The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 4)

5.

                My early days in the Quarter were characterized by a peculiar conjunction of silence and deafening tumult.  The silence of those days related to my life, which I had made hermetic and undisturbed with a surprizing ease and briskness.  People assumed, I suppose, that I was busy with my Pendleton book, and having expressed their terse concerns in relation to my breakup with Catherine, were happy enough to leave me to my own devices.  I had been vague in relation to where I was moving, so nobody really knew where I was.  I had no classes to teach, no emails to answer, no deadlines – nothing but a surplus of time in which to do what I had as yet no precise conception of.   But just as my own inner life was assuming this quietude, the outer, natural world had fallen into one of its increasingly characteristic convulsions. 

Our summers now, as you know, are hotter than ever before, and extend their bounty of clear skies and sunshine well into late September and even early October.  I believe that these impossible Indian summers engender some slight stirring of an ecstatic paganism in our disposition – the summer sunset in October being like the enigmatic Midnight Sun spoken of in the lore of initiates.  However, in December and January we are subject to that other aspect of paganism: the sense of dread incumbent upon our inability to control the natural world.  At the beginning of each New Year, as though to test our mettle, we are lashed, battered, and excoriated by nature at its most viscously temperamental. 

In the first of those out of kilter Januarys, we had a prolonged period of ice and snow.  I recall a strange atmosphere one evening coming home from work.  It was very dark, conveying a feeling of late night or early morning rather than the customary evening bustle – the sense of that time which is quiet, hidden, and occulted from the sleeping majority.  Perhaps it was the silencing of the traffic – the streets were too perilous to traverse – which created that odd atmosphere.  Unable to drive their cars or take buses home, the workers lined the footpaths in droves, picking their way like tip-toeing sleepwalkers across the icy pavements.  But what was peculiar, what really impressed itself upon me that evening, was the mood I sensed among my fellow walkers.  Everybody was very quiet, and everybody had a certain look, almost childlike, in their eyes.

I believe that they were looking around at the beauty of a frozen, stalled city, and entertaining the suspicion that this was how things were going to be from now on – all the steady, grinding rhythms of the industrialized, technological world were going to fall away to a resurgent and defiantly unpredictable nature.  And I really think that at that precise moment, the idea was very appealing to them – they took a quick stock of the whole contour of their lives, the sense of disgruntled panic every morning, the repetition of their work lives, the petty conflicts that festered in those artificial environments, the endless concessions, the small defeats and smaller victories almost lost to visibility like the spokes on a spinning wheel, the lack of real danger or prospect of real reward in their lives -  and suddenly the idea of it all collapsing in a heartbeat felt reassuring rather than threatening.  It was the particular joy a school child feels at the prospect of school closing due to inclement weather – the magic anticipation of that stolen day, that it might last forever.  It was that evening which first got me thinking about those lines in The Circuitous Path, about those young people of 1905 “eagerly willing the catastrophe”, which, in that century, turned out to be the Great War, and those many decades of carnage in which the technologies of the Space and Information Ages tentatively began to take shape.

                The snow thawed, however, and our days yet belonged to the classroom roll-call.  Since then, winter has denied us even the consolatory aesthetic pleasures of the snow, and we have been subject instead to bitter storms and torrential rainfall, to weather which is apt to make us feel older than our time rather than rekindle childhood embers.  It was in the midst of this stormy season that I moved into my apartment in the Quarter.  Later, I thought that this appeared like the first stage of some grand conspiracy to make me a prisoner of the place; that those early days in which I barely left the apartment somehow contributed to the peculiar agoraphobia which I came to experience whenever I strayed too far from the Quarter.  The gales howled through the canyon between the towers like a beast butting its head hither and tither against the walls of a narrow stall; raindrops were pelted against the glass balcony doors, breaking the light from the other buildings into tiny, liquid projectiles.  Up there on the 17^th floor, I had the feeling of being at sea, and the guilty conscience of a Jonah drawing his adopted vessel to wrack and disaster. 

It was hard to think of anything but water in those water-logged days.  My only outings were quick dashes across the courtyard to the supermarket which was located on the ground floor of the D tower.  On the first such excursion, I bought wellingtons and an umbrella, changing out of my sodden trainers in the foyer of the supermarket.  I watched the news on television in the afternoons.  At home, coastal areas assaulted by titanic waves and flooding, emergency provisions found wanting once again.  Britain is even worse off, its countryside severely flooded, panoramas of drowned villages and towns, helicopters ferrying families off the rooftops of their sunken farmhouses.  My television was set at an angle against the glass panelling of the balcony, making the whole a consistent watery study.  I turned down the volume, shifting my eyes between the spatter of rain against the glass, and the images of disaster on the television screen.  It generated a peculiar effect of synaesthesia between the immediate world and that mediated through the television screen, as though the winds gusting my apartment were travelling into a tiny coastline that existed on the border of the television, and the rain from the balcony seeping into a tiny Great Britain were it was magnified into a great flood.  The newscasters spoke with the rising, whistling cadence of the wind, and exchanged terse, meaningful looks. 

        At night, the steady rainfall was seeping into my brain, and I began to have a series of Flood dreams.  These dreams were all variations of the same basic apocalyptic scenario.  I awake one morning to find that the whistling wind and patter of rain have finally ceased.  There is an overwhelming calm, an utter silence.  I get up, open the sliding doors and step out onto my balcony, to discover that the whole world has been submerged overnight in water.  I note with a start that the water level reaches to about a metre below my balcony.  Everything below that point is lost forever, the beginnings of a new archaeology.  By a hair’s breath, I have been selected as one of the tiny Elect, the Chosen remainder.  It was surely for this reason that the Quarter was built, and I so strangely drawn to it, that I, and the other dwellers of the topmost storeys of the high rises, should be preserved to carry the human seed into this New Dispensation, and thus a strange new life begins for us, the Elect, the balcony-dwellers.

   

The weather is always warm and sunny now, and soon our pallid flesh acquires the vivid reddish brown of mariners.   We construct make-shift fishing rods from exercise equipment and speaker cords, and spend our days casting out from our balconies, enjoying a languid, mystical kind of subsistence.  Strange creatures are occasionally witnessed moving beneath the placid surface, providing the vague outline of speculative future mythologies.  A new language of physical gesture, similar to flag semaphore, evolves to facilitate communication from balcony to balcony, tower to tower.  People court one another in a sequence of distant, ambiguous facial expressions and physical motions, leading ardent lovers to climb to higher storeys, or swim across the channel between the towers, to join the object of their desire on their balconies.  It seems that this gesture, this leap of faith, is enough, and no lover is ever rebuffed.  The new lovers embrace, and a quiet celebration erupts among the other survivors. 

Up on Roger Grady’s roof garden, a boisterous party is in perpetual swing.  It seems to me that of all the Chosen, this, the highest point, is by far the most favoured vantage, the most beloved of whatever mysterious Providential forces preserved us all from the Flood.  The party on the roof-garden embodies for me the ultimate expression of an elite sensibility: to retain one’s essential frivolity, even in the face of the end of the world.  In every dream, I am nervously preparing myself to finally abandon my own balcony, and commence the treacherous swim and climb which would take me up to Grady’s penthouse, to the apex of our deluge-shrunken world.

                Each morning, I awoke from those dreams as though cast out from paradise.  The dappled sunsets, the languid ocean beneath my balcony, the strange flag semaphore language moving in waves across the balconies, these things echoed in my mind throughout the day as pure, crystalline flashes of something real and indelible, something which I could apprehend but never quite grasp.  Dreams are wasted on our somnambulistic, dreaming selves, just as our lives, I suppose, are wasted on our wakeful selves.  In either case, we cannot grasp the delicate, transitory opportunity that is there only until the daylight draws in. 

My days then, sequestered in the apartment, were dull and unproductive.  I thought at first that I might actually make a stab at completing my book about Pendleton and The Circuitous Path, but the whole project started to instil in me a kind of superstitious anxiety.

