Iain Sinclair - Downriver

There was the ugly interference of a monogrammed helicopter overhead, a cone of lights to confuse us; the snow powder swirled and stung, the figure was lost. The Royal Personage was evidently making his appearance. Around us the ice began to creak and strain, to protest: our boots were surrounded by pools of water. It looked as if, very soon, we would have to start swimming; still chained to the weight of our sledges.

We began to slide, to skid, to scramble for the dockwall. But which direction should we take? Away to our left we caught the orange glow of a fire and, irrationally, pulled towards it; towards a primitive source of comfort. We advanced on the patch of ice that would be first to give. Joblard’s cauldron of lead was about to be tipped, his liquid silver spilled. I feared for him. It was always the big men, the bulls, who went fastest: Petty Officer Evans, a legend, a tower of strength, ‘so confused as a result of a fall that he could not even do up his boots’. The culling had to start somewhere: we were too many in too small a place.

The lead hissed at our feet, a scimitar; a moon was cast, a delicate, rough-edged meniscus. THE MOON IS THE NUMBER 18 , I flashed; how I’d puzzled over that title of Charles Olson’s, intrigued but uneasy, until I discovered the tarot, and its interpretation. ‘Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error.’ Is that all? It felt much worse; those were pinpricks available anywhere. A few pages deeper into Olson another title lurked: AS THE DEAD PREY UPON US . The purity of Joblard’s act under these extraordinary circumstances was post-human. What drove him to it? The preparations and the difficulties were everything. He worked best under pressure. He searched for someone to hold a harpoon to his throat. The object itself was redundant, self-erasing, an embarrassment. Joblard hunted the irritation of motive through blocks of inert fat. I can accept anything from these artists — except their justifications: the laboured, stuttering language-seizures forced upon them in their attempts to procure some pitiful dole of credit. ‘Take a bath, man. Don’t explain.’

The smoke from the cauldron thickened, and resolved itself: a giant figure had entered our circle. It had shaken free from an antiquarian’s gazette, a Gentleman’s Almanac : a Wicker Man, tongued with fire, his lineaments blazing, a mane of crackling whips. We could see through him, and see ourselves; mesmerized, inadequate. Sonny had wet himself like a frightened child. The Wicker Man was helmeted like a poilu in a spiral of shell. His frame was warted with snails; they popped, and spat hot oil as he burnt. A Job, he was magnificent in a cloak of boils. His wooden ribs breathed fire, but were not themselves destroyed. Gladstone’s effigy had marched from Bow in stern rebuke: his arm stretched out, pointing beyond us. Frankenstein’s Adam come to his end, prophetic, goaded further than his capacity for forgiveness could bear: he was cast in pride. ‘ I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames .’

The ice, with cracks like fired timber, was breaking up all around us; we were afloat. Clumsily, we twisted free of the sledge harnesses, and searched for something with which to paddle our floe for the shore. All of Joblard’s machines were sparking, smoking, failing. The wind dropped and the fog lifted. A sour lemon sun revealed the Boschian scope of all these Earthly Delights.

The Consort’s Folly, the stepped pyramid (its lions, and friezes, and elevators) was a black torch. Flames tore at the sky. Sirens screamed. Masonry crumbled. The concealed steel joists, supporting the Heinkel, buckled; then gave way. The bomber nosedived into the dock, wrecking a rescue launch that was attempting to take the panicked official party to safety. The sound system pounded out anthems of rage. Crimson fire engines ineffectually jetted high streams from both banks: they crossed, married, fell short. Glistening liquid arches converted the dock into a cathedral, and the memorial stack into an altarpiece.

The Wicker Man was stepping, with single strides, from barge to barge. The embalmed corpse of the Consort hung from his arms; leathery and fire-blackened, wood in its veins — a bog sacrifice, or Grünewald’s Isenheim Christ. The pair were expelled from the world of men, exiled in a collaboration at the heart of the flames: the sudden chill of the furnace’s fiercest cell.

We had passed unconsciously through some warp, crossed the border, and were viewing gospels of the future; but we were frozen, trapped, floating helplessly — unvoiced witnesses. Like Mallory and Irvine (‘still climbing when last seen’) we had reached our summit, our Everest; but we could neither return, nor report. We were no longer required. We had all travelled far beyond the possibility of any useful participation in the resolution of these events. The fire erased us. Let somebody else interpret the preserved shadows, the thin prints of lead, the irradiated wafers of light.

Yes, we have no bananas . A nightmare then? How does one run a credible banana republic without them? Child’s play. The ingenuity of our fiscal cardinals, our thinktank of snapping turtles, is needlessly invoked. Sell what has already been stolen and let the victims of this sleight of hand believe that, in some miraculous fashion, their long sequestered property is being returned to them. The zebra-suited pirates, puffy pink faces innocent of all corruption, are rewarded in votes and adulation, in yen, Deutschmark, krugerrands, dollars — credit! ‘Interest’ is a distorting mirror, its own contrary. Let the plant wither on the vine, but the deal must go down.

It all began when South Wales, from Caerleon to the cathedral city-hamlet of St David’s (the grail dreams of Arthur Machen to the seven cantrefi of Dyfed), was ‘leased’ to Onokora-Mishima Investments (Occidental); and a Shinto shrine was erected at the epicentre of the Bridgend Enterprise Park. A gold-crusted phallus was set in a rectangle of raked white sand (gathered from the radiated ruins), to frustrate the ambitions of corporate raiders and to abort the flight plans of locusts. Half-naked, male worker/slaves built up the ridges of their upper bodies, glistened and chanted: admired, from afar, by fluttering painted bird-boys in travesty. The Sun Dragon! The ancestor-worshipping rituals of rugby football were honoured by the people of both cultures — living on a pauper’s diet of bitter memories, and conquests celebrated only in song. The aboriginal Cymry , natural quislings, greased back their hair, shifting allegiance from Gene Vincent to Toshiru Mifune: finding solace in Germanic oratorios, and the seasonal slaughter by fire of innocent estate agents. Their racial pride, a sour thing, was made tame by a cargo cult of hi-tech toys, filling the cupboards of their immaculate hutches. They lived, gratefully, by a creed of strong bellies and limpid poetry.

Norfolk, from Lakenheath to Sculthorpe, went to the Dallas Cowboys. The decision was close, requiring a plebiscite by male suffrage. The benefit-drawing underclass and the mentally disadvantaged (Liberals, Gays, Book Collectors) were rigorously excluded; which resulted, inevitably, in a low turnout of weekenders, east enders, and media gypsies. Who voted, after searching the darkest recesses of their psyches, over many a dinner party, to exclude the Washington Redskins. The pinks and the greens could not live with the word ‘Washington’, and the right-thinkers ( sic ) were not about to invite some ragtag of landless Blackfeet to camp in their lush back yard (despoiling the habitat of so many recently discovered toads, coypus and birds of passage). Lock up your daughters. The Dallas Cowboys it was: by a neck (size eighteen, ruffed in fat like prime beef in the stockyard).