The Divine Inside Of Thoughts Picturing the memory of where I grew up… To us, this remembering, the entering inside of memories and dragging out of all you could get your hands on, how sad it made you feel, everything so far away from what it feels like now – watching it, always, in vain, because there is no memory. Man looks out on reality through an intervening and only partially transparent medium – his language. Thus the real things of memory are overlaid by verbal taints; to feel a thing without language, to be filtered through the myriad implications of language, and at last to be remembered among a host of dreams and sea of feelings that all confuse themselves in a blurred and washed out grasp of a once truth. Over time I would begin to imagine old age as everyone you’ve ever loved being dead, all you’ve ever believe in turned over. I’m beginning to feel odd, from all the way back here trying dumbly to day dream around a memory, just to start somewhere near the beginning. And so I sit long faced, inside the dumb calm of my room and think, meditating in complete darkness, followed around by memories, memories which I in turn pursue, patiently, waiting, trying quietly to enforce the idea that I have no real care for it taking a thousand years, just for it all to make sense, but then what sense? What sense can you make of anything when you’ve stared into it for so long, when everything you remember and know has no fixed environ, no static point to recognise, when all memories melt. Do we fill in the gaps as best we can? Perhaps that’s right? Memories of where I had grown up, even then, seemed to me some great unresolved sadness? Or perhaps it was it just ritual, breed, hot and underneath the skin, nurtured in this gaudy backyard, with all its inhabitants drown? It’s a different world every corner you steer or turn, the rules are different, like those of a dream, a sleep that allows you to berserk, savage and without consciousness, the naked potential of the human condition. But then love and hate will grow from anywhere. And this tree has a long suffering shape, is spread in half by its two limbed fate, rises from grey rain pavements to traffic in the bleak brown air of the cities, and where is love when you’ve watched them stick fists into children. The fear on his face the colour of ink. They’d take it back, suffer probably more than his few cuts, but they accepted that…it was the way things moved for them, down there. No real difference to any other vessel that houses our human predicament. The only plain difference is its nakedness, it’s being dressed like the walls of the buildings around here, the skin and paint cracked. The pealing facades of the structures opened up, by the harm of not thinking, by the empty attitudes of those who keep it. The red brick showing through, through holes, and the collapse of its guise. The early lineaments of the estate were fixed in mind as some great feast upon the naked human condition. You’d see children just old enough to walk, squat, with bare feet playing among the gardens of the re-let houses. The punctured brown metal sheets that covered the windows torn down, those old enough to traverse its entrance jumping in and out of the building through its openings. On into the night now, armed with fireworks and screw-drivers, the innocence gone, snuffed out on these pavements and roads among the long shadows and the street lights. The picture of youth etched out so unnaturally in front of you, left out to roam alone like animals, with small red eyes protracted out against dirty faces, the aerosol still stringing in the back of your throat. Being that young we’d move around, the sun constantly in our eyes, giving itself up through the cold air that would burn your cheeks. The damp grey wrinkled tar of the roads splitting off into patches, no grey quite the same as the next, I’d follow them around the estate, pick one shade and see how far you could get on it, jumping around with the sun in our eyes trying to make it to the next corner. The streets of the estate were cold and slow, now and again some backward argument would spill out into the street. Some drunken son confronting his father, heads emerge from every conceivable glass orifice, the son knocked to the floor, the old man hung over him, the floored body, screaming down into him…still trying to teach. And yet despite all this rackety grey I grew to the grave maturity of 16 or 17, seeing at around this time the quiet shape of everything outside the estate. The divine inside of thoughts…(African theatre is not watching your black friend on drugs) We were in the Wharf bar, there in our corner of the room, all six of us an others dipping in and out as the night drew on. The feeling that everything that was spoken of held some great significance, that it played orchestra to your thoughts, leading them off into