When All's been Said and Done - an Annie Story

I`m walking down Piccadilly. The weather is atrocious. A wind blows in gusts across Green Park.

Sometimes I hate myself. I have periods of psychic pain. Sometimes I feel as if the world is full of violence, and my mind is just numb from it. At other times I`m overcome by anger, I want to use the energy of that but I can't find an outlet.

Occasionally, I have flashes of Annie. Annie and myself, mostly just talking.We shared a dreadful flat in Camberwell and we were mostly depressed.

So what? We loved each other.

One day Annie awoke and said, "What the fuck is going on?"

"What," I said.

"I mean," said Annie, " What are we doing. It`s all so shit. we aren't`t going anywhere.

"Oh fuck," I said. I was sort of hoping she wouldn`t notice how bad it all was.

We were living in a little flat in Camberwell which we shared with some guys from Morocco who never spoke to us. It was all a bit squalid and strange and neither of us had much in the way of work or money.

Climbing trees

*

I used to climb trees a lot. That was about freedom, of course: freedom from adults.

The top of trees were places they could not come, and I remember defying their pleas for me to come down, specifically the high shrill voices of old woman, tiny specks below calling from the old folks home across the road. I thought I wanted freedom from safety, but I did not really. Surely no-one really enjoys fear, except in the limited sense where they desire the controlled risks of sports or competition. Real fear is an appalling emotion, reckless and reductive.

I did not really understand the dangers inherent in climbing high and, moreover, pride had accompanied my ascent. I would not come down.

When I was high up I could see quite far, almost to the parade of shops on Great Western Road, certainly as far as the silent lawns and ashen Beech trees of the old folks home. Aberdeen is the granite city, and there is the harr besides: everything greyly softened by that shadowless light.

My imagination lent that I was a pirate, on a ship high at the crow’s nest, an image that keyed with my idea of rebellion, escape. I had no eye patch but I did have a dark blue jumper that my mother had knitted and which I considered very piratical. I also had the idea of myself as feline, agile, which in truth I was, as I was unusually adept at climbing and rapid besides, and as pirate rebel I shared the heights with cats alone.

The Chestnut was best: the Lime had been pollarded, so it was just a mass of green shoots, and the stickiness of Lime leaves was not pleasant either. The Maple had no lower branches and those it had above were too tightly packed to make climbing possible. In contrast, the Chestnut occasionally offered the alternation of almost ninety degree stems so desirable to climbers. Its bark was rough enough to grip even on wet days and did not come off.

I hoped it would be possible to go from the Chestnut tree to the Maple, and then across the branches of the Maple to enter my own bedroom window on the first floor. But the Maple branches were too slender, and the two trees too far apart. However, summer after summer I could see their arms nearing and thickening to grasp each other and I looked forward to the day when that mysterious journey from the chestnut to the maple and thence into my room would be possible.

But then when they did strengthen ten years later, and I was 20 and had come back from university one summer I found that they had been cut, pale yellow discs of timber where once limbs had been. My desire to climb across the trees into my bedroom conflicted directly my father’s cathartic need to amputate their branches. He did this in a haphazard way: they resembled the broken forms of painted trees by Vincent van Gogh. This implied a profound desire to do violence against nature*, the chainsaw-massacred trees like crime scenes. It also limited my arboreal wandering.

Another possibility was to go from the Chestnut tree to along the walls bordering our house, which were about 7 foot high, of rough granite but with a course of red bricks at the top. One could walk along the borders of our garden , along the borders of another pair of gardens and then on again. How much they varied, this one orderly, with vegetables in neat lines, the next merely a lawn, the third featuring a huge plastic pool- until one reached the Amatola Hotel, where if you were unlucky a kitchen porter or chef, smoking outside the kitchen back door, would shout and start as if to chase you; something that caused me genuine fear, but which I can now see was merely sport on their part.

*

The trees and my child’s mind showed me a freedom that home and family and school denied. I thought then that I would some day attain the splendour and liberty in real life that my childish imagination had projected. Instead, I find myself at forty unremarkable and compromised, shouting at children to climb down from tall trees.

* I visited a Hungarian family in Lugano, Switzerland. They had a fine house with a garden that was a former orchard and had many fine trees on the slope of the hill overlooking the lake. They also had two dogs. The dogs barked causing frequent altercations with the neighbors. Arguments about the dogs came and went over several months. One weekend the Hungarian family went away on holiday. When they returned, they saw that all the trees in their garden had been cut down by the neighbor. When I visited them, the Hungarian family still had their dogs.

*

The Dreaminess.

The dreaminess was a response to life's general nastiness, an inner migration.

I read once about how people in solitary confinement taught themselves to survive the ordeal by developing fantasies, one of which was called "the hotel". In order to maintain control of his mind, the prisoner would elaborate the fantasy of being a millionaire hotel owner, imagining everything from the bellboy's buttons to the hotels architecture and the streets around it in fantastic detail.

