I Miss The North (by Michael Lawton)

‘I miss the North,’ she thought.

 

‘I miss the North,’ she thought as she was cleaning the espresso machine the pub had bought during its refit. She saw her face, frowning with exertion as she wiped the milk frother, distorted in the metal of the appliance which with its dials and handles reminded her of a rudimentary time machine. The pubs she had grown up in hadn’t had espresso machines. The pubs that she’d grown up in, where she’s met Tony, 16 years ago. They were jukebox-places, places you were loud in to show you were pissed off with the world, not loud because everybody else was. The pubs that she’d grown up in, where she’d got her first job, crisps-kicked-across-the-floor-places. She smiled at the cycles of life; she was back behind the bar. 

She was singing to herself as she cleaned, she had emptied the fridges of their bottles and was wiping the shelves. She was listening to the Richard Hawley album Lowedges. It was a present from one her colleagues; Mark.

“He’s one of yours isn’t he?” He’d said referring to the fact Richard Hawley like her was from Sheffield. His slight surliness not hiding that he clearly had a thing for her, he’d bought her the CD after all, he didn’t own it himself; he’d just downloaded onto his IPod. He’d tried to explain the process to her, to convince her she should buy an MP3 player. 

“I’m 34 and a northerner Mark, it doesn’t mean I’m thick. Don’t patronise me. I’ve got other things to spend my money on, not least; rent.’

She’d let him seduce her though. She liked him and she was lonely. She was living in ‘shared accommodation’ for the first time in her life, the Victorian properties with sloping floors and skewiff window ledges. She lived with other ‘young professionals’ a term that’d made her bark with laughter when she’d heard it. She didn’t see much of her flatmates and they didn’t seem to spend much time with each other. She was close to one girl, Lucille, a postgraduate student from South America who was close to her age.

 

“Why did you move to London?”

 

She’d whistled softly, thinking of her reply.

 

“That’s a big question; I guess I’ve always wanted to see it. To live somewhere different and well to get away from my life, it was bringing me down in Sheffield.”

She’d confided in Lucille up to a point, but a complete explanation would mean getting her own head around it and she found that difficult to think about.  Where would she start, meeting Tony in the pub was where her life started. Or her life as it was anyway. He chatted her up, ‘coppers have to be good at talking,’ he’d said. They’d dated for a year then married. She’d got pregnant, given birth to Hayley, raised her, something had gone wrong. They’d separated and she’d moved / got kicked out: A life in a paragraph.

 

But she missed the North. Missed the friendliness of the café she’d go to. The music made her think of parks. Of taking Hayley to the park when she was little, the winter air heavy in the park as she pushed Hayley on the swings. Do I miss the North, or do I just miss my youth she wondered. What youth? Or what twenties? She wanted the amorphousness of the twenties of her colleagues. Twenties of nothing save gathering experiences; as Mark had it:

 

‘I love your stretch marks; lines of experience and life.’

 

‘Shut up you soft git, stop being so pretentious,’

 

Was how she replied. But she liked being with him, immersed in his life. He was a DJ as were half the people his age she’d met in London. There was nine years between them. All of it showing in her mind.

 

She’d tried to find office work in London. She’d gone to a temping agency, but had walked out. She didn’t like the women there. The pink cowboy hats in their in-trays, ready for the forced abandonment of a Friday night. She was bored of that. She seen a sign in the window of her local and applied there. And here she was. 

The CD had repeated, track three was playing…“All my love’s too late…” She’d scream this as she was lying on her bed, damp after a shower, drying in the air. “All my love’s too late…” She’d bawl this thinking about Hayley her daughter who had chosen to stay with her father.

Hayley had shown no inclination to visit her. Not even to go shopping. ‘I can go to Meadowhall mum.’ But every text message lifted her, to know Hayley was thinking of her.

 

She didn’t know what she was going to do. She knew she had to make a decision sooner or late, point her life in some direction and head that way but which way, she was giving herself time to do nothing. 

She turned to greet the man who’d entered, a newspaper under his arm, she could tell he’d knocked off early, as he was smiling gently at having the pub to himself, he’d a start on the city that evening.

“Yes luv?”