    

The protagonist of the poem is trapped in a cycle of eternal recurrence, destined to lead the same life over and over, the same life characterised by an overwhelming sense of loss, of scuppered opportunity.  In one section of the poem, it is suggested that this cycle may have been initiated by a stupid, trivial incident in which the protagonist (Pendleton?) and an American youth drunkenly mock a gypsy woman in a square in Barcelona.  The woman curses them by “making a precise pattern in the air with her fingers.”  As many scholars have pointed out, if the curse occurs within the cycle itself, then ordinary causality breaks down, and there is no way that the protagonist could conceivably have avoided getting trapped in the circle.  Each time he saunters drunkenly to the terrace in Barcelona in July of 1905, he has already encountered the American, and mocked the gypsy, and already been cursed to do precisely this, over and over again.  Or was there once an innocent timeline, where the protagonist could have behaved differently, and avoided his fate?  

Like many aspects of The Circuitous Path, the episode of the gypsy’s curse is shrouded in mystery, although it is thought to have originated in a real incident in ‘05, which apparently unnerved the highly suggestible young Pendleton.  By this time, however, I had begun to take seriously the notion that the poem might itself be in some sense cursed.  An absurd notion, of course, and yet, had it not proved a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy for Pendleton himself?  He had written it in his early twenties, partially as an expression of his fears regarding how his own life might turn out.  He called it “an act of primitive magic, designed to alter my destiny, by writing it, and exorcising it, before it could happen in reality.” In the end, however, his real destiny had been perfectly adumbrated in the poem: Pendleton ended his days huddled in a blanket on the balconies of the Paimio Sanatorium, silent and distracted, probably half-mad, the recipient of a vision which was incommunicable, his mind becoming as sluggish and quiescent as the recuperative regime of the sanatorium itself, possibly burdened by the sense of each moment echoing recursively into the infinite, each moment echoing into infinity while his fellow patients wheezed and snored, and the war that ravaged the rest of Europe drifted in and out in fragmentary whispers, like the hidden world of adults intuited and half-glimpsed by children.

                I was beginning to suspect that perhaps the poem might have a similarly disastrous effect on the lives of its scholars.  There have never been many Pendleton scholars, and I only ever encountered two in the flesh.  Looking back, it seemed like both of them were a little spectral, a little distant, a little suggestive in their manner, as though they knew something, and were carefully sounding me out in order to ascertain whether I was also in the loop, and whether it would be safe to broach certain topics in my company.   At the time, I’d written it off as the paranoia or subtle Machiavellian skulduggery typical of scholars in the humanities.  Now, however, I wasn’t so sure.   One of the professors invited me by email to attend the first ever Pendleton conference, which was to take place in the small Moldovan university town of Mitergrad.   My suspicions were quickly aroused when I could find no reference to Mitergrad anywhere on the internet, except as the 18^th century setting for La Mashera del Gatto Diavolo ( 1963, US title: Nine Lives to Kill One Maiden), a little seen and critically derided Gothic shocker from Italian director Lucio Soavi, better known for his efforts in the “Peplum” genre.

Once again, I’d written it off at the time as a juvenile attempt at academic sabotage, but I now I had to wonder what I might have found, had I flown to Moldova and followed the email’s complex and peculiarly specific directions.  I began to recall the more outré speculations I’d been exposed to as an undergraduate regarding the image of the Bird out of Space and Time, and the peculiar fate of Pendleton’s friend and fellow poet William Edward Pusey, who disappeared without a trace in 1902.  Some said that his researches into the esoteric architecture of London had led him to the discovery of a magical portal through which he’d absconded; others that his failure to discover said portal prompted him to jump into a lonely stretch of the Thames, a grim fate possibility covered up by his father, the Rev Anthony Pusey of St Saviours Church, Pimlico.  (Perhaps he had also been invited to a conference at Mitergrad?)

Thrown into a panic one afternoon by these febrile recollections and imaginings, I resolved that the project had to be abandoned.  By way of a symbolic gesture, I took my dog-eared and heavily annotated copy of The Circuitous Path out onto the balcony, and cast it out over the railing. The winds whipped it up, and the slender paperback unfurled like a bird spreading its wings.  I thought for an instant that it might fly right back into my face in a moment of pure, portentous slapstick, but instead the winds died away for a miraculous instant, and straight down it sailed, with a peculiar grace and slowness, as though it were cushioned by parachute, down into the watery grey courtyard below, where the winds caught it again.

                Shortly after that, I had the last, and most complex and puzzling, of my Flood dreams.  Though following the same scenario, this one started up differently from the others.  In this version, I found myself disastrously ill-suited to the post-Flood world.  First of all, it transpired that all of my immediate neighbours had been attending a kitsch fondue party on the 11^th floor when the world ended, and thus my balcony was a little isolated.  All my attempts to construct a fishing rod had been an abject failure, so I hadn’t eaten for several days.  Coupled with this, I was badly sunburned and possibly even suffering from mild sunstroke.  In this poor physical shape, my mental processes were extremely sluggish and disordered, and I was unable to grasp the basics of the flag semaphore language, which everybody else seemed to have acquired with an almost psychic rapidity.  Being out on the balcony became unbearable.  I felt alienated from all the other survivors, and became utterly paranoid about what they were communicating to one another with the ceaseless motion of their arms. 

I lie in my room in a feverish condition.  I have some recollection of the other dreams, where the end of the world had been a tranquil paradise.  Something, clearly, has gone terribly wrong.   It seems like it might really be all over for me.  Just then, I hear a tremendous sound, the angry growl of a motor, coming from the balcony.  I pick myself out of bed, and stagger in the direction of the sound.  Shafts of sunlight are dancing through the whole apartment, whirling and spinning at tremendous speed.  The source of all this chaos couldn’t be more startling: a helicopter, painted to resemble an iridescent dragon fly, hovers directly over my balcony.  It is piloted, with considerable adroitness, by the television personality Roger Grady, with one hand at the controls and the other gingerly holding a mojito.  He wears a straw boater hat, round, cherry-tinted sun-glasses, and suspenders that hoist up tremendous, high-waisted cream slacks.  “Jump aboard, Old Sport!”  He grins with crooked, conspiratorial gusto.  The ebullient theme tune of Magnum, P.I. (1980-88) plays briefly while I balance myself on the railing, and clamber into the helicopter in a wide shot.

                Grady passes me the mojito, and speaks in a rapid, excited cadence: “Well, Phase 2 is well and truly under way now, what?  It just happened a lot quicker than I could have expected.  But I knew it was coming……it was all there, in the Green Language……it’s all there, back in the tapes.”  I have no idea what he’s talking about, and form the distinct suspicion that he has me confused with somebody else, but say nothing.  I’m still dazed by this stunning reversal of my fortunes.  A couple of sips from the cocktail have an instantaneous effect on my sense of well-being.  I feel revivified, almost reborn.  This new lease of life, coupled with the upward thrust of the helicopter, leaves me feeling exhilarated.  Grady continues to talk: “There’s a little soiree going on at the homestead that you really ought to attend, Old Sport.  But I want you to pay very close attention.  The whole evening is peppered with vital clues, do you understand?” 

The helicopter makes a rocky landing on a makeshift pad on the roof-garden, the pressure from the blades whipping a series of baroque designer follies off the heads of a gaggle of actress-models who have sauntered over to admire the landing.  The hats take off like exotic birds, out over the edge of the garden where they will never be seen again.  “Oh, well,” Grady, stoical, “they were going out of fashion anyway.” 

“But what does fashion mean, today?” I press, vamping the part of a Grave, Humourless Intellectual. 

“The same thing it meant yesterday, Old Sport: whatever we can pry out from the wreckage below.”  Grady saunters away.  “Business to attend to.  Feel free to mingle.”  He joins a group of stereotypical German youths, clad in a fetishistic polyvinyl chloride variation of the Bavarian lederhosen ensemble, at a Ping-Pong table.  The ruddy-faced German youths are embroiled in a heated argument over the game, and two of them replay a particularly contentious volley in mime, over and over, until Grady catches the notional ball in mid-air.  He extends it in his closed fist, splays out his fingers, and blows the ball away like a conjuror.  The Germans appear to snap out of a trance, and dropping rackets huddle conspiratorially around him. 

                                           

                 I make my way nervously towards the party, which consists of a handful of small, insular groups, when I spot a familiar face seated at one of the tables.  It is the girl who let us into Grady’s party several years ago, and vanished after going to fetch glasses. 

“Hello you,” she says, “how have you been?”  She is about twenty two or three, clad in a punkish style suggesting a slight affinity to the Catastrophe Kid subculture.  Her face is calm, and has an endearing quality of jaded intellectual curiosity.  I take a seat at the table. 

