Igor’s thoughts

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.

A young lady sitting at a junction chatted idly with her passenger, and, when ready, thrust a tonne of moulded metal across my two-wheeled path as I sailed into a green-light gauntlet, throwing the common perception of rectitude conferred on me by that beacon into stark relief against its ultimate meaninglessness.

Time lolled lazily ahead of me, affording a nonchalant Destiny the opportunity to dangle in my sights the possibility of action against its intended trajectory; daring me to deny its dominion, challenging my challenge of its apparent authority.

Contemplation of the uselessness of an in any case absent bell done and dusted, the startling abundance of exhalation sprung like a well from my lungs was still not sufficiently strong to penetrate the toughened glass shield, and this first fist shaken furiously at the hand of Fortune fell again, futile.

Shaken suddenly from a now seemingly lifelong sensory indolence, abruptly acutely aware of the surrounding world’s almost visceral and certainly soon-to-be tangible physical indifference to my plight, my mind elevated by excitement and adrenaline to that mythical state of presence to the moment of existence, I grasped fully in that very moment the eternally infinite complexity of Now; that vortex of happenstance, that abundance of potential pathways continually strewn palm-like before us and summarily trodden beneath the grinding steps of our narcoleptic trudge through the luminous intervals we call our lives.

Seized by my own capacity, I squeezed on my brake and the back wheel – apprising me, even in my access of apprehension, of the paradox of choice and mechanism – started to skid on the dry tarmac, ceasing immediately on my grip’s relaxation; one course closed, I opened immediately another, my mind and body tightened, together, to a sneer at such dualistic distinctions, and tilted my frame away from true, leaning into a leftward swerve which though inadequate to avert entirely the expected collision, would surely diminish its force, and leave me free to proceed with my reflections?

The instant of impact took me momentarily outside of myself; in the pitching, yawing rolls of hand-wound gramophone cycles, the bike was knocked from under me and I slid to the dirt, my ear presumably, as evidenced by its subsequent revelation to a hospital nurse of chipped black metallic paint, grazing the nearside wing of the car fractions of a second before the ground treated my elbow in the same manner. The cosmos scrabbling around me in a crazed dash to regain its familiar orientation, my panorama returned to its customary aspect and I lifted my head towards the rapidly-approaching anxious onlookers, then back to the car, puzzled as to why its passenger, the door now open, was towering above me at such an unusual angle.

I stood, dazed but unbroken, and was assisted kindly to the roadside where I sat for a moment bemused, befuddled, and bewildered, distracted from my meditations by the ministrations of an emergency-ambulance motorcyclist. Where was I hurt, could I see, could I feel?

To those questions I could provide answers, but to another, more fundamental: had I averted my fate, or merely co-operated in its implementation? – I had, and have, none.

Suddenly, it seems, the hirsute crest of flourishing youth announces its
Intention to pass the way of the rest of all flesh.
Cruel is the irony of existence, played out through the path of

Testosterone: in early hours it runs a relaxed
Riot, coursing freely, unworn by care, unfettered by
Anxiety; beholden only to the satisfaction of physical
Necessity, revelling in the magnetic pull of a crown quite so full - but
Soon, the daily grind inevitably
Impinges, inescapably, upon
The hitherto heedless viscerality of

Glowing adolescence,
Leading the newly over-active adrenals to attend
Openly to their accelerated
Recession of the erstwhile pilous perimeter and its
Ignominious retreat to entirely unexpected
Areas.

Many are the compensations to be gleaned from a life increasingly
Unencumbered by juvenile confusions and agitations; yet
None can deny how cruel indeed a
Deception is wrought upon us: to grant so transcendent a glimpse of
Immortality through the briefly burgeoning bloom of experience - so swiftly and so softly whisked, wholly, away.

We wonder how this might have come about. Of course the reason might easily have been as simple as that the TV star was hungry, angry with the homeless man (damn those homeless men), or merely criminally insane; one can’t help but wonder, however, whether there might not have been a deeper and altogether more fascinating scenario at the root of this regrettable occurrence (assuming, of course, that it was regretted and not vaunted). Perhaps the TV star had also become homeless and stumbled into a biting episode arising from a territorial dispute over begging rights with another member of the homeless fraternity (or indeed sorority)? Or maybe, just maybe, there exists a secret society whose members are all TV stars happily paying to attend staged fights between homeless men in (temperature-controlled) empty swimming pools in the basements of Barratt mansions secreted deep in Epping forest? Perhaps the TV star was so incensed at the loss of one such fight by the homeless man he or she had sponsored with a significant display of fiscal confidence that the bite was simply one of frustration? Or maybe - just maybe - the TV star, once a keen participant in such light-hearted leisure activities, might have fallen from grace, losing a coveted spot on “Celebrity Bastard Squad” following a mysterious incident with a turkey and a Cumbrian rapist, collapsing via a glut of explosively lurid coverage ultimately into a desolate morass of anonymous obscurity, eventually ending up, in a staggering and of course entirely unexpected dénouement, fighting for coins in the cellar of his replacement’s crypto-Wimpey pile?

We may never know.

The sun sneaks its way ’round the back. The wheels just keep on turning, and the great mechanic they power hums apace; objective, indifferent, yet ultimately inspiring our tiny hearts, setting the scene for a fresh focus. Time takes its toll on our fragile frames, yes, on our rosy lips and cheeks; but also on our yokes of care. With every inch of each revolution, disappointments dissolve into distance; with each step of every rotation, losses themselves lose their very sting. “Oh, mundane earthly matters”, as my Dad had Galdós put it: “you are not worth a single sigh”. And so we rise, though sometimes our spirits sag, and this universal marker, this covenant of continuity, on greeting us grants a glimpse of how transitory are our tribulations; and so we forge, a degree more fixed, ahead. So it goes.

