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Tuesday 30 August 2016

The Sea is Rising excerpt: Part IV: The Archaeology of Hyperobjects.


(This is an excerpt from my long poem 'The Sea is Rising,' comprised of 5 parts. This is part 4.)

Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae
Yes we watched the ships sink,
But I, mein schwester,
Was busy burning the forests and blasting the soil with lime.
I was busy writing the book
-no don’t close the book, you know that should you close it, the final page will emerge in the twilight of a forest fire, telling of painted motorcyclists burning dust amid their hell-fated screeches!-
Aye, but the book, mon frère, mon semblabe,
The trees birthed the book,
And now, the trees are ash,
Or embers rake in cosy little homes
Or logs in cabins for lumberjacks
To head out and labour of a cold morning.
There will not even be a wasteland, just an empty space in the suns orbit.

Oh dear!
I can see the diamonds tumbling out the window,
Oh dear, and the gold, too,
As the ice rumbles and groans,
As it awakens bleary eyed, desperate to know
Who had the audacity to commit such an atrocity
And who first saw the problem
And what did anyone do
Oh, the diamonds and gold tumbles into the cracks,
The jewellery box scatters across these floors,
Once such polished expensive wood, the finest, you know, imported,
The only other place to use it was the royal palace
But the ice has that now…it was of no use to the ice,
The ice cared nothing for the rambling gardens or ornate sculptures.
We skulk the surface rolling shit little cigs, what-we-doin,
Waitin’ fer the ice to crack? Fer our jobs back?
We leave what little coin we have tappin’ upon the table
Drag in the husks of filthy gulls for suppers
brawls fer the great bloated corpses of whales when they come
bobbing and bouncing under the ice. We’ve skinned the cats n’ dogs an’ all.
Money’s more of a werd than a thing nowadays eh
Up above the close shore, I see somethin’glitterin’ an’ glistenin’ outta window,
Something pretty, something deadly expensive, something exhaustively useless.
The floor boards are warped and sodden, soaking banknotes pasted to the floor…
The ice rises from its invasion of distant fjords, it breaks clean and free from its moorings in death-held harbours where fishermen try and murmur
The names of the yolde gohds, try and summon something somewhere somehow.

On the Sea Burial:
A sea burial, is nothing new.
I’m sure your Grandpas & Grandmas
Your Aunts & Uncles were all treated to the phenomenon;
But never like this, this unforeseeable, un-unseeable daymare.
Men haul bodies all day long into the shallow basin of ferry decks,
From 7 til 5, with a lunch break.
Just passing corpses, one to the other to the other to- Bam! The wooden deck.
Tacked up in one of the ship-container offices, a sign:

EMPLOYEES MUST WEAR FACE MASKS AND GLOVES AT ALL TIMES

The ground’s too sodden, or too arid, too full, too frozen; too many bodies;
We can’t make things grow let alone put the dead down in.
At the end of the day’s work, when the labourers, mostly prisoners and refugees, are lined up and filed into their buses,
I watch the boats roam out unto their final visit, to add to the forest of the dead
To allow their final baptism; hell,
The sea’s rising anyway, this is everyone’s destiny…
Still, I can’t help imagining
The wrapped bodies, bloated,
Inedible, and, besides, uneaten,
As sharks and whales alike are already dark, swollen carcasses themselves,
Tickled along by the current
To their final destination,
The shrinking shore.

Merely a dot viewed from the broken coast, but all know the power;
A great swarm, miles square, of plastic disintegrating into micro pieces in the sun;
Of fishing nets lost in ancient trawls, now catching terrified prey for no mans dinner;
Of black and rotting shards of wood, splintering and sodden;
Of corpses of all manner of life, gaseous and hideous, entwined and starved;
“like an isocline of death.”
Here the exiles wait out their last moments; on the surface,
A horizon of everlasting shite, of stinking, gull-walked, dead dead dead waste.
Underneath, like shattered and unattuned icebergs, the trash continues, into the dark,
frozen in the light-splattered waters. Their corpses add to the mass,
like a cloud; visible, effectual, but unsolid. We have made ourselves useless islands.
A boat returns from the dot, minutes before sundown, ice crystallized on the mens’ beards;
I cannot see their expressions, but after leaving a squealing exile amidst the “salt sepulchre,”
I doubt that they are beaming.
I detect a slight stench, and cannot decide if it’s imaginary,
from the vortex of waste over yonder,
or the grass and birds legs I have stewing over the fire.