Transparency: A Future Without Sunday Drivers (by Gene George Earle)

Ways of Looking

A question no-one really asks is what happened to transparent casings for computerized objects. I recall as a child peering with fascination at chips and motherboards inside old VCRs and PCs, bewildered by how impossible it seemed that an abstract world of unnatural green and sharp solderings could make the tapes spin, CD’s play, or Doom beasts explode. What the original manufacturers had in mind is anyone’s guess, having had what seems a very brief lifespan somewhere in the late eighties and early nineties, yet subsequently falling into ‘failed design gimmick’ obscurity thereafter. Some techno-acculturated minds might procure the image of the first Apple computers that tried their hand at the ‘transparency’ quip on a commercial scale, disappointingly doing it only in a referent way that manufactured semi-transparent blue and orange cases and keyboards which in sum, never amounted sadly to much other than curvy but dirty looking fish tanks. And though it might surface here or there every now and again, its modern manifestations are predominantly squeezed out along a miserable production line of a vastly inferior objects, failing usually to poke its existence above the mere gimmicks and other ‘retro’ inanities like plastic vomit, Furbies, Tamagotchis and heart-shaped frying pans. Even today it seems astonishing that there hasn’t been one mobile phone range with this particular quality incorporated in its design, a commodity as protean as it comes. There’s something strange going on when the ‘transparency’ of objects are largely absent from the present but wholly part of some of our speculative futures, making notable cameos namely in the literature of cyberpunk (it’s heyday -by no accident- being in the eighties). But its realized relics remain few; all I have salvaged from this fuzzy phase of product design is a bedside lamp and an old Gameboy, things which –looking simultaneously at and through them now- casts once again the power of wonder over the inner child, offering the hidden interior life of an electrical good up to the eyes in a way that emulates the most basic unit of advertising; the shop display.

 

The World As A Shop Display

For practical reasons no-one asks why glass wasn’t used -though as a thought experiment computers glazed in glass doesn’t seem completely inconceivable-, however on the surface of it, the temperament of transparency (or its lack) would seem rather at odds with much of what today is perceived to be embedded in ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, in a era where we have great hopes for transparency. It for one it enjoys regular outings in political rhetoric, used as reprimands in expense scandals, birthing initiatives such as the Publish what You Pay Campaign, designed for mining and oil companies in the third world (a mention should go to Gordon Brown’s voluntary ‘Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’, a less successful programme with an eye on the same aim) and institutions as far ranging (or near, as the case me be) as police and newspapers/journalism. But as on the side of the built world too, these are things relate more specifically to a balance of power; its no accident that glass is today one of the most loved materials in city architecture -most notably it follows financial or business districts, where towering glass houses exude a symbolic transparency of an ideological ‘all seeing’ office community-. In fact in the context of global capital, it’s truly a material for the future. Some of these buildings do the exact opposite and play with their own invisibility (employing mirrored or one way glass for example as an alternative), deflecting the would-be gazes of pedestrians into a hall of mirrors tour of themselves, dipping as if in and out of dreams in front of shop displays¹. But big transparent glassy offices operate differently by operating paradoxically; despite offering the entire interior visually to us, the spectacle is there not to be truly looked in but at. It may sound like a confusing window, but the principle is familiar to any cinemagoer perennially exposed to the illusory visual experience of fusing the flat moving image with depth, mistaking the screen for a world. These ways of seeing in visual shorthand’s are probably inherited from the usual suspects (many adding cynically that the world is becoming one big advert) and have become practically second nature to the well-initiated city dweller who, walking through the city in the late afternoon, somehow intuitively catches the mysterious broadcast left by the intentioned architects; that work needs to be visualised.  Whether this process is anxiety driven, symptomatic of a specific ideology, or simply a third wave unimaginative response to a more generalizable trend is an open question. However what can be accounted for is that the expression of work in this way has meant turning our physical trajectories through such buildings into virtual narratives and allegorical energy flows, things which in Tati’s ‘Playtime’ (perhaps the most instructive exemplar to date) describes the design of the modern office as the ultimate panopticon; and which much more radically also proposes that for the ‘civilized’ worker/inhabitant of these spaces, that they are actors on an penultimate stage².

Sunday Drivers

 

Yet despite its shortcomings, transparency -limited to objects- seems entirely plausible as a fixture in our modern world, operating if it must, like buildings, on an almost secondary level of looking. Perhaps its because most of us have become (to use a stubborn term of George Friedmann’s) Sunday Drivers. Whilst Friedmann meant it as a way of describing people who have never opened their car bonnets (this was the fifties after all) and who had no idea of what was under their hoods, contemporaneously the notion spreads to entire swathes of our technologically governed lives. As gadgetry and technical machinery have proliferated, the mythologies and morphology that mask and conceal the inner lives and function have moved correspondingly, like complimentary steps in a dance. This in a sense constitutes the beginning of a fashion. The very existence of such forms necessarily hinge on the need for obscuring the integral mechanisms or components at the very point when it has become apparent that our language and vocabulary for describing the multiplicity of objects and their minute components have stagnated. Furthermore, language has been left behind by the sheer velocity of competitive markets perpetually driven by nuanced innovations, outstripping the ability to name and comprehend items truly fast enough.³