“Oh, you know.  The end of the world.” 

“I know, right?  My name is Christina, by the way.” 

“Have you been here since the last time I saw you?” 

Her face betrays a slight chagrin.  “Yeah.  I tried to leave a few times at first, but it just wasn’t happening.  I dunno, there was something weird about the Quarter, you know?  Like it envelops you, or something.  Every time I tried to leave, the outside world felt either threatening, or really uninteresting, you know what I mean?  Of course, if I had left, where would I be now?  Davy Jones’ Locker, with all the rest.”

A girl comes to our table with a tray, and leaves us fresh cocktails in plastic cups like they used to have at concerts.  I ask Christina if she lost her parents.  “I guess so.  I don’t really think about them that much.  They were all screwed up.  They were, like, middle-aged swingers and pill-poppers.  It was more like I was their parent, you know what I mean?  They wanted me to work in television, and used to, like, virtually pimp me off to these connections they had.  I don’t think about them too much.  Hey, you know there’s a theme to this evening’s party?  Grady said that we have to figure out which sign of the Zodiac each of the people represent.  He also said that Sheldrake might be here, but I think he was putting me on about that.  Now, let me see, I assume that Grady must be Aries, and the Iguana Twins have to be Gemini, obviously, but what about the rest?” 

                I look over at the nearest group to us.  They are vamping a nautical theme.  There is a Popeye and Olive Oyl, a Captain Birdseye, a Sea Dog Dark Rum sailor, a Captain Morgan, and a Captain Ahab.  They are snorting lines of ketamine from an old barrel, and dancing to techno music.  With a look of zealous concentration etched into his hoary face, Ahab pounds his stump against the ground to the beat while the others clap and cheer him on.  As a group, they are in high spirits, but there is a look about them which gives you the heebie-jeebies.  Captain Birdseye slumps against the barrel and hugs his knees, a look of stark terror in his eyes.  He is haunted by the same lobsters that pursued Satre down the Champ Elysees. 

Finding no obvious Zodiacal parallels in these personages, I continue to scan the crowd, my eyes now resting on the inexhaustible comedienne Maxi Mediumwave.  Unsurprisingly, the end of the world caught Maxi in the middle of pantomime season, and this evening she is clad – literally and ingeniously – as Jack and the Beanstalk.  She wears a one-piece body suit which is festooned in a dense tangle of lush green vines.  Somewhere between her naval and bosom hangs Jack, his face in profile revealing a look of hopeful determination.  On her shoulder, the ravenous giant leans over the parapet of his castle, mouth watering and eyes glinting with epicurean malice. 

Mediumwave confers with a gypsy fortune teller, who passes her a card.  “Always the Tower,” she sighs, eyeing our table suspiciously, “always the Tower.”

                Christina is also scanning the crowd for Zodiacal correspondences.  “The one I really can’t figure out,” she says, “is Tilda Swinton.  Which one is she?” 

I follow her eyes to a table where the actress and unconventional fashion muse Tilda Swinton sits by herself reading a paperback. 

“How did she get here?” I ask. 

Christina’s brow furrows.  “I’m not sure.  Some people say she came with the Iguana Twins.  I also heard that she was at an ironic Tupperware party on the 14^th floor, and when the Flood started, she climbed up the balconies with an airport paperback clutched between her teeth as a last keepsake of pre-Flood civilisation.  Who knows?” 

Swinton is very aloof, and it is almost like she isn’t really there.  By this point, I’m growing bored and frustrated.  “What do people talk about now, anyway?” 

“Well, there isn’t really anything to talk about now, you know.  The sun comes up, and the sun goes down.  People really just talk about the Party, because that’s the only thing that’s happening at the moment.  Oh, rumours swirl around, from time to time, but they don’t ever amount to anything.  A rumour went around last week that the people down below were still updating their Noosfeed accounts.  It was an exciting rumour for a couple of hours, but of course it wasn’t really true.  Sometimes people discuss the shapes which are seen in the water.   Are they real, or illusionary?  Are they organic, or mechanical?  It never really amounts to anything.  Then, of course, there are the rumours about Drylandt – the fabled landmass that rose up after the Flood, a mystical new home for humanity.  People get quite excited about that rumour from time to time.  They’ve actually built a couple of boats, you know?  There’s one in the spare bedroom, and a bigger one in the hall.  But those boats will never go anywhere.  People get into them when they’re high, and pretend that they’re on legendary voyages.  They pretend that they are St Brendan, or Columbus, or Magellan, or Picard, or one of those.  It’s fun when you’re high.  But all of those things are just pipe-dreams.  Who wants to go back, anyway?” 

“The real topic that engages people’s attention is the Party itself – its movements, its ebbs and flows, its morphing contours and lines of force, its sustainability.  Who is falling apart?  Who is reconfiguring?  Who is adapting to the condition of permanent Party, finding the fluidity, the correct Zen state, to just roll along with the endless ups and downs, all the changes we go through, the slow transformation of the human nervous system into a flashing pinball machine?  It really is an interesting topic.” 

“The practical end of things is under Grady’s supervision.  The main challenge he faces is keeping the supply of drugs and booze steady.  Luckily, he happened to have some scuba diving gear handy, so parties go down to the lower storeys every few days to gather booze and tinned food.  There’s loads down there.  They say it feels a bit weird, lifting booze and food from dead people, but isn’t that just what we were doing before, anyway?  Only then we couldn’t see the dead people, except sometimes on the news.  Getting drugs is a little more difficult, and a little more pressing, considering the state everybody’s brains are in.   Grady sends a couple of dudes on jet skis out to this other high rise where there’s lots of drugs.  They barter for the drugs with booze and food.  Now, the sustainability of drugs and booze issue isn’t really that serious.  The people over on that other high rise, they’re a little wild, you know?  Tribal.  They were Catastrophe Kids before the Flood, so the end of the world was exactly what they were waiting for.  Pretty soon, they’re going to start manufacturing their own drugs and booze.  I mean, they’ve got animals over there and everything.  They’re way ahead of everyone.  So, that issue is safe enough.  The Party can go on indefinitely, in terms of resources.” 

“The real question is: what will happen to people’s minds, what will they evolve into, under these conditions?  The Party at the End of the World is a really fascinating thing to watch.  I mean, people are losing their minds, literally losing their minds.  Their identities are becoming ad hoc, improvisatory creations that vary from room to room, hour to hour.  Everybody is just following the energy of the Party, adapting themselves to whatever conversation they happen to be in at a given time, whatever clothes they happen to be wearing, whatever drugs happen to be in their nervous systems.  It’s really free, but a little scary at times.  There are people inside the house who have really gone native.  They went into certain rooms weeks ago, and those rooms have become their total reality.  In one of the en-suite bathrooms, you have three people who have been living in the bathtub for two weeks, and a girl who’s been in the shower for over a month.  We leave food for them, but they’re very suspicious about outsiders.  They just talk about the tiles, and the sink, and the mirror.  The mirror really fascinates them, because I think they don’t understand reflections yet.  Every couple of hours, the girl in the shower turns on the hose and just starts howling!  I mean, wow, I wonder if she’ll ever make it back.  The people in the tub call her the Glass Witch.  It’s a fascinating scene in there, but like I say, they’re very suspicious of outsiders.”

                I have conflicting feelings about Christina’s description of the Party.  Part of me finds it very appealing, and another utterly terrifying.  Surely there is a need for something, some stable oasis, some familiar place to return to, something private you may only have persuaded yourself was profound, some separate realm which is yours alone, away from the burgeoning demands of the Party?  Or am I just vamping the part of a Grave, Humourless Intellectual again?

 

“What about you, Christina?  Have you lost your mind?” 

“No, not at all.  I’m an observer, like you.  You can’t observe if you lose your identity.  I’m still me.  I remember my first Holy Communion, my first kiss, the illustrations in a book I used to stare at when I was five.  Everything.  (Smiling sardonically, vamping an old pre-Flood advertising slogan.)  Because we share everything, nothing is ever truly lost.”

 The sun is at its zenith, and the small crowd on the roof-garden are all out dancing: the actress-models, German youths in PVC lederhosen, Maxi Mediumwave, the fortune teller, and the Nautical Crew.  Captain Birdseye has gotten a ferocious second wind, and plays a squeeze box while he dances to the techno, the Seadog Rum sailor having taken his place in the lobster-infested K-hole.  Ahab is being very uncool, asking people to feel his stump, and guilt-tripping them when they express discomfort with the idea.

