Igor Clark

What with Friday night’s revelry causing me to spend most of Saturday in bed, I missed my recently-instituted weekly trip to Dalston market, and so decided today to stretch my legs and grab some essential supplies by strolling down to the supermarket in Whitechapel, walking back the long way, up towards Aldgate and back up Brick Lane. I snuck out of the side gate to cut the corner round onto Whitechapel Road, and couldn’t help but notice immediately an unusually heavy police presence. Walking further along the road I encountered more and more, stopping to snap some shots, wondering whether this could really be a normal population for a Sunday – surely the Met aren’t so uptight about Whitechapel that a few street-stalls and a fancy-dress procession would inspire such blanket coverage?

A quick consultation with an enthusiastic photographer whose view I’d inadvertently blocked in the execution of further investigations bore Olympian fruit; the Torch was to be borne along Whitechapel Road as part of its journey to Beijing, via the Millennium Dome. My gaze followed hers up to the police helicopters hovering above, back down to the sea of fluorescent jackets, and, realising that the route would coincide with mine, I continued along my way, shopping bags in one hand and camera-phone in the other.

Soon the density of detectives grew dramatically; on foot, on motorbikes, in vans and even on pedal-bikes they came, and sure enough, the first bus of the Torch Team came past the bottom of Brick Lane, aswarm with yellow coats and flashing blue lights, with more vans hot on their heels. In spite of a policewoman’s estimate of an hour, a five-deep guard of shouting, sweating, screaming officers heralded the arrival of the torch-bearer within moments of the bus, and instantaneously the atmosphere of the scene transformed from pregnant anticipation to an unmistakeable, almost tangible atavistic thrill. A battle of shouts was merely the sonic manifestation of a battle of wills between the phalanx of police, and the demonstrators whose attentions they wished to ward off, the latter shouting not only various admonitions to the boys in blue but also, amongst other things, “Free Tibet!”, “Go home!”, “You’re not welcome” – that last, I thought, particularly personal and powerful in its clarity, simplicity and directness.

Here was the representative, the conceptual; here was the pinnacle of a clash of human forces, the apex of antipathy between a set of interlinked and interwoven binary oppositions. Imperialism and freedom; China and Tibet; Western and Eastern policy, power and perception; order and anarchy; the Olympian spirit inevitably set deliberately and manipulatively in stark contrast to political machination, human frailty in the face of the temptations of power, and human cruelty in the face of that power’s actual attainability.

Yet also here was the real. The spine-tinglingly immanent reality of tribalism; of simple aggression and antagonism dressed up in self-righteousness; of the thoughtless exercise of duty. An ultimate reality, yes, the street level of this internecine struggle pointing inescapably to the reality of the powerlessness of the masses, their lives laid out before them by the soaring sweep of History and its implementation through the desires of ideologues the world over, whose causes and intentions they champion at the front line of conflict; but also the palpable, material reality of the crowd, the hormonal and adrenal dynamics of the constituents of those masses, the sudden and powerful meaninglessness of the ultimate at the very moment of its infusion into the corpus. It was that which grabbed hold of me, the excitement of the moment, the presence of the world and its power and I turned to follow the runner, first with my eyes and then with my feet, overcome not only with a sense of immediacy and connection to my surroundings but also by a heady cloud of comprehension of everything swimming around me; the grunts and Marine-like shouts of the police, the angry baying and shouting of the protestors, the apparent calm of the torch-bearer in the face of what suddenly seemed to be mayhem, organisation barely maintaining dominion over chaos.

Here, now, was a primal happening; a chink in the fabric of daily existence through which one might conceivably slip, a believable possibility of the collapse of order; people running madly down the street, pavements and roads becoming one, cyclists, pedestrians, police, protestors, passers-by like myself intermingling in a frenzy of excitement, my shopping bags swinging beside me, my camera clicking away, my mind exalted and my senses ablaze, an explicit distinction on political grounds mirroring the sociological and psychological chasms separating these groups of people so close to each other that they could reach out and touch, grab, caress, punch — and within it all, almost subsumed by the emotional seismology, the still, small voice of calm, of integrity and endeavour, its figurative presence rendering trivial the manner of its physical representation: the Olympian intention.