Third Man: part musician, part crocodile.’

  Jack presents himself, initially, as an alien life-form. The light from the streetdoor shines through his grey raincape. Beads of sweat trickle down his scalp. His thick glasses are misted over: he is eyeless. His arms are lost within the wings of the cape.

  Jack grinned at us: not extinct, obsolete.

  But he was so amiable, so lacking in nervous speedy aggression of manner, that I was forced to assume a terrible stubborn fury beneath. Jack made no imposition, needed to assert nothing. More than any human I had met he ob
eyed Nietzsche’s gnomic instruction: ‘Become what you are.’

  Strong-throated, Jack cleared his glass; listened. A vital witness, neutralising the possible escape of the third side, the necessary stranger, always present when two men are talking. Jack sealed the triad. A new benevolence.

  I truly believe that if we could have kept him we could have changed fate. The sacrifices would have been annulled. The shriek in the night, by this addition, earthed.

  But the fret is on, it’s compulsive. One of those times when it has to be said.

  ‘Rimbaud, Verlaine. Went over the ground. Verlaine said, “As for London, we have explored it long ago… Whitechapel… Angel, the City… had no mysteries for us.” He said that the City had “the atmosphere of a machine-shop, or the interior of a heart. All the heroes are to be found there.”

  ‘And this is simply the truth. They are there as guides – the poets born and dying at the old gates of the City.

  ‘Chaucer, Keats; Milton, born at the sign of The Spread Eagle, his father had another house, The Rose. And they are there in the stone effigies, the Moloch façades. It’s the most darkly encoded enclosure in the western world. Bad magic, preconscious voodoo.

  ‘Rimbaud and Verlaine were, at that time, the great time for them, the time of their time, into that inhuman sex heat coupling, “total derangement”, that was occult in intention as well as effect; the will of Rimbaud and the compliant sacrifice of Verlaine, reversing and twisting, exchanging, animus and anima, reading each other’s dreams, spine snake dramas, double-helix, pain. The black acts. Like Crowley and Victor Neuberg in their talentless variant. “They were full of eyes within.”’

  The evening was rancid now, our glasses slid in pools of sweat across the table. Our arms stuck to the chairs, which creaked as we moved; faked pornographic sighs.