13th September 2008

A horse-drawn funeral cortege, all white, whithered feathers bursting from their manes, blinkers constricting their awareness of the modern i.e. exterior world. Behind them, a sequence of stretch hearses, beads on a string. I didn't know with to tip my hat or drop my pants. Death is madness is an absence of lucidity, where there was one before. What others might term my madness is a deeply lucid procilivity towards exploration, investigation, the unfolding of established orders, a violation of recieved wisdom, a paradox of the most ghastly degree. And for all the despondency, melancholy this insistent hyper-awareness invites, at least they are my own; I've never succumbed to therapy, medication (of the un-self-prescribed variety), never plugged into a collectively empiricised gentleman's club of clinical disorder, and its impotizing panaceas.

I continued towards the station, boarded the train. I adore train travel, perhaps even above the anticipation of arriving somewhere exciting. Before I lost my wealth, I'd spend a month of each year, sleeping on a train, if only to bolster my energy for the impending months - something of the rhythmic hum of transit induces the most seductive, intoxicating sleep. I'd spend the days tripping about, usually coastal Britain, then, always, by nightfall, I'd be on a train, grabbing a the most exquisite twelve hours of perfect sleep.
London was as hideously paranoid as ever, saturated with vainglorious cunts, manic, gabbling, having collectively tapped into a rhythm of life way beyond the capacity of any natural heartbeat. Delays having situated my arrival directly in the middle of 'rush-hour', I was immediately co-erced into a hyper-condensed melange of sweating commuters on the wheeled cannisters that patrol the underground. A City agents underam seeping stinking fluid onto my hair, his arm aloft to the support rails, as the train lurches grumbling between stations. Such hopeless disarray - peeling paint, safety stickers daubed with obscene graffiti, an aisle bereft of smiles, warmth or interaction. I read my Pasolini collected poems, and its transcendence glimmered like a portal into the anithesis of this grubby, tangible, present realm. And that privilege, the rare twinkling jewel of a suspicion that I may be witness to a gilded seam of life unglimpsed by those around me - and not in a conceited, exclusive way, it's always there, waiting to be tracked down and accessed, but only out of desire - instantly dragged my memory corpus back to the less rancid parts of my adolescence, namely, squatted up a tree, reading Rimbaud, nourished to new depths by the blaze of the verse, titilated by the anarchism of his homosexuality, and, it being the height of summer, assured of the work's transifugred vitality by the correspondence of its exoticism with the everyday realness of the rays transmitted by that ineffable solar eye, beaming wisdom, hope, value into my soul. All of my deities and allies have shared this state of absurd wonderment under the universal judgement of the sun, beneath the solar canopy we are as one, howveer mundane our incompatibilities, if we gaze too hard we'll go blind, if we careen too close, or if it plummets, bored at our tinfoil insolence, we'll incinerate and be so much scatted carbon dust, compatible as water with thirst. For me the tube is myopia writ in crusted, clanking metal, and we are at best moles, consumed by our amphetamine inertia.