When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

Half a Blessed Hour

I was once a vegetarian, my blood boiled with a violent Rightness. Now that I am more Carnal, it laps back and forth like the ocean. A pig smiled at me from its sty and I had to throw my chorizo in the gutter. Now I stick to beef. Why? A shrug of the shoulders looks like worldliness but can never be wisdom. 

I walked through Santiago's streets, five hundred years of frozen stone, and came upon a building with banners hanging from it. I know an activist squat when I see one. The door was open and I looked in, a few bags in the back and cut out paper signs, some voices echoing around the halls. I didn't go inside or make myself known. I turned back to the street and closed the door behind me.

A voice resounds in my head, Helena the Spiritualist Church President, the second hand psychic.

"You won't be doing this for very much longer you know."

"Doing what?"

"This."

Today was good, to walk around the streets with no aims. I got back my artist eye, the one that just appreciates whether good or bad, ugly or beautiful, the one that just sees. There are other eyes, we put them in and take them out. The wanter's eye, the eye that looks for things to consume. It's the eye that wants to destroy things and make them part of us. The judgemental eye that looks for things to violently change. It's the eye of volcanos that leaves nothing but ashes and a field of stone. The eye of wilful ignorance that happily erases vision. It's the eye we call rose-tinted. If I can leave out these other eyes, if I can resist their broken light for just half a blessed hour, then I can get the artist eye, the buddha eye, the one that just appreciates whether good or bad, ugly or beautiful, the one that just sees.   

I'm not going back to England. At least, I won't go back an Englishman. Nationality is overated. In an encyclopedia entry it comes before everything else except name and time. For instance: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) German Philosopher. And so everyone from blazing stars to hellbound villains gets categorised first by the name they did not choose, by the years they were born and died in which they did not choose (save for suicide), the nation they did not choose and finally their vocation, calling or lasting legacy. 

The nationality I did not choose and the country I did not choose are causing me increasing embarassment. A nation of turkey's regularly voting for Christmas and a lot of English doormice, a lot of British bulldogs and Prize Pigs but not many Englishmen and not many Englishwomen. And  now, though I'm doing nothing near so dramatic as burning my passport, England can count one less Englishman. 

So, goodbye fair England's rolling fields, where a parking lot now stands. Goodbye dead poets whose art lies just as dead now beneath those once rolling fields, where that parking lot now stands. Goodbye to a culinary culture which has nothing in particular to boast of, the memory of pleasure lying deeper still than the dead poets and their dead arts and the rolling memory of those rolling fields beneath where the parking lot now stands.

The parking lot who has just been graced by the prescense of a drunk, sloped off from the pub at closing time, a time so early as to embarass a nursery child across the channel. 

The drunk unhitches, unsheaths, and spills the 6 pints and 2 shots he earlier consumed. Down the wall, pooling a little at the base. It then swells and bursts its banks and this raging river creeps across the tarmac, drawing in ants and lice and other industrious near-blind beings to drown in its rapids. As the river flows between an empty crisp packet, a half full kebab container and a soiled condom, it looks a little, in the amber lamplight, like the River Thames and London.  

At last, fully relieved, the drunk shakes off the last few drops, sheaths, hitches and looks around. 

"Bloody hell, where am I?" He exclaims, although the beautiful language so slurred and upended as to be rendered near incomprehensible.

"Bloody hell, where am I?" He repeats, chuckling as if emboldened by the warm reception of his first utterance. 

"Bloody hell! Where am I?" He says again, as if forgetting that he'd just said it twice. 

He looks around the car park bordered on one side by a fast food chain, on the other by an outlet for near-disposable clothing. The third opens onto a minor road the other side of which harbours a line of grey concrete buildings with windows darkened. On the fourth side there is a carphone warehouse. 

He looks at the outlets, he looks at the token handful of sick looking trees, and he drinks in the birdless, cricketless, lifeless silence. 

And a fourth time he repeats the same phrase, but this time quieter, uncertain, the dark twins of defeat and despair pacing the outskirts of his pisshead exuberance which is all the while fading.

"Bloody hell... Where am I?"