24. From 'Nocturnes'

From a currently dormant project, a sequence of prose-poems. I was considering including these in my end-of-year portfolio, then decided against it for reasons of space.

After John Burnside

I

These avenues are an absolutism. Statements in tarmac, red-brick, pebbledash, we do not want to hear. Webbed with traceries, absorbing the resonance of streetlight, the footsteps’ years. The mapping, above all, remains.

II

The marshes, a ghost-map on tarmac and concrete: fronds, tower-blocks. Congress of the semi-detacheds, sand-brick Barrett estates, mulched in brackish water. Curlews and bitternes ululating in public toilets, nesting in ground-floor offices, stalking between the flooded cubicles. The shopping precincts patrolled by fish, the charity shops flourishing with bulrushes and ferns, weevils devouring old hardcover Hazlitts. And, as evening draws on, the sputtering: sodium communing with marsh-light.

III

The beach sloping, stretching along the curve of God’s dragged finger, the churned-up mica in endless drift. Settling as a conglomeration of loose powder, congealing as the sea feels fit, repository of misbegotten stones, slashing razor-shells, the sea-life expelled. Charcoal petrified, a black, hard memento. And, in the evening, the half-lit swarming of Victorian needle-nuzzlers, parasols to the harsh moon.

23. Excavations

2nd draft of a story included in my end-of-year portfolio.

I have the photographs before me. They are spread out, like an ornate Japanese fan. Night came on some time ago, and I did not stand and switch on the light. But I can, for my sins, still see.

I do not know where or when I recovered them. They are already coated with dust again from sitting on my desk for weeks. Nonetheless, they do not show any age: the dress of the girl whose photo occupies the centre of my desk is as vividly scarlet, the flowers around its hem as white, as I imagine they were when first taken. She sits in a field, patches of daisies scattered behind, an acoustic guitar by her skirt, which sits placidly on a leg brought up to her body, thin as a switch. Her arms loop around her knee as if she were holding a dog. This is her only photo: there is nothing of her other than that smile, perturbing in its reserved curve, its flash of utterly white teeth, like the opening of a bean pod. I knew her, after then – we talked, sometimes, I’m sure. But the only extant information of her is that rictus. She is with others, whom I knew, also after these first days. In the other photos, they are gathered in twos or threes, the camera sometimes tilted at a crazy angle, the frame perhaps severing away half a face – for some, that is all I have. Some instinct other than that of survival draws them together, touching, clasping. No matter how long I look, it remains unknown. Skin, hands and hair blur into incomprehensible geometries. I pick up one, dust it off, scrutinise: a young man and his lady friend, slightly off-centre, almost compacted into one slithering shape. Their eyes are arrogant and supplicating: they know that the camera makes them, just as without them, there would be no photograph.

I stand, my body cracking out of inertia, and shuffle to the kitchen. Its unlit corners, crowded with black heaps, are a foreign territory. It is the places that come back, again and again: a palm tree, strung with fairy lights, people surrounding it in the background, the lit vectors of the city spilling away over the wall surrounding it. In one of the photographs, a young man plays rough-trade with it, his girl companion half-heartedly joining in. A slash of black hair frames her eyes, lit by the flash like a cat’s. I feel in these photographs, I am always just off-frame – in this one, sipping miserly at a Corona. But of course, I know I am not. If there is one fact they testify to, it is that. Everything else is supposition. Looking through the open kitchen window, down at the city, I know that this tableau of lights will have disappeared by morning. To have it set down in chemicals, unchanging – that is the thing. Everything else is tawdry imitation.

Standing over my desk, I glance down at them. When I try to remember, they come back, frozen and projected from that time, as if through a magic lantern. The geography of a face, certain senses of personality, affection. Where did they go, who were tied to these things? Where did I, to lose them? Of course, these are not my memories. I look at the arc of an arm, the tautening of skin around a cheekbone raised in smiling, the red cavern of a shout, and wonder where I was when all of this was happening. Dead? Dreaming? Some other world may have harboured me, but I do not remember it. The only, ignominious one left me is this, where the only voice is the October wind battering my window. They are the surface traces of everything that was never mine, like the coils of a sea-ammonite in chalk, the strata going down and down. When I try to remember these things – the heat of a hand around a shoulder, breath-explosion in another’s face, the ambience of beings – the only thing that comes is the heather blazing into colour on the scrubland, in the late sunlight, a fieldfare’s song whistling down from the distance.

