Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Sonny still danced to a self-inflicted cattle-prod tango. ‘If we can borrow a standby crew from “Local News” or “Blue Peter”,’ he said, ‘we’ll simply compose with their tired utilitarian footage. Exploit banal images that have no resonance, no sense of being inhibited by meaning. The method has distinct possibilities. Found art, construction by selection: editing is the really constructive stage anyway. Give us your raw material — formulaic establishing shots, over-emphatic close-ups — and we’ll electrify the air waves.’ He broke off to hammer at the walls of our designer-vandalized compartment. ‘An Art Train! Dziga Vertov! Kino-Eye! Montage is the true engine of the lyric. We’ll plunder those reservoirs of unconscious aspiration. Take whatever we are given, and cut/cut/cut to the heartbeat, to the rhythms of the breath: engines, wheels, statues falling, racing clouds, the quaking towers of the city. Futurists of a New Reality!’

Sonny’s lips were moving but the sound, mercifully, escaped from me; ran out into the overhead wires, leapt towards Canvey Island and Shoebury Ness, bearing false messages of revolution and hope. His gestures were wilder and faster. His teeth dazzled like Mexican bone dice. It was like watching a madhouse charade in which some flesh-scorched depressive mimes his remembered account of the Book of Deuteronomy. Without warning, I experienced an excruciating pain in my ear (how crude are the body’s metaphors!); as if Sonny’s irrepressible torrent of enthusiasm was splitting the incus, the anvil, with a tiny (and blunt) cold-chisel. Each blow projected a scarlet flash on to the ceiling of the carriage: cooling towers, the moulded angel on the side of the Custom House, the black and silted canal. I tipped forward to rest my head in my hands. Sonny was pouring the landscape, in the form of an ointment of honey and melted film stock, into my external auditory meatus. It was slipping, sticking, soothing; inwardly sealing my father’s voice, which prompted me towards actions I could not begin to understand.

Absolute madness! Sonny had no mandate from the Corporation. We were without cameras, crew, or recording equipment. We had no budget. We couldn’t raise a production number between us. Our epic looked certain to qualify as one of those masterpieces that exist only in the conversations of film buffs. The fewer people to see them, the fewer to contradict the legend. Eventually you have world rights on a cockney cut of Orson Welles’ It’s All True — and without exposing a single foot of film.

I was drowning in the psychopathology of obsession: the harder I drove myself in composing this account, taking down the voices (the intrusions from ‘elsewhere’), the more exposed those around me became to repeated and meaningless mischiefs. My lacerated ego puffed and swelled to a critical state: I began to believe that, by some magical trope, unwittingly enacted, I had moved ahead of the events I was describing . Or even, and this is hardest to swallow, by committing these fictions to paper, I had ensured they would occur. I found myself, a sandpaper-pored Richard Burton, opening my newspaper with palsied hand to have the latest atrocity confirmed. Vessels of Wrath : ‘angels that failed’, revengers, river-inhabiting, tied to the earth (but not part of it), deluding with false divinations, whispering into the wires, toying with stop lights. Light bulbs exploded as I touched the switch. The typewriter cut out as I pressed the first key (I considered shunning the letters ‘j’ and ‘k’, but that was insufficient penance). I fell prey to the temptation to destroy everything I had done — as if that would revoke it; to pitch the whole mess into the fire. As soon as I completed my narrative of the Whitechapel train-fury, typed the final paragraph, I slumped in front of the television set to receive equally distant, but more compelling, versions: blood, carnage, suffering. I began to wrestle with the present tale of widowhood, memorials, monuments, and I was telephoned with the news of my father’s death. If I moved on, as I proposed, to crucifixions, cursed motor launches, Islands of the Dead — what could I look forward to?

Walking away from it all — escaping — the house, the desk; a Saturday morning, down the Waste, for old time’s sake. And I found in a box on the floor a curious, awkward, Germanic engraving: ‘Descent from the Cross’ by A. H. Winter. It was very cheap. I bought it to resell, as I hoped, at the next Book Fair. But succumbed to temptation and held on to it, hung it on the wall. A slumped Christ; maimed, extinguished beyond all hope of resurrection. The peasant disciple, mongoloid with shock, fingers hooked beneath the lifeless shoulders, struggles with a dead beast-weight. The twisted neck, the veins of the kneeling woman. It was unutterably bleak.

I recognized the cross, a monstrous concrete tree, as we turned off the motorway and down the private slip-road to the crematorium. Red furnaces against an overcast sky. Perimeter fences of the steelworks. Out of the window of the Silvertown train the whole reel was available, now, today, at this moment, the film of life: event by event, second by second, a procession of single frames. It is all there, all within reach; birth to grave — and beyond: it requires only the courage to stop everything and to look.

I pushed the heel of my hand against my ear and succeeded in muffling the pulse of pain. Held firm by the gravity of sick pride, I remained exactly where I was — and nowhere else. There was no further expenditure of stolen time. The trauma was safely frozen.

Sonny is nudging me, opening the door: Silvertown platform. It is as mauve, silky, stocking-filtered, fey, day-for-night as Delvaux’s ‘Nightwatchman’; used on the dustjacket of the American edition of Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Obscure, semi-official buildings. A snake’s nest of rail tracks. Hills in the distance — across the river? And the river itself, that self-renewing avenue of escape? Denied to us. I grant no credence to this preposterous set. If this is reality — pass me a paintbrush.

We have to arrange, somehow, to re-enter our narrative, to advance; or stand for all eternity, shivering in this dogmatically transitional limbo. (I flashed to John Clute’s warning of my ‘not remarkably powerful grasp of narrative syntax’. But I am powerless to act. It is like being handed a plague card.) I allow myself to be dragged, club-footed, a storm anchor behind Sonny’s still bustling pilot boat.

Silvertown, sadly, makes little attempt to live up to the glory of its name. It would have to be acknowledged even in the most optimistic auctioneer’s catalogue as ‘distressed’. Subdued by the deconsecrated ziggurat of the Sugar Factory, the thin main street — once active in the field of nautical exploitation — now reluctantly let chaos greet chaos; it tumbled into more and more boisterous characterizations of squalor and decay. The once fire-stormed hamlet was now a glittering beach of sugar. The air was thick with a viscid sweetness; inspissated droplets fell, without fear or favour, like a sleet of poisoned nostalgia. As you smiled, charmed by this version of the picturesque, the enamel of your teeth was stripped to the nerve roots; the periodontal membrane dissolving into black lace.

We crossed and recrossed deleted railway bridges, trying to find our way to the City Airport, the Royal Docks, the site of the almost completed memorial to the Widow’s Consort (known locally as ‘Dirty Den’s Knob’). The tracks always petered out among the same tangles of wire, giant wheels of extinct machines, columns of treadless tyres.

A mustard-plaster Victorian Gothic church, St Mark’s, primed with a terrifying bestiary of gargoyles, oversaw and dominated this principality of unemployed apparitions. S. S. Teulon’s masterpiece, with its hollow ceramic blocks, was caged in wire and no longer approachable. Soon it would be returned to the populace, the eager communicants, with a new identity — as a storage shed for the local history collection of the Passmore Edwards Museum. An unneccessary conceit: the entire canton should have been under a bell jar, with a neatly engraved sans-serif label. Even the inevitable First War cross was beyond our reach. I pressed against the fence, striping my cheek: a refugee from the razor gangs. The words ( Courage , Remembrance, Honour) exulted the dead ‘whose names shall live for ever’; but not here, where the sugar-smog has already eaten the gilt from the sandstone, and erased the lost squadron of claimants on our sympathy.