some diligent force that consumed you. One brief pause, like a turn to childhood; the fragrance induced glimpse at what it was to exist for that moment, paused and illuminated. Made tangent on that brief half wave of feeling, the past. Back at Dave’s, Parry being sat there, like a black James Dean, his tight frame poised and everyone in the room is watching his lips, he’s got a beautiful voice and somewhere in these enchanting tones of his recollection he slows down the hearts of everyone listening. The dim red bulb in the ceiling catching the smoke, gathering it into the high space of the roof, making waves, but everyone’s attention is on his words, he’s reading extracts from some dog eared collection of old pieces of paper, his own poetry I suppose. I notice Dave in the corner of the room and move over to him. He’s reclined in a large chair smoking Kief cigarettes and talking about Parry’s energy to a girl I’ve never seen before, he turns away from her, winks at me amid the commotion of people and mouths something along the lines of this girl thinking Parry is Pound. His huge Christ like figure with a look, young, serious, hung from bright sharp lineaments. Sitting there with his dark eyes on everyone, astounded and greedy for everything, watching people and things, but also a great drugs man, anything in the way of kicks he would rally around intensely and ensure 100% application, being as gracious as he was human he suffered for it mostly. Eddy and Andy slide into the room through the door, the smoky inlet carrying fragments of attention away from Parry. They begin to heckle him, complaining that he was riddling their phantasms, folding over the delirium of their drug crazed vision; “poetry was for the cold drain of tomorrows morning, when the waves of feeling had dispersed, gone, leaving the soul open and unhinged by what it no longer felt.” So Parry puts down the pages and disappears off into the kitchen. Dave suggests we show this girl the kitchen and introduce her to Parry, as we get up I noticed that across from our window, the earlier sunny tenement had turned to a sunken dust. It felt like it should mean something, but only felt, never does make any more sense than that. We stumbled out over the crowded floor into the hallway. The girl turning as we get half way down the corridor, not noticing I walk straight into her, flipping out for a moment at being so close to her that I could taste her breathe, she’s got beautiful eyes…then snap out of it. “Sorry”, “That’s…ok”. She replies under her breathe, pushing me away from her and turning off into the kitchen. In the kitchen it was all going wrong, people edged for the doors, laughing nervously at the shy splinters they feel. Ed was naked and sprawled across the work surface, he had an assistant with him and his scrotum hung laborious and uncomfortably against his legs, Andy and Dave with stupidly profound smiles on their faces. “Have some Ket.” Five odd minutes later, the girl having exited the kitchen along with everyone else left only the five of us in the room. We eagerly wedged the door shut, blasting more ketamine up into stinging brains, some one falls over and I hear muscle bang, clack, the balls split and run off across the tables felt surface, be cool, there is no pool table in the flat? Ketamine is in current use as a veterinary anaesthetic, it’s ranked among the dissociatives, causing the mind to separate from the body. And we chose to waste our time in this way; none of us watched TV that night, realising that our lives were frauds, which got it wrong? Sat there, the two of us, watching the movie of our own existence. The other three of us past out, completely no comprehension of anything left, somewhere in between the folds of life. The morning was drawing in and so taking the last of the pills out with us, we decided to go and watch the sun rise from on top of the old flats on the far end of town. We got as far as the old market square, sat ranked, an ornate view too far for people so distractible, we found beauty in every grain of shit we came across, fuck the sunset we had the mud and tissue of the pavement. The tranquil shell of the public market opened up in front of us. The few people that were sat around grew silent. I watched an elderly man walking on the opposite side of the square. Through the soft morning air you could feel the old guy drowning from across the street. Old age the slow footed bent up forms of men, whose paralysed fingers forget the feel of long dead lovers skins. I wanted to reach over and pull his quiet slight frame into my body. To hold the old man; for existing as long as he had. For watching everyone he’d ever loved die, for accepting that everybody goes away in the end. We sat and talked until morning crept in on us. Everyone else was exhausted and we still had to make it back to Dave’s. Everything became ugly