Iain Sinclair - Downriver

He chanted an ecstatic litany of road signs: Fern Street, Violet Road, Blackthorn Street, Whitethorn Street. ‘I can see for ever,’ he said, ‘an open vein, the lifeblood of London, a trail of light. Devons Road converting to St Paul’s Way, filtering and fading, dying as Ben Jonson Road. Do you realize that Ben Jonson’s first known work, The Isle of Dogs (1597), was suppressed by the Privy Council as “lewd, seditious and slanderous”? It earned him ten weeks in the Marshalsea, where he was plagued by two narks, government agents; one of whom, Robert Poley, was present at the death of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford. Now the play’s lost, only the record of the punishment remains.’

‘There’s something unlucky about the mere mention of the place,’I replied. ‘It probably vanished with Jonson. There’s no other reason to go there; you can leave the known world behind. Let it be struck from the maps.’

‘Poets knew how to live in those days,’ Sonny accused. ‘Jonson was branded, rope-scorched; an angry, sweating, pock-marked, ungodly man. He killed the actor Gabriel Spenser on Hoxton Fields with a sword. This empty arena lets all those things flood back. Do you feel it? It’s a flattened book, ready to snap shut, and kill us like flies. We’re there, and here. On it, in it. Found. A slice through the wedding cake of culture, a geological section: a self-preserved dereliction.’

It was true. We had stumbled into the Borderland, the space between the fortress developments of New Money to the north and the De Stijl colour-charts and pineapple-dressings of the riverside oases to the south: between the poisoned swamp of the Lea and the Limehouse Cut was one last slab of unclaimed territory.

Beneath the railway embankment was a wide allotment band, neatly tended, five-year-planned, baled with straw; a medieval strip system, generously sooted by the constant fret of passing trains. Commuters could glimpse this rustic scene and imagine a greening of the inner cities. The hospital barracks conveniently blocked out the uncontained acres of industrial graveyards. It was marvellous: we were floating between Empson Street and Purdy Street — the austerities of the Cambridge School and the fine baroque flourishes of homophile decadence.

Kids used the mud slopes to road-test their liberated BMX bikes, while barefoot freaks spun and stabbed in exotic Tai Chi ballets, like white-faced’ Nam vets exorcizing their trauma in some crummy Hollywood guilt trip: Nick Nolte, or the cheapest available beefcake. One solitary end-of-terrace pub, the Old Duke of Cambridge, stood in the middle of the wasteland. It was somewhere for the demolition men to drink, while waiting for the loot to come through, so that they could step back on to the street as fully-fledged brickies for yet another motte and bailey canalside folly.

A pirate cable had been run over the wall from the Docklands railway to a fugitive scrapyard, where blue flashes from welding guns lit the gloom with nerve-destroying bursts, as they cosmetically sculpted new wrecks from a mound of old ones: spare-parts surgery.

Sonny did not know how to handle this. He kept twisting, grandmother’s footsteps, muttering: an aide-mémoire for his ‘Last Show’ synopsis. ‘Gladstone… City of Towers… the sump… anarchist aubergines… Colin Ward.’ He did not recognize what stood directly before him, what I myself had only vaguely sensed, until Imar O’Hagan, the anchorite, the snail painter, had pointed it out to me. This dim field had been, very slowly, and very precisely, rendered as a scale model, smoothed and graded, of the Silbury Hill-Avebury-Windmill Hill complex. Imar, alone, had worked for years, digging and measuring, planting out. So that now Sonny stood, arms raised, on the East London Silbury, the burial place of kings: he trumpeted aloud his brazen affirmations of everything that was not here.

IV

Bracken House was the kind of set you encounter only in radical documentaries about ‘Chasing the Dragon’, or in reruns of ‘The Sweeney’. These places had no official existence; they had been wiped from the books, transferred from the housing list to some directory of naff locations. Unpeopled balconies, madly angled, relished their independence — beyond the reach of stairs that went nowhere, connecting only with other stair systems. Numerology had run riot: doors and walls were defaced with columns of figures (like equations that would never come out, predicting a sun-swallowing black hole). Every dustbin was numbered, many of them several times over. After slashing your way through a yard of booby-trapped motors you can enter the labyrinth, and never be seen again. Your finger bones discovered in the foil of a Chinese takeaway. Rabid infants snapped the wipers from the vans of social prowlers, or set fire to the rags that fluttered on the wire washing lines, from which some trainee psycho suspended the occasional cat.

Imar O’Hagan had converted his flat into a stunning workshop/cave, a vibrant green cell, the walls electric with a Baconian brew of fish oil and reconstituted snot. It was heaped with piers of axed firewood, gathered from the wilderness of Tower Hamlets Cemetery. An abandoned mangle had been transformed into an etching press. One glimpse of Imar’s wild-eyed charms and Sonny was filling in the application for his Equity card.

Trays of lascivious snails betrayed one of Imar’s current obsessions. A visit to the fridge revealed the other: blocks of frozen vampire bats, shipped in from the German labs (like an airline breakfast of compressed leather gloves), fought for space among the melting sparrow hawks and other assorted dead things that friends charity-faxed from the Dorset backwoods.

Sonny timidly refused the offer of a carton of blue-green yogurt, uncapped among this ice-furred carnage. We voted instead to broach an interesting bottle that contained either Monte Alban worm-water, or turpentine.

A postcard self-portrait of Chaim Soutïne honoured Imar’s master. The Bracken hermit had successfully brought Minsk to Bow. Notebook flashing, Sonny gazed longingly at the dark curls, the high cheekbones, the profile chiselled and chipped by adversity. Fired by our interest, Imar’s predatory smile broadened: he shone in an aureole of red-gold light, as he piloted us through his portfolio of deformity: the darkly etched abortions, the pathology crayons, the quattrocento dementia of snails and hands.

Finger-drumming, Sonny stared — with a costive pout — into the courtyard. He had almost completed the draft treatment he would offer, as soon as he could reach a telephone, to the top corridor of teenage producers. ‘The FRIDGE as Storehouse of Magical Possibilities (cf. Joseph CORNELL). Any chance of working in Eli LOTAR’s slaughterhouse photos for Bataille’s Abattoirs ? (Check with Sofya.) Outsider Art. MUD location (Voice over: Eliot reading from Wasteland ). Studio; Talking Heads — Januszczak? Ignatieff? Some woman??’

(The prime advantage of these jokers with the outlandish monikers is that your godfearing Englishman will only accept that something is ‘cultural’ if it comes with a music-hall accent. Foreigners may be an inferior product, lacking true spunk , but they do know about art and cooking.)

Sonny would not sit: a mistake. He refused the luxury of another era, a row of salvaged tip-up cinema seats. He could not let the moment breathe; he was impatient to drive on, impale all the facts, achieve some grand conclusion. He began to read aloud from his preparatory notes. ‘The bunker?’ he blurted. ‘I thought there was a bunker. I need a definite bunker for our title: “The Bunker and the Monument”. That essential contrast of vertical and horizontal energies, the secret and the showy: the glitz of Silvertown and the modesty of Bow. All those nightland images. I want some of the great Henry Moore drawings on our rostrum. Tilbury Shelter Scene! The sleepers and the dead. What a metaphor for the condition of English kultur . Epstein’s pietaà attached to the Headquarters of the London Underground. Thick-lipped mothers of gloom!’