Medway Exiles Club

Uhh... so... where was I?

Oh yeah, train stations.

To walk into a city terminal station is to be caught up in a whirled of glamour, speed, excitement and opportunity. A journey taken by motor car tends towards boredom, frustration, solitude; resignation. On the one hand you have the imposing legacy of the nineteenth century, with its vanity, and power, and faith, writ large in the enormous vaults. In the other you have the twentieth century, which offers up a pusillanimous counter sign of humility, routine and pragmatism: the car park.

I do not drive, nor do I have any great desire to learn how to. If I ever learn, it will be because it has become necessary. But the necessary is not beautiful, and I submit to it resentfully. Daughters of the impoverished nobility were married off to the boorish scions of monied industrialists in much the same fashion. Duty must be borne with grace.

In the Good Old US of A, the railways were treated most scandalously. They had fulfilled their role admirably; allowing continent-wide settlement and a consequential economic development that laid the foundations for the superpower we have come to know. And then they were gone, pushed out and marginalised to the point where in many cases they simply ceased to exist.

As the death rattle of the oil economy grows louder, however, it becomes apparent that this ungrateful neglect was premature. The combustion-fired car - that little box of private space, that repository for regulations, symbol of a selfish and unsustainable life - is dying. The vaults will be rebuilt, and hopefully a little of the faith will return with them.

Dead Stations (Infrastructuralist, via The Economist)

Less rare and special Monday update

Breakfast: Granola and oats with warm milk. Rooibos tea.
Lunch: Ham and Swiss cheese sandwich. Cashew and brazil nuts. Earl Grey tea.
Supper: Smoked mackerel, rice and peas.
Music: ELO - Eldorado. Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder.

Narrative: Two posts in eight days, that's one for each of my readers. I've had blinding headaches for the past week. Don't know why. I mean I think it's a stress thing. I had a... I... I think it's a stress thing. I've not had a weekend out of London in some time. It's just catching up with me. 

Rare and special Monday update

Breakfast: Granola and oats with warm milk. Rooibos tea.
Lunch: Falafel sandwich. Cashew nuts. Earl Grey tea.
Supper: Reheated trimmings from a roast forerib of beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy.
Music: Footie on Radio Five

Narrative: Should anyone still be reading: I am back. What, then, has occurred in the life of the Exile since last I posted here? Well, shortly after my last post I got caught up in the usual round of pre-Christmas drinking and shopping that I have come to resent so heartily and resist so feebly. Then I went on holiday to Tunisia for a couple of weeks. Camel trek, Carthaginian ruins, you know the kind of thing. My photos are on Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/medwayexiles/sets/72157612159208539/. Apologies for the clumsy link but Squarespace crashes every time I try and do a proper one. When I came back from Tunisia I had enormous amounts of work to catch up on. Then I fell in love. Then there were blizzards and flooding. Then my computer broke.

So with one thing and another, circumstances have not been conducive to creativity. Believe me this is as frustrating to me as it is for you, because I have a great deal I wish to say. When I am not writing, I am not happy. I am now backed up to here [indicates large metaphorical pile] with half written notes and posts and that makes Jack a very dull boy indeed.

Tonight however, I'm a tad busy so I'm going to settle for pointing you to an article in The Economist: 

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13139619

Those of you that know me in person will know that food is important to me. Indeed I am a veritable, and verifiable fascist in the kitchen, to my quotidian embarrassment. Still, the article makes a strong case for why food should be important to everyone. Cooking, and cooking meat, it seems, could be one of the things that makes us what we are; a defining feature of what it is to be human. As much a part of us as sex or language.

It's a viewpoint I am naturally sympathetic to, because it correlates with my belief that the individual human being does not exist. It's been my amateurish conjecture for a great many years that the 'individual' is merely a language concept; utterly lacking a historical physical basis. Cooking, like sex and language, are fundamental to our understanding of what it is to be human; they are part of who we are. No human society has existed without them. However they have meaning only in the context of the whole, of the community, of society. The human being is a node, in a web, and only as a node can any meaning be derived from his existence. And only by studying the web can we really begin to know our place in the cold, dark empty blackness of our universe.