Over here, they’ve found something!
Somethint aynshunt aynshunt aynshunt
Not like all the seabird skulls an’ smashed tellies we been avin’,
There’s not no switches or wires to this ‘un
Look at ‘im loom outta the ground,
The great funnel over there, the round orbic
Surface deeply and familiarly warm-
Has this machine been turned on?
With what switches and pulses
Could such an aynshunt device animate itself.
I hope it’s not fuels of crumbly black or drip-drip black or gushing choking black.
We all know how the world felt when
We did that before. When we did that
In the glory days, our mouth full of it all.
Not now there’s no birds an’ bees
Barely worms an’ trees… Just us, really, Somehow,
Loping about, bred, dumbfucked,
Twisted with all the old stupidities.
When I look up I see grey and

I need not taste the rain to know every day is another step-

Friday 22 July 2016

Isle

        

  "I will leave behind my terraces and my walls... They will be enough. 
              They will be more than enough."   - Cruso in Foe by J.M. Coetzee.

           It’s Narda. It just won’t get better, the cancer has really charred a hole through his jaw. Probably shouldn’t eat his meat. Good job I don’t have to milk him either. Still, I let him continue grazing with the others on the slopes. Can’t see the benefit in killing him. Maybe it’d leave more grass for the others, but not very likely. I feel the rest of his warm, short coat for ticks and lumps before sending him on his way for whoever I grasp out of the herd next. I often find wounds from play and tease among themselves, or from when they’ve gotten too far into the woods, among thorns and denser brush, or maybe something jagged washes ashore. Ten. I always make sure there are just ten of them. I don’t need any others.
            There wasn’t much more when old da was about. Back then counting the goats was his job. He did it with rough hands and force; the goats would bleat and spring away in confusion renewed daily. It was to feel the meat he said. To feel the bones. There were even more goats when mother was there too, and even more back when the old terraces and the old huts were just the huts and the terraces and people skittered and roamed the Isle completing constant tasks in smiling groups. The goats would skip and tumble about the terraces and be found in the huts. They shrunk the woods with their trampling and munching and browsing. It’s grown back now. It’s even spread.
            The goats have complete free roam of the terraces, no longer filled with rich dirt and crops, but grass and stubble. Gale’s pregnant, so soon I’ll choose an old one to bleed out. Still unsure if Narda’s flesh, hide and bones will be consumable or usable. I don’t like putting out the goat’s sparky little lives, as I find myself openly chattering away to them, treating them as my brothers and equals. It’s not often I have to kill one, though. Just to keep the even ten. There’s the fish of the sea and beach, the birds and their eggs which they lay in crevices in the Northern cliff face, and the leaves and roots and berries and mushrooms of the woods. A good crop to top it off, mainly hardy root vegetables and perpetual greens. I collect the rainwater when it comes, and there’s the stream that comes through the woods around the old huts. There’s a well, too, but I don’t always trust it. Too old. Too underused. I’d go down and clear the tunnel, but I don’t like the thought of the dark, small space. That was old da’s job too.
            I can still talk mother’s language. On stormy nights when the wind and rain roar at the hut an I can hear the sea blast the shore, I whisper some of the things she might say to me, out in the air as it goes from humid to a crisp coolness in the eye of the storm. After storms, the beach is filled with some small an large treasures, and a decent stock of driftwood. I hear my mother’s language in the lapping of the waves of the post-storm morning, a calm swash forever up the bay.
            Old da tried to beat the language out of us. Re and throbbing, he’d scream that on the Isle we talk the same tongue, we have to be part of the same group, we must all be the same. The others would go silent and sad. I remember their voices warbling old un-understandable songs out in the fishing boats coming back in to the bay. Mother would sing her own tongue’s songs when working the terraces, and everyone admired them. Slowly, after old da’s first explosion, the Isle became emptier and emptier, until we had to slaughter more than half the goats and burn their corpses before they rotted. The woods swallowed the huts, once populous, and the terraces got riddle with weeds. Soon, the well started to become untrustworthy. It was just old da, mother, me and the goats. The goats knew nothing. Gleefully, they explored the territories opened up to them. I’ve seen the stories and histories painted on the walls of the old huts. Their colours and patterns once soothed me but now they make me sad, as they are written in some other language that some of the other Islanders brought with them. Somehow I felt their language and writing was much more ancient than I’ll ever truly grasp.
            The goats congregate around old da’s grave, as it makes a sudden and unnatural change in the otherwise naturally sloping topography. When he died, with just me and him on the Isle, he smiled, weak and feverish, rook my hands, and whispered “It’s all yours. I leave it all for you, my lad. The Isle is your inheritance.”