                Things are a little hazy after that.  Now it is sunset, and there are only a few of us left.  Myself, Christina, Ahab, and a couple of the actress/models. We are all sitting cross-legged on the ground, watching the Iguana Twins play a game of Connect Four.  The ground around us is strewn with crushed plastic cups, the spent peels of lemon and lime, cigarette butts, sand, and assorted curiosities that served some now forgotten function in the earlier frolics: the flattened outline of an inflatable woman, an archery target, a pair of walkie-talkies, an amateur astronomer’s telescope.  The Connect Four grid is balanced on two large old books: The Loom of Art by Germaine Bazin, and Everybody’s Enquire Within: A Key to 10,000 Questions and 100,000 Facts, edited by Charles Ray.  There is an ornate hookah positioned beside the books, its pipe trailing off like a glistening snake into the sand and debris.  The game itself is a vintage set, with yellow grid, and red and black checkers.

 

Perhaps it is the deep, reddish texture of the light, or the presence of the hookah, or the look of rapt concentration on the youthful faces of the Iguanas, but the scene possesses for me a peculiar antique glamour.  I’m thinking of Persia, or Byzantium, or the Ottoman Empire, and imagine the Twins as a pair of sultans, caliphates, or rajas, who play an intricate game while they await news from the provinces of some vast empire, news that will have passed into the ethereal realm of myth by the time the hoary messenger arrives into the gilded stillness of their palace.  The youthful princes are unperturbed by all the news that comes to them from dying lips, and the far-flung corners of their empire, for theirs is a sensual, mystical time that long predates clocks, a time of cyclical rhythms that turn about one another, each turning of the great wheels one and the same motion, each place the same one that will be returned to the next time around……

                I realize that nobody is actually following the game.  We are all looking intently at the grid, struggling to remember what ideal placement of checkers is required for a victory.  The Twins themselves are equally lost, and keep changing colour from one move the next.  Despite our frustrating inability to understand the game, a mood of blissful serenity is slowly creeping up on us, like a cat falling asleep to the low, contemplative hiss of a warm hearth.  The sun is beginning to sink now into the gleaming mirror of the earth, and it is as though a marriage of their essences takes place.  The sky contains impossible textures, and the water’s still surface is a molten, seething mass of dancing, shimmering, bright-light particles that seem to conjure up an aural landscape of distant bells, chimes, and dulcimers, memories of sandy beaches and soft whispers by firelight, ornaments that adorned the ceilings above our cradles and cots, slowly rotating as we drifted from one sleep into another. 

The Twins have given up on the game by now, and fool around with the checkers.  Each Iguana takes a different colour, and they place a checker in the other’s eye, like a monocle.  Vamping moustaches with their index fingers, they peer at us from either side of the grid, smiling like children.  I recall all the speculation in the Pre-Flood days as to which of them, Bradley or Lucius, was the bad one.  In the mood I am in at present, however, it seems impossible to me that either of them could be bad.  They are the bright, buoyant, and unsullied children of the Sun card; their innocence is timeless, incorruptible, and perpetually renewing itself, regardless of how far we ourselves have strayed from that condition.  A peculiar thing happens then.  My image of the Twins is split into two separate frames.  The frames move apart, and then slowly overlay one another, until Bradly and Lucius are superimposed into a single frame, and become a single being, with a red checker in the left eye, and black in the right.  When the images overlay, I hear a delicate, suggestive chiming sound, the type of cue they used to employ on old soundtracks to alert the audience to a significant detail or clue, or to indicate the presence of a hidden, magical dimension to reality, manifested in some apparently mundane object or location.  

                My perceptions are becoming increasingly disordered.  The scene on the roof-garden is still there, but it is like a film, or several films, are being projected over it.  The first film shows the fortune teller, more youthful than she appeared earlier, seated in a dimly-lit, cramped cubicle.  She is turning up a spread of cards.  The camera closes in on the card she has just turned: it depicts an Indian peacock encased in an alchemist’s retort.  We cut to the fortune teller, recoiling with a visceral expression of fear.  This short sequence plays on a loop.  The anomalous card is an intrusion from Outside; like a curse, it infects the entire System, altering all previous and subsequent permutations.  Now this loop is overlaid by another film, and I see a wheel, divided into the traditional symbols of the zodiac, spinning slowly.  It is a grainy, degraded film-stock, possibly from an old documentary; I can hear dim snatches of music, and a narrator’s voice.  My mind now recalls earlier images of people from the party, the memories transferred into this grainy film-stock.  As each person’s image appears, the wheel stops turning, and a sign is aligned with each image: Grady at Aries, Christina at Pieces, Maxi Mediumwave at Scorpio, the Iguanas at Gemini, and so on.  Each alignment is accompanied by the chiming sound, and the correspondences make perfect sense as they are revealed to me, although I cannot begin to articulate why.

                My perceptions having finally stabilized, I turn to Christina, and say: “I feel like I’m on drugs!”  Everybody is laughing, and Christina is eyeing me like an amused, indulgent parent.  “Of course you’re on drugs!  Grady spiked you on the helicopter!  You’ve been in the Valley for the past couple of hours!  On behalf of all permanent and semi-permanent Valley-dwellers, I’d like to welcome you to the Party!”  Now I start laughing, and find I can’t stop.  It all makes sense.  The way everybody looked so strange, and vaguely threatening…..it was because they were all in the Valley.  The term itself makes an ineffable kind of sense: in the Valley somehow precisely describes my present mental condition.  The laughing fit subsides, and we become silent for a long stretch, absorbed in the deepening beauty of the sunset.  Our opiated trance is broken only once, when the Iguanas realize that they are still wearing their checker-monocles, and let both fall in a deftly synchronized relaxation of brow-muscles, prompting another laughing fit in the group. 

Suddenly, we see two dots moving briskly across the shimmering waters.  Ahab springs to his feet with a monomaniacal gleam in his eye, and rushes over to the railing.  Now we see that the dots are Grady’s jet skis, returning from their errand at the other high rise.  They have stalled alongside the tower, and their riders are waving to the people on the lower balconies.  Ahab, his voice fierce and booming as the love the ocean once lavished on the shoreline, hollers down to them: “HAST SEEN THE WHITE BALE?  HAST THOU SEEN THE WHITE BALE?”  One of the men roots around in his rucksack, and hoists out a thick, bulging bag of cocaine, which he waves gingerly like a flag.   Ahab’s hoary features redden with contentment, and he touches the bridge of nose lightly, like an expectant Lothario idly priming his erection.  The Seadog Rum sailor, emerging glassy-eyed from the K-hole, teases Ahab: “You’re going to need a bigger nose.” 

 

Grady and the Germans appear, carrying an Ikea couch from the house.  The couch is attached to a long, winding cable, and has two makeshift harnesses.  After a long preamble, Ahab bellowing: “Heave boys, HEAVE, will ye?”, we hurl the couch out over the railing. Then we are slowly hoisting the two couriers up the side of the high rise, and behind us they are all emerging slowly from the interior of the penthouse, eyeing one another to see what each has come as tonight, wondering, as I am, what new fads, rumours, bitcheries, melt-downs, past-life regressions, spontaneous abreactions, or coolly theoretical orgiastic permutations will emerge in the course of the night, what new symptoms and outward manifestations of the Party at the End of the World will be exhibited for us, and through us……  

                I came to from this long dream in an instant.  The storm had subsided during the course of the night, and the season of wind and rain finally exhausted itself.  The world was battered and weary, but once again it trundled along, a slight stirring of spring’s imminence drawing it through the slow and overcast days.  Although I didn’t realize it then, strange things were also stirring in the seclusion of the high rises, waiting to bloom and sprout when the temperature was right. 

The top image is The Sun from the Thoth tarot deck by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris.  The other cards are from the surrealists playing deck by Andre Breton et al, which I discovered at Dangerous Minds.  The images of the zodiacal wheels are from the wiki entry on the zodiac.  Continued shortly. 

The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 3).

Part 1, Part 2.

4.