at this time of the morning, the calm we had all been enveloped in for the past few hours had gone. People were starting to feel sick and no-one spoke a word or gazed up into a familiar eye. We pushed off from the curb and started moving toward Dave’s. Once back there most people went to find some quiet space to fall asleep. I guess it was with no formal attention to anyone and around this time that I first saw, saw with no regard for sense, only sense of sense, that there was no way out of this. I could see that the slits in the envelope were letting slow steady streams of powder out onto the glass table. From under a heavy brow, weighted and sleepless for over three days Parry snapped out; “your getting that shit everywhere, you fucking stooge.” I yawned and watched him giggling. A smoke silhouette of the room was hung in the air, it moved gently, curling into the necks of people, worn on the quiet shoulders of those moving under the heavy firmament of the air. I began to feel ill again, it didn’t feel right anymore. I mumbled something to Parry thinking for some reason that his mind was best equipped to sympathise with my retreat. I said my piece, broke away from the room and shuffled over to the bus station. I only had to wait a few minutes for the bus to arrive and the journey was warm and dark. As I stepped down from the bus I breathed in, closing my eyes and feeling the cool air brush against the scene, post the death of my feelings. While not exactly invisible, the form of things around me fell estranged upon now foreign eyes. It was around half past six in the morning and I decided to go into the house, I got in bed and lay awake for hours, cold and anxious, with no way of shaking it off, no sleep, just the sound of birds coming in through the window and the light slowly creeping up over the sheets. I’d have to converse with the Almighty, Him being the only other who’d listen at this time of the morning. I’d have to tell him everything, again… *** We woke up every morning and fell a little further down. I remember seeing the sky that morning, asking myself what it meant to see the sky without words…Great tumbles over into God…what did he mean by that? The days rolled on, I remember a conversation with Andy early one morning when we were driving back to Dave’s, sat there with the feeling that I had understood the whole world. Andy’s eyes had turned glassy, out of the car window solemn lawns falling away from view into darkness. The morning air buzzed with the light spray and night, everything rolling over in the street lamps flickering dark. Once we move out of the town the view opens up into the void bowls of the night, rolling off into dark dull silence. Long sad empty roads, blue in the soft morning dream. Light dimly shining through the window screen into my lap, sat there dumb under another ominous dawn. Then he started talking, straight out of nowhere, the coke had opened him up, carrying on some theme we had been discussing earlier in the day as we had got drunk and smoked hashish outside the wharf, the theme of my struggle to write anything I was happy with, to write anything that made sense. “Don’t forget that this little world of yours isn’t quite as real as you’d have it be.” “How do you mean?” “Think of your mind in different moods, on different drugs, you exist in the same sense as everyone else but your mind is detached, experiencing worlds that are outside of any normal state of mind.” “So?” “So record them honestly, you can’t build a house with one angle and a worn out tool. Tell the unexplainable truth, don’t just make your life readable, I’ll never fucking speak to you again if you do, paint as confused a picture as the thing itself is. Propose your soul to them nakedly, don’t dress it up, just fucking write. The second you make it readable is the second it ceases to be life, its life ordered, life that makes sense, not the life that’s inside your head, where a myriad of waves crash and roll back out into obscurity, constantly, unevenly…” The sentence tailed off into a string of mumbled words that he smiled to himself about. “Yea, maybe, it’s still a theory though. I like it just the way it is, without any excuse, just there, for whoever, for whatever reason.” The rest of the conversation rolled itself out, along similar lines until we reached Dave’s. Once inside I sat down and went to sleep. The next day would be special, we all woke early and stuffed ourselves full of drugs. The divine inside of thoughts, and it went something like this…moving slowly around in the room, and in fact this is what we see now, light grey, the pencil marks you’ve made, sliding to the corner of the room to watch. Any further on in and we start to smell shit in the grass. Look up, the huge blue sheet hung over you, along the splashing puddles of the pavement, the damp air and the sun on your face. Butterflies