I do not count the seasons as I should. I understand the changes that happen over a year, but no longer have anyone to share the significance of time with. I wait for them. Mother told me about them, the groups, and their many names; “coast guard,” “army,” “police,” “government.” Strange, nonsensical names. They will come, and they will be people, as I am people, and we will finally share the Isle, just like before. Just as it should be.

Wednesday 15 June 2016

The Castle

We were certain it was this rock, circling this star. Undiscovered, uncharted, dangerously far away, and yet it was definitely this spot, emanating signals throughout the universe, driving our wiser ones insane with the cosmic reverberance, a galactic scream. Encroaching the atmosphere, we see nothing but a burned out sphere.
            Ash. A world of ash; clouds rain ash onto mountains and plains of yet more ash, the whole thing wrapped in a confusing layer of signals and data echoing endlessly.
            I can feel it. This world was alive, all too alive, I can feel it resonate and pulse under the piling of ash, in the very spot I am stood at now.


            Covered by bushes, their naked bodies, used to the whipping of wind and rain, silent and filthy, observing. In the distance, on the hill overlooking the river valley, men haul stones and clank tools at the whim of authoritative yells that echo among the grunts.
            “See that? They’re setting up a castle.”
            “This far out?”
            “You’ve got eyes, haven’t you?”
            Fen dragged his dirty, tattooed fingers through his scraggy beard. This was bad. A castle this far into their untouched lands meant that they intended to go further, to war and conquer Fen’s people. It meant expansion and soldiers, and someone sitting in expensive and exotic surroundings eating expensive and exotic meals at the top of the castle. It meant permanence as well; not much could tumble a castle, nothing the tribe had anyway, so it would remain to succeed in it’s mission of expansion, or be replaced with other rich, fat occupants, or become ruins; temporary bases for the violent wandering tribes, for sly and troublesome bandits. This castle meant the end.
            “All I knows, Fen, is this land is going to be drenched in blood for a long time. I’m not sure how we’ll survive this one.”


            A high pitch whistle screeches over the low grasslands, not from the woods, but from beyond the trickling streams, and beyond them, the fields and hamlets. A man on horseback approaches. He has caught Llewellyn’s attention.
            “Hoy! Lou!”
            “Aye, Fen. Aye.” Exhausted, bloodied, bruised. Llewellyn didn’t want to fight. He was a farmer, with simple goals and methods to reach them, but the Kingdom had snake-like teeth and a little dogs yap, and kept nipping and scrapping with the neighbouring kingdoms, sending the serfs and peasantry out to clash with one another over petty matters, fighting arguments with fists strung from knights and standing armies.
            “You alright? Hurt?”
            “No, no, just… Resting.” Killing doesn’t get easier. The neighbouring kingdom’s colours flap from bodies and banners everywhere, torn, trampled and dirty.
            “The Lord’ll be happy with you, Llewellyn, out in the Forecastle. Just when the charge seemed hopeless you had our backs, you got in there. I’m sure reward’ll come. Just like your father, you are, just like old Stephen. You fight well for your lord.”
            “Just surviving,” muttered Llewellyn’s heart to the bodies, to the bloody mud, to the quiet and cold grass moist with dew.


