Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Let it go. Commentary is not compulsory. This isn’t radio. You don’t have to notice every colourful detail. Drink your coffee. And get back to the road.

  Track read Danny’s Plotlands book. Danny fiddled with his black box, adjusting dials, tapping keys, making notes in a ruled ledger. I prepared for the coming alpine assault by dipping into Arthur Norton’s journals. Trying to find a clue to his state of mind at the time of his expedition to the Peruvian interior, the vanishing.

  Retirement came early.

  For the next ten years I extracted as much enjoyment out of life as perhaps ever falls to the lot of ordinary unambitious mortals; but at the end of this time I fell among thieves and, as misfortunes rarely come single, the Hemileia must needs play havoc with securities in Ceylon at the same time, so that I began to look abroad again for investments and occupation, resulting in a trip to Tasmania, an adventure much talked of with friends now gone, Skeat,J.W. Birch and L J. Petit.

  I resolved, a sum of £2,000 wasted, in the unrewarded pursuit of precious metals, to attempt the only remaining sub-continent that I had never visited, South America. My age and partial incapacity, a troublesome knee-joint, should have argued against the enterprise. Sensations of doubt and uncertainty, premonitions derived from the belief that no free-born Scotsman had any business in a land bedevilled by Papist rogues and cassocked inebriates, could keep me from Tilbury, and my passage, by way of the islands of Barbadoes and Jamaica, to the Isthmus of Panama. It remains my strongest conviction, however, that the great lesson of travel is that we learn to better appreciate the qualities of the land we have left behind; perhaps for the last time.

  Beckton Alp

  Beckton: a fake alp under real snow, a marvel. The ascent, Dante-fashion, is like unspooling apple peel, tracking ghosts. A man-made Glastonbury Tor with a ski-lift (hidden by boards, protective fences). Slowly, curve by curve, viewing platform by viewing platform, the wonder of the thing, the spread of ersatz London (much brown, some grey), is revealed.

  Danny’s brass rods, lightly held by frozen hands, swivel and cross, as he locates the spiral energy, the heat-core of the demolished gasworks. The alp’s a true illusion. Built on rubble, stepped like a Mayan pyramid, this is a bespoke ziggurat designed to be lost, secreted in Guatemalan jungle. The alp is so much in the way that nobody notices it. They rush on, never appreciating its generosity. Being nothing in itself, a bump, a wart, the ski slope offers: prospects. Somewhere to pause, look back. Look forward. Weigh a life in the balance. Blue Surrey hills (Italianate water towers, TV transmitters) to Epping Forest. The cold, glacial torrent of the A13 doing the work of the antiquated Thames.

  There is such clarity of light in the temporary suspension of the mundane, the after-effect of snowshowers. Arctic Albion. High air so clean that it hurts our lungs. The division of spoils, Docklands towers, sugar factory smoke over Silvertown, Upton Park football stadium, Jewish Cemetery beside outfall walk, is as blatant as a boardgame, a three-dimensional map.

  Beckton, for me, completes one of London’s significant triangula-tions. I’ll leave the church, the abbey and the holy well, to Chris Street. And stick with Greenwich Hill, the missing mound of Whitechapel (to the west of the London Hospital) and Beckton Alp. Natural and manufactured elevations. Offering: vision. An aerofilm pattern of constructed things. The lie of the land. Rivers, clay. A basin of eels and veins.

  A short puff to the summit for a large reward; even eyes as blooded and tired as mine can be scraped and rinsed. The mound is an eye: jacketed in mud, turf, beer cans and a light dressing of slush. Industrial quantities of shaving foam. I thought of a Los Angeles crime scene, described in a film book: a manager (pimp) who had shot his unfaithful protégée, before putting the gun into his own mouth. Sucking fire. The New York journalist, cranking up the metaphors, explained how the intimate blast had taken out so much bone, armature, that the face had slipped into a single-eye mask: Cyclops. A blind, black hole at the centre of the forehead.

  Beckton was Cyclops.

  Beckton was the missing eye of Rooster Cogburn (in Henry Hathaway’s sentimental western). John Wayne’s capacious socket stuffed with true grit.

  White eye speared by Dennis Hopper: in the form of a raven. Odin.

  Or Kirk Douglas, Jewish-Russian-Californian, as Viking beserker, showboating his deformity. (The missing hand of Tony Curtis. The stump waved at stalled motorists under the unfinished A13 flyover.)

