Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (23 page)

London has been, and will again be, obliterated; its vanity, its pride. Crocodile-dissidents, myself included, take pleasure in the Old Testament finality of eco-disaster: woe, woe. Disaster for who exactly? Not ecology. Ecology is indifferent. Ecology is pragmatic. The creaking and crumbling of icebergs, the melting of the polar caps, the opening of the mythical northwest passage, all of this is good news for doomsday professionals: the failed presidential candidates with their blockbuster movies, the corporate entities funding good works while despoiling the planet. And the usual reflex artists rounded up to sign petitions, mournfully accepting air-mile gigs in endangered places. Queue here to book passage on the latest ship of fools heading for Greenland to respond to the obvious with inflated metaphors.

During my brief interlude as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute, after Chobham Farm and other industrial episodes in the marginal lands, I found myself returning, obsessively, to the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. I was on borrowed time, a married man with a young daughter, no prospects, no funds. And about enough proficiency in French to follow a rugby report in a sports tabloid, or to nod over subtitles in a Godard movie. My immersion, by slide show, in Cézanne and the contentious beginnings of cubism, was racing towards banishment, tactical withdrawal. In another life, I could have spent a fruitful year with Picasso’s
Demoiselles d’Avignon.
They were excellent company, those bone-carved ladies of the south. A chorus of voices, parrot-shrill or Gitane-husky, I could never begin to translate. The African masks, the brothel setting, the fierce distortions: they were the cover story for my trips to the ethnographic museum. The galleries were cool and quiet, little-visited. The morality of storing and displaying tribal fetishes, shamanistic drums, carved tusks, grave goods, didn’t trouble me, not then. They were an important element in my London mythology. They were so nakedly themselves: a goad towards the kind of poetry I wanted to write.

Walking through these dimmed rooms, I thought about how cubism affected my reading of the labyrinth of Whitechapel streets; how crimes splintered, beginning everywhere at once, unresolved, re-enacted by those who could not break their compulsion to reach the last page. To see the past as an ongoing conspiracy. Yang Lian described the Lea Valley in a present tense that included both traditional forms and future imaginings: all one, earth, water, cloud, held within the envelope of his physical being. Starting with the sound of my footsteps on the polished floor, the inspection of Peruvian pottery, jugs like the ones my great-grandfather brought back to Scotland, I projected rafts of work for the years ahead. I would try to break London down into scraps of forgotten books, postcards, accidental discoveries – and, above all these, unreadable and overwhelming, the fact of the Thames. Skin without body. Body without skin. The dark passage: out.

It hurt, coming back, to find the museum cancelled, captured: an annexe of the Royal Academy. The pharmaceutical giants, Glaxo-SmithKline, were sponsoring a show entitled ‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’. In keeping with the Anish Kapoor event, on the other side of the Burlington Arcade, this eco-extravaganza focused on the rude colonization of a classically proportioned public space. Kapoor’s paint guns and trundling clay-block railways exorcized any lingering piety left in these solemn, high-ceilinged chambers, with their dainty cornices and established hierarchies of value. Meanwhile, in the former Museum of Mankind, glass-fronted cabinets were exposed in their nakedness, like political prisoners awaiting interrogation. The death-of-the-planet message was visible in expensive HD panels, or minimalist interventions published on an epic scale. Where there was truth, there was poetry, free of dogma and relatively unpolluted by patronage: Cornelia Parker’s hanging, fire-blackened forest, conceived as a response to Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
(by way of the chemically defoliated jungles of Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now
). Tacita Dean, a favourite of J. G. Ballard, exhibited blow-ups of Slavic disaster postcards with handwritten director’s notes. Downbeat endings, she revealed, were contrived by Danish film-makers, for export to Russia; Europe and America preferred a lover’s embrace, a smiling child.

