Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

The mercilessly cold wind blew right in my face; I shivered and covered my head with the blankets … It soon passed over … save for the groaning of the poor restless mules, seeking in vain for food or smarting from irritating sores. Poor, starved, over-burdened mules! I shall never quite shake off the qualms of conscience I carry through life on account of these too-hurried rides.

Norton’s journal fitted this place.

The thing I’d seen in the mirror at the Travelodge, my double, swung from the resurrected ski-lift: a Goya caprice that I imposed on this all-too-material mound (anticipating the Chapman Brothers). Sound was enough, bringing back sight, bringing back the patterned quilting of the vanished ski-slope, bringing back the gasworks, the complex industrial landscape that existed as a prime target for Goering’s bombers.

Thick tongue rolled around a Fisherman’s Friend, holding heat, I took my time, breath in the lungs, staring — for as long as it required — in each of the cardinal directions. Danny recalled the raids, one of the gas holders blazing after a direct hit. Beckton had never recovered. They’d brought down a few Germans, you might find shattered fuselages, hanks of propeller, buried in the mound. Bones and boots. Identity bracelets on sheep-yellow wrist joints.

Once war is declared, it’s an absolute. So Danny believed. There are no winners. Stanley Kubrick picked up the marshal’s baton, carried on where Hitler left off. Call Beckton Vietnam if you want, but you can’t summon a vanished culture with a truckload of palm trees, shipped in as root-balls from Spain, and a few thunderflashes. Palm trees die. They scream in the ground.

It wasn’t enough to lose a war (that you weren’t supposed to be fighting), you had to be seen to lose: madness, psychosis, afterimages. The last great conflict for American journalism, Michael Herr, Norman Mailer and the rest, rucking over the skull-splinters of Ernest Hemingway.

Beckton was the killing ground.

Compare and contrast: Coppola’s lush palm forests, lagoons, beaches (Conrad’s East, the Philippines), with Kubrick’s Beckton. Like a Margate Dreamland. A painted set for a seaside excursion. Apocalypse Now , redux or dead-ducks, is not Heart of Darkness , it’s one of Conrad’s Malaysian tales, an upcountry yarn spun by lawyers and accountants on a yawl in the Lower Hope, the Thames Estuary. A different kind of colonialism. Jukeboxes, hot tubs slippery with seasonal Playmates, fleets of helicopters. Coppola gives it the treatment, overkill, hallucinogenic popcorn opera. Kubrick swoops low over Norfolk wetlands.

English light.

Full Metal Jacket is about English light, a fine grading of absence: shades of grey, low cloud, melancholy, forgetfulness. A documentary, with a real drill sergeant, happening in limbo: the Battle of Beckton. Anton Furst, set dresser, perfectionist, rigs up the doomed gasworks with avenues of sad and solitary palms; he fires unpeopled generating houses. He fires memory: Blitz nights.

Full Metal Jacket.

The alp becomes the helmet logo of Kubrick’s prophetic English travelogue, Thames Gateway as a future American fiefdom: Exxon refineries, Dagenham motorplant, multiplexes, retail parks. Ford’s water tower. The alp is a grass-thatched steel helmet (borrowed from Sam Fuller, Robert Aldrich). Manichean tag: BORN TO KILL — with peace symbol. Love and war. Snipers waiting at every window.

The Thames is untouched: ‘Charlie doesn’t surf.’ Charlie works the flyover with the Kosovans, showing his wounds. Kubrick’s explosions have shaken something loose, something unfixed between sewage beds and river. Over-actors, reaching for Oscar-gilt dildos, make too much of the crack between worlds. A nude Michelin Brando lisping his Eliotic pieties and splashing himself with water. Orson Welles, photographed, mouth agape, horsehair beard, snuffling through a prosthetic conk, eyes too young: as Kurtz.

The horror.

For the film that never was. A few test shots in a tank. They don’t understand, the impresarios, Kurtz is the thing that cannot be seen. Kurtz is posthumous. Kurtz is place. Kurtz is not Michael Curtiz, Hungarian showman, soap sculptor. ( Kurz , adj. short; short and to the point.) They don’t get it. The Hollywood genius thing is never short and to the point. It’s inflated, loud, destroying whatever it sets out to celebrate. The smothering embrace of respect. Crocodile tears of child-molesting Louis B. Mayer.

‘Who’s the commanding officer here?’

‘Ain’t you?’

As soon as Hopper appears, on the steps, on the Beckton pyramid, cameras like shrunken skulls, cameras all over him, I know we’re in big trouble. Coppola’s in trouble. Madness takes discipline. Eliot put himself together on Margate Sands. The poem comes later. Coppola feeds Eliot’s lines, like birdseed, to his costive genius actor: to pastiche madness.

Wired Dennis, chilled Dennis. Dwarf Dennis: cameras, grenades, sweat-soaked faux-guerrilla headband. Doesn’t cut. We don’t see the photographs he took, we can’t afford them.

The nightmare of America is the hysterical belligerence of non-combatants: excused service Waynes, flatfoot Nixons and flatulent L.B. Johnsons, the Bush baby in Texan reserve uniform. Faking orgasms of righteous indignation. At the perfidy of others who lie more effectively than they do.

Beckton Alp, as Danny the Dowser discovers, is replete with lies, substantial debris. Memory deposits of actual raids and staged battles are indistinguishable. Generators of false history. A viewing platform on past and future.

‘Pernicious dust.’

That’s what Kubrick said. Beckton: Hué. Coal-blackfaces of actors and crew. He wanted dignity, pathos. Andrew Joseph Russell’s photographs from the American Civil War. The dead of Gettysburg recorded by Timothy O’Sullivan. He wanted the destroyed buildings of the Paris Commune of 1871 in an anonymous stereoscopic view. He wanted Roger Fulton at Balaclava. Reality with its faint ghosts (where subjects moved). He wanted Julia Margaret Cameron (soft at the edges) for his own portrait: serious man with beard.

And he got Matthew Modine, an actor. A well-intentioned amateur with an expensive camera (it passes the time). He got coal-dust. The print of mortality.

Turning at last to the east, the zone into which we will soon walk, our destination of choice, I am stopped, heart-struck, by the futility of it: my journey, the book. London is leeched from the chart. It is white, hazy, phantom forests of pylons. Upcountry, Essex belongs to the warring tribes, guerrilla killers, driller killers, Ecstasy bandits. I’ve written pieces slighting the Sleeman brothers, taking the mickey out of O’Driscoll. I was safe in Hackney. But footloose in Basildon? Petrified in Purfleet? Describe them, use them for local colour, but keep clear. I wasn’t stupid enough to arrange a meeting with Mr Big, Declan Mocatta. Mocatta was my Kurtz. Off-screen. And best left there.

But what if it’s already too late? What if, like Heart of Darkness , this tale is being told backwards? What if someone else, out on the coast, is the true narrator? Then I am Kurtz, gone native, addicted to savagery. Listening to drums. Waiting for the bullet. Terminate with extreme prejudice.’

Danny, face to the west, rescued me. He had a text for every occasion. A book of local history cobbled together by one of those green walkers who dedicate their lives to revealing the location of London’s few remaining secret spaces.

The dowser read badly, no rhythm, no emphasis, gaps in the wrong places. The drone was soothing. He taught me what to do: abort, abandon. Head for home along the sewage outfall. Take a train from Fenchurch Street. Go looking for Marina Fountain.