            “Come on! Walk, boy!” Fen stumbled along, rope grinding at this wrists, the horse teetering unaware, leading him along. He’d used up all the excuses he could think of, about the law, the Lord, the King, the Church…
            “No law but me out here, boy. No law but the sword and the stone.”
            What is the law anyway… The king in his palace passes papers to his snivelling nobles, the paper spread across the land to those privileged enough to be literate, to the priests in their church, to the Lord in the Forecastle, what little business hours he must keep between hunting and feasting.
            They stopped in the centre of an immense grassland, framed by some woods and a collection of streams cutting through the turf. “There you are, boy.”
            The rope was untethered from the horse. Joshua Stephenson drew his sword, and breathed the still, cool air for a moment. “Great battle fought here long ago, boy. My ancestor fought in it, fought well. Little Kingdoms back then. All the King’s now. All God’s.”
            “Nothing out here, boy, but God’s law; through the King, through the man in the Forecastle, through me, it is exacted. Make your peace now.”
            The fields are fed another’s body. Perhaps the soul survives, perhaps it rots and decomposes with the body.
            Joshua bends his knee, and reels of a short prayer automatically. His mind suffers a sudden grip, A guilt, a doubt in God. He would repent later, once he had buried the body. Few questions would be asked about Fen; a young man with a terrifying mind, a peasant boy who troubles the lordship too much; his death was foresaw by all. He was a lost boy, in the universe of the lost.


            Killing doesn’t get any easier. Thick sheen of cordite and rubble dust hangs in the air, in the gutters of no-mans land that is the trenches. All British boys here, whipped into being, practically children, torn from mothers, wives, friends; females are tearful dreams out here. A faint suspension of class, but very faint; everyone knows what fine broth the officers were poured from.
            Mick’s hands shook on the guns. Not a bad shot, even now, but his time in hell has taken it’s toll on his nerves. Constantly exhausted, constantly exhuming, chattering teeth in a broken smile.
            Captain Forecastle saw all, wandering the trenches. He saw the young Mick lose himself, his eyes two glinting coins staring out of the mud. He saw the rats, the lice, the fetid toilets, male tears mixing with rain. “Easy young Fen. Don’t want to trip.”
            “No sir, yes sir.” That boy couldn’t be more than fourteen, surely…? Through the trenches with a pot of boiling water for the men to clean their guns. Mick’s hand instantly scalded as he shudders his share of boiling water loose over himself.
            “How do, Stephenson?” The glittering coins spark at Forecastle. No answer, the same chattering teeth in a broken smile, rattling through. A fatherly pat on the shoulder is all that can be offered in the way of healing. Again gazing out greyly at the glinting coins, the rats; itching, raggedy soldiers, soot, grime, and among it all, young Fen darting about with the water pot. “We’re never going to survive this…” Whispered to nobody.


            “Mrs…uh… Forecastle?”
            “Oh yes that’s me.” Stands up, slightly soggy from a September downpour, slightly hungover, definitely exhausted.
            She follows the young nurse through the corridor, her gait strained with a few grocery bags, her drenched coat, her hand bag; the nurse’s relaxed and open in the freeing scrubs, in the heated building, but sullen and bored at the angles. They arrived at the door, partially opened, a plaque on it displaying “Dr. Stephenson.”
            Come in yes put your coat over there yes fine sit down sit back relax relax now open wide… Dr. Stephenson had seen twelve patients that day, all children and old people, both of whom eat the wrong things, forget to look after their teeth, and react strangely to basic practices of hygiene. Exhausting.
            What long nose hair he has. Intermittent thoughts as metal clack-clacks around her mouth. What a strange smell. Dr. Stephenson spoke to the nurse, foreign science words, fresh and exciting to the ears but just as soon forgotten. “Fen could you pass me some…” and the tired Fen would gently fetch various items.
            Just as Mrs. Forecastle was near sleep, the Doctor announced, startlingly bright, that all was done and everything was fine. She sat up in the dentist chair, that began electronically following her motion, gathering about her things, receiving a short bit from the Doctor about the intricacies of her mouth, while Fen leant against the worktop with his palms flat on it’s surface behind him. “Just keep surviving until your next appointment now!”
           

            “Want to know more about your ancestry, Mrs. Iona Forecastle?” No I bloody don’t… Stupid adverts, they draw out the loneliness, but I don’t have any money to make them go away. Out of work for months, constant striking, friends speak up and disappear to black blocks out on small rocky islands where no one can hear them. I’ve chosen to hide away. I’ve had the projected screen up for almost two days straight. Who cares about my ancestors anyway, whether they were conquerors or servants, rich or poor. It’s nullified now, unless the past is alive and screaming, but it’s not, it’s shod skin from a constant ripping reel of the present. Fen made that present worth something, but he’s gone now, and I know he’s gone, skin shod, heaping up on the floor…
            More adverts. The loneliness is almost climactic, like a dusty, guttural, tea-stained orgasm, humiliating and unfulfilling amid city lights. I know out there armoured trucks roll down avenues, megaphone blaring. The show’s back on, some gel-haired idiot with prefect teeth yells into the microphone, probably some dick off the street with a head of air and a head of hair given a leg-up into the ridiculousness of money on screen. Something Stephenson, Mr. Stevey…? Falsehoods layered on one another. In this room with this show, it’s like the world has already forgotten about the food wars, about Big Ben being hit, about the strikes, about me. More adverts. No money. More loneliness. More dead skin.