 

Anxious Luddites, the Cyberpunks Are Waiting…

 

The cyberpunks for example, know what to call that-thing-that-does-that-thing, everyone who doesn’t is either vulnerable or extinct. The protagonists in these novels are nearly always the antithesis of Sunday Drivers (implying nearly always in them that those who don’t are extremely rich and live sheltered lives -usually in high orbit-, or dead) when it comes to computerized technology, knowing how to hack, physically make, manipulate, and customize from scrap, ensures better survival; the old order of automated machinery and technology implies ignorance. Not only that, it would seem futuristically, it implies a weak disposition; for the smooth casings that made early Mac laptops the white gold, are they say, for the benefit of the psychological comfort of those who can’t bear ugly inner truth; structures are violent. Perhaps it means that transparency will never make a true comeback until earthly conditions get more apocalyptic, and our relationships to our objects are determined less by the manufacturers, who always have a consumer in mind. Maybe the eighties was a blip on the radar of time for transparency, but fictionally its heart seems closer to the Cold War. Some popular dystopian visions stem precisely from allowing the luddite’s classic anxieties to have authority over the landscape, who looking at much of our alarm clocks, TVs, microwaves and vacuum cleaners know that apart from their immediate use value, each is a terrifying testimony to a void of knowledge. It is perhaps this mild ambience of precariousness that in daily living disturbs, and which to add to the anxiety, implies we no longer know how to even fix things. The things that are now taking over more and more space in the house, the garage, the bottom of the wardrobes, sometimes kept there for years, some noisy (so we have to work round it, never putting it on before bed) some always solidly but silently at work, have in many cases become like a familiar and bizarre cast of sitcom characters with no or limited life insurance. The modern day user is like an imbecilic doctor in relation to them, not knowing how to diagnose, and when it comes to surgery, will lose patient after patient. Here is where our inner luddite feels them crushing him with their ontological weight. So for now we’re content with enamel white elliptical laptops, silver fridges and things that look ready for space travel, their forms always steeped in the formal mystiques of our present time (forgetting hubristically that we are living in fashions, and that they too, when the structure of production alters, will look –or be resurrected- again and again with a new body). For functioning is not merely the function of things, but also their mystery.

 

Notes

¹ Around a recent roundtable discussion concerning urban planning, it became clear that there was real ambivalence towards the modern phenomenon of seeing oneself multiplied into the surrounding architecture, the positive attitude akin almost to a ‘modern take’ on the Narcissus’s myth, the other akin to the fabled tribesmen who upon smiling to a camera and seeing Polaroid’s of themselves, thought that a their souls were being stolen.  

²One of the most haunting signifiers of this relationship between work, transparency, and the built world exists in the quintessentially modern phenomenon of lights being left on in office blocks, even when the normal working day has quite clearly ended. Putting aside the fact that our working hours have stretched into a disorientated global rhythm, from a pious (and sensible) perspective, it’s a waste of electricity, one which the offending companies should be taken to task for. Simultaneously however its symbolic function feels like a solemn visual hymn, or a chord that drones from the aggregate of each individual lit office culminating into a sheer symphony of the city. It somehow seems indispensible (paranormal even, considering how collectively well co-ordinated the entire affair has been between buildings and employees who have never met each other). From a psychoanalytical perspective, perhaps it expresses or enounces the modern anxiety of being alone in a place where we are never able to be alone (much like the functional by-product of muzak), or perhaps it’s a grand conspiracy to communicate with objects, donning materiality with spirituality. Either way, we let the messenger live. 

³ Oddly enough this seems like a reversal or parable of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, who must have had several very frustrating episodes trying to invent new names for things; not least having been later expelled from the garden and forced to start again in the fallows. Regardless, in studying our own use of language in relation to increasingly more computerized technologies, it has become evident objects for us today are less ‘natural’ in essence but more biological than ever; the supreme examples being the systems theory inspired automated environments and regulatory ecosystems that both HAL and GERTY preside over.  