because April was such a good time to be alive, with vague afternoons of nothing, beautiful nothing, just talking, smoking sensimilla, of getting drunk on the grass outside the wharf, watching the tenement buildings at the top of the town being torn down, for recasting. Pious bastards. So we sat drinking at midnight, cloistral walls paved upwards as you lay back and gaze up into whatever it was you were watching. Do we even know what love is, soon the first long waves of our lives will hit the beach, swelling solemnly at the mouth of the sand, and then gone. Shutters up and suddenly God you realise, there it goes in broad daylight, memory like a dream you feel. Datura tea rolled in heavens conversations, trying to rile from inside some hole. “Don’t get too respectable, you’ll end up making rich heroes out of fools, forgetting what it means to feel those old emotions that no one wants any more, hidden under a refined canopy, perspiring oil of Olay.” So she was right; “the heart is a lonely hunter”. I notice she has really dreamy big eyes, the open circumference of her face an almost inexplicable oval dream. My legs shook under me. I envied her extreme disappointment, her beautiful forehead, her unexcited eyes. Her every articulation was a grey breathless utterance, and no-one noticed me as I sat there gaping at the Mellon collie surface of her skin. It seemed impossible to decipher any inch of her, the mute slope of her temple that jumped as she spoke, my eyes falling to the interminable landscape of her neck. Safe in my own head approaching her slowly out of sheer fright, the incredible dream of her face was impossible to convey. She seemed to be reflecting sensation over the room’s heavy blue air. I sat, watched, listened…for a long time, she would occasionally glance up neutral and calm. But no-one can stop you from yearning, and so we never spoke and never fell in love. Tune in someplace else, medication shifts time along a little faster and the Kief and pills have time to defuse through me. Someone gets an itch so and we end up going down to the car for a drive. I stamped about, waiting, the motion of his head was distracting, he seemed to be looking everywhere at once, motioning in every direction. “who’s going in the boot?” I vaguely recollect it being my turn so I climb in, he climbs in after me without a word. Andy shrugs down at us/me and closes the boot. Perfume hung heavy in the cold night air that was trapped inside the car with us, finding me and this friend closed into the boot, the others taking seats up front. I tired to tell him that my thoughts were really weightless and ended up saying something along the lines of; “what the fuck are these drugs?” our bodies like quilts worn around each other in foetal positions. His huge body making oblique patterns of movement. Pure energy, charged, veins rising, he kept smiling and breathing up into my face, I felt pinned down under abrupt currents of some automatic obedience, the smooth flesh of his small waist under my hand, asserting his sex crazed lips all over me. I took out his cock and attempted to work it up into an erection. The thirst rising of his breath hung still in the air as he drew his lips away from mine. The car pulled up. He said dreamily that we were there and had to get out, the boot clipped open and the whole fucking world crawls out onto the street. Pause, rain sifting down through the air into his pale blue eyes. He paws over me and smiles. I pull myself up cautiously and roll out onto the floor, catching my skin and scaring down into the pink flesh. I feel immediately composed, but with elbows and knees aching. I have a smiling image, invisible to your naked eye, of the ridiculous position, no longer oblique, I didn’t care if we spoke again that night, free from any borrowed reflection, my eyelids cooled in the rain. I felt a respite from the calamity, a soft indifference. I gazed out from under my eyes. He seemed to take bite but then rolled his shoulders over himself as if he could only turn by the pivot of his whole frame, he walked away. Sex and gender distinctions were only interesting if irrelevant. I told everyone to go on ahead and that I’d walk up to the bar in a while. I wanted to stand in the dark old moonlit street and observe the still quiet air for a moment. The floor had been abandoned, all but the thin strips of paper that lined the pavement and seemed to stretch of indefinitely along some purposeful course; as a bright, fairly luminous sky crept a little further out. It seemed that the whole affair was lost, beyond record, only in some deranged half-memorised sense had anything been recorded, or ever would be. Another day gone. Somewhere around this time I meet Anna for the first time. She is drunk and flirts with me, its her seventeenth birthday, I know nothing about her, it seems odd from all that way