Time goes by like some kind of confidence trick.  The shells move briskly around the table, and you keep your eyes fixed on the one which you think contains the pea.  Things whittle away somehow, like children growing up in reverse.  The shells move briskly around the table, but at some point you’ll have to put an end to the suspense, and rest your finger decisively on the one you have been watching all along.  At that point, you might think how much better things were when the shells were still moving, when the game was still afoot, and you might yet have picked a different one.  In that way, the past is made anew, and appears infinitely richer only when the possibility of actually grasping its riches has gone.

Whatever was happening to me had been happening for some time.  I couldn’t tell whether it was that I was growing older, or the world itself shrinking somehow into an all-pervasive middle-age, a period of radically diminished energy and vitality.  Whether it was in my mind or the state of the world, everything seemed to be retreating to the suburbs, to a quiet garden where one might sit in the evenings and imagine the emergence of wild, anomalous beasts from the hedgerows, their forms growing ever briefer and more insubstantial as the light waned.

 

I’m not sure if I became disenchanted with work or with Catherine first, or if the one were the cause of the other.  Having long since divulged everything about ourselves which was hidden from the rest of the world, we found we had little left to really say to one another.  I think that we were both disappointed, in our own way, with how things had fallen for us.  The chips fall a certain way for people, usually when they are somewhere in their thirties.  Most people, I think, are satisfied with how things fall; or at any rate, they are divested of the spark which breeds discontent, and kindles the desire to radically alter their place in the world.  For those who remain dissatisfied, a kind of second adolescence beckons.  Old persecution complexes are resumed, and with them long buried suspicions about the malign and hopeless nature of the world; there is a welling up of the keen and even morbid lusts of youth; a sense of foreboding, perhaps specifically the sense that one’s present discontents are to be the incubator of something new and alien, the cradle of an as yet protean replacement.

 Something like this was happening to me, and I suspect to Catherine also.

Around the time I was looking for a new place to live, I felt that I had also made some kind of definitive break from the university.  I was taking a long sabbatical, ostensibly to finish my book about The Circuitous Path, that famously enigmatic poem of alienation and eternal recurrence amongst the demi-monde of fin de siècle Europe.  Privately, however, I vowed never to go back.  But what was I actually doing, what were my plans?  My savings would run out sooner or later.  In the meantime, I would wait for something to happen.  I would wait for some upheaval, some disaster, some miracle, some sign from the heavens.  I longed for an unprecedented event that would shatter the ground beneath my feet, and point my life in an authentic direction, or else make a suitably inglorious end of the whole business.

Admittedly, this plan was not the most practical ever devised, and was arguably fatalistic at its core.  Nevertheless, I felt a kind of overwhelming conviction in those days that something was about to happen – some transformative and possibly calamitous event on a global scale.  I felt that trying to achieve anything at all was a waste of energy, because everything would soon be altered beyond all recognition.  I thought that everybody really knew this, on some intuitive level – that all the world’s toil, all its pleasures and all its sorrows, were now being undertaken under a spell of somnambulistic resignation, under the pall of an old epoch trundling hazily into its own obsolescence.

In The Circuitous Path, Pendleton describes a similar premonitory sense of impending disaster and seismic change hovering over the wealthy British expatriates he encountered while travelling around Europe in the summer of 1905.  Moving in a glamourous but often debauched circle of “aristocrats, swindlers, and spies”, the middle-class Pendleton detected an under-current of rootless desperation in their endless parties and faddish preoccupation with new aesthetic and occult movements.  In a famous apocalyptic passage, often suggested to be prophetic of the impeding calamity of the Great Wars, Pendleton writes:     

I watched them all returning, from the wine-scented fragrance

Of their evenings, and the carousel frenzy of their nights

Some in giddy stupor, others disconsolate

Eagerly willing the catastrophe.

And sometimes in a momentary lull,

I hear a sound like a great bird beat its wings

A tentative gesture, in prelude to the soaring leap

But each time I hear it, the motion has

A greater impetuous, a renewed vigour

And it beats like a drum, or a skittish heartbeat

Pumping the world’s lifeblood from hidden well-springs

To all its visible arteries; the blood will surge, soon,

And the bird out of space and time take flight

Her vast wings trampling the tethered earth.

I felt that this mysterious, precarious time had come around again: not merely the end of one century and beginning of another, but the end of a whole epoch, with the birth-pangs of a new world hovering on the horizon like signs and portents in the heavens.  Of course, all of this, I readily conceded, was just as likely a product of my own mind as any real state of affairs in the world without; my mental adroitness at that point was clearly not above reproach. 

Nevertheless, I could not shake the sense of an impending apocalyptic event, whether personal or communal.  The world is, after all, only the confluence of all the individual minds that observe it, so that there is no thing which might be said to exist only in the mind within or the world without.  All things are amphibious, and indeterminately divided between the surface and the water.  The moment of mystic accomplishment, or so I have been lead to believe, is that where, in the words of Stephen Daedalus, the mystic finds in the world without as actual what had been in his world within as possible.  In The Circuitous Path, Pendleton seems to suggest that when in a state of transition, the world enters a phase of communal mysticism, wherein elements of the private world within become increasingly reified as objective events in the world without.  Although there is little critical consensus regarding the image of the bird out of space and time, it must be regarded as the harbinger or avatar of this period of transition and erratic communal mysticism, wherein the minds of solitary madmen and artists become in some fashion directly intertwined with that of the communal imagination, and with actual physical events in the world around them.  Elsewhere, in a verse redolent of the more troubling passages in Lovecraft’s later Call of Cthulhu, Pendleton writes:

Tiny fragments of the bird’s plumage are increasingly evident,

As though scattered in a breeze, and borne hither and thither

By what trade winds serve the hidden ports of errant and dreaming minds;

A painter in Paris, who fancies himself daring, scarcely knows

The true horror of his study, for it is but one part of a triptych,

Another adorning the wall of an asylum in Rotterdam, and the last

The sketchbook of an alchemist who hangs by a rope

In his pauper’s garret in Prague;

If Pendleton’s thesis were correct, it didn’t matter how much of my convictions were imaginary, because in the apocalyptic period the imagination is no longer private – like a Noosphere account, it is connected to a wider network.  My goal was to find somewhere suitable where I could wait for the apocalypse, and trawl the network for fragmentary glimpses of the bird which was poised to take flight in this new century.  Traditionally, a mystic retreats to the stillness of some profound wilderness to await his revelation, but my mind was drawing back to the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter.  It was, in its own way, a desert and a wilderness, albeit one which had accrued human beings and human industry almost as an afterthought. 

It was a place where one could feel the immaculate isolation of an icecap or mountaintop, while always retaining the close proximity to a well-stocked supermarket.  Its austere style made it like a honeycomb of monastic cells, furnished by Ikea, and equipped with a veritable hair shirt of ultimately desultory and soul-sapping creature comforts.  It was a place where you might hear the voice of God, forgotten and placatory, competing with the faint babble of news-readers and advertisers percolating through the walls.    I felt a certain nostalgic and sympathetic connection with the Quarter.  In the aftermath of Roger Grady’s party, both our fortunes had gone rapidly into decline, mine at the whim of whatever strange constellations steered my disposition ever widdershins, and the Quarters’ owning to its umbilical connection to the general economic health of the nation.  After the party, it all seemed to unravel and come undone, private and public fortunes tumbling like dominos which were related to one another only by an invisible nonlocal association, by the vagaries of a sympathetic magic which nobody any longer remembered how to control or manipulate. 

First, a score of young socialites OD’d, all aged 23, causing a wave of legal and existential panic to sweep the high-rises.  Many celebrities were so spooked that they embraced parenthood and new fitness crazes as a means of escaping the now perilous party circuit; those unwilling to relinquish the lifestyle fell prey to a fog of Byzantine superstition, seeking daily consultation with an ever-expanding motely of tarot readers, geomancers, bio-energy workers, economics Ph.ds, meteorologists, astrologers, Women’s Studies graduates, horse whisperers, sensory deprivation tank savants, influencer marketing gurus, complexity theorists, soccer pundits, poker strategists, string theorists – virtually anybody claiming the possession of elusive foresight or obscure expertise was welcome in this carnival of oracular panic.

 

In hindsight, the divinatory frenzy which took hold that summer was an instinctive premonitory gesture, a human variant to the skittish behaviour observed in certain animals prior the advent of an earthquake.  The financial crash followed soon after, hitting the country’s circulatory system with all the shocking force of a health and safety examination, sprung on a hotel which had, at some indeterminate juncture in the past, handed over the managerial reins to its vermin.  Captains of industry and banking magnates, their fortunes overturned in an eye-blink, fled the country in search of more clement bankruptcy laws, like a fleet of organ grinders who had left their hapless monkeys to face the ire of the public and gather up the sputtering wreckage of their barrel organs. 