The dreaminess is involuntary. It's an Apollonian state of mind, about self-removal. It's connected to music. When I got the dreaminess I'd hear music in my mind and then the dreaminess was most powerful the music was apocalyptic, distressing. At other times the music was usually melancholy: Neil Young from "After the Gold Rush", or Joy Division. The films that best capture the dreaminess are "Closely Observed Trains" and "My Own Private Idaho", where the dreaminess is transformed into narcolepsy. The author is probably Celine, perhaps Hamsun.

I remember one summer I had a job in a shop in Edinburgh. The under-manager was an ugly hag from Wester Hailes with a drooping lower lip and hideously pink skin and a penchant for nagging in her plebian accent and I spent the whole three months in the dreaminess, never leaving. I survived by anaesthetising myself totally from the monster.

I remember entering the dreaminess when I was walking to school. The tedium of the walk (twice daily, as I lunched with my mother at home) pushed me into the dreaminess and I began to imagine mysterious underground railways or that I had wings to fly so that I could complete the journey more rapidly. Transport and movement have often been a theme of the dreaminess, perhaps because it is a response to confinement and restriction.

At other times, my childhood experience of the dreaminess involved self-transformations into animals, (usually hybrid animals combining the fierce cats with eagles and sharks) or cavalry officers: beings that expressed unassailable will-power, energy and force, qualities my languid mind so clearly lacked.

I have never spoken to anyone about the dreaminess. When I was a child I imagined it to be commonplace: now I am older I have come to realize that few people ever enter it. It feels like being stoned, or that you are in that suspended state of mind usual after waking from a deep sleep. I developed the dreaminess as an antidote to the extreme tedium and restriction of school (I still feel considerable resentment about how my time was wasted there). It is a sort of respite from pain too. In one way it makes one quite powerful because you are unassailable in the dreaminess. On the other hand, it weakens you because you are prevented from confronting the things tht might permit you to change your life: because the dreaminess is involuntary it can come and prevent you from achieving things, like an unwanted dose of morphine.

For example, the dreaminess prevented me from passing my driving test: I found it so nasty to sit with the boorish instructor (why are so many driving instructors such oafs?) that the dreaminess engulfed me and I would go through the lessons as if asleep.

Of course, these people don't know about the dreaminess and think that by being rude or aggressive they can make you "snap out of it".

Ultimately, the dreaminess is a morbid state, and when the dreaminess has been at its strongest is when I've felt closest to suicide. I don't enter it often now because I am lucky and don't so often have to suffer the ennui and nastiness that seemed to colour the first thirty years of my life.

The photo is a detail of a photo of Chantilly by Frederick H. Evans, from The Chateaux of France, from the Archives of Country Life 1897 - 1939, by Marcus Binney (pub. Mitchell Beazley, London, 1994).

Kim's Game, finished picture

A few changes, including the orientation of the picture to reach the final version
(the first version is at the bottom, the latest at the top).

For mysterious reasons that govern these things this picture never "took off", for me, the process leading nowhere surprising, and always polite.

Dear Annie...a letter I found.

Here is a letter I found inside a book (Voltaires's Candide). It is undated.

Dear Annie,

It is a long time since I last heard from you: I hope you've been well.

Things have been unusually grim here.

My room is at the end of a long corridor, and overlooks the courtyard. It is small and I have to lie on the bed to take my shoes off. I have a wardrobe, a small desk and a bed.

I sit at the desk and look out the window. Usually I hear little from the courtyard except the sound of water running down the drains. At times the face of one of my neighbours appears in one of the windows, usually a pasty faced woman, with grey hair. I cannot see her features more clearly. There are net curtains on most windows, the atmosphere tranquil, like a Dutch painting and I would not be surpised to see a clog-wearing servant appear with a white smock and bonnet and broom at any moment. Also, twice I saw a siamese cat, perched with absurd elegance on the seat of an old bicycle.

I am fighting the goblins still: we have reached a sort of truce: the room has been deivided in two, we marked the floor with a white chalk: I get the left side, they take the right.The line cuts the bed, but that cannot be helped, at least they aren't shreiking all the time.

I hope to see you soon,

I suppose I wrote the letter some years ago in Camberwell, but it is undated.

The Best Cars Are Bristol Cars

This painting is a conversation that has begun happily. Only a few alterations are needed- most obviously a tidying up of the silhouette of the Bristol cars. It's not often a painting begins well like this, it only happens when you don't give a damn, but, of course, not giving a damn isn't something you can just choose to do. You just have to find yourself in that mood somehow.

The texture of paint is particularly likable here. It comes from painting over an old canvas.

Bristol Cars are a hand-built luxury car. They have been manufactured since 1945 and are sold exclusively through their showroom in Kensington High Street, London.

For those who are unfamiliar with this splendid British car company: http://www.bristolcars.co.uk/index2.htm

I do not exist

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

This is Part II of T.S. Eliot's poem, Ash Wednesday (1930) Faber Paperbacks.

The painting is a detail of a recent imaginary portrait.