Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

my failure, God is giving me

more than I tried for.

But, Howard, there is a

wrong, an intense wrong, in

to the Divine Cause. ‘What I

see in nature,’ he said, ‘is the

Divine power acting within

an imposed limit. God, self-limited,

is the universe. God is

not the universe, but it flows

from Him and becomes

phenomenal by the laws of

limitation.’

I could not at the time but

check him by quoting Goethe–

laying severe stress upon hope,

and urging on him that the poet

did not seem to admit the likelihood

that we should ever

realise it by seeking truth as it is.

Hinton would not, however,

be brought back to our everyday

views and imperfect ways

of thinking, but insisted that

we voluntarily hindered our

vision by the mere scientific

relation of facts as opposed to a

true philosophy of them.

Suppression and reappearance

in a new and higher form was

to him the fundamental law

of physiology. Organisms in

upward order, concoct, digest,

assimilate, ‘and corporeal to

incorporeal turn’.

Hinton’s thoughts on moral

subjects were of the same

our society running all

through our life, and it will be

made righter some day. I

dashed myself against it; but it

is not one man’s strength that

can move it. It was too much

for my brain; but it is by the

failure of some that others

succeed, and through my very

foolishness perhaps, there shall

come a better success to

others, perhaps more than any

cleverness or wisdom of mine

could have wrought. And I

hope I have learnt, too, to be

wiser. We have not come to

the end; though I am so

exhausted, that I seem scarcely

able to believe in anything

before me.

I cover my eyes from the sun

but my hands can no longer

keep out the light. I can see

through! Skin is glass. There is

nothing. The darkness turns,

turns, an eye on a pencil. It

turns faster. And faster. I do

not think now that it will ever

stop.

your loving father,

James Hinton

character as those on material.

The miserable, despised, and

abandoned outcasts of society,

sacrificed to the selfishness of

the well-to-do and respectable,

was a glaring instance of the

deception of the phenomenal.

I think I am justified in saying,

from my first intercourse

with him, that he thought

such facts illustrated the object

of Christ’s work on earth, as

showing us how contrary truth

is to appearance.

To descend to lower matters, I

may say that Hinton’s physical

energy always seemed to me as

great and indomitable as that

of his mind. Together they

afforded an example of intellectual

and bodily activity

rarely surpassed. The work he

did was well done, and by it he

laid stepping-stones for others

to advance upon.

Hinton’s life was not so full

of incident as it was full of

thought. He was one of the

pioneers of humanity through

the obscure and dark ways of

the senses to the region of

truth.

W. W. Gull

Ian Askead took us down to look into the fridges. He was a night porter at the Metropolitan, his fawn overall buttonless with rolled-up sleeves; wet-haired, constructing a smoke in his glass cubby-hole — the grim building itself frozen into a kind of malign silence. A mausoleum of impacted wasp-blocks.

We were nervous, oppressed by the locale, which gave him a status he did not have on the street. He had that benevolent Glaswegian charm that goes all the way through mania into self-annihilation. And he did it with a grin. There was an innocence here that would have fed the gas ovens. As victim or as operative. Just as it fell out.

It had been a quiet weekend and most of the fridges were empty. He found one that was tenanted and slid out the white bundle on its tray for our examination. A swaddled something, emitting traces of blue light. In a plastic bag like a Sainsbury’s chicken.

Askead, amused by our interest, produces the instruments of pathology, the saws, calipers, head-sets. He plugged in an electric-kettle.

On this stone slab with its sluices at the corners, like a slate billiard-table, the soul is cut free. The bird is sprung. Within this ring of false illumination and under this taint there is a bruised initiation. The conversations of the Indian doctors, the Irish students, are set into the greasy walls; uneradicated. As the skull splits, the words enter. As poison.

It is agreed. We will go with Askead to meet the Victor Haldin Death Cadre, an unlocated splinter of the Angry Brigade, meditating action.

*

Askead, then, sitting in what remains of his underpants, tactically black, on the edge of his mattress, his son, robust and nordic, like the product of an Aryan babyfarm, hands on bars of cot, pisses out a curve of clear gold water onto the matting. New morning. Askead lights the stub of last night’s cigarette.

As with old dopers, it’s difficult to get him moving . Our brief is insecure; we are potential film-makers, lacking only cameras and film-stock. We are invited neither to participate nor to witness. And Askead is only in this for the ruck. Theoretical Anarchy holds no charms for him. A good night out is going over Kilburn to trade insults in the Shamrock Lounge and wake up bleeding on alien pavements. On very good nights he wakes up authentically paralysed in the gutter. And comes home free in an ambulance.

One great night he will wake up in his own fridge.

His wife, who has some kind of position in the household, as child-minder, winning them the use of the basement, is ‘involved’ with a minor technocrat who dresses in Burton’s leisurewear. This pleases Askead — who sees it as a context for violence.

‘You’re a slimy little globe of damaged frog crap,’ he spits, gleefully, on sight of the lover, tearing all the buttons from his shirt, before his wife fells him with a cast-iron saucepan. Strong skulled, chipped, not shattered: not even a headache in the morning. The lover goes off to the office, his shirt-front held together with large pink nappy pins.

Stoke Newington is the neck of a killing bottle, wearing its entropy without guilt. Cinema-mosques disappearing under a generation of papers, groups, dates, meetings.

Brilliant brickwork of the blacks beating against the shaded Hassidic fringe. Scufflers working the gaps: a gentility that will bring it all down. Everything centred on the police barracks and its boastful spread of wanted posters.

At Abney Park we turn away, break from the pastiched New Kingdom glamour, into a wide leafy avenue. They are waiting, behind the curtains of an upper room.

Multiple locks and chains: everything but a password.

They’ve got the bottles, but not the petrol. Threats and handbooks and the insides of alarm-clocks. Present anger focuses on Redbridge. Barbed wire squat. Neo-fascist bootboys licensed to poleaxe, to sledgehammer, to evacuate. The wolf is at the door. They persuade with crowbars, rip out the plumbing. And this rhetoric is countered by fire-buckets, ball-bearings, paint pots. It is a frontier zone of demented doctrine. Everything’s boiling but the recipe’s been lost.

Denis is savagely bearded in a style that owes something to the cover of the Pan Books edition of The Dharma Bums . He wears a black vest, takes up threatening martial arts poses, moving sharply backwards and forwards across the window, compulsively checking out the empty street. His wife, Pearl, is, of course, pregnant again. And the credit for this seems to be awarded to Denis alone.