In the brisk upheavals that followed, the dream represented by luxury apartment complexes like the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter lost all of its lustre and meaning.  Outside the city, there were great tracks of completed but never occupied estates which the press labelled “ghost estates”.  They were an eerie spectacle, these vacant would-be commuter belts, with their rows of crushingly uniform houses amassed on the city’s outskirts like an army of sedentary Daleks.   It was somehow an apt fate for places which had never really been designed for anything but the most abstracted and impoverished notion of human habitation in the first place.  In the city itself, the apartment complexes, some half-finished, many lurching into receivership, were a similarly embarrassing reminder of a bygone era of precipitate enthusiasms.  Their rental value declined, and landlords were sometimes forced to rent the showpiece penthouses to large groups of students.  It was a strange image: children playing innocently in the castoff opulence of models and magnates, while they prepared their minds for a future that no longer existed.  It meant, however, that I was able to take an apartment in the Harrington/Sheldrake at a relatively modest rent, and thus began a strange new life – comfortable, languorous, but perilously unstainable; a retreat, an escape, touched by an increasing sense of unreality, and that jittery sense in which unreality hovers on the threshold of dreams and nightmares, before plunging headlong to the embrace of one or the other. 

Image: a vision of Hildegard of Bingen.   Continued shortly.

Shakespeare in the Alley: Bob Dylan Through the Lens of Barry Feinstein.

Barry Feinstein's photographs of Bob Dylan's legendary '66 tour of England contain some of the most indelible images of rock celebrity ever captured on film.  Along with the D.A. Pennebaker-shot documentaries Dont Look Back and Eat the Document, they record the swirling, Fellini-esque chaos that produced Dylan's greatest albums - and fried his gourd enough to drive him into the arms of country music and semi-seclusion for the rest of the 60s.  These shots of the hipster bard hanging out (on the streets of Manchester?) with some adorable scamps are a particular joy to behold: 

Images found at Ananas a Miami, Nothing Seems as Pretty as the Past, and lidmagazine.

The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 2).

2.  Occultism in the High Rises.

1.

                I should have been at my very lowest ebb that summer, but for some peculiar reason I felt content.  Well, perhaps content would be overstating the case.  It would be better to say that I was untroubled.  My days were characterized by that particular kind of languor which neither troubles the soul, nor ever stirs it to any great pitch of excitement.  For most people, accustomed to life’s stressful rhythms of tension and release, such a period of extended suspension is hardly the most satisfactory mode of existence.  For myself, however, I was forced to conclude that such a lifestyle held an undeniable attraction.  To live without the customary stresses and pleasures of the active existence is burdensome in many respects; and yet while other muscles and faculties atrophy, the imagination is stirred to a strange, languid pitch of creativity, and subject to slip periodically into a state of placid ecstasy, a sensation like that of surrender to some exquisite painkiller.  Now, I should say that though I felt myself to be in perfect equilibrium, it may have appeared from the outside as though I were depressed, or undergoing some kind of bipolar fugue.  Such things are difficult to judge objectively.

                The main upheaval, of course, was the cooling off of my relations with Catherine.  That may seem like an oddly impersonal way of describing it, but the whole business was itself every bit as chilly and impersonal as the commonplace implies.  Our relationship had come to an end without a bang, with scarcely even a whimper.  We’d simply grown bored of each other.  In some respects, it was a relief to end a relationship of eight odd years on such cool and amicable terms, but it’s hard not to feel a little cheated when you’ve spent a large sum on liquor and have no hangover to show for it.  Most couples, I imagine, are subject to this type of boredom in their relationships, but stave it off by having children.  Typically, that’s the next leg of the adventure.  This, however, was not an option for Catherine and I; we regarded the idea of having children as being as inexplicable and unseemly as that of joining a cult, or espousing some alternative medicinal theory that the respectable newspapers frown upon. 

We had that, at least, in common.  So there was nothing else to it.  Magnanimously, I insisted that Catherine should remain in our house, while I would find a new place to live and continue to pay my share of the mortgage, until a more permanent arrangement could be arrived at.  That, more or less, was how I found myself living in the only three-quarters finished luxury apartment/mixed-use quarter by the dockside quays.

 

                The Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter was one of those wonderful follies which had been dreamt up during the property boom; dreamt, it should be added, with such keenness that most of it was actually built before anybody woke up or came to their senses, and thus it stood incomplete as a memorial to the strange fancies and manias of a time past.  It was an ambitious project which sought to transform several blocks of mostly derelict industrial yards into a sleek, all-purpose urban living space.  The central square was composed of four gleaming high rise towers that punctured the sky like glass hypodermics, and overlooked the rest of the complex: a wooded park, twelve smaller apartment blocks, an artificial lake, and a drop leading down into a massive square gouge in the landscape, where concrete foundations had been laid, and work abruptly ceased when funding for the project dried-up.  The high rise towers had their own supermarkets, cafes, gyms, and crèches, and one of the office complexes contained a large, open plan area which had been nebulously labelled “a cultural space.” 

                I have never fully understood what drew me to the Quarter.  To begin with, I’d always been fascinated by different styles of housing.  I remember that when I was a child, being driven around the countryside by my parents, something about houses always puzzled and intrigued me.  A house was something which it was apparently obligatory for all adults to own, or aspire to own – a house and a little patch of grass, a neat row of trees to hide behind, or peer through.  To an adult, such a thing is perfectly natural, but a child always longs to creep under the hedges and fences, to make a beeline through other people’s lawns and backyards like a cat in the shadows.  Growing up, houses retained for me some sense of that essential strangeness – that potent variety of strangeness that hides under the most ordinary and familiar surfaces.  Paradoxically, houses seemed to aspire to an appearance of emptiness and abandonment, and to a sense of mystery – like the adult personality, they frequently resembled a shell which had been constructed to hide something.  What was it they sought to hide, in their appearances of order and homogeneity, of stability and calmness?  What happened in those houses that you never visited, whose interiors you would never see?  

           Later, when I lived in the city, I developed a particular obsession with high rise apartment blocks.  Stacked one atop the other, with their little balconies replacing gardens, they transformed the once organic business of living into a mass-produced commodity and strange kind of public exhibition.  That was the thing that really captured my imagination about them: the way their balconies and windows positioned the once private act of living in a public space, and framed it like a painting or television screen to be perused by passing strangers.  I couldn’t purge from my mind the notion that the apartment block was like a behaviourist’s laboratory, a lattice of glass cages whose occupants were unaware of the vast, clinical eye which surveyed their meagre world at a glance.  Yet, at the same time, I found there to be a certain austere glamour and beauty in the idea of the high rise; the notion of living in a space which was at once private and public, in such close proximity to people who would remain as anonymous as the strangers on trams and buses whose direct gaze we labour to avoid.

Yet for all my fascination, I never got to live in an apartment block.  As a student, I passed through a succession of run-down Georgian dumps, and then Catherine and I moved into the suburban semi-detached which had been our home for the past five years.  A year or two prior, work had begun on the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter, and the tram I took to the university passed by its construction site every morning.  Although I would have been reluctant to admit it publically, the development fascinated me.  It represented a corrosive ideal which I found oddly seductive: an aesthetic of beautiful, streamlined emptiness; a dream of money and intoxicating, even rapturous, surface pleasures; a setting for warmly-lit, drug-fuelled revelries and soft, opiated recuperations, whose regrets and sad vows were always replaced by fresh, renewed appetites, by new surrenders to giddy night and gaudy vitality.  

My odd attraction/repulsion towards the Quarter was perhaps cemented by a photo feature I came across in one of the weekend supplements.  The television personality Roger Grady had purchased one of the towers’ penthouse apartments.  With prematurely greying temples, rugged features, and athletic build, Grady co-hosted the daily Afternoon Break show with the bubbly, voluptuous brunette Deborah Kelly.  He was pictured enjoying a light continental breakfast on an expansive roof garden.  Flanked by rectilinear decking, potted trees, and the gleam of distant skyscrapers, he wore off-white, slim-fit chinos, desert boots, burgundy golf sweater, and a navy windbreaker.  “BACHELOR BREAKFAST”, the caption read, “TV personality coy about relationships, says gruelling work schedule doesn’t give him time to wine and dine.”  Although Grady and I would later become very close, after a fashion, back then I regarded him with nothing but contempt and derision – the sort of contempt, mingled with a degree of unpalatable and unacknowledged envy, in which we tend to hold successful media personalities. 

