A Photo Casebook #

A man with a tattooed forehead.  The waterfront at The Wheel. The zombie holiday makers snapping.  In his 50s.  He  walks through, his expression downcast, tired by the tattoo’s loud noise - boom!  He wishes to disown it. Downcast by the ambiguous need to be seen.  Is the world home to one because the right sort of visibility is available? Standing amongst friends? Noisily alive amidst the visual?   

When that whistle blows
Girl, I’m down the street
I’m home, I’m out of my work clothes
When I’m out in the street
I walk the way I wanna walk
When I’m out in the street
I talk the way I wanna talk

[A lyric from The River] Springsteen’s ‘lean/to’ approach to living being a Baby/They mythic: Work/Play Youth/Age Home/Street Girl/Marriage Car/Poverty Fighting/Dancing.

Underground Inc.

Comedy contains the virus of reality.

George Formby for example.  (To change the example.) 

( 1 lux of ink = 10 blank stanzas written on blue cardboard)

A Wipe Clean Surface

When I was little, there was a toy craze. It was over those magic slates. You’d draw something to erase it by lifting the plastic surface sheet.  Instantly!  The childishly fascinating phenomenon of erasure brought up the, to my mind, equally interesting question: of what was the main point of these things?  Was it to draw or was it to erase?  Nothing that was drawn would stay.  One drew to erase.  Erasing was the beauty of it.  Or the cause of tears.  Set the thing down for a minute, distracted, but with a prize image fixed on its surface, insecure; turn and find that someone else had it and their image.  The erased picture of a cat and bird and eggy sun.  The drawing could be as crass as one liked, it didn’t matter; it was even, being crass, ideal in this condition, because it was to the purpose for it to go: to make the decision to indulge the mystery of that grey bland afterwards.  That nothing thereafter.  Nothing ugly.  Nothing but battleship grey.  Like the prow of one of those naval frigates cutting the blue of the Solent.  However, it did after a while acquire a kind of palimpsest of squiggles.  And there might be a single unignorable diagonal; a visible scratch that wouldn’t undo; the slate’s under reality injured; in a condition not able to be healed, this not being a living thing after all – unless one bought another slate.

Flat Track

Prose is the body’s temperature.  The human voice.  Inside – outside.  As a simultaneity.  Pictured as flat print on a four-cornered headless hat.  A wallpaper widget, a pat of flat.  A voice; recorded by feather, once, appropriately enough, now it is an energy pulse; an onscreen steady state light.  Heatless heat.  Warmth in a place. Simultaneously one is inside / outside. Neither instance however. Perhaps this is a grief. When I first moved to [N.N.] five years ago, taking up my commuter yoke of – plus n. … I remember walking onto the grey platform and finding a curious release in the train space of the track curving off invisible into the green, into the trees and bushes at the edges.  It was like finding the start of a sea in miniature, a small four track wide world that zipped into a who knows where of limitless promise.  It merely went to London Bridge, but that isn’t how it felt.  This might explain the persistence of the graffiti one finds up and down the line on every possible surface, that the obliterating brown paint merely finds a fresh context for.  The feeling that here is a forbidden zone.  A place forbidden and therefore a kind of wilderness.  A place where one can’t go.  As into a word on a page, provoking the writing of the word itself.    

Work

I have acquired an unexpected addiction to work.  To the world of work.  To the routine of work.  To the very act of getting to work.  To looking at people on trains; sharing a space with them for ten or so minutes and then leaving that space forever, to go through the same procedure again in the evening and then again in the morning.  To doing that plus then having a coffee.  Describing it like this ring, ring, it puts me in mind of being in a carousel.  Round and round I go.  Have I finally acquired a liking for this city?