I'm too tired tonight to make my arguments clear, sadly, but I will return to this theme in the future and hopefully develop the ideas more coherently and cogently. In the mean time I leave them here as a jumping off point.

Extract from "The Book of Dreams", 10 July 2001.

Feeling ill, in a room full of people feeling ill. A cross between a doctor’s waiting room and a school gym. The doctor comes in, marches up to me and says “Hello, Exile” in a very confident way. He is shorter than me, slightly overweight, dirty blonde receding hair. He is in his shirtsleeves. Despite myself I am offended, so I summon up as much dignity as a sick person can and I say “And you are?” and he replies “Doctor such and such.” I can’t remember exactly what it was.

Anyway he begins by giving me three or four injections into my bicep, I think the left one. One or two of them involve large amounts of clear liquid going into me. The others seem to be for the insertion of small metallic objects under my skin. Sensors or something. And despite the fact that I can see these metal things sitting there under my skin, I feel no fear or pain, possibly because of the clear liquid. He goes into his office to talk privately with my parents. When he comes back, he tells me that he wishes I had told him about the shooting before he started treating me. As he says “shooting” I have a flashback to a moment of darkness, fire and searing pain, and the vision of a small metallic pellet or bullet entering my head near the temple. I realise that I still have this pellet in my head.

Then, either later in the same dream, or another:

I am walking down a large sloping road on the outskirts of the town. I meet a South African youth walking the other way. He seems interested in what I say. He follows me and we continue talking, all the way to the bus stop. We get on the bus, and sit on the top deck, where I continue to talk to him. I appear to be educating him – giving him philosophy in some crude way that he is lapping up. I don’t know anything about him. Then as we drive up a large road, with large dark green trees and parkland on either side and the sun setting to a sort of autumnal afternoon blue, I get off the bus. It happens to stop outside a large cathedral or church, which is down a grassy slope dotted with gravestones. The grave nearest me is very large, ornate and newly carved. I bend down to read the inscription and discover that it is the communal grave of the company I work for, and that all my colleagues names are there. There is a gap at the bottom that I intuitively know is for my own name.

Tales of a Black Heart.

1: Anna

Anna.

Anna, Anna, Anna.

The silver-blue hair hanging wistfully over gamine ears. Eyes, pleading panda eyes; thickly circled in turquoise like a cartoon boxer. Flickering, at intervals, a lighthouse-steady helplessness. Her smallness wrapped in a black raincoat that falls short of her knees. Poking out from underneath, some kind of legging; the lacy, stretchy, synthetic type. Poking out from the sleeves are black lacy wrists, as she sips her coffee. The girlish coffee grip: elbows on the table, a small, pale hand either side of the cup and held about three inches from the mouth. Gentle blowing of her thin plum lips and the anxious tapping of her cheap flat shoe against the table leg. A bird with a broken wing, beating against a shoe box.

There is, of course, a bloke. There is always a bloke. The agent? The photographer? Gopher? Shortly he arrives, in a yellow anorak. He is well spoken. Thin-rimmed metal spectacles and ill-fitting navy twill trousers. What is that he's carrying? One of those faux leather portfolios. And a ballpoint pen. It clicks ostentatiously in his plump hand. Click-click! Click-click!

"So... let's start by quickly going over what you've done so far, what your experience is... then we'll talk about what we might do in the future...."

"Okay."

"Girl-girl?"

"No problem."

"Girl-boy?"

"No problem."

"Girl-girl-boy?"

Hesitation. Bitten lip.

"Okay."

"But mainly photographs, so far?"

"Mainly photographs."

"Any videos?"

"Some videos. I... did. Last week I did... but...."

"You weren't comfortable?"

"I wasn't... rewarded."

"So it was a money thing?"

"Yeah. A money thing."

So... let's talk about money..."

Their voices dropped, lower: inaudible. I went back to reading my book. I didn't want to hear much more anyway.