The piece that hit me hardest hung like a vertical river, a thin waterfall, a scratchy torrent of pulsing light. A strip of film playing without camera or projector, self-exposed, on a loop which never returns to its starting point. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, operating as Semiconductor, composed
Black Rain
: ‘from raw visual data recorded by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), a pair of satellites that track interplanetary solar winds and coronal mass ejections heading towards Earth.’ You need to be that far out to get the picture. Privileged bleating doesn’t mitigate original sin. The ultimate condition of everything is
river
: light, mass, form. Torrents of cosmic dust and the post-human shrieks of all sounds since the dawn of time rushing backwards into a forgotten echo. Successive ice ages are coded blips on the surge of a crystal-particle tide.

The formal columns of the pseudo-classical building cannot support this troubled energy field. Overcoated figures, shaking off the rain, step into the darkened room, pause contemplatively, before moving on, up the stairs, to where Antony Gormley is giving an interview about his
Amazonian Field
for a British Council website. And where Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are explaining why they brought home 700 acorns from Joseph Beuys’s oak plantation in Kessel: only for 400 saplings to wither and die. Or be devoured by English squirrels.

Poets, long before the days of drug-company patronage, researched, debated and confronted the anguish of the planet. In the summer of 1967, at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, the Cambridge anthropologist Gregory Bateson spoke about melting polar ice caps. The listening poets fell on the metaphor. ‘The end of the world?’ said Allen Ginsberg, ‘I’m worried about my windows in New York. Peter Orlovsky’s sanity. He flipped out and they put him in Bellevue.’ Twelve years earlier, in October 1955, Ginsberg launched ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery, a converted auto-repair shop in San Francisco.
‘
Howl’ is apocalypse, self-evidently; a long-breath chant intoxicated by entropy, dying cities with hard-cocked messenger angels, state madhouses and Russian endings that don’t end. The ecstatic repetitions, the biblical groans and sticky clusters, carry the poet down to the black water where all human narratives dissolve. ‘Shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open’.

Reading with Ginsberg at the Six Gallery were Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, both registering in quieter, steadier voices, a poetry of place, of threatened birds and beasts, poisoned wheat, lifeless seas: of being in nature. Gnosticism, they called it. Ethnopoetics. Achieved works made from direct experience: and nothing like the dim pedantry of the copywriting on the explanatory cards at the Royal Academy ‘Earth’ show. Which concentrated, as if up before a war crimes tribunal, on explaining precisely what they were not doing and how we should take it.

Snyder read his ‘Berry Feast’, an invocation of the Native American first-fruits festival in Oregon. McClure’s poem, ‘For the Death of 100 Whales’, was inspired by an article in
Time
magazine, reporting on the activities of ‘seventy-nine bored GI’s’, armed with rifles and machine guns, taking to the ocean from their ‘lonely NATO airbase on a subarctic island’, to slaughter a pack of killer whales. Wounded mammals were attacked, and torn apart, by other members of the pod, deranged by the unremitting hail of fire, the lethal corralling of the Arctic cowboys. The West Coast poets, through forms of adapted shamanism and years of ethnographic study and practice, became figures of inspiration for an emerging generation with an interest in self-sufficiency, trail-walking, Buddhist communes: the original land, its gods and spirits.

It had not been a good year, the devastation of the ecology of the Lower Lea Valley, with the loss of allotments, unofficial orchards behind abandoned lock-keepers’ cottages, native shrubs, wildlife habitats, disturbed the balance of a substantial chunk of London. The corridor between the Thames and the orbital motorway. The folk memory of a broader and more vigorous tributary. But it was the betrayal of language that caused most pain: every pronouncement meant its opposite.
Improving the image of construction. Creating a place where people want to live.
Promoters spoke of the regeneration of a blasted wilderness, underscored by high-angle views of mud paddocks forested with cranes, but omitted to mention the fact that they had created the mess by demolishing everything that stood within the enclosure of the blue fence. They warned of the huge budgets and paranoid security measures required to counter the threat of terrorism: a threat they provoked by infiltrating this GP park under the smokescreen of a seventeen-day commercial frolic. And coshing the public with years of upbeat publicity. The product placement of those who are beyond criticism, wheelchair athletes (who will struggle to use the impossibly tight lifts of the Stratford International Station) and young black hopefuls funded to enthuse about training within the shadow of the emerging stadium.