My disdain for Grady had a more pointed resonance, however.  During my more indolent student days, I developed a peculiar erotic fixation with the deceptively anodyne landscape of afternoon television.  Though maintaining a veneer of cheerful, wholesome banality, I began to detect in the afternoon scheduling a subliminal language of potent, transgressive eroticism.  I saw a video once of a politician’s speech with all the words edited out.  What remained were only the breaths between each sentence, and the look, at once panicked and solicitous, which signalled the commencement of each fresh utterance.  It seemed to me, watching this video, that the body has its own compulsive, hidden language which it constantly seeks to smother and subdue by speaking, by losing itself in a stream of words.  In the split seconds between speaking, the person appeared like a frightened animal, poised and alert, ready for fight or flight – then the words came, a tension was released, and a sort of torpor ensued.  Speech, for all its marvellous efficacy, so often assumed the characteristic of a compulsive, hypnotic defence mechanism.  Although I knew, in a sense, that the idea was perhaps more poetic than literally true, it seemed to me that a vast, hidden reality might emerge through the removal of the spoken word from news broadcasts, political rallies, debates, even everyday interactions.  Bodies would dance about in perpetual, skittish motion, faces freeze in the naked panic of pure, silent being; shorn of all its ultimately hollow and officious verbiage, the landscape would become a pristine, sandy shoreline, washed by inhalations and exhalations of tremulous living breath.  (I suspect that it was partially this earlier intimation of a secret language of the body which made me so receptive to Grady’s theories about the mysterious Green Language.)

I believed that the afternoon light variety programme would provide an ideal test case for these theories.  Scrubbed of its banal pleasantries, I was certain that Afternoon Break would reveal the true mercenary sexuality that it subliminally communicated to housewives and the unemployed.  That being said, my theories regarding the hidden erotics of afternoon television were never exhaustively developed, and may have been simply a by-product of my puppyish and mildly masochistic infatuation with Afternoon Break’s host Deborah Kelly, whose coquettish relationship with the camera thrilled me with its cold impersonality. 

Roger Grady, on the other hand, I found to be an irksome distraction.  Even by the standards of light entertainment, he struck me as a failure.  His bonhomie felt particularly forced, and his commitment to the variety format sorely limited; he made no attempt, for example, to hide his sullen masculine boredom during the fashion and cookery features, and was sometimes palpably rude to the guests who accompanied small animals or children.  The feature in the weekend supplement detailing his purchase of the Harrington/Sheldrake penthouse thus further exacerbated my feelings of contempt and submerged jealousy towards Grady, and solidified the ambivalent glamour which the Quarter held over my imagination.  Strangely, though, my destiny was becoming intertwined with that of Roger Grady. 

Long before I would move to the Quarter, and Grady make me the sole confidant of his inexplicable occult project, there was that strange, endlessly suggestive night in which I found myself attending a party at his feted penthouse.

      2.

                This was a few years ago.  The good times, I suppose.  Things with Catherine were fine, and I was new enough to my work at the university that I didn’t yet find it oppressively tedious.  The financial crash was a couple of years away, and still an unthinkable contingency in most people’s minds.  Money was everywhere in the psychosphere – the allure of it, the smell of it colouring the horizon, its particular mania festering in the communal imagination like an adolescent’s first discovery of sexuality.  It was a Friday, I think.  One of those summer nights where the sky acquires a certain crisp, electric sheen that merges seamlessly with the artificial glow of the city, bathing everything between the heavens and gutter in an ambient florescent haze, like the warmth of a distant, universal technology.  The streets were filled with buoyant revellers of various types, beaming shoals that milled together and overlapped unpredictably in the evening’s loose and carefree momentum.  I was drinking with a small group of my students, and at about eleven, a sleepy, neurotic rich girl called Esther announced that she knew some people who were going to a party in Roger Grady’s apartment.  We all distained the world of minor celebrities, of course, but the opportunity to swim briefly in their ego-inflated fish tank seemed too good to pass up, so I very quickly found myself wedged into a taxi with Esther, two other girls, and a handsome, sullen boy named James, who played bass in a band called Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and maintained such an astringent air of aloofness that I was never certain if he was arrogant or merely slow-witted.  

The girls were talking in rapid staccato bursts amongst themselves, while James and I sat in awkward silence. 

“Why are you called Four Flies on Grey Velvet when there’s five of you?” I asked, to make conversation. 

James shrugged. 

“It’s just a name.  Or George could be the grey velvet.” 

We were moving along the river, past pleasure boats and sodium orange walkways, the vacant, dreaming plazas of financial complexes, through the iron clockwork of an ancient, slate grey rolling lift bridge, and then we could see it off in the distance: the dream of the Quarter in its full nocturnal vibrancy, its jewelled gleam dancing on the surface of the river, and jutting proudly into the irradiated night sky.  I was drunk enough already to feel like I was floating, disembodied, along a current of events, but everything after that was dreamlike, seductive and strange.  We disembarked from the taxi, and ambled along a walkway that skirted the artificial lake, until we came to a stairwell that led up into the main courtyard.  Once inside, we were dwarfed by the towers. 

I have always found the experience of that courtyard difficult to describe, and wondered at how the architects achieved its vertiginous effect.  Looking up, you had the sense that the towers were not horizontal, but rather sloping diagonally toward a point, like the interior walls of a pyramid.  The buildings wrapped their balconied walls around your visual field, as though they were floating on the air above you, and slowly closing in upon themselves.  It was strange vista, somehow very appealing to me: the business of living arranged into geometrical and aesthetically spartan grids, uniform and rectilinear, yet set at some oblique, gravity-defying angle that made the whole structure feel weightless and dizzying to contemplate. 

While I was taking all this in, Esther was ringing her friend, looking up into the distant blackness where we envisioned Grady’s penthouse in full, sybaritic swing.  After a long delay she finally got through, and following an even longer interval, a tiny, energetic, wide-eyed girl appeared at the door, miming greetings, apologies, and various other emotions as she struggled to open it.  We entered a mezzanine with a concierge’s desk and vast, antiseptic jungle of brittle-looking shrubs and bushes.  Two well-dressed, middle-aged men with matching bald heads and mutual affectation of professional serenity sat at the desk, staring into the shrubbery as though it contained the threat of a creeping indigenous militia.  The new girl ushered us into an elevator.  “This elevator is specular,” she said, “listen to the music.”  The elevator was playing Mason Williams’ Classical Gas, so we yo-yoed up and down a couple of times, the girls attempting a rudimentary go-go dance, while James and I did our best to avoid their failing limbs.  The next track the elevator played was Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, but the song’s mood of laden, almost cosmic eroticism seemed to bore the girls, so we finally made our way to the apartment.

The party was everything, I think, we could have hoped for: a feast for anthropologists of the near future, and a carnival of vacuous delights and strange delusions of threadbare grandeur.  The apartment itself was dimly-lit, with small groups slumped everywhere in a deep trance of chemically-heightened sincerity and seriousness, spitting paragraphs back and forth like animals who feed their young by regurgitation.  We passed briskly through these baying lotus-eaters, and went out onto the roof garden, where the main energy of the party was focused.  A sound-system was playing a mixture of dance anthems and Bryan Ferry ballads (then enjoying a brief, semi-ironic vogue due to their inclusion in an innovative series of tampon advertisements).  LED striplighting bathed the roof garden in a cool, blue sheen, making the revellers appear like holographic ghosts projected against the penthouse’s dizzying vistas of city and star light. 

We found a place at the fringes of the crowd, and the new girl went back into the apartment to find some glasses, but we didn’t see her again.  I occupied myself breaking the crowd down into its constitute elements.  There was a smattering of television personalities, their melodic voices emerging out of the white noise with the sickly familiarity of a favourite song travestied by pan-pipes.  I saw the host of a popular household DIY programme, seated by himself in the throes of some kind of drug-induced panic attack.  He was breathing deeply and evenly, and drinking pint glasses of water that seemed to flow directly out of his pores.  Throughout the night, he would cyclically return to the festivities with a demonical second wind, leading each time to a relapse into his former condition, until he was finally laid out on a sofa with a small electrical fan positioned near his sweating temples. 