back there, again, like a dream. I was nodding and smiling at her, watching the perfect symmetries of her face motion slowly; her eyes burning into me, making my stomach lift some violent liquid up into my throat, so that I couldn’t breath. Exciting your senses, the way death does in dreams. Her face looked warm pink, the pinched corners of her lips drawing in as she lifted her face into a smile, her eyes dilated, her cheeks forming perfectly and comfortably along the lines of a smirk as she watched me, her lips full, moist and red…when I opened my eyes I sat there blinking, as if to capture in my mind some photograph of her at that moment. But then I had never been fond of photographs, I preferred things as I had remembered them, not as they were. She nimbly stepped around the mess we had made at the table. Her lips were damp and pushed out over the lines of her mouth, gouge mouthed and with her hair falling over her eyes she twisted and glided across the room. There was no light in the room but the lines of her pale shoulders caught something in that low, damp evening, her skin made me feel…well…hear are the complexities of it, I got drunk and stoned, yakking in poor Anna’s ear about nothing, then following her in October afternoons, and finding cold autumn mornings full of lying warm in bed wrapped in her soft hot skin. “I can see you watching me.” And so it went on, I had swapped my friends for her loins. * * * And there in motionless air we turned over pale white sheets, writhing drunken harlequins, drinking mouth to mouth, the vivid resounding colours of the room move, noiselessly and hopelessly. I leaned off just to look again, pressing into an image, remembering the taste of human flesh. Pain so great my pores suffocate. I get dazed by the smell of her, her body lay over me, her lips parted, following subtle luminous lines from her eyes to her chin, soft pink tissue enveloping me, my hands reaching all over her hot cinnamon skin. The visceral world draws up and dissolves it’s self in front of me, blushing, the rush and swell of skin, pressed up against pink palms and between fingers outstretched. The morning falls through the curtain and colours the lines and torsions in her back as she twists around me. Sending dizzy black waves over you, like granite I fall into her and drown, a thousand tons sink, with paradise rolling from neck to ankle. I watch the sharp clean lines of her, she whose curved feet move softly over mine…the picture falls backward into the folds of my thoughts seeming lost irrevocably. She drew up in a low web, limbs outstretched from her centre, and after a few minutes lying on top of the unmade lining she sank into sleep…to dream…to wake. I keep having these profound day dreams about death. I can feel the world ending around me, in my stomach…in the soil…and so what dream did we wake to today? Any of them are true. Only my own memories to struggle with, this thing I love? Just biochemical? And not just that, me, and you my friends? Where is it located, that thing that is what ever we are, and how do you keep your picture of the world forever open, to record a story is not to record the truth. I love her? As mass and fluid, as love… Eh…Nior No complaints, light a cigarette, forget the sullen rush, it gives me the impression of hopelessness or loneliness (I cant put my finger on it), and sure of nothing I raised myself out into pretty powdered faces. There was an extraordinary urge to loll idly against my eyelids, feeling the absurd pretence of a wide open moment, to dream under tired eyes. And for Christ sake it points it all out, lips that mine had kissed gone blue. Moving down over the noises I vividly imagine what it feels like in practice. The rail against her thighs, the origins of her light heart rushing, the thickening sufferance, as the rich primitive in decorate cerulean worn over the shoulder carries reverberant incense into the air, gone, as they openly gambit, under thickening heat coming in through the windows vents, and with priests performing anthropological hunting outside on the front lawns. I replay it again and again, smug under a huge half moon, the naked torsos take off across the scant dump ground with shards of ecstasy that go off in their eyes. In the distance the sound of a requiem plays lightly through the air, the rash progress toward a nimble prize, the pleasing heaviness of sleep its weighing anchor in the stars. And so much for your grand carnival, “you fucking stooge”. That wax milky mist over your eyes, again, you looked as if you’d stared a century along the corona of a star. We have one day, where everything is perfect, you could see the plain on which the clouds moved, traversing the steel blue air above and below, the sheet a flat vast sheer calm. We wandered around in a liminal daze. And then you turned grey.
Copyright © 2004 Elroy Jamoke Lloyd |