            There’s always suicide I suppose… But I feel too much pressure from the past, from my entire heritage, starting with a cell billions of years ago in a dirty puddle, breeding and mutating and breeding, until my parents squirmed and screamed and dropped me, and I met Fen, and he is gone now, but here are more adverts, more skin, a world in a room and a room in what could be an eternal night. I’m not sure who’s ranting more, me or the television. Mr. Stevey smiles away. I wonder which of us will survive.

Tuesday 10 May 2016

On National Animals


(image via http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/11/Julie-Larsen-Maher-5816-American-Bison-in-wild-YELL-05-05-06.jpg)

Bison will wake up everyday from now on across the U.S., they will take the hard hits from sun, snow, wind, rain, they will duel with wolves and hunters, because finally, fine-al-lee, they’ve done that thing that they were born for, they were made for, their ancestors took knocks from tusks and spears and fangs for; they’re now the national mammal of the U.S. of A, my friends; they’re the proud hairy beasts of God’s own freedom country.
            But they won’t. They’ll snuffle mounds of each other’s faeces, they’ll bray strangely at slight sounds among the woods. If they saw a flag, maybe they’d try and eat it, but more likely it’d be an annoyance, a brightly coloured occurrence in a day’s plan of eating, crapping, roaming territories and, at some point, shagging.
            Glancing over the fine people’s at wikipedia’s list of ‘national animals’ I see a bit of a weird trend; migratory birds and sea creatures are ‘claimed’ as some nation or another’s animal. The animal’s feelings asides (sorry about that, Hawksbill Turtle through to peregrine falcon.) How can these animals represent a nation when they’re busy thinking of the next place they need to get to? Some countries have gone with safe bets; Australia’s national bird is the emu, which can’t fly, so it has no choice but to stay in Australia and be the Australian national bird for all the Australians.
            I’m choosing to look at this globally because Britain is a bit embarrassing. A lion. England’s national animal is a lion. Your friendly neighbourhood lion, spotted waiting for the bus on Lewes road, having a pint at the harbour in Falmouth, humming to itself on the Victoria line. Yes. Lions. The English kind. At least Wales and Scotland have got this thing right; the Welsh dragon and the Scottish Unicorn, both as equally real and palpable as a national identity should be.
            What I really want to talk about is what making an animal the representative of a nation means. What does it mean to the animal? This is obvious enough; nothing. An animal sees none of the borders or details of cartography that we have coded out over the centuries. They have no way of understanding or appreciating any facet of a nation’s unifying identities. The bison will join the bald eagle in having no feelings either way on the Iraq war, on George Washington, even on Donald Trump.
            The creation of a national animal reverberates with the same distraction that a zoo or mass conservation effort holds; some animals are allowed to live. People will congratulate the bison while fellow bovines are churned through the slaughterhouse. The bison, if killed, will join Cecil the lion in the list of animals that we’re going to get upset about, that we’re going to fight for. Chicken no.4587’s neck is broken, and the sound is unnoticed, while everyone screams at markets for dog meat for being inhumane.
            The national animal can be filed away; it is safe. Another corner of nature is made clean and shiny, part of the booming mirror we like to see; a world of humans, and symbols for humans to appreciate. The bison is no longer a bison; it is an aspect of human patriotic thought, feeling & national identity. Yet again, animal silence is not translated, not appreciated; it isn’t even interpreted, just conflated, painted over. The national animal now speaks, and its voice trills with the vibrant colours of the flag of the human nation it now symbolizes.


Sunday 8 May 2016

The Same Scene 6 Times

For some reason, I have many pictures of this one scene. These are just the few I managed to find on file; I used to see this field every day, any time I stepped outside my front door. Maybe I took the pictures forgetting I had already taken the predecessing ones, or maybe everytime I saw it from a different angle, under different weather conditions, the trees at a different stage of growth, it appeared a whole new setting.







