last man out of eden

After She Stopped

 

“You could look at it forever, couldn’t you?”

It was my first visit to the Hilbert Gallery. I’m not sure why I was there. Maybe it was raining outside. Maybe there a meeting I needed to miss.

Looking at the screen, I thought the words were part of the exhibition.

I stood there staring at images that seemed to change every ten seconds or so, wondering how much of my life would be too much to spend with a piece of art.

It was minutes before I noticed the girl standing next to me. She had a Mary Quant bob and she was wearing a long woollen coat although it was summer. I wondered how long she’d been there.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a kiss.” She didn’t look at me. It was like a cord ran between her eye and the screen.

“I can’t see any lips.” Between the clothes and the stillness, she had this kind of Beatnik authority about her, and I felt like a klutz as soon as I said it.

“Yeah, weird, isn’t it?” she said.

We stood in silence after that. I kept watching the screen, trying to figure whether the film was on a loop, whether anyone was going to kiss at any point. I’d forgotten whatever it was I’d come in to avoid doing.

I wondered if there was some kind of etiquette for who leaves first in situations like this.

“Come back tomorrow,” she said, like she was reading my thoughts off an autocue on the screen.

“I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.”

“You’re coming here.”

It was like that for months. I have no recollection of the hours I wasn’t at the gallery. I’d turn up at the Hilbert. “You could look at it forever, couldn’t you?” she’d say, and we’d stand in front of the screen like we were playing a game of dare.

The day she stopped coming, I had this cramping, seasick feeling. I felt her absence next to me like it was thumping my kidneys.

For weeks I went back every day. I stared harder and harder at the screen, as though she might be in there. She never was.

One day I was standing in front of the screen and the emptiness next to me was missing. A woman stood next to me. She had a sharp suit and her blonde hair was tangled like she was on her way somewhere.

I said, “You could look at it forever, couldn’t you?”

 

 

 

 

 

Petals

I was told yesterday that a former colleague took her life shortly before Christmas. We weren’t very close friends, but we were certainly friends, and close enough to have been out drinking more than several times. This is an old poem of mine, but posted here for the first time, and for her.

And a reflection, because we always wonder at times like this what we could have said, or whether we could have made it clearer that we would have listened: make sure everyone you work with, however senior or junior to you they may be, knows that, if there’s no one else, they can talk to you without fear of judgment. Be an open person, and if that’s considered a weakness where you work, then do anything, however small, to change the workspace around you.

RIP Emma

Petals

Pieces of broken bodies fall around me

Like funeral petals

Fallout from friendships

Faced with the nuclear option of my madness.

I gouge through gobs of flesh

That were once lips, dribbling easy promises,

Scouring for something so solid

As a splinter of bone to support my soul.

 

I laughed and you loved it,

And then I laughed too much and in the wrong places –

And I could not stop.

 

Down I dig through gristle hair and teeth

Scratching at sinew for a single fingerhold of empathy

There is a solid something

Somewhere

There is a noise that is not the scraping of my skull

Somewhere

But not here

Live Bed Show

You picked me up over espresso

in Bar Soho,

cut me open,

and found neon glowing through my veins

and as I bled the blood that flowed

formed pools that spelled

Live Bed Show

Alibi

The words to the previous video

Alibi

When you fail, you cry
Because you believed the lie
That if you try
With all your might
If you pursue a single line of sight
Looking neither to the left nor right,
Ignoring the distractions and delights
There is no height
You cannot reach
So when you don’t
You’re the failure, right?
Not them.
Your dreams provide their alibi.

But I know there are things I’ll never achieve
And I deceive myself if I believe I will.
My limitations are a bitter pill
Of stillborn expectations
And thrills I had to leave behind
But I was too blinded by stories
Of glory, fame and wealth
To see that I had whored myself
To the lie that I’m alone.
You see the only dream that counts
Is that we all count,
That every voice is heard
Every hope, anxiety, despair
Every tear you shed that no one saw
Because you turned away
And every desperate word
That you were too ashamed to say.
And I can’t do that on my own.
And that’s
OK.