There was a gaggle of pretty young women whom I guessed to be occupants of the glittering and eternal limbo between modelling and acting careers.  We saw two hulking, radioactively tanned beefcakes making gauche advances towards the women.  The beefcakes were the stars of a type of programming which was very popular at the time – one of those shows that documented the peccadillos of a vulgar working class nouveau riche.  (I’d seen them on television once, waxing an antique dealer’s scrotum and asshole as part of their weekly challenge.  It was suspenseful enough, I thought, although the effect was largely achieved through clever musical cues and editing.)  There was a small contingency of older, middle-aged men in attendance, a group of property speculators and lawyers whose cold, dead eyes were trained on the younger women, making rapid, intuitive calculations of their blood-alcohol levels.  They were talking to a telegenic economist who would find far greater fame after the crash.  (I overheard a snippet of the conversation:  “That’s the thing, nobody knows Sheldrake!  Nobody’s ever even seen him!  He could be just a name on a piece of paper for all anybody knows.”)  The festivities jumped to an even higher plateau of boisterous vitality with the sudden arrival of the aging and fearsome comedienne Maxi Mediumwave, fresh from performance in a children’s pantomime downtown.  Maxi burst onto the roof garden still in character and full costume – a black-hearted pirate queen with cutlass and ersatz parrot lolling on her shoulder - accompanied by a retinue of garrulous dames and ebullient, exotic male dancers who hung beneath her jutting chin like a gaudy necklace.  Even Roger Grady – clad in a sports jacket and blue jean combo which I felt was frankly beneath him - appeared notably energised by this spectacular entrance.

Although the other party-goers were inclined to ignore us for the most part, we were nevertheless able to absorb something of the drift of their conversations.  There were many whispers swirling around regarding the fortunes of the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter itself.  The funding for the project was only then beginning to unravel into a labyrinthine paper trail of loans whose securities transpired to be other loans whose securities then echoed recursively into infinite spirals of nothingness.  The main item of gossip that thrilled through the roof garden that night, however, was the most recent high profile tenants rumoured to have purchased an apartment in the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter: identicals Bradley and Lucius O’Leary, known in the pop world as the Iguana Twins.  The Iguana Twins were the latest sensation to emerge from television’s talent furnace Idol Assembly-Line, having scored an unexpected Christmas number 1 with their auto-tuned reggae travesty of Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. 

Cultural theorists argued that there was an insoluble explanatory gap surrounding the Iguana Twin phenomenon.  Children and young teenagers adored them, but nobody old enough to articulate their thoughts cogently could even begin to understand the appeal; hence the Twins operated in a realm which could never be adequately quantified by the adult brain.  Most adults chose to regard them as an alarming manifestation of sociological decadence and creeping mental atrophy, while others suggested that they might in fact represent a new species of mutant genius, whose brilliance vibrated at some higher frequency to which adults no longer had access.  Androgynous, with handsome, gaunt, sepulchral features, the Twins seemed to embody the indecipherable sexuality of some future epoch.  They frequently wore contact lenses that turned their pupils blood-red, a gimmick which gave them the aura of a pair of ailing, homesick extraterrestrials. 

They spoke in a strange, insular stream of consciousness which often descended into a fully-blown nonsense language of their own invention: Shally Shindig, Cassa Zoom Boom! was a well-known expression of triumph in their private argot.  They were, however, master manipulators of Noosfeed.  In one of their most ingenious capers, they posted a sinister-looking close-up to their Noosfeed page, with the caption WHICH ONE OF US IS THE BAD ONE?  This provoked a furious debate amongst the cognoscenti which was still on-going.  Naturally, exotic Noosphere rumours swirled around the Iguanas, ranging from the easily falsifiable (that they weren’t really twins, but rather a pair of genetically unrelated narcissists who‘d augmented an existing resemblance with cutting edge surgical techniques emanating out of the Balkan region) to the more speculative and elusive (that they were part of an ET acclimatization programme, designed to gradually make the public comfortable with the appearance and presence of extraterrestrials, or, alternatively, to lay the groundwork for an imminent programme of clandestine inter-breeding.)

3.

                We didn’t stay too long at the party that night.  We were really only there as anthropological voyeurs, our intention being to sneer inwardly at the worthies as they sneered outwardly at us.  As fascinating as the spectacle was to contemplate, the atmosphere only became more oppressively manic and unfriendly as the night wore on.  Two events, however, remain etched in my memory, and are worth briefly noting.  The first was a rather unpleasant imbroglio which erupted between the two beefcakes.  Excluded from whatever supply of low-quality cocaine was circulating freely among the inner circle, they had responded by becoming balefully drunk.  One minute, they were engaged in a slurred, incoherent argument, the next lunging at one-another with explosive ferocity. 

Before anybody knew what was happening, they were rolling around on the ground in a powder-keg clinch, laying waste to Grady’s avant-garde outdoor furniture.  Everybody seemed more amused than alarmed, however, and the girls eagerly filmed the action on their phones.  Any doubts that the videos would become a minor sensation on Noosfeed were immediately vanquished when a seething Maxi Mediumwave threw herself into the fray, jumping atop the beefcakes and making a very valiant attempt to pry them apart.  This peculiar struggle continued unabated until Mediumwave’s parrot was decapitated under the weight of one of the beefcake’s shoulders.  “Look what you’ve done!” she shrieked, her face suddenly like a mirror cracking in slow motion.  The desecration of the rubbery bird shocked the two brawlers into sobriety and contrition; I think I saw a tear streaking down one of their cheeks, but I could have been mistaken.  The situation very rapidly diffused itself after that.  Mediumwave’s coterie flocked around her, and commenced an apparently familiar ritual of coaxing her febrile nervous system back to some kind of equilibrium.  The beefcakes apologized profusely to Grady, who seemed to regard the whole incident with a blasé, amused glint in his eyes.

                While this first incident was ultimately comical in nature, the second I recall as having something sinister or even portentous about it, although I cannot quite put my finger on the source of this impression.  There was a sudden flurry of excitement at the border of the roof garden, where a group of girls were looking over the edge, and pointing excitedly at the opposite tower.  The crowd surged over to the glass balcony walls, following their frantic directions.  Standing on an opposite balcony some eight or nine storeys down was the unmistakable shape of the Iguana Twins.  The rumours were true.   The first twin stood erect with his hands on his hips, and the body of the second was set at a peculiar slant, as though he were about to fall over, or take off at a sprint.  There seemed to be no motion whatsoever in either of them.  They wore matching white outfits, and their faces, though heavily shadowed, appeared blank and expressionless.  Despite the distance, their red eyes shone very brightly, looking like the eyes of a fox startled in the flash of an old Polaroid camera.  The apartment was dimly lit and the light had an eerie quality which suggested some kind of cold-storage facility.  Everybody waved, and the model/actresses called down Shally Shindig, Cassa Zoom Boom! and other Iguana nonsense at the top of their lungs, but the Twins retained their unearthly poise.  They seemed to be presenting themselves as an object of contemplation, as some kind of ambiguous Ying/Yang symbol. Then they jerked briskly awake, and strolled back into the soft, ultraviolent light of their apartment like disinterested gods.  I felt somebody nudge my shoulder gently.  It was one of the lithe dancers from Maxi Mediumwave’s coterie, wearing an uncharacteristically solemn expression. 

“Which one do you think is the bad one?” he whispered. 

“Lucius,” I replied instantly, with an odd sort of conviction that came out of nowhere.

                

We left shortly after that.   The elevator, as though receptive to the mood’s downward turn, was playing Procal Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale.  We appeared ghostly and insubstantial in comparison to our ascent, and the song’s lyrics reflected the wispy, enigmatic impressions that were gathering in our minds, struggling to cohere.  In the taxi home, we were mostly silent.  As she neared her stop, Esther nudged me.  She produced something from her bag, and held it up to the light so I could see it.  It was the head of Maxi Mediumwave’s parrot, whose passing was destined for brief Noosfeed notoriety in the days to follow.  Separated from its body, the parrot’s features were lifelike and conspiratorial. 

“You’d think it was going to speak,” Esther said, smiling. 

Continued shortly.    

Image of Toronto condo towers found here.