Her Eyes Reflecting Everything (by Lewis Acott)

Photograph by Margaret Durow

Beaver looked at me as if I had a hole in my chest. “You opened it the wrong way.” He spoke. He spoke? He’d been sitting opposite playing with his lips for half an hour. “What the hell Beaver?” I said. He said, “You opened your crisps upside down. That’s unlucky.” I said “good”. Playground lies. After a few minutes I said “go back to school Beaver.” I was thinking it wasn’t too late for a come-back. He didn’t respond. He was completing a Sudoku, it looked disorderly. I offered him a crisp, he hesitated and then he said shook his head.

I pretended I didn’t care about this superstition. But I thought about it all day. I kept the crisp bag with me rustling in my coat pocket as if disposing of it would make the situation worse. Later I opened it out the other way too. It made me feel better. It was a clever thing to do.

                                                                                   ***

After work I felt more lucky than not. I went to visit Carl with Mum and Suzie. I sat on the back seat of the car on the way there. Robbie Williams was playing on the radio and Suzie tapped her shoes together. “Let me entertain you....” We were letting him entertain us. Carl was at a friend’s, in a country house. The friends were not there with him, just him and his girlfriend and a black cat that was like a tiny panther. We arrived and drove up a gravel drive-way, and I felt like Inspector Morse.

The house was one you walk around slowly, as if looking through the pages of a magazine, it was spacious and everything was made of real wood. The bath had lions feet. The house sat snugly on two acres of chlorophyll with tall trees standing like monoliths. There was a small woodland further down near the back. There were two Mongolian yurts, one larger than the other. Both hidden behind a queue of small trees and foliage, their thick generous shadows folding over the sides and over the tops of the yurts. Two wooden steps led to each of the tiny doors - big enough for no-one it seemed. A large vegetable patch was filled with kale and large malformed tomatoes, rocket, lettuce, and other leaves I didn’t know. There were onions and garlic growing, and a neat row of potatoes. We picked the kale, and tomatoes and rocket, and used it in the dinner we had that night. We all helped, but Carl cooked. At the table we tried to remember how to draw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, taking turns drawing ugly burger-headed monsters on scraps of paper.

In the evening after the meal we went into the woods, pushed logs together and built a fire to sit around. The night folded us up in an ambience of hazy intimacy. As we talked I felt a light tap on my shoulder as if a tiny man wanted my attention, and I touched the spot to see if borrowers were indeed real. My hand came away warm and messy from an owl’s well-aimed crap (dead mice, shrews... I thought. It was practically still screaming...) that was now slowly dripping down my mums work fleece which I was wearing. I let out a small cry and pointed the torch I had in my hand at it pathetically. And everyone laughed, and talked quickly at the same time... “It’s lucky!” “Eurgh...” “That’s my work fleece!”.

I walked back to the house then with the torch in one hand, and my poo hand held out in front of me. The torch was a small toy torch, which had some cartoon cars on the side, and which made it only slightly better than walking in the dark. I walked quickly towards the dark bulk of the house. Through the back door I was in the kitchen, and I took some time cleaning my mum’s fleece and washing my hand. It wasn’t as bad as I thought and I curiously didn’t mind. Though it smelt fusty. The cat purred at my ankles and then slinked off outside. The lucky bird poo reminded me of the bag of crisps earlier, and I couldn’t work out whether I was lucky or what now but it didn’t matter. I put the fleece back on and walked out back to the fire. And they were all smiling at me, sitting in a circle, their faces warmly lit up and rosy.

When we put out the fire and started walking back to the house I said I wanted to sleep in the yurt. So everyone went around and gathered blankets inside because it was by now cold. In no time at all the bed was ready and looked like an over-sized vibrant birds nest. And then we were sipping tea inside, in the kitchen. We talked drowsily and happily. And after some time we said goodnight; Ben slept on the floor in the lounge, and everyone else had beds around the house. I went around with my mum and helped tuck everyone in and then lastly she went to bed. I walked downstairs and Carl had put the kettle back on.

Carl and I went outside with our cups filled again with tea and sat on our knees in the bigger yurt. The cat came in later and curled up on the bed and slept, sometimes silently lifting her head to listen. Her eyes reflecting everything. We drew pictures as we talked. One drawing was a spiral, with two smiling snails leading off of it, their trails making up the spiral behind them. Arrows pointed two separate ways from one of the snails. One way pointed to two children, their outlines drawn lightly. The other was to an ellipsis.

Carl told me smoothly he thought human spirits would be able to inhabit animals. I said “you’re a piece of gold.” But I believed him. He convinced me that Nanny could be there with us, in the cat, and when he wasn’t looking I looked in the cats eyes to try and see a sign that this was true. There was no sign. A long time after Carl said goodnight and I heard him walk away back up the garden with that toy torch.