Zoom out from here. Pass through the wrought-iron gateway, back away down the churned, dried mud path ’til your feet are planted firmly on the cracked light grey tarmac, Leroy's firmament-focused monument still in your sights; feel the fixity, and spin yourself slowly ’round. A solitary slatted wooden house; ploughed fields, meadows a little further off, woods covering distant hills. How patiently has this land lain silent, immemorial, still and strong, untouched, its surface barely scratched, blissfully unaware of the arrival of these mayflies who flare briefly in an illuminated access of passion, a charge of excitement, yet immediately fade, scattering their corporeal detritus as though a thin cover of dust - and there is no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither is there any more pain, for these former things have passed away - and still the land lies in dignified repose, unmolested, timeless … fleeting.

I like tea. Tea is well good. I don’t like caffeine though; caffeine makes me jittery, so I don’t drink things with it in them. Like, you know, normal tea. Builder’s tea. Mmm. Which is a shame, because I like drinking it. (Well, you know, I like the drinking bit, at the actual time of drinkery, because of the taste and the refreshment bit; not after the fact, because that’s exactly the point at which I do the being-made-jittery thing.) Anyway, I digress. Unlike I usually do. Usually I stay right on target, cutting incisively through to the core of the matter. Let’s face it, digressions are hardly the sort of thing you’ve come to expect from me. Anyway, about 2 months ago I went to an exhibition at the Wellcome Institute, you know, the one on Euston Road, yeah, opposite the station, well, kind of, between Euston and Euston Square, but on the other side, so I guess kind of not between them but triangulated with them, and, prior to going, I arranged to meet some friends there so that we could allow light to bounce off the exhibits through our eyes and into our brains at the same time. I arrived a bit earlier than the appointed hour, and rather than just sit there, or even stand there, testily tapping my feet in the manner of one who’d drunk too much caffeinated tea, I went to the very nice café and bought a pot of decaffeinated English Breakfast and a Bakewell slice. The crockery was rather elegant; a triangular (bit of a triangular theme going on here) plate, triangular saucer and teacup and even, if I remember correctly, a matching triangular teapot, all with satisfyingly rounded corners, reminiscent of that ’50s style of crockery whose name I obviously can’t remember, but mixed with a bit of Alessi-style pastelism to make everything feel excitingly Noughties and simple - thus functional in appearance - but stylish. Shit yeah. Anyway, the tea, this substance chemically deprived of its primary purpose - its ergon, as those Greeks might have had it - this apparently functionally defunct jitter-inducer, fulfilled an entirely different function, perfectly: it tasted brilliant, and made me go »aaaaaahhhhh«. The bakewell was pretty damn fine, too.

What a dejected, disconsolate train-waiter. Note well the rounded hunch of the shoulder, the crestfallen tilt of the head; the ennui, the loneliness. The intolerable »tick, tock« of the oversized clock, ramming home the inescapable passage of time, a constant, ever-present reminder of the fleeting nature of human endeavour, wrapped up in meaninglessly snazzy luggage or not. Haha, well, never mind, eh?

You'd never have got signage like this in the Soviet Union. That's for sure.

Setting aside (as I'm wont, daily, hourly, even minutely, to do) the myriad unresolved complexities already established regarding the possibility or otherwise of any form of genuine mental continuity in the face of constant molecular change, ‘my’ mind often wanders (insofar as it may, within such tortuous constraints), on engaging with cosmic phenomena, over the seemingly innumerable moments of human experience prior to our own - yes, even across the glassy, impenetrable sea of macro-chronology - to an era in which that collection of thought-atoms ‘our’ species (go on, indulge me) granted itself the conceit of including within the body of those it considered elevated to the canonical was sufficiently small in comparison to our contemporary equivalent that they'd look up at the moon and just be like "WOOOAH". Given this same species’ seemingly preternatural disposition towards supernaturalisation of the inexplicable, what ghastly, divine horrrors might have loped across the under-developed primeval cognitive synapses of those complete loonatrons if they'd seen »this«?

I mean, OK, I'm a 21st-century guy, I ‘know’ about penicillin and wasabi, nanotechnology and relativity, ultimate reality and cats that don't exist (well, I've heard of some of those things, anyway), and frankly, when I cast my gaze up to the majestic splendour of the firmament and see wiggly, squirly, loony shit like this, well, I just don't know what to think any more. Come on, the moon's not supposed to be red, for a start, and it's »DEFINITELY« not supposed to dance like a crazy spaniel frantically dribbling spaghetti out of its ears. Imagine what those poor buggers would have thought.

Bloody sky, I don't know.

What happens to seagull reasons if a man carrying a rope ladder walks calmly and purposefully into the depths of an ancient forest, far from any borders, in the heart of an old, landlocked country, and stumbles across a deep, dry well? What happens to seagull reasons if he secures the ladder to the rusted but thick and still firm iron fittings on the side of the well and, confident that though the iron bears the marks of centuries of neglect, reflecting the despondent, isolated gloom of the clearing in which the well makes its home, it will stand proud, strong, unflinching against the fleeting, transient, meaningless force of his tiny weight, climbs down into the darkness, turning his attention from the dank dampness around and inward toward his self, making his ‘I’ its own focus? What happens to seagull reasons if, by the time his foot brushes gently on the soft, mulchy mud of the bottom of the well, his conscious mind is so abstracted from his surroundings, so absorbed in self-contemplation that his body functions merely mechanically, allowing his manifestation in the by now illusory physical plane to fold itself, to scrunch up its stretch into compact, encapsulated compression so that those surroundings absorb him, and his presence becomes one with the universe, his being disappears, his ‘him’ transforms into ‘all’?

Nothing! Ha.