Saturday 7 May 2016

Feeding the Buzz


most of this penned some other time, found it in a notebook of mine recently, some edits & mistakes made in typing up. Thought you were due another affectionate ramble. 

Where the hell did Buzzfeed spring up from? Which internet fad had to die for Buzzfeed to come screaming out of the ashes? Cheezburger cats? (or whatever the devil calls itself) Memebase? Not 4chan or reddit, no, those will continue long after humans have vaporized themselves off planet, I'm sure of it.

Something about the very name, the peppy, white-toothed smiling name that leaves me unhinged. People need their 'feed,' their news, celebrity gossip, treend rants and the rest, fast; in a buzz. People want an exhaustive condension, from events that unfolded over days, months, reduced through planning, editing and posting into hours of labour, to produce a light-hearted list that can be ingested in seconds.

Saying that, there is an extremely unexpected clash in Buzzfeed's publications; there are weighty, thoroughly researched, well-considered historical narratives with pleasingly placed & relevant historical imagery and artistic illustration throughout, and in a click you'll hurtle away to a drenching of gifs relevant to the emotions you remember going through as you watched Friends or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or ate a biscuit or a shoe or a vegan hot dog.

Buzzfeed 'community' is a strange invention within a strange invention. A few attempt to revel in contemporary and memorable pop culture, like the actual staff of Buzzfeed, importantly referencing as much Simpsons as possible and spoiling every major plot line in Game of Thrones. A large chunk of posts just appear to affirm scopes of different identitys, and in subtle ways affirm an us/them discourse. 'You'll only understand this list if you are a carnivore/ a head in a jar/ a hundred year old baby/ from Xville in Y county in the realm of Z. Now I've ranted that out, let me tell you that I am magnetically drawn to these posts. What nuances and everyday experiences do the American offspring of El Salvadorian immigrants go through? What's it like to be a Nuclear-submarine repairman? Worlds that would otherwise be far away from you are (perhaps unwillingly) bare to your gaze.

I am knackered and my feet hurt, so there's probably not much tone to reverberate here... I mean, there are definintely worse things on the internet (the poor editing and general aesthetic of this post probably one of them) but I thought it necesarry to cast a wide-eyed, bleary stare into what I think of Buzzfeed, as history will one day doubtlessly trudge on, from what was just becoming familiar to what is beyond current speculation.

Now, to sleep, unfed, unbuzzed.

Sunday 1 May 2016

The Last Fisherman


(click to see The real-life last fishermen)

Each knot of the net is another nobble in his history, swimming in his memory unwittingly; the moments where his father would come home, cold and wet, cracking the knuckles of his index fingers with his thumbs, standing in the threshold dripping & huffing while he warmed up to greet his family; those same beaten & burned fingers pointing out the carving at port, marked 1604, a crude picture of a boat, which the fisherman's own hands, a child's hands back then, traced out by the freezing beach. Unbeknownst to him, as he methodically counts knots, he counts the details of himself; the view he breathed in of the village from the slopes; walking past the huge Captain Mickey Morton to work on his boat, fresh-faced & wearing new boots; hauling his first catch, being coerced quickly to disentangle and release the young fish back into the ocean; the storm that overturned Morton's boat, sprawling the fisherman into the twilight depths while cruel waves swashed above. He tosses the net overboard.

The knots of the net scrape the deck as the net returns. Husks, shells, the odd wee fish, and a boatload of plastic. If only it were edible or useful... Ha! If only it were non-existent! He empties the net, folds it, ties it up, and puts it back in its place on deck, where it will never be touched again, save by the slime that will build up over time as neighbouring empires of microorganisms duel for the rich nutrients the net has captured from the sea.

When the ship comes ashore, it will sit upon the beach, giving way to splayed ribs, like all the other hundreds of boats already dwindling away; once, those ribs held together a vessel that clogged with barnacles and bumped with sharks. As the fisherman sees the dull glint of his village in the distance, he eases off the engine of the boat, allowing it to coast, and then finally be tugged dimly by the current. His mouth gaping with silence, he imagines his life from the moment he touches shore; his boat unfolding and rotting; the sea turning black, riddled with flotsam; his hobble-backed shuffles to pick up the dole; his face becoming blotchy and red as he wears out a seat in the pub, telling tales of storms, catches, fish and gulls, knots he once tied, an ocean that brought the village and himself into being.

