Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The bells! The bells! A recorded tintinnabulation doubles these canals and fetid lagoons — another Venice — summons albino crocodiles from under the rotting piles. Slithering from their bolt holes, the sick legions of the invertebrate faithful creep into the morning light, protecting their eyes behind dark glasses, huddling under umbrellas: fire-damaged turtles. They tremble towards some unknown cathedral. It is time for us to join with them: to walk upright into the Holy City.

IV

Shuffling along, eyes on the floor, we are disposable extras in some monochrome spectacle: the megalomaniac nightmare of a one-eyed Austrian dictator, whose celluloid epic will be acclaimed for exposing the myth of totalitarianism. (How many times have we heard Lang’s account of his interview in Dr Goebbels’s office? The hands of the clock. Money in the bank. The Paris train. Polite expressions of the Führer’s admiration for Metropolis and Die Nibelungen .) A premature anti-Fascist, prophetically announcing the coming of the long knives, Kristallnacht ; wolves from the iron forest skulking into the suburbs. But prophets are redundant on the Island. The worst has already happened.

The avenues! Treeless, broad, focusing on nothing. Dramatic perspectives leading to no revelation: no statues of public men, no fountains, no slogans. Nothing. No beggars, no children, no queues for buses. This city of the future, this swampland Manhattan, this crystal synthesis of capital, is already posthumous: a memorial to its own lack of nerve. It shudders and lets slip its ghosts. It swallows the world’s dross. Isle of Dogs, receiving station of everything that is lost and without value. A library of unregarded texts. Escaped pets. Abortions. Amputated limbs. Hiding place of Idi Amim, Baby Doc Duvalier, Martin Bormann. There must be a showcase tower that contains nothing but the collected shoes of Imelda Marcos. There must be a pyramid filled with the severed heads of torturers, waiting for the quacks to steam them to reincarnation. Their red-veined eyes move, like the eyes in portraits: they watch us. There must be a gambling hell for all those who blaspheme against fate by calling themselves ‘Lucky’: a sullen moustached Lord Lucan ‘greets’ a toothpick-chewing Luciano, who slips him a counterfeit nickel. There must even be a shrine where collectors of military fetishes can worship the single testicle of Adolf Hitler.

We tramp through award-winning piazzas where all the monuments fake at collapse: heaps of loose honey-coloured bricks have been cunningly arranged to suggest the frisson of real disaster, metal fatigue, earthquake: jagged fragments of Rivera and Orozco murals have been imported from Mexico City. But there are also once-active dockworkers entombed beneath wrecked apartments that were pushed too high in worthless materials, held together with bandaids and unbonded cement. Pastiched catastrophes overwhelm the dusty traces of true archival pain.

We find ourselves sniffling into our sleeves, exposed to all this emptiness, to nothing beyond the dementia praecox of the buildings themselves. They confess, they boast, they lie; they make us ashamed of the tired remnant of our humanity.

How much further? The procession of charcoaled communicants winds among tombs of vanished dish-hogs, the heavy players who put their trust in sky-sucking satellites. They slink down sirocco-buffeted canyons of damaged glitz that swiftly repudiate any notion of pedestrianism. The desire to lift our heads to the stars, to admire the pulsing lights on the summit of these alcazars, is immediately blocked by a jungle ceiling of tracks from the elevated railway, as it shuttles in another cargo of relic buyers, grit-tongued penitents, architecturalists with cameras, endlessly repeating the same reflected images, flattening the city, carrying it back out into the world; lecturing, proselytizing, extending the screwball aesthetics of collaboration and surrender.

There were no streets in this paradigmatic city, only public boulevards, and tributaries linking the basins of dark water, the unmeditated pools. But even in their obscurity these tributaries had to be named, and the names set in alabaster to mock them: Ambrosiano, Gelli, Sindona, Ortolani, Marcinkus. Marcinkus ? Why not? It might have been the Bishop from Cicero, Illinois (home of Alphonso Capone, Jake ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik, Frank ‘the Enforcer’ Nitti), we saw on the rooftop, wasting the golf balls. The Bishop was no longer a name; neither living nor dead, he remained perpetually incommunicado, an exile in his Tower of the Winds. There was still too much he could tell. Let him spit in the water.

We were evidently closing on the heart of the place. The grand boulevard was zonally marked; so that we passed through colours, states of consciousness — perhaps of grace — through Platonic harmonies towards the cathedral of all the mysteries. Blinking, we emerged from darkness (base lead) to approach the painted spokes of the sun, an hallucinatory scintillae of Byzantine gold. The formal stages of our initiation were designated by Neo-Classical letters tooled in silver upon the scarlet brick road. P V, P IV, P III, P II …

The light blinded us, bent wantonly back from the pyramid at the peak of the Magnum Tower, eight hundred feet above the scutal bowlers of the pilgrims. It remained London’s tallest man-made structure: a fortified nest, an angled chamber, the nearest point to the hand of God. He had only to uncurl His finger to touch it.

William Blake’s interlocking columns of words were the armature around which the monster’s panels had been bolted. The Magnum Tower

… frown’d dreadful over Jerusalem,

A building of Luvah, builded in Jerusalem’s eastern gate, to be

His secluded Court…

Dens of despair in the house of bread, enquiring in vain

Of stones and rocks, he took his way, for human form was none;

And thus he spoke, looking on Albion’s City with many tears:

‘What shall I do? What could I do if I could find these Criminals?’

By indulging in these ethical speculations we have fallen far behind the other communicants. They look at nothing, advance with regular, zombie-piston tread on the portico of the Anubic Temple. I am willing to pause in admiration of the twin deities, the basalt throned jackal-headed guardians on their granite plinths, who oversee this pilgrimage of dead souls; but Davy is tugging at my coat-tails, pulling me away from a fatally seductive vision of Cynopolis, City of Dogs. We escape from the central boulevard, dodge down one of the tributaries, a blind alley that leads inevitably to another fenced building site, a ziggurat shrouded in flapping black nylon.

Alien footsteps, creaking spars, subdued voices: we press ourselves back into the shadows, lurk behind the hollow pillars of a false atrium, watching. We expect, at least, a Conradian bark or Twelfth Dynasty funerary barge, sliding down the herring-bone road to disappear among the floating draperies of the wrapped mound. But there is only the noise: a dragging, bumping grind of some recalcitrant cargo over the uneven mosaic of bricks. The performance is not far behind. Two priests, a fat one and a thin one, tethered like oxen to a grand piano, shudder and shake; their faces pasty and flushed above soiled white bibs. They struggle past us without lifting their heads, mopping themselves with rags of altar cloth. This listless Laurel and Hardy couple have been sentenced to perform this bizarre penance, as I imagine it, for crimes against children. Roped together in a sterile hermaphroditic marriage, they debate the Pelagian Heresy while orchestrating, with every step forward, a hideous discordant jangling. We have penetrated some latter day version of Pilgrim’s Progress : moral lessons are being made visible . We have only to interpret them.