Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

… the curvature of the earth

from the obscure Islet of Diego Garcia East of

the Arabian Peninsula an experimental

missile vibrates and then launches

from the carrier, and Oh Good Lord, minutes later,

… American dumb missile arrives with punity

in the southern suburbs of Baghdad, ruined Cradle of Civilization,

just north of the Garden of Eden which looks, I must say,

rather abused and tacky now …

Dorn was locked into the chemistry of the thing, from a hospital bed, years before it happened — seeing through walls, reading the future on TV. Destroyed topographies. Futile sacrifices. Abused language.

I shouldn’t read newspapers, it’s not good for me (for you). Especially the concerned ones, the ones the hucksters and crooks are always suing for libel (career suicide). Newspapers don’t know what to do about poetry, they ignore it — unless there’s a prize attached, money, prestige, campus preferment. They might sponsor the other stuff, reflex verse, cheap war rhetoric: the easy way out. Anti-poetry. All too available. Nasty little satires and bleeding hearts. Language is a lump on the tongue. A tight throat. You can’t spit it out, unless you rip flesh. Drip blood on paper.

I used to start with the back pages, in my sunny, geranium-on-sill, pigeon-watching, West London mornings: football, rugby, cricket scores. Then the art: book, film, theatre reviews. Junk the rest. One cup of coffee, finish. Get back to work. One chapter — off to the tube.

I dropped the Guardian (never a love affair) when they shafted Jack Trevor Story and started using Andy Norton (pit bulls, gangsters’ suits, barbers, forgotten London literature). On the evidence of the copy picked up at the Bo-Peep Inn, Marina Fountain (leopard-skin pillbox hat, French cigarettes) was a new Guardian reader. It didn’t matter to her if the paper was out of date. This was an ironic gesture, a style statement. Life on the coast. Last-gasp Art Deco (1938) revamped for property supplements and second-home runaways: worst of both worlds. Marina had the look down pat, the apotheosis of transience. Blink and you miss her. Paint-blistering perfume in a seafront pasta joint.

If, these days, a newspaper left its grubby traces on my hands, it would be in an optician’s waiting room, on a train. And I started with the obituaries. Moved on to New Age quackery: fruit for cancer, expensive trainers for ruined knees, torture chairs for wrecked backs.

A book review caught my eye, the title. Madness: A Brief History. Wonderful! Like: Immortality: An Instant Sketch . Or Starvation: A Diet of Contemporary Views . The author of Madness was the prolific and respected Dr Roy Porter. His ‘eighty-somethingth’ book. His last. The delusions of the insane can stretch our definitions of the word,’ wrote the reviewer. Porter, London writer, broadcaster, raider of lost libraries, decamped to Hastings: a new life. He died, heart attack, cycling uphill to his allotment.

Porter’s thesis, distillation of many years’ profound study, was troubling: treatment is pointless, madness cannot be defined. ‘Aetiology remains speculative, pathogenesis largely obscure, classifications predominantly symptomatic and hence arbitrary and possibly ephemeral and subject to fashion, and psychotherapies still only in their infancy and doctrinaire.’

What point then in my consulting Hannah Wolf? What useful account could I give of my condition? What diagnosis could she form from a single consultation at the Travelodge? The world was the problem and the world the cure. The long march of the A13. The remorselessness of the sea.

The big obit — poached face, candystripe jacket, badger beard, hair like Hokusai wave — was for an artist. A friend of poets. An ‘American film-maker who brought a unique eye to his craft’. Another Cyclops, evidently. James Stanley Brakhage (1933–2003). Born in Kansas City: as ‘Robert Sanders’. Adopted, two weeks later, by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage.

Stuck there, nowhere, in Kent on a stalled train, by that dull field, the news, not unexpected, was a blow. Stan Brakhage, author of the ultimate autopsy movie, Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes , was himself dead: exposed to obituarists. Biography glossed. Achievements listed. Standing evaluated: ‘a kind of poetry written with light’. Brakhage taught seeing , fault, flaw, scratch, mark of hand. Layers and shifts. The living/loving family, its ground, at the centre of everything: childbirth, friendship, death. ‘An eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.’

Brakhage wrote so tellingly about the moment when film-pioneer George Méliés watched a static image of waves projected on a screen, and how they suddenly began to move. To breathe .

I was diminished by this loss. Marina Fountain, leaving her newspaper folded to the obituary page, had set me up. The catalogue of those who mattered in the world, by whose words and images I had navigated so long, was being rationalised, trimmed. A bad year for poets, now this. They put the bladder cancer down to the coal-tar dyes Brakhage used when he handpainted strips of film.

You can, if you’re braver than I am, give your tumour a name — Rumsfeld, Cheyney, Perle — and live with it, reluctant companion in a white marriage, for the time that’s left; live with the knowledge that the lump, the cell cluster, is going to die when you die.

Ed Dorn, visiting Rome, took an interest in ‘Keats’s struggle to die … almost visible through the window of his somber room’. The problem of separating ourself, in full consciousness, from the anchor of the body. Dorn’s tumour was female: ‘she detests who and what I detest’.

The lesser obits didn’t hold me. I was running on empty, crocodile tears. The train seemed to have been chartered by Jehovah’s Witnesses, the grateful dead on an awayday, crawling towards heaven. Ghost Dance Sioux of the 1870s (courtesy of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, precursor to the tent show at Guantánamo Bay) saw the railroad as a ladder up which returning ancestors would climb. Justified corpses in the radiance of eternity.

In the bottom-right corner of the newspaper, somewhere between an obituary notice and a news filler, were a few lines penned by a person called Johnson.

ROAD WRITER DIES ON M25

A.M. (Andrew) Norton, 60, bookseller and occasional author, died last Friday in a freakish accident on the road which was the subject of his best-known book, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 . It is thought that he was intervening in a road rage incident when he was attacked with a machete. The site of the affray, the West Thurrock approach to the Queen Elizabeth II suspension bridge, had previously provided the climax to his pedestrian circuit — an over-complicated collision of antiquarian retrievals (Bram Stoker and Dracula ) and hysterical satire (Purfleet oil storage facilities and Essex drug-dealers).

Norton, recently unpublished and retired to the south coast, was revisiting Essex with an eye on turning his earlier documentary research into a novel or film.

Born in Wales, educated in Gloucestershire, his work was largely set in East London. Standard figures from the Gothic catalogue — Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Jekyll — make frequent appearances. After some early success, as a latecomer to the school of Ackroyd and Moorcock, his adjective-heavy style with its verbless sentences passed into disfavour and critical neglect. He returned to his original occupation as a used bookdealer. Much of his material had the authentic musty tang of the book stacks and street markets. Norton, according to Calcutt and Shephard’s guide to cult fiction, was ‘an archivist of omens and the occult past’.