Silently, amid the reel & writhe of the ocean, the great booming womb of the sea, robed with ice, carressed with sand while dancing with rocky cliffs, the last fisherman exhales, and falls over the side of the boat, leaving it to drift in fog at dusk, mooring itself alongside old fridges and washing machines on the rocks down the way.

Hurtling into the end times: How to do it properly, and maybe start again.


Everyone seems to have adopted a pretty nihilistic point of view towards the obvious collapse of the environment. We are falling deeper into the clutches of massive fetishistic disavowal, acknowledging & fearing the visible downfall of the world & all within, but blindly continuing to fuel that degradation; the phrase of the anthropocene era, a band of time revolving around the actions of humans, appears to be ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’
            Several times a week I hear people claim that ‘it’s all fucked,’ that we’re living in the end times, that the future is layered in ancient plastic and bones. Our media and fiction reflects this rather well; countless films come out every couple of years portraying an Earth literally tearing itself apart; a vast swathe of fiction, in no way new, consistently portrays the times after some catastrophe as bleak, unavoidable, and entirely our creation. Commercial news reels off imagery of socio-economic collapse alongside freak weather and quirks of environment, (saying this, one of the largest environmental disasters of our time, the Indonesian forest fires, has gone largely unnoticed, despite its immeasurable effect on people, animals, trees and the land, not to mention it’s origins in the illegal clearing of land by global businesses) encapturing us in a nervous chatter of doom, gloom, doom.
            This is all in spite of the fact that it is human mechanisms, completely within the control and minds of humans, that allow this sort of thing to continue. This appears to be contributed a fair amount (read: a huge amount) to by the workings of capitalist, materialist culture. The pressure to earn just enough to afford to live invokes people to choose the rashest, most damaging option; driving everywhere. Clearing land with petrol. Killing animals that endanger crop. Using harmful pesticides to guarantee crop survival. As well as this, the desire for an aesthetic product ignores the uselessness of wrapping and landfill sites awash with greasy swathes of indigestible plastic, settling on the surface of the sea, at the bottom of the seabed. Education plays a large part as well; people who don’t think to recycle or compost probably aren’t fully aware of the implications of their everyday actions; or, they are: see phrase ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’ This mindset appears to revolve around the idea that humans are big & clever.
            If that is the case, then why are we not saving ourselves? (saying this, we’ve caused enough problems among ourselves to start righteously declaring the environment ours to save.) The basic equations are thus: world ends. We are in world. No world = no us. A very reductive argument, but how do you convince someone that can’t be bothered to walk to the post office down the road or recycle small items that the planet, largely owned by bacteria and microorganisms, is worth saving?

            Whether or not everything is ‘fucked,’ we could at least give it a shot. Think of it this way; if the world is slowly ending then the best that we can do right now is alleviate universal suffering. We should take actions that solve environmental and human concerns; relieve the oceans of pollution and start fishing sustainably and the ocean recovers, and people will have access to fish for many more years to come, as well as an ocean environment that is not toxic. Solve issues of packaging & waste; people will be paying less for items, and the environment will not suffer more bulk waste. Encourage permaculture, organic farming & fair-trade; people will be working in healthier environments across the globe, they will be allowing natural habitats to flourish, avoiding the current cost from commercial farming, and the consumer will be healthier & better off. These are only a few examples that I, a mere literature final year student with a part time job and a broken pair of shoes have managed to fumble together. They’re probably not the best examples, but the technology for saving the planet is flourishing, the means and ideas are there, people just need kicking into gear. If we do solve universal suffering in the face of the end times, if the world is free from the burden of human stupidity, then there is a greater and greater chance that it will not simply be in preparation of entering the dark eras with a clean conscience, but that our actions will have a positive and rejuvenating impact on the planet at large. So the simple statement I’m driving at isn’t ‘why bother?’ but ‘why not?’