Do not comply
With what they tell you to desire.
Defy the boundaries
They place upon your mind
And start a fire
That will not die
Until your whisper
And that of every brother, sister
Mother, father, lover,
Every angry fist in history
Unclenches and becomes a kiss
And every pair of lips becomes a choir.

Don’t let your dreams provide their alibi.
Make them accountable for every crime,
For every voice that they deny.
Look them in the eye
And let your rhymes and passion fight them.
Unite and let your love and the fact that after every disappointment you still believe in this sorry species indict them.
When you embrace humanity in its broken condition,
When ensuring those who cannot speak are spoken for’s your mission
And you chase the truth till every eye is open,
Every sleeping conscience woken,
Then your vision can incite them
To a revolution.
So take a moment, and your dreams,
And write them.
Go out into the alleys and recite them
And if humanity evolves
Sufficient to resolve
To make a reckoning
Of those who were involved
In lifting us from the mire
And those who just devolved
The choice to someone down the line
You’ll stand absolved,
Your head held high.
Their dreams,
The ones that you made fly,
With a whisper, quiet as a lullaby,
Those dreams will be your alibi.

Stuck In The Middle

Coming right up to date with the journey so far, before sloughing off the introspection for the new year and having a year of unadulterated literary fun.

In the middle of 2010 I started eight cuts gallery. A place where I hoped to bring the best of the collective values whilst having the creative control I hadn’t had there. eight cuts gallery has been, and continues to be, exhilarating, exciting, a place beyond what I could have dreamed possible. We’ve held three online exhibitions, filled with wonderful work, heavily curated around themes I wanted to explore and hyperlinked to each other in provocative ways.

And there has been a steady stream of live shows through which I’ve met amazing people, and played to sell-out crowds at the likes of Stoke Newington Literary Festival. And the icing on the cherry on the marzipan on the whatnot has been the publishing. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do most of all is promote the very best writing around. Having a small publishing wing allowed me to do that to the very best of my ability for a few titles and authors within the narrow niche of contemporary urban/experimental fiction I’d chosen.

It’s been an extraordinary ride. Some of the most exhilarating highs imaginable. Each of the book releases being some of the highest highs. Penny Goring’s The Zoom Zoom being singled out for praise by the Guardian First Book Award judges and Cody James’ The Dead Beat being shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize giving moments of woot woot joy. But publishing has also brought my darkest literary hours. It’s something I’m just not cut out for and won’t do again. From fall-outs between authors to the pressures of caring for authors through the lows as well as the highs, I was left on many occasions ill and drained and feeling the closest to suicidal I have in a long while. And my own writing was left completely cold for months on end leaving me drained, grey, anxious and resentful. I am still hungry to promote the very best culture I find. But I need to do that by shouting its strengths – what I do best – rather than doing the actual publishing thing.

And the live shows – filling the dark, gothic basement of Baby Bathhouse in Stoke Newington, playing to a packed crowd at Oxfringe, the anticipation of my first ever show in the North, at Manchester’s legendary Afflecks. And meeting some remarkable performers – Lucy Ayrton, Clarissa Pabi, Emily Harrison, Anna Hobson, Joe Briggs, Paul Askew, Kate Madigan and omany thers. But there have been some incredibly dark moments here as well. And some tough choices. There have been opportunities to grow, to play bigger venues – if we could just tone down some of our stuff. And people, friends, desperate to perform with us whose material was way outside our normal sphere.

 

It was always that same pull I felt with The Company of Fellows. Opportunity against integrity. That’s how it feels. And, I hope, it’s something I will feel less and less as I stop thinking about “success” and focus only on the integrity of the art. But there’s still the question of how to deal with the e-mails I get from people who want to be part of what we do even if their work is totally different from what’s suitable for our shows. In a way that’s more of a pressure now, because not focusing on “success” and focusing on fun should leave more space for inclusion. Yet being more serious about the art means I have to be selective. Figuring out how to work that - who knows!