Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Looking — a wild hunch — for something worth reading on the subject of runes, I turned to J. H. Prynne’s Pedantic Note in Two Parts , and found myself, at once, linked, or inspired by this text, to demand that the black sentences be made manifest in these streets: I would see the words take a physical form, painted on floating sheets of glass. ‘ The runic concentration ,’ Prynne writes, ‘ is in each case the power of longing to include its desired end, to traverse the field without moral debate or transcendent abstraction; joy as the complete ground underfoot .’

And so it was: the inn sign of The Spear of Destiny was revealed as a barrier, or challenge, dropped across my track; visible to all deranged souls fleeing from their destiny with enough resolution to discover gehenna in this dusty warren: to go no further.

A familiar figure, puffing out his cheeks with the effort, clung precariously to the tilting signboard, while completing the last dramatic flourishes of a bogus calligraphy. What he had conjured, in a hailstorm of tachist enamel, was some solvent-abusing Siegfried’s vision of a bolt of lightning shattering an anvil of blue ice: more of a lager video than a primal race-memory. The lettering was a chaos of pastiched runes, based on a vague pictorial resemblance between the letters of the alphabet and the rune-marks on a Novelty Shop chart that the artist was consulting with great deliberation, by rubbing his nose against the plastic card. The steroid-pumped ‘S’ of Spear was represented by the rune of ‘wholeness’, sowelu ; and the ‘p’ by the axelike purisaz . The system was a sham, mere decoration, artfully faked so that the letters seemed to have been cut into the wood. The covert occultism of this attempt was dispersed, made futile — and yet the cunning of the artisan, his painful snail-knuckled precision, created a shield of defence that, as it faded and took dirt, would achieve a significance unintended by its perpetrator. This benevolent dwarf honoured Prynne’s demand that ‘ formulae of power ’ should be ‘ compact and anonymous ’.

I held the ladder while Woolf Haince descended. They didn’t come more compact, or more anonymous than Woolf. He was a man of infinite, but astigmatic, courtesy. He recognized only those things that he could touch. As we shook hands he stared and sniffed until the connection was made. In another existence, Woolf had painted signboards for the smaller antique shops around Camden Passage; most of them changed hands every quarter, when the rents were ‘reviewed’ and the Italians and Americans were still staying at home. It was, for a time, a good business to be occupied with: he survived, earning enough change to pose, cash in hand, as a bona fide customer for the bookstalls. That’s how I met him, hopping from foot to foot, wiping his nose with his sleeve in an agony of indecision. I supplied him with the reassurance that the mantle of mysteries was intact: he fondled promiscuous paperback fables of Atlantis, Borley Rectory, UFOs, pyramid power, Spring-heeled Jack, talking stones, spontaneous combustions. He nodded over them, a woodpecker with the shakes — twitching, stroking, muttering incantations — before he ended my suspense, dropped a couple of icy coins into my hand, and slid the chosen volume swiftly from sight, into the deep pockets of a Petersburgh Hay Market overcoat. He never needed to extract or consult these books: he absorbed their essence directly into his bloodstream. They kept him warm in winter, padding him — from neck to ankle — in a protective armour of reference. Woolf Haince was a walking library.

Sadly, the sign-painting dwarf, martyred by the exactions of his calling, was now half-blind, capped in a horn of comforting darkness. I led him by the elbow into the depths of the pub. Joblard was waiting, chatting to Eleanor: the introductions were made. Woolf was so diminutive that as we talked, his chin resting on the edge of the table, he turned with anguished deference, a rotating gargoyle, from face to face, in quest of the meaning of these sounds he could not quite bring himself to capture. He weighed each syllable so carefully that he was left far behind in the mad rush of our fragmented and competing narratives.

The matter Joblard wanted to nail was far ahead of him; he could only circumnavigate it, making raids by means of a notebook and a fine black pen. He identified a sequence of abrupt pictographs, cancelled suggestions, hints, flickbook mappings that ran over several nervously turned pages.

‘ Seated winged figure with gold hands waits in boredom? ’ He searches for the image that might confirm this risky quotation. ‘ Plaster of Paris map and four white African moths? ’ Too late, they have fluttered out from between the imprisoning pages: he has obliterated them with a gesturing paw.

Eleanor, with enormous tact, had turned herself into a stuffed and lacquered bird. Her smile is fixed and the drinks are jerked into her tight mouth, like coins swallowed by a chocolatecoloured toy. Woolf is also adrift. His life was solitary. He had barely acquired the habit of speech. The sound of his own voice terrified him. He sunk into his coat, tugging down a curtain of uncombed hair. He calmed himself by picking a louse from his celluloid collar and snapping it between horny fingernails.

We had been drinking for two or three hours (during which time Woolf toyed with a half-pint of orange cordial; dipping a lurid tongue into his glass and spreading the stain, as he licked compulsively at his blistered lips, into a rictal deformity) when the little man suddenly darted a hand into a bottomless pocket and pulled out something white and tightly folded. He ironed the scrap with the heel of his hand, indicating by the rapid movements of his head that we were free to examine it.

The design meant nothing to me: a narrow rectangle, small circles at the four corners, dotted lines to cut the diagonals. Our benign but uncomprehending stares seemed to excite Woolf, like burning tapers applied to the soles of his feet. He ran a paint-stained finger along the base of the rectangle. ‘See?’ he choked, ‘Fieldgate Doss House, the twin towers.’ We nodded, returned empty smiles; waited. He jerked his thumb to the head of the map. ‘Princelet.’ Then, with greater emphasis, ‘Princelet again!’ This still provided us with only the loosest sense of a scheme that was evidently of critical importance to the dwarf. Snorting, he leapt to his feet, and — snatching at my sleeve — dragged me out of the twilight bar and on to the street. Joblard, pausing only to throw back his chaser, and to make a snatch at mine, followed us.

Drawing a length of rough twine from around his neck, Woolf fished out an enormous key. He stood before us, posed against the bars of afternoon sunlight, like some blasphemous parody of a boy-bishop by Mantegna: hands outstretched, he inched his way up the steps, leading us into the belly of the Monster Doss House. Woolf, it seems, had claimed — by default — the temporary status of caretaker, and lived in the topmost room of the east tower.

The view to the south, obviously of no interest to Woolf, judging by the state of his windows, was breathtaking: and would be featured in all the developer’s brochures. Beyond the litter of roads and railways, the cranes and the scaffolds, we caught a glimpse of the white extravagance of St-George-in-the-East. Closer at hand was a furtive peek into Joblard’s flat, where his young friend was evidently enjoying a post-prandial nap: a vision the other denizens of the Doss House would have killed for.

The world at large did not concern Woolf. What interested him stood on the table: an ancient Grundig tape-recorder, a spectral deed box. We waited expectantly, but it was not yet the right moment. Joblard took the only seat in the room and interested himself in rolling a cigarette. Idly, I picked up one of the books I had sold Woolf, long ago, never having got beyond the first page, on which my staggeringly modest price was still inscribed: Men of Wisdom, Lavishly Illustrated: Master Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics . The pictorial wrapper was now grey with a sticky film of dust, but — beneath it — I could just recover the image of a monk and his Bible. I played an old game that never lost its charm, and flipped the book open, to read a couple of lines at random. ‘ I answer: One work remains to a man truly and properly, that is the annihilation of himself .’