I looked at the cat and willed her to stay with me. I curled my body around hers, where it was, and shifted carefully under the blankets, awkwardly half covered. I lay awake for a long time with fuzzy thoughts that didn’t lie down with me. At some point I fell asleep, it must have been for an hour or less, as I woke and it was still as dark as it could be and still cold. I moved over onto my back, pulling the blankets with the cat over me, so it was curled up on top of my chest. She looked up briefly chewing the air, and then went back to sleep. And I fell asleep again. I woke at sunrise, as the cat stretched and yawned and jumped off my belly. It sat poised for a moment, and then walked away, out a small hole next to the door. The morning was cold but it felt new, and it felt good. I rubbed my arms and stood up, aching slightly. I stuffed a pillow up the front of my mums fleece, which I was still wearing, as a last minute maneuver against the cold. Then I stepped out the small door of the yurt and out into the open.

Just beyond the front wooden step was a dead mouse, flattening a tiny portion of grass. It’s delicate body effortlessly dead. It made death look easy. No wounds or blood, no mess. I thought it could be my breakfast from the cat. I felt humbled, and grateful. I left it where it was.

Inspired by the cats’ early enthusiasm, I went exploring, treading slowly around a tall pile of wood. Behind this I found a fence, and a small paved path running off into thick woodland. It was overgrown, and the path collapsed in places. I followed it and came out eventually into a small clearing, the far side ending with another small fence. Beyond this was an infinity of fog. It was crisp and silent. The sky was a purpley red. A non-colour. A colour I couldn’t describe. A hill stood barely visible behind the fog, standing on its own like an animal, and I’m sure I could see it breathing. For a long time I stood there, wordlessly.

I came back the same way, along the broken path. I started treading again around the pile of wood. But I saw something grey and white and large in between all the leaves at my side and so I kneeled down then and had a look. Half buried in fallen leaves was an old statue of a heron, lichen on its concrete wings and beak. So I crawled forwards, under the boughs of this thick tree and I grabbed hold of the heron’s thin legs, dragging it out whilst crawling backwards. When I had it out it was half my size. I carried it with me out beyond the yurt, and stood it up in a small border bush, and patted it lightly on the head. Then I walked up the grass to the house. I looked back and from far away it looked real.

I could see my mum in the kitchen as I approached, and then opened the back door. She had the radio on quietly, a barely audible murmur, so as not to wake anyone up. She was washing up last night’s dishes. The kettle was boiling behind her. She looked up as I walked in and smiled, while her hands continued to wash up without her.

It's been one of those days, all week (by Michael Lawton)

So this week I am in an exhibition put together by Paul McCann. The show as a whole features media-specific works focusing upon notions of temporatlity and nostalgia. Paul invited me specifically to respond to the Victor Burgin quote describing painting as 'the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’. My response was manifold, incorporating a digital image, a painting, a sculpture and a text piece that I have reproduced below. If you wish to see the show it is at Wimbledon College of Art until Friday.

 

Practice Nostalgia

Painting is the best medium for dealing with nostalgia because it is no longer living, and therefore need not concern itself with time or linear temporality. (After all it cannot become more obsolete and the undead don’t worry about ageing; it is what it is.) Because painting no longer exists in the same realm as time it can talk about things less fleeting, can comment from the position of an outsider and look on from a distance and observe wryly.

 

Painting is the worst medium for dealing with nostalgia because it is no longer living and therefore cannot concern itself with time or linear temporality. (After all it cannot become more obsolete and the undead don’t worry about ageing; it is what it is.) Because painting no longer exists in the same realm as time it cannot speak the same language, cannot empathise with the mechanical, the analogue, the digital or conjure up their flaws. 

A request from the future (by Peter Lawton)

If you are actually bothering to read this then the chances are that it’ll be online. Few if any will print off and save preferring instead to return if desired to the blog and just scroll down. That’s fine, in fact in terms of conservation that is probably the most environmentally friendly way to do things. One of the ironies is that I’m actually handwriting the first draft of this, though mainly because I’m on holiday without my computer. When as a family we go on holiday we try to eschew all forms of electronic media; it makes us feel virtuous, though why I don’t know. Anyway the theme of this short rant is not the overuse of technology; I’m not some quaint Luddite who thinks the move away from goose quills was a step towards eternal damnation, but I am concerned for what the move towards more and more electronic reliance means.