  Panoptic eye at the roadside, albumen and blacktop. Surveillance systems operated by the monocular dead of the Estuary, bomber pilots, accidents of heavy plant, gas explosions.

  Ascending, sightless, we would learn to see: Danny by touch, Track by good-humoured detachment, and myself – by fear. Of age, death, impotence. The spectacle of open land denied. The click of the ski-lift. The creaking of panels in the protective fence. Hot steam from the retail park.

  I took Danny’s dowsing rods; my breath was coming hard, the climb was longer and sharper than I remembered. It was disconcerting, not being able to locate the summit, not anticipating the next blind corner, feeling the rods dig into the palms of my hands.

  At the penultimate turn, the rim of the western slope, above the Alamo of the retail park, its imported eclecticism, Woolworths and Matalan, World of Leather, light overwhelmed me. I staggered, fell. Reached out for support.

  By and by the heart’s action seemed to fail, and I suddenly collapsed, slipped off the saddle and lay down on my back, my mule gasping for breath beside me. When I gradually came to myself, I could see around me the bones of many a good mule and llama, cleanly picked, while high in the air floated the ever alert condor, said to be the largest and most powerful of all birds; but I was not just then in a mood to admire his proportions nor appreciate his attentions, and, gathering myself together again with the help of a more fortunate companion, I moved on, but only for fifty yards, when I again fainted. This was repeated at least fifty times till the crest was crossed and some progress was made down the western slopes.

  Limp as laundry, I sat, head between knees. Danny, tactful or unobservant, lumbered about the tree line, noting buried electrical cables, the lively detritus of the old gasworks. Track kept going too: under the fence, onward and upward.

  DANGER/BATTER/UNSTABLE.

  The ski-slope had been dismantled, asset-stripped. Waffle-texture matting peeled away, to reveal spoilt ground: deadwhite. Skin under plaster. The slope was no longer a slope, but a series of steps, wet concrete platforms. The lift mechanism had been excavated. The Swiss Chalet that served abominable hot chocolate (dun-coloured Swarfega) had been detonated. The scam was discontinued. The alp would be absorbed, no doubt, into the London Industrial Park.

  But I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t work my eyes. Arthur Norton’s voice, his ride across the Peruvian mountain range, altitude sickness, falling from the mule, still echoed in my head.

  The mercilessly cold wind blew right in my face; I shivered and covered my head with the blankets … It soon passed over … save for the groaning of the poor restless mules, seeking in vain for food or smarting from irritating sores. Poor, starved, over-burdened mules! I shall never quite shake off the qualms of conscience I carry through life on account of these too-hurried rides.

  Norton’s journal fitted this place.

  The thing I’d seen in the mirror at the Travelodge, my double, swung from the resurrected ski-lift: a Goya caprice that I imposed on this all-too-material mound (anticipating the Chapman Brothers). Sound was enough, bringing back sight, bringing back the patterned quilting of the vanished ski-slope, bringing back the gasworks, the complex industrial landscape that existed as a prime target for Goering’s bombers.

  Thick tongue rolled around a Fisherman’s Friend, holding heat, I took my time, breath in the lungs, staring – for as long as it required – in each of the cardinal directions. Danny recalled the raids, one of the gas holders blazing after a direct hit. Beckton had never recovered. They’d brought down a few Germans, you might f
ind shattered fuselages, hanks of propeller, buried in the mound. Bones and boots. Identity bracelets on sheep-yellow wrist joints.

  Once war is declared, it’s an absolute. So Danny believed. There are no winners. Stanley Kubrick picked up the marshal’s baton, carried on where Hitler left off. Call Beckton Vietnam if you want, but you can’t summon a vanished culture with a truckload of palm trees, shipped in as root-balls from Spain, and a few thunderflashes. Palm trees die. They scream in the ground.

  It wasn’t enough to lose a war (that you weren’t supposed to be fighting), you had to be seen to lose: madness, psychosis, afterimages. The last great conflict for American journalism, Michael Herr, Norman Mailer and the rest, rucking over the skull-splinters of Ernest Hemingway.

  Beckton was the killing ground.

  Compare and contrast: Coppola’s lush palm forests, lagoons, beaches (Conrad’s East, the Philippines), with Kubrick’s Beckton. Like a Margate Dreamland. A painted set for a seaside excursion. Apocalypse Now, redux or dead-ducks, is not Heart of Darkness, it’s one of Conrad’s Malaysian tales, an upcountry yarn spun by lawyers and accountants on a yawl in the Lower Hope, the Thames Estuary. A different kind of colonialism. Jukeboxes, hot tubs slippery with seasonal Playmates, fleets of helicopters. Coppola gives it the treatment, overkill, hallucinogenic popcorn opera. Kubrick swoops low over Norfolk wetlands.

