Iain Sinclair - Downriver

An heroically direct track leads to the island’s south-east tip. A puddled red dirt road, out of some grander tale, is caught between retreating telegraph poles and the deserted beach. We can share the fantastic Icarus flights of the pioneer aviators, high above luminous green fields and out over a blanket of grey sea. Smoke columns. Fires among the cabbages.

Our two-man procession slowly absorbs, and celebrates, the energy of the curve: a wild sweep into open marshland. (The liberating spin, the tilted world!) We can follow the whims of a modest dyke path to the drowned fiefdom of Harty. Totemic birds shelter at a distance, nicely calculated, from the parking place of sharpshooters, the bicycles of fish-hook-casting juveniles. Crested, nodding lapwings hop over the quaggy ground, cackling at their own abundance. Let them remain what they are. Make no demand on them as symbols. The White Goddess is dead, and all of her triads.

This is not what I expected. This is not the barnstorm finish. I can’t come back. I was prepared to confront another self, a double, a fetch. To be carried away, sucked like a prophet into the clouds. It’s all too easy. Saltmarshes, tidal flats, water meadows: a remote agitation of fat white sheep. A new vocabulary is required, creating a new mind. I am transformed by the previously unknown beings I am required to name. I whisper the terms like an invocation: ‘sward’, ‘fleet’, ‘sluice’, ‘raptor’, ‘passerine’. I begin to let go, to fade from the path; to lose my always fierce sense of individual identity.

Small craft buck over the Swale in unaccustomed sunlight, dipping and chopping against a running tide. And yet the older boats at anchor barely stir. All movement seems unreal, made in defiance of this pastoral landscape, this panorama of recall.

The long grass wraps my feet in a sodden poultice, giving them a fresh strength. I am renewed by an expectancy of healing. The path (a green serpent) doubles back on itself, hesitates between the slate modesty of the river and the promise of small fenced hills. Teal, shoveler, wigeon, pintail. We can expect them all. They are listed on a notice board. A short-eared owl breaks from cover and glides, wings spread, in confirmation of our track.

Sinclair waits for me. I feel the accusation. He is pushing so hard. He wants more than there is. His imposed silence is developing into a threat. I am no longer able to follow in his footsteps. His challenge is a shadow I must step across. He wants me to share his madness, to refuse my comfortable graph of success: to fail. Or am I taking my duties as storyteller too seriously? Am I reading motives into the silence of contentment? I’m probably being as literal-minded as the students of those early Russian montage experiments that cut a neutral close-up against images with different emotional values. He wants none of these things. A blow, a rest from words. He turns back to the path ahead. He is only pausing while I draw breath. He doesn’t want to lose me. Not now.

I am the sole prosecutor. Should I have made myself a Kultur shaman of fire and ice, a lead-scratcher, another Anselm Kiefer? Should I bring all that Nordic apparatus, that clutter, into galleries? Lock myself in cages with wild beasts? Produce myself as the wooden tongue of wisdom, the articulate mask? The choice is mine alone. This has nothing to do with him. What happens, happens. The third man, the unacknowledged one, is joining us. The other: feeding on his grim and remorseless belief in the quest. I abdicate my reserved status, and enter the narrative. He conned me. That was his trap. Fictional puppets have all the freedom of action. They can deny their creator. They can refuse his manipulations. They can abandon him.

Our own messenger floats down towards the rush-fringed fleet, disappears. This is an island that is not the world. It is removed, discrete; one of those transitory border zones, caught in uncertain weather, nudged, dislocated by a lurch in the intensity of the light. A special place where, I’d like to believe, ‘good persists in time’.

These are not my thoughts. This is not what I want to say. ‘Good’, if it still survives, is sustained by its concubine, ‘evil’; its sullen dependant. There is only the will towards good asserted by these unnoticed landscapes. And the quality we discover in ourselves as we are drawn towards them. ‘Good’ is a retrospective title. To be used when it is all over.

As I stare in mongoloid fascination at Sinclair’s heels, I realize I have accepted a new doctrine: there is no third person. There never was. The watcher and the watched are one. And that is just the first stage. My analeptic concentration on the rhythms of the walk drowns all lesser motives, restores me to myself, reinforces the visionary dynamic of the route we have chosen.

Now anything is possible. I can see the ash-shaded body of the church of St Thomas the Apostle at Harty: pebbled walls sinking into the soft ground. A low sun picking out the pinkness in the stones. Turf is rising to cover it entirely. I see the dark oak of the muniment chest with its jousting knights, as it was salvaged from the Swale. The building has no further use for its priest and congregation, no concern with pilgrims and baptism in black tidal waters. But a procession of penitents and plague-fearing believers resist this apathy. They rush, slithering and stumbling, on to the mud flats; edging narrowly ahead of the darkness. They renege on wicker fire-gods, pitch themselves into the cold white hands of the saint; bleating with terror, they beg for immersion.

And I see the other side also. The architecture of repression: bunkers buried under protected lands, unlisted blockhouses sheltering beneath a promise of sanctuary. The preservation of wild life is seen as nothing more than a charter for the destruction of all other kinds. The long-range binoculars that log the coupling seabirds also warn of the approach of unauthorized witnesses. Bird wardens double as security guards. Under the boastful photographs of rural England are cells of elimination, torture, death. Romantic watercolours pipe and wash over broken bones. Modesty is an avatar of ignorance. Curiosity does well to hesitate at the perimeter of any open space. When there is nothing to offend the eye, beware. The green hill above Windmill Creek is the dome of a prison.

I see into subterranean honeycomb laboratories where monkeys in suits are testing blasts of radiation. Their thin bones print the grey cloth like stripes of chalk. They look comic, but there is no relief from this joke. It goes on for ever. Fur falls out in scalded patches. They suffer shock and chemical assaults. They have the skinned foetal cast of veteran rock stars at society weddings. They are dressed up, traumatized, trembling. They are deaf. They lipread the lab assistants’ obscene banter.

Addict monkeys. Researchers on their backs. ‘ The sustained administration of maximum doses of morphine, heroin, and codeine on healthy monkeys (MACACUS RHESUS) in conditions more extreme than those to which humans could be safely exposed. These pictures were taken after the animal had been on morphine for seven and a half months .’

A pregnancy of pain; conditioned nightmares. I see the blueprinted textbooks emerge from shelves of morbid dust. Sheets of heavy gloss paper (bedsheets) fall open, part, with a noise that is almost sexual. Cool analytic prose undermines the hideous static poses. We finger the fore-edge, flicking the illustrations into a parody of life. Monkeys gibber and shriek on stoneblock altars: damaged, senile children.

Hastily convened families of the unclaimed dead ‘volunteer’ to sample the force of controlled detonations. They are arranged, by the Widow’s sponsorship of Mrs Beeton’s domestic virtues, around tables spread with contaminated food. Wooden cutlery is wrapped in silver foil. They consume. They are glutted with possessions. The unmortgaged dead. They can boast of fridges made from paper and cardboard televisions. Flesh linen dissolves into gangrene and mutton, soot, carbon, corpse-cheese. They are photographed, described, measured, recorded; buried in earth. How deep can we go? How much clay does it take to smother these sights?