Recently I came across some old photos, they were a mixture of informal and formal groupings of relatives, some of whom I instantly recognised others who, but for the notes on the back of the pictures would have remained anonymous. I studied them carefully, many of the subjects I had never met and since they were now dead apart from in an afterlife, in which I don’t believe, never will. Others had died more recently but were remembered in family stories that have become the staples of our history. The great thing is that seeing those people brought the stories back to life.

I have always been a keen photographer and yes my first camera was a box Brownie, given to me when I was on holiday with my aunt in Norway. Somewhere my first tentative steps towards recording images are tucked away in some cupboard, though where I have no idea. I gradually improved the standard of my equipment and in the early eighties moved into developing and printing my own pictures. This gave me the type of creative freedom that until then I had only dreamed of and some of the collages I produced still remain amongst my favourite images. The in time for a trip to New Zealand I bought my current digital camera, a Cannon. I love it. I can take loads of photographs and they’re all there. I download them, stick them on CD or flash drive and look at them whenever I choose. And that is where the problem lies. I can enjoy them but what about in 50 years time? Will people come across flash drives and CDs and instantly be able to play them? I doubt it.

Only a few years ago three and half inch floppy disquettes were what we saved our information to; there aren’t that many computers produced, if any, that read these as standard. And I’m only talking about 10 years ago, what about 50, from where most of the photos I was looking at came from. Personal computers were a dream of the future. The other thing is that each ten years more development and innovation takes place than in the previous ten.

So what is the point of this piece of writing? Easy – print off your photos! Write the names of who is on them on the back. Keep the visual records of lives going, not just electronically but in a ‘hard’ format. That way 100 or 200 years from now someone might pick up a photograph and connect to her or his past.

 

Dog Years Ahead of Our Time (by Mark Bell, Obsolescence Correspondent for the Foolscap Journal)

At a recent symposium on internet technology, (not that I was there, but I have friends who attend such things), one speaker marveled at how fast new developments were being introduced. By her estimate computer technology is now advancing by one year every three months. Sounds fast. I was always told that dog years could be calculated by dividing human years by four, or in other words, one dog year every three months. I’m not sure what the similarity between these two calculations means, but I don’t think this bodes well for the future. Why does everything have to get faster all the time? It’s like we’ve all signed the Futurist Manifesto all of a sudden and the only thing that matters anymore is speed. The Futurists would have loved the internet (which makes me even more suspicious of it), but instead all they got was the First World War. War was the perfect vehicle for the speed and technology that they loved so much, and they were all quick to enlist. Those that weren’t killed were able to praise it as a great triumph once it was all over. Of particular interest to the Futurists was the large-scale use of aircraft during WWI, a first for any war. Although primitive by our current standards, the use of flying machines represented the most impressive use of speed and technology ever seen up to that point.

Since then our quest for speed has continued unabated. When it was first introduced in 1976 the Concorde was seen as a great leap into the future. This wasn’t just another commercial passenger plane, this was a supersonic jet that could fly at twice the speed of sound. New York to London in 3 hours. It was just a matter of time before every plane would be flying at Mach 2. All of a sudden flying cars didn’t seem so far fetched.

The promise of flying cars, jetpacks and other personal flying devices dates back to the story of Icarus, (and we all know how that one turned out). It’s interesting that not only did Greek Mythology give us flight before it was actually possible to fly, but through the story of Icarus the Greeks gave us the first plane crash a few thousand years in advance of the first plane. One might think that this parable of technological hubris would be of great interest to a contemporary audience, but as near as I can tell the only impact it has had on current technology is that we now avoid the use of beeswax when constructing aircraft.

When the calendar rolled towards a new millennium in 2000 the air was thick with cries of “where’s my jetpack?” We’d been promised our own set of wings for so long that it was hard to believe we were still required to walk around on foot. At the time, just saying aloud “the year 2000” sounded so futuristic, it seemed inevitable that great leaps forward awaited us.

Coincidentally, 2000 was also the year that a piece of metal debris fell off a Continental plane on a Paris runway during takeoff. The next plane on the runway that day was Air France 4590, a Concorde bound for New York. The debris on the runway apparently ruptured one of the Concorde’s tyres which in tern sent pieces of rubber debris flying up fast enough to damage the number five fuel tank. Having already reached maximum speed for take-off, the pilot had no alternative but to continue the ascent, but as the fire from the leaking fuel quickly spread to the engines the plane lost altitude and crashed into Les Relais Bleus Hotel killing 4 people on the ground in addition to all 109 passengers and crew on board. Within 18 months the Concorde was retired from the skies altogether, and in the decade that has passed no supersonic jets have stepped in to take its place.