  English light.

  Full Metal Jacket is about English light, a fine grading of absence: shades of grey, low cloud, melancholy, forgetfulness. A documentary, with a real drill sergeant, happening in limbo: the Battle of Beckton. Anton Furst, set dresser, perfectionist, rigs up the doomed gasworks with avenues of sad and solitary palms; he fires unpeopled generating houses. He fires memory: Blitz nights.

  Full Metal Jacket.

  The alp becomes the helmet logo of Kubrick’s prophetic English travelogue, Thames Gateway as a future American fiefdom: Exxon refineries, Dagenham motorplant, multiplexes, retail parks. Ford’s water tower. The alp is a grass-thatched steel helmet (borrowed from Sam Fuller, Robert Aldrich). Manichean tag: BORN TO KILL – with peace symbol. Love and war. Snipers waiting at every window.

  The Thames is untouched: ‘Charlie doesn’t surf.’ Charlie works the flyover with the Kosovans, showing his wounds. Kubrick’s explosions have shaken something loose, something unfixed between sewage beds and river. Over-actors, reaching for Oscar-gilt dildos, make too much of the crack between worlds. A nude Michelin Brando lisping his Eliotic pieties and splashing himself with water. Orson Welles, photographed, mouth agape, horsehair beard, snuffling through a prosthetic conk, eyes too young: as Kurtz.

  The horror.

  For the film that never was. A few test shots in a tank. They don’t understand, the impresarios, Kurtz is the thing that cannot be seen. Kurtz is posthumous. Kurtz is place. Kurtz is not Michael Curtiz, Hungarian showman, soap sculptor. (Kurz, adj. short; short and to the point.) They don’t get it. The Hollywood genius thing is never short and to the point. It’s inflated, loud, destroying whatever it sets out to celebrate. The smothering embrace of respect. Crocodile tears of child-molesting Louis B. Mayer.

  ‘Who’s the commanding officer here?’

  ‘Ain’t you?’

  As soon as Hopper appears, on the steps, on the Beckton pyramid, cameras like shrunken skulls, cameras all over him, I know we’re in big trouble. Coppola’s in trouble. Madness takes discipline. Eliot put himself together on Margate Sands. The poem comes later. Coppola feeds Eliot’s lines, like birdseed, to his costive genius actor: to pastiche madness.

  Wired Dennis, chilled Dennis. Dwarf Dennis: cameras, grenades, sweat-soaked faux-guerrilla headband. Doesn’t cut. We don’t see the photographs he took, we can’t afford them.

  The nightmare of America is the hysterical belligerence of non-combatants: excused service Waynes, flatfoot Nixons and flatulent L.B. Johnsons, the Bush baby in Texan reserve uniform. Faking orgasms of righteous indignation. At the perfidy of others who lie more effectively than they do.

  Beckton Alp, as Danny the Dowser discovers, is replete with lies, substantial debris. Memory deposits of actual raids and staged battles are indistinguishable. Generators of false history. A viewing platform on past and future.

  ‘Pernicious dust.’

  That’s what Kubrick said. Beckton: Hué. Coal-blackfaces of actors and crew. He wanted dignity, pathos. Andrew Joseph Russell’s photographs from the American Civil War. The dead of Gettysburg recorded by Timothy O’Sullivan. He wanted the destroyed buildings of the Paris Commune of 1871 in an anonymous stereoscopic view. He wanted Roger Fulton at Balaclava. Reality with its faint ghosts (where subjects moved). He wanted Julia Margaret Cameron (soft at the edges) for his own portrait: serious man with beard.

  And he got Matthew Modine, an actor. A well-intentioned amateur with an expensive camera (it passes the time). He got coal-dust. The print of mortality.

  Turning at last to the east, the zone into which we will soon walk, our destination of choice, I am stopped, heart-struck, by the futility of it: my journey, the book. London is leeched from the chart. It is white, hazy, phantom forests of pylons. Upcountry, Essex belongs to the warring tribes, guerrilla killers, driller killers, Ecstasy bandits. I’ve written pieces slighting the Sleeman brothers, taking the mickey out of O’Driscoll. I was safe in Hackney. But footloose in Basildon? Petrified in Purfleet? Describe them, use them for local colour, but keep clear. I wasn’t stupid enough to arrange a meeting with Mr Big, Declan Mocatta. Mocatta was my Kurtz. Off-screen. And best left there.