Gregory Bateson, in his 1967 Roundhouse talk, ‘Conscious Purpose Versus Nature’, explained how Dr Goebbels believed he could control Germany, at the time of the 1936 Olympics, by creating a vast communications network, and by suppressing any unapproved alternative versions. If it is broadcast, it must be true. Here was the template for the imagineers and spinmasters of the present moment. You can buy a postcard of the Houses of Parliament, but you are no longer permitted to take a photograph. You face interrogation, forced deletion of images, under emergency powers: Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, the Public Order Act, the ‘Stop-And-Account’ legislation. There is a basic flaw in control-freak psychosis. As Bateson points out, the controller in his high tower, like Fritz Lang’s demonic Dr Mabuse, requires a network of spies and informers to report back on the efficacy of the propaganda. The entire agenda is about
responding
to what people are saying about the grandiose schemes. To strengthen his grip, the controller adjusts his pitch to deliver what he decides the voters want. Or what they should want. What they must be
made
to want. With police cells, camps, non-person status for those who favour another narrative.

2009: Xerox history. Bodies shipped back from war zones, resource-devouring invasions. Black propaganda. Floods. Washed-away bridges. Swollen, rushing rivers. A year of rogue viruses and viruses that failed to multiply. I needed the skies of the Thames Estuary, unpeopled tracks through the reed beds and salt marshes of the Isle of Grain. A healing walk before the bad thing took its definitive form.

A river expedition, mouth to source, would carry me away, so I hoped, from confusion and information overload. The Thames was a kind of empty scroll, a way of postponing engagement with China. Gary Snyder recorded in his journals how he sat writing, or drawing, Chinese characters, but said that the activity had no particular significance. It was a way of emptying the mind through reflex physical action. Like the rhythms of a day’s walk. At that period, Snyder laboured on the docks, and spoke of ‘the necessity to roam at wild’. He followed the cat-tracks of San Francisco, plotting the moment when he would be free to dive, once again, into the great void. Years later, an established man, an authority, he travelled with his son to the ocean’s edge and reported how the body of a river, when it approaches low ground, is ‘all one place and all one land’. This was the world-river I had been dreaming about. A mantle overspreading the wide earth.

While I was making my plans to quit Hackney, I checked the transcript of the Bateson speech. There was no mention of polar ice caps. That must have happened during one of the informal and frequently heated discussions that took place, between the main events, in odd corners of the Roundhouse. I had forgotten or misinterpreted much that Bateson said: he was focusing on the interplay of mind and its extension into the biological world. He explained how disturbing information can be processed to shine like a precious stone, so that it never makes a nuisance of itself, by forcing us to
act.
He used a phrase that perfectly described the liminality of the mouth of the Thames Estuary, where nothing is resolved and pearly sky leaks into grey sea. Bateson discovered a ‘semi-permeable’ membrane between consciousness and the natural world. By means of my projected walk, I wanted to erase that ‘semi’, and to allow total mind, with all its negative capacity, to wash away into a grander self: the thick-running river, London’s Thames.

On the rough lawn in front of the improved Haggerston flats, there is a chart, behind misted glass, in a wooden cabinet designed for community notices. The cabinet features an optimistic map of the Olympic legacy. The text is indecipherable. The blot representing a portion of the Lower Lea Valley, shrouded in folds of grey, reminds me of the Hoo Peninsula, a secretive landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. It is the only solution to the spiritual crisis: another walk. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage. I carried Ackroyd’s 2007 epic,
Thames: Sacred River
, as I plotted my expedition along the permitted path from mouth to source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’

Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: origin of the city, passage between the eternal verities of deep England and the world ocean. Drawing on the example of Hilaire Belloc’s
The Historic Thames: A Portrait of England’s Great River
(1914), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river underwrites an imperialist pageant of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. Ackroyd is quick to notice how time curdles in certain places, an eternal recurrence, a singularity in which dramas are fated to happen, with a different cast, time and again. Walking where there is nothing familiar, nothing to stimulate personal memory, we are not ourselves; we must begin afresh, and that is the excitement.