There is something strangely comforting about the obsolescence of supersonic flight. We now have this one instance where we have ceased to go forward.  It might be a fluke, but for once the genie has been put back in the bottle. Maybe we don’t need to go any further with other technologies, too. Maybe we should all just stop where we are and pause for a decade or two. It wouldn’t be so bad. Must we continually update everything all the time? As long as we have pain-free dentistry what more could we possibly want from technology? The future will reach us all in good time, what’s the rush?

A Story in Several Parts; Part Thirteen (by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau)

This is the final part of A Story in Several Parts, by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau, the previous parts can be further down the page. (The painting is by George Shaw and is taken from here;http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/online_shop/ikon_catalogues/artists_monographs/… )

When Lloyd looks back, he does so quickly. He doesn't really see anything, but convinces himself that he can see the whole house on fire. Burning up with huge flames rising from the roof. If Lloyd had seen anything it would have been something else. He would have seen the window to the main bedroom glowing with an unhealthy orange darkness. And he would have seen a shape, thrashing around in that darkness. He would not have heard his Mother screaming from the bottom of the stairs, and his younger brother screaming back from the top of the stairs. He could not have heard that.

They run and they run and they know where they run. It is not far to the woods. It is not far to the body. The street lights are still buzzing, but most of the oranges have become yellows and they don't buzz so much once they are yellow. They don't stop to listen. They get to the woods and they slow down. They both move quickly through the undergrowth, brushing past thorns and breathing heavy breaths. They reach the two trees on top of each other and climb over them. The trees are dry tonight and there are no shits, though Alex checks before he puts his hands on the branches.

Lloyd is laughing differently, hoarsely. His eyes are more blank than ever and he is gurning harder. His bottom jaw grinding on a complex axis. Alex has adrenaline pumping so hard he can hardly choke down enough air to keep him conscious. He feels faint but perversely safe. Like there can be no more. Like that was it. But he knows that isn't it, because they are with the body now and he knows that whatever has gone in Lloyd has gone forever and what didn't happen before must happen now.

The body is still covered in the thin, liquid shit that Alex tried to use to make the deal with the body. It is too dark to see, but it is there. It is wet and greasy and sour. Most of the liquid has run off, but it has painted the skin a yellow brown. The world can be roughly divided into three colours: blue, green and brown. Blue is the sky, green is the plants, and brown is pretty much everything else. Like when you are at primary school and you mix colours, it should make white, because white is all the colours mixed together. It doesn't though, it makes brown. In reality, all the colours mixed together makes brown.

It happens fast. Alex is bent with his hands on his knees and his breathing is taking up most of his concentration. He can see Lloyd, but only in the corner of his eye, and the edges of his vision are even more blurred than usual, because of the dark, and the adrenaline. Alex hears a noise, Lloyd isn't laughing any more. He is crying. But not like a normal cry, this crying comes out from Lloyd's feet. It explodes down from his head to his body to his legs to his feet and is a sort of shout. He burps and wails and snot is streaming down his mouth which in turn is gasping out huge bubbles of snot and pain. His eyes are closed tight and he is roaring. He crouches down and Alex tenses upright. His legs are completely stiff with fear and lactic acid. Lloyd flies at Alex like a football when it hits you square in the face. You can watch it for that majestic second, as it fills your vision, but you cannot move out of its way.

Alex is on the ground and hits his head, Lloyd gropes at Alex's face and scratches and slaps him, trying to grab his eyes. Alex tries to push his hands away and Lloyd punches him. Lloyd scrabbles up his body, grabs Alex's arms and kneels one leg on the ground and one foot on his chest. He takes his time to draw his arm right back and pounds Alex slowly and surely in the face. Alex puts his arms up in front of his face but it is no use. No use at all. He tastes the gravy of his own blood thickly distributing itself around his mouth. Lloyd is roaring and crying and spitting and coughing. He even burps at one point like he will be sick. Alex loses the pain and lets his arms lay back down, they lay across Lloyd's foot, like Alex is stroking his shoe.

Lloyd gets up off Alex's chest and drags him by the legs across to the body. Alex can see Lloyd at a ninety degree angle. He thinks it looks weird, normally you sort of flip your image so it makes sense, but Alex can't make his brain do it, so he lets Lloyd walk up and down the walls of his vision.