  But what if it’s already too late? What if, like Heart of Darkness, this tale is being told backwards? What if someone else, out on the coast, is the true narrator? Then I am Kurtz, gone native, addicted to savagery. Listening to drums. Waiting for the bullet. Terminate with extreme prejudice.’

  Danny, face to the west, rescued me. He had a text for every occasion. A book of local history cobbled together by one of those green walkers who dedicate their lives to revealing the location of London’s few remaining secret spaces.

  The dowser read badly, no rhythm, no emphasis, gaps in the wrong places. The drone was soothing. He taught me what to do: abort, abandon. Head for home along the sewage outfall. Take a train from Fenchurch Street. Go looking for Marina Fountain.

  Danny held his book at arm’s-length. And he growled.

  Leaning on a creosoted railing, London makes sense. There is a pattern, a working design. And there’s a word for it too: Obscenery. Stuttering movement on the road. Distant river. The temporal membrane dissolves, in such a way that the viewer becomes the thing he is looking at. Green rays of the setting sun strip flesh from the bone. He’s done it, vanished into a Jimmy Seed apocalypse, an epic painting, an intensity that the writer knows he will never achieve. So he settles for quotation, echoes of other men. For photographs. Documentary retrievals. Memory prompts. Useless. We are still on the inside of the outside, searching for fissures. Trapped in an envelope of diesel dust. From the summit of Beckton Alp, view is raw and absolute and unappeased.

  ‘Is there an author?’ I asked. ‘For this flannel?’

  ‘Yes,’ Danny said. ‘A Mr Norton. A.M. Norton. Dead, I believe. Car crash on the M25. He was trying to read and drive.’

  The cold did things to Track’s hair, despite the pins, combs, clips. The Polynesian rescue kit. She was obliged to notice it, deal with it; pat, pluck, wrestle (like ironing seaweed). Her hair helmet was crisped with frost, dead weight. She was fit, strong-necked, but the mass of curls and knots was a nuisance, a burden. And, when the day, the adventure, reached that stage – self-conscious hair – it was time to quit. Regroup. Return home.

  She had had enough for now, more than enough (of Norton and Beckton); she wanted to be in the studio with the heaters that didn’t work. Her table: yellow pencils in a blue jar, black notebooks, tray of reduced (stamp-sized) colour images. Green ink and pens with nibs. The fuss of the road ordered, laid out in columns, pictographs, glyphs. Her words.

/>   Quit. Right now. Norton’s narrative was unravelling in a potentially ugly way. Sticking with him would be a folie à deux, collusion in his madness. The Vietnam film stuff, the mutterings about his fictitious grandfather in the jungle: it clogged the frame. Norton had his uses – as an unreliable guide, dredger of oddball facts and fables – but, in his mulish way, he wanted to take over the lives of those who accompanied him, the road itself, the weather. This nose-pinching cold was his doing: that line about ‘fake alp under real snow’.

  Track was sick of his consciousness: of being involved with it, implicated in its traumas. Everything that had happened to them, since that first afternoon walking to Aldgate Pump, had been refracted through Norton’s fiction, his voice. The unplaceable accent. The half-truths. The bending and warping of a simple event, a walk.

  She was unprepared for echopraxis. The mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures. His road, her road. Their road. It didn’t work.

  She wanted to consider other things. Would she, for example, go back to Seattle in the summer? Her mother? The drapes, the net. A mistake? She’d been thinking of that place by the sea in Bergman’s film Persona. Another male fantasy. Barbecued monks. Dykes on heat. But a good clean house in which to work. Should she go with Ollie to Sweden? Was she more like Liv Ullmann (height, lips, weight of hair)? Or Bibi Andersson? Apparently practical, actually out of it, on the edge: a reader of other women’s letters. She’d read Ollie’s diaries. The boy, Reo Sleeman, didn’t send letters. Sweden might be good, expensive. One of the islands. Ollie had stolen her mac. That’s where it had gone. Like Bibi Andersson, much too big for her. Never using her specs, except in the studio. Ollie’s little vanities. She was one of those people. It was easier to talk to her, properly, on the phone. If she couldn’t get a show, sell a couple of things, they’d have to give up the lease. There might be a message, at home, from Ollie. There would be, for sure. Ollie at the seaside.