There are two more photos of them in the fields. In one, three of them – two young men with scraggly hair, and another girl with the guitar – are sat around a fire of dead logs and ivy, more smoke than flame. In the other, the guitar-case lies by it, a copy of Shelley’s The West Wind and Other Poems sitting on its lid. Outside, I can feel already the evening’s coming frost preparing to seep in. They are saints, pasted into the gold frame of an icon. For them, it was the summer.

22. Why I Hate... Youth

Column, first printed in Plan B #36, August 2008.

“Flagging pursuit of happiness… Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over. [Pause] False ring there.”

--Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape.

In June 2007, the Observer Music Monthly dedicated an entire issue to “the bands and fans kickstarting a youth revolution” – an indication not merely of the OMM’s hubristic zeitgeist-tracking self-image, but of the music press’ singular reverence and hunger for ‘youth’. Since the mid-20^th century pop has been primarily consumed and performed by young people; the glamour of adolescence still forms a significant part of the music and PR industry’s language. Female singers are now accorded publicity and cred according to age – hence Duffy (24) being outclassed by Adele (5 months my senior) and Kate Nash – and are usually out of careers before 27. NME pronounces a new bunch of walking acne patches the Second Coming each week; Artrocker seems to exist to convince people that an unhealthy pallor, tiny legs and sixth-generation post-punk guitars do excitement make. Even the dadrock mags have token ‘hot new bands’ to get sweaty over – witness Mojo handing out 5 star reviews to whichever trad-folk wunderkinds appear.

Neither is Plan B entirely immune: its roots in post-C86 indie music-crit leave its unstinting and commendable neophilia open to moony-eyed sentiment about ‘innocent discovery’ and ‘childlike wonder’ – used, more than is healthy, to justify wilful underachievement and aesthetic conservatism. The insistence of some writers – especially those of a poptimistic bent – that youth’s music should not be subject to critical orthodoxy, only to the blind pleasure principle, is a means of draining ideas from music. As Adorno wrote, “Reflection that takes sides with naivety condemns itself: cunning and obscurantism remain what they always were”; it isn’t criticism, but a shutting-down of criticism, of discourse.

The fixation on youth – its supposed ‘excitement’, vigour, etc. – corresponds worryingly with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism to deny the more unsavoury realities of human existence: suffering, aging, decay and death are elided from the spectacle. The ruling class obsesses over imitation philosopher’s stones (anti-aging products, alternative medicine), while tabloid readers worry over slippages in the celebrity façade of eternal youth. In music discourse, it maintains the claim that radicalism is reserved for the young, that musicians over a certain age are fit only for the nostalgia circuit, or PR-approved, Rick Rubin-assisted Creative Comebacks. This despite the fact that there are many musicians of middle-and-advancing-age soldiering on – Whitehouse, Richard Youngs, Matthew Bower, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Portishead (average age 43) – and producing music far better than kids half, a third of their age. Some of the most compelling music writers around are in (or past) their forties: Mark Fisher, our own Everett True, Chris Bohn, Simon Reynolds. And look to the margins and the scale shifts: for example, 30 in jazz is young, and the number of musicians still keeping up the good work – Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, etc. – past bus-pass eligibility is inspiring; in classical, if you’re below 50 you’re no-one. The continual emphasis on the cultural production and milieu of youth is a perfect example of late capitalism’s fixation on a newness that isn’t new; a state in which, as Frederic Jameson pointed out, “an unparalleled rate of change” is twinned with “an unparalleled standardisation of everything” – the idea that the young might come up with art to shame their elders is becoming more laughable precisely as it becomes a yet more central focus of marketing rhetoric.

Youth has its tortures, too, among the worst being its ephemerality: it disappears soon enough, and to deny the value of age is to state that the rest of life is not worth living. The extension of adolescence – the impulse at the heart of poptimism and indie/hipster culture – is also the admission that the future is not worth it – the basis of a nihilism unable even to make demands. Observe the young today – their blank eyes, zombie movements – and try telling me these creatures are our be-all-and-end-all, rather than a (literal) dead-end; they seem to have, a priori, as Greil Marcus put it, “bur[ied] their nascent personalities in received images”; to have, in their regression to the boredom, indifference and petulance of childhood, foreswore any “need to explain themselves and explain the world”, any wish to change it, or their futures. These things signify not, as the myth of cool would have you believe, a spirit of adventure, of seizing the prime of life, but a resigned fatalism. The artificial excitement, the sweat and hedonism of adolescence that the press clamour after – the correlative of the hyperspeed production of late capitalism, its bipolar cycles of boom and bust – is merely the obverse to the plague of depression, mental illness and substance abuse among teenagers. The kids aren’t alright – and we should realise it.