He watches Lloyd walk up to the top of his vision wall and kick the body over on to its back, then yank the body's trousers and pants down. He watches Lloyd walk down the wall and pull them all the way, till they are nearly off, but the body's shoes stop them coming off. Lloyd lets out a scream. Lloyd walks towards the bottom of Alex's vision, his feet getting bigger and then Alex feels Lloyd's foot connect with his mouth. His teeth feel like hard boiled sweets being crunched and they come apart and as Lloyd walks away Alex rolls his bitty broken sweets around in his mouth with his swollen tongue.

Alex can't really see anything at all now, but if he could, he would see Lloyd stroll back to the body and take out a small pen knife and hack at the penis and testes of the body. Its genitalia are cold and small and waxy. It is dark and Lloyd doesn't make a clean cut. He grabs at the bloody mess and pulls away a clump of thigh skin, scrotum and part of the penis. He walks back over to Alex; pulls him over so he is looking up at the night sky. Lloyd waits till he thinks Alex's eyes are open and then crouches down and pushes the hacked off bits of the body into Alex's face. Lloyd gets up and pats his pockets. He screams again. High pitched and then low. He jumps at the body and stabs it repeatedly, in its exposed stomach, in the gap where its cock was.

He does a bent over, pained walk back to Alex and crouches down next to him, his face so close. “Where are the fucking matches?” Alex hears Lloyd speaking but can't hear him through the fog of blood and pain. Lloyd slaps Alex a few times, tries to pinch his cheeks but can't get a firm grip on the bloody flesh. “Where are the fucking matches?” Alex hears him speak words now, woken up by the new volume. And though he can't see Lloyd, Alex knows that his eyes are closed. And that he has stopped gurning. He is no longer crying now and his words are clearer and his eyes are dead and closed, no longer of any use. They are both blind now. Alex can't open his eyes properly, and if he could, they would be covered in his blood and the body's skin and he wouldn't be able to use his arms to clear his face. Lloyd has snipped his eyes off from his brain and every muscle in Lloyd's face is relaxed and soft.

Alex opens his mouth wider and moans, he wants to help but he can't quite do it. Lloyd speaks softly again, not whispering, but close, “Where are the fucking matches?”

There is a moment where Alex thinks he will just moan again, but he breathes slowly, and focuses on making his mouth and tongue and throat all work for the words he wants to say. “In my pocket.”

Lloyd goes down to Alex's trousers with his face close to Alex's body at all times. Alex can't feel a thing now. Unconsciousness grabs at him and he sleeps. Lloyd sticks his hands hard into the pocket and pulls out the long matches, they are wet from the mud and sweat and yet still greasy. If you looked close you would see that the water is all in separate dots, separated by the coating of grease. It is too dark to see that anyway, even if you were up close, but it is true.

Lloyd rises and walks away from Alex and to the place where Alex dropped his half bottle of petrol. Lloyd stands for a moment, holding the bottle in one hand, and the matches in the other and his face is turned up at an oblique angle to the sky. He closes his eyes again, and empties half of the petrol over his head. He opens one eye a tiny amount and goes over to the body, manoeuvring himself down on to it, careful not to spill the petrol or open his eyes more than he has to. He is face to face with the body and he pours the rest of the petrol over him and the body. His arms stretch out behind his back, and most of it goes on his head, and his shoulders, and the body's head, and the body's shoulders. He drops the empty bottle next to the body's slightly bent arms and then pulls a match out of the packet. He does this with his arms outstretched, in front of his head, face to face with the body, careful not to open his eyes, careful not to see. The match won't light on the first go, Lloyd's hands are sweaty and he can't see to get the angle right. On the second go he almost loses the match from his fingers but he repositions without too much effort and on the third go it lights. Like before, like when his hand became the flame to Alex for that moment, there is no time lag between him lighting the match, and all of the petrol going up in flame. A wave of heat travels down Lloyd's body and he grimaces but grabs on to the body's shoulders and doesn't open his eyes. He bites down so hard, his tongue is between his teeth and he almost bites right through it.  He lets out a gasp but doesn't cry out.

If Alex wasn't still unconscious, and still basically blind, and still facing the sky, and he could see Lloyd and the body in flames, and could understand what he was seeing, then he wouldn't be able to see them anyway, he would see them as one indistinguishable mass of multicoloured flame. The fire would be so bright, compared to the dark that is all around, that it would be too bright to tell which bits of the fire were which. It would be so bright that Alex would have to look away, even after just a second of trying to tell which bits were the body, and which bits were Lloyd. And even if Alex could see them, and not look away because it was too bright, then he would still look away because if he could look hard enough, he would see one of the indistinguishable bits of flame is still moving, shuddering with the flames.