Monday 25 April 2016

Green; Blue; Grey; Black

All photos taken in UK (largely Brighton & surrounds and Gloucestershire, from a period of 2010-2016. Camera used varies as does film.








































Wednesday 6 April 2016

Selected Dreams

8.07.2012
            I am walking home from work, and am very close to home, at the top of the hill after Gastrells School. A boom echoes across the valley, and I turn to my left; where usually there is a drive leading to an orchard and a few more houses, I have a clear view of Stroud & Stonehouse in the bottom of the valley, and a huge orange and black mushroom cloud emanating from there. I run home, tripping and struggling against the blast wave. When I get in, the house is bare wood, with rain coming through the roof, inevitably radioactive. My parents are slow and solemn. I look out the window at the field opposite my house, and see the sky turning orange, the mushroom cloud reaching the wood atop the hill there. A family from down the road are scaling the field to the woods, where they probably intended to survive. I racked my brain for somewhere to shelter, and conjured images into my dream of white painted tunnels and basements underneath the place I worked in at the time. I suggested this to my family, but they said there was no point; at best we could live a few weeks more here, at the bottom of the hill.
23.09.2012
            I am in an old sea town, all cobbled roads and old pubs. It is a secret place, and I immediately feel under threat as an outsider. I can’t remember how I got there, or how anyone could; I had a sense that it somehow existed underneath the sea. I tried to escape, and was apprehended by an enemy that I couldn’t see or grasp in the dark, but every now and then I’d feel my outstretched hand touch warm flesh. A larger threat froze me in suspense as it loomed out the water.
3.02.2013
            I am a Vietnam war veteran, struggling with Post-traumatic stress disorder. I stroll around my large garden, with an old war buddy, both of us smoking cigars, drinking brandy, wearing lumberjack shirts, blue jeans and pork-pie hats, rolled up sleeves.
            Later, at a ceremony or some event, I keep seeing things differently; dancers suddenly appear as a black man in an evening suit, perhaps an adversary or even comrade from the war. I have outburst and collapse. The whole event stops, with people staring. I am taken to hospital.
            This NHS hospital has green, peeling paint on the walls. I am upstairs, and look down on a street corner in Stroud I’ve known all my life, but know it looks like a 1700s German fairy-tale city, but somehow modern.
27.04.2014
            Maggots cover my glasses but I pour some potion over them to get rid of the maggots. There is a town in Turkey regularly visited by a troupe of giants, which has become a tourist attraction. It culminates in a ritual needing to be enacted to save the town, maybe even the world. The ritual is complete apart from the last part- an “open man.” Upon hearing this, a man stabs himself, and throws himself at the feet of a giantess. She picks up his corpse, and holds it to her face like a telephone, and she gains an expression of soft understanding. The giants leave.
12.05.2014
            A virus spreads across a seaside town. The infected go mad, and attack each other, spreading the virus more and more throughout the town, which is a mixture of St. Ives and Brighton. A fair few infected simply fall ill, and eventually die. I am in a hideaway with four ill women, trying to survive the entire ordeal.
            I have now travelled to the town pre-outbreak. I befriend a child, and remember some underlying mission I have, and discretely prick him with a needle without the child or anyone noticing, trying to hold back my obvious sadness; the needle contains the virus from whose results I was earlier hiding. Before this, the virus was caused by a wasp-like insect with slug-like larvae that came out of the sting.
31.06.2014
            A zombie-like creature follows me from room to room. At one point, most of his body is missing, leaving a bloody, gory hole. People call him Bob.
13.09.2014
            A horde of T-rex like creatures devour all life on an alien planet. I survive by hiding in my friend’s bathroom.
25.01.2016
            A very posh woman down on her luck in a musty, useless vintage shop on a cold and rusty beach creates short-lived and fanciful perfumes from animals. She assesses the animal almost hypnotically, automatically, the knife in her hand becoming more elaborate and long and beautiful, until she finally kills the animal slowly, as it lets a horrible, human scream cry out of the animal. The perfumes become more popular, and people queue up along the beach with unsuspecting animals to be sacrificed, the air filled with the constant screams of dying beasts.

05.04.2016

            I enter the black door of 10 Downing Street. Behind it is another black door, number 38; behind this one, a yellow door, number 68. These numbers appear logical and related to one another, multiplications of one another. I enter an L- shaped hall filled with pairs of people, the same person, a young self and old self, interacting, playing. I approach a pair that are me, young and old, but now there are three of me; a fourth version of myself enters, aged seventeen, confident and angry; I feel pathetic against the old, wise me, the child me, gleeful and innocent, and the younger self, cock-sure and coolly glazing over the world.