Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

In the Volvo, Livia interrogates Track (the American woman). What on earth is she drawing? What could she possibly find to memorialise in this slow-puncture entropy?

A sketch for Marina. For Marina’s book. The book Marina was supposed to be writing. A possible illustration. Something Track had noticed in a shop window as they waited at the lights, Westgate Street into Mare Street. A pair of giant spectacles, painted with bright blue, unblinking eyes. Quite surreal. Marina will love them.

That was her project, gathering random images for a book that Marina hadn’t finished, might never finish. A book that seemed to anticipate the road trip we were never going to complete. Never begin.

I was superstitious about lost or undeveloped films, how they displace more memory than faithfully preserved albums of family portraits. They don’t decay. They are imminent. Their potential is absolute. Lost films are dreams that anybody can steal.

Not trusting my ability to download names, signs, shifting skies, I always carried a small camera in my pocket: Canon Ixus L-1, forty exposures, idiot simple. With time, and Japanese technology, the cameras got smaller, lenses sharper — but it didn’t help. Photography was still, as the man said, ‘a form of bereavement’. The recording instruments shifted from awkward black boxes to silver toys (credit cards that ate light). My snapshots had no pretensions towards art or duplication, they logged a day out, evidence for narratives I would later subvert.

Photography, in its brokered aspect, is about exclusion: the high-contrast theatre of Bill Brandt, Eugene Atgèt’s deserted Paris with sharp-prowed buildings like transatlantic liners in dry dock. Keep out the inessential, stay alive to significant accidents. I understood the theory, but I couldn’t live by it. Once you break free of the traditional one-eyed stance, everything loosens up. You breech the middle ground. I abandoned my viewfinder as much too risky in Kingsland Waste Market, Clapton High Street, Green Lanes. The click of a shutter would alert the minder who watched over the contraband peddlers (the Albanian women, the man with one word of English, his mantra: ‘Cig-ar-ette, cig-ar-ette, cig-ar-ette’). The unrequired flash reflected in the dark glasses of the Black Muslims with their sinister suits and bow ties. The hooded tollers on bikes. The fat man, on his knees behind the video stall, unpacking two carriers of hardcore. The loungers in the doorway of the Kurdish football-club café. The rock sellers yawning outside the newsagent. The police, in their white van, eating pies, ignoring the ratty scavenger who is making off with black bags of clothes donated to Oxfam.

If photography is a form of masturbation, then exercise your wrist. Imitate the gunfighter, shoot from the hip. The eye in the palm of your hand deflects the victim’s curse.

I deactivated the flash and learnt to frame by instinct. The result was a pleasing, slapdash, unmediated aesthetic. The prose I contrived from these snapshots would be more provocative, so I hoped, than the awkward blocks of verbless sentences ‘inspired’ by the many thousands of diary-images I’d gathered during the years of my compulsive logging of London and the river. What are we really doing with those handheld obituary lanterns, our cameras? Despoiling virgin topography. Forging, on stiff card, autobiographical confessions. I witnessed it. Every picture a story, every story a lie. Look at them now. Look at the captured rectangles in their prophylactic envelopes. This person, raking over mounds of paperback books, left when the market packs up, is someone I once was: predatory, stooped, close to the pulse of the city. This building charts my ruin, wrecked knees, twisted spine. A failing heart. The fouled stream skulking through Rainham Marshes, a piss-trough, is my lost optimism, my childhood. When the local was eternal, water (clear and fresh) always flowed towards some larger, busier river, a cold grey sea.

The photographs that haunted me were the ones that got away. The new mountain range of smouldering waste, lava trails of burst black bags, between Rainham Marshes and Dagenham, reminded me of one roll in particular. A strange story, a voyage out from Limehouse to Southend, to the mouth of the Thames, the North Sea, in search of an off-shore fort. Our craft, a fishing-boat brought back from Yarmouth, was on its last voyage. The skipper, drunk at the start and getting drunker, was preparing himself for that lashed-to-the-mast Dracula gig. Most of my shipmates, it soon became apparent, had signed on to locate and confront their demons. And they were making a very good job of it. A shivering photographer, inadequately accoutred in a thin T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, having puked himself dry, was hidden (from the rest of us, from the sea) under a dog blanket. A video director, incapable of taking his camera out of the satchel, droned through the long night, an Ingmar Bergman recital of dreams, phobias, confessions, visions of existential horror. He hated boats, loathed the river (with reason: accidental deaths of loved ones, drownings witnessed at close hand). He suffered from a recurrent nightmare of being trapped for hours, midstream, watching the dim lights of a shoreline he would never reach. This moment, he informed us, recognising the never-extinguished fires of the Rainham Marshes landfill site, was the realisation of his trauma. Talked out, the man slept, tossed and turned, returned to the borders of consciousness — and there it was: the oil refineries. Canvey. Prospero’s island, abandoned by its devils, left to burn and smoulder for ever.

As the only photographic amateur aboard, strong stomach, no imagination, I kept on snapping. Registering the details of this lunatic voyage. But I didn’t secure the rolls of completed film. What was the point? We were never coming back, onwards and outwards. I saw those little black plastic containers floating ashore, in Suffolk or Denmark, with their obscure messages. Like suicide notes in miniature whisky bottles thrown over the side of a Channel ferry.

By the time we reached Leigh-on-Sea, the neurasthenics had given up their ghosts; you could hear teeth chattering like ill-fitting computer keys. The photographer was laughing hysterically and banging his head against the deckboards. I wanted a couple of shots of the women — bad luck — who had smuggled themselves aboard to keep the captain company, to steady the wheel while he opened another bottle. He demanded oral satisfaction while he dodged oil tankers in the narrow channel off Gravesend. But there was no film left. I decided that, in the circumstances, I’d have to reuse a roll I’d shot in Howard Marks’s borrowed flat in West London. A pity, really, but the random superimpositions would give whoever found my floating canister something to analyse. Derrida or Sontag. Let them quote their way out of that mess with Walter Benjamin and Schopenhauer. Howard, it was generally acknowledged, dues paid, was the acceptable (out-of-focus) face of cannabis culture, reform of soft drug legislation. New Labour s favourite anarchist. On the road, on message: on the money.

Marks had been in splendid form, talking freely, exhaling dense clouds of herbal nostalgia, saying nothing. The London light was exquisite, verging on excess. It seemed to imply: you can get away with it, walk free, sunshine on old wood, interior jungles, quiet streets. You can come home again to make a career out of bent memory; telling it how we’d like it to be. Howard twinned nicely with Alex Garland, Irvine Welsh, Danny Boyle: he anticipated the era (pre-terror) of hallucinogenic tourism (Thailand, Bali, Edinburgh). Sheiks and falconers sharing a lift in the Cairo Hilton. Airports, massage parlours, record collections and favourite paperbacks: Lord of the Flies , soft punk, Bill Wyman barnet. The ideal is to stay in prison — or smacked out of your head — long enough for retro to come back as this week’s tendency. J.G. Ballard-lite: tropic beaches, tourism as a life style, business-class flights, the discretion of the suburbs (where all the best conspiracies are hatched).