Moving away
If achieving light-speed travel some time in the far future for us humans is merely an engineering problem and not a physical impossibility imposed by the laws of nature, then here is one reason not to do it - any journey at or above the speed of light, let’s say to our second nearest star Proxima Centauri (our Sun being the first), 4.2 light years from Earth, would require an act of supreme sacrifice from the light-speed craft’s crew; would mean that their family, friends, all the people of the earth, would hurtle into old age, shoot into death, dart underground, scatter into the wind with less ceremony than a sneeze, in hours, mere moments for the beam-speed travellers. Time dilation. Einstein’s special theory of relativity tells us such miraculous devices, such engines, throwing us forward, would create an untraversable chasm-distance of heart-breaking time as well as that of physical space - an agony of warped space-time. Upon return home, eight and a half years later, the light-speed travellers would discover an Earth very different from the one they had left. Thousands of years would have transpired, our cultures perhaps entirely unrecognisable after further advances in an exponentially accelerating technology, a change in the very nature of human life moved beyond biology. Or would they would find a barren planet withered from apocalypse or evacuated, people having fled some untraceable danger? A regression perhaps could be observed - a retreat back into soot-ceilinged caves, fears marked out by char-tipped sticks, a tentative art or numb-tongued language of hieroglyphs, back to blood-letting for the crops of the sun god, to blades made of stone fashioned with calloused hands under hard and animal eyes.
I myself have done some moving away. Over one and a half years ago I moved to Krakow one thousand kilometres from my home in the North of England. Distance is a given. Sometimes I feel as if I’m a light-speed traveller. I feel a distance beyond miles, beyond physics, a detachment which, I suppose, was part of the deal. You left us, they would think. The visits inevitably thin out over time, as do the little visits of telephone calls, my being away becomes the norm, as any me-shaped hole is filled in and paved over. I had hoped friendships were like monoliths, free-standing, impervious to the atrophy of the grit-spitting wind of years – if these friendships are dead then even graves need to be kept clean. But they are yet living, blood still moving, relaying, but hungry, needing to be fed, defended, held like breath.
Or maybe I didn’t leave, not entirely, not yet. Perhaps I need to lift the rest of me here, to move completely, discreetly, cease straddling time and space. But I will keep them all, like coloured stones polished by my pocket’s lining, perfect, rounded by the gravity of my travel.
Unified theory
This is the heart in oil. See how it shines with nacreous skin of light. Hold it. Feel the weight. This is a birds skull, a whispering husk, paper thin. Listen. It rattles with dry seeds, like the old hard bitter berries of prejudice, tightly curled in, concentric like pearls with space-dark cores, hunched in stasis, unshucked in a skull. These are the rays of pain. Radiating onto the screen of my mind, an interference pattern on a sheet of linen on the line, damp in the dew-ghosted dawn. Feel my hands snow-ball cold. The deeper we dig the darker it gets. Physicists, experts in the limitations of maths, the probing language of science, peer down the kaleidoscope of our cognisance, down the tunnel of our hunting and gathering minds. These are the hands. The fingers sprouted from mud-skipping flippers. These are the eyes, apertures - apertures trained on apertures observing themselves observe themselves. What alternative to witnessing? These are the birds, our planes bird-shaped. There is a kind of running together. These are the legs. The carriers. This is the human mouth. It eats and makes words for others to eat, psychotropic words, new worlds transmogrify. This is the mind. It contains the universe, an emptiness punctuated by stars, only further pronouncing the loneliness, these little glimmerers like candles lit in hope, lit against hopelessness, where echoes move blindly, serving only to exaggerate the darkness, to conjure the darkness by contrast. Can the heart and the mind be unified? Look at what you’ve won. The here and now, a jackpot to have come crash-rattling out of the trillion-reeled slot-machine of all there could’ve been. Congratulations. You made it.
Recording #2 Krakow
Airports, sparking, nervous places. Eyes on doors places, pacing places, arrivals, departures, delays, baggage claim, passport inspection, x-ray places. Passengers, only minutes on the ground, emerge through the sliding doors at Krakow’s Balice plane station, wide-eyed as if born into unknown realms. I love the logo for Krakow’s only airport – a dandelion seed drifting on the breeze. Perfect. Perfect for Poland’s wandering masses. So they emerge, these emerglings, through the doors before the waiting crowd and instantly feel a pack of eyes on their faces scanning for recognition. The producer arrives, he doesn’t spot me straight off, I lift my hand and wave, but his eyes march on, the vanguard of a tunnel-mind. He seems hurried, bristling, anxious, soul of iron filings currented by magnetic stress, the residue of a frantic Gatwick still clinging to him. A hand shake, a pat on the back. I offer to carry one of his two weighty equipment-Tetrussed bags. It’s half 12pm
We step out into the cold, a mere minus 7, recent weeks have seen temperatures as low as an unreal minus 20, but this brain-sorbeting, actually life-threatening cold snap has recently eased, nudging up the mercury to refreshingly-cold-but-dress-warmly-and-don’t-stick-around-type cold. I smile at the consternation on Giles’ face as we walk up to my ride - a mostly blue Micra, battered, dented like some kind of old battle-bitten shield, paint peeling off, and with a huge dorsal fin or sail-like advert for my fiancees’ gym mounted on the roof. We don’t so much drive as tack home.
So later that afternoon we rendezvouz for mic stands and xlr cables in front a small theatre, get home, get set up – we unplug the fridge which gurgles and whines and buzzes, pluck the battery from the wall-mounted clock, disengage the heating, pray for no baying from the neighbourhood’s many guard dogs. One small distant yap can ignite explosions of barking which seem to move across the whole of Krakow like waves.
Quick sip of whiskey and we lay one down. Luckily Giles is sympathetic towards my drinking during sessions. He knows it takes the edge off the recording jitters for me, and better takes are realised as a result. I never allow myself to get rendered however, just pleasantly disconnected from the dreaded red rec light, ‘rolling!’ he says, and so too sometmes the waves of panic within, the stampede, the thunderous flight of beating hooves. So with a take in the bag, we kick back and await the arrival of Ash, our double bassist, due to arrive the next afternoon.
As Ash and I pull up to the house (this time in a different car) the double bass we are hiring arrives, having just been picked up from a Jazz club in Krakow’s old town. Quick cups of tea, then a forest of mic stands sprouts up. We record upstairs. With me in our bedroom, Ash installed securely in my eye-line in his bedroom across the hall, and Giles in his make-shift control room in the corner room off to my left, Ash’s right. Cables wind across the floor of the landing like the rivers of the Ganges Delta. Some revelation perhaps could be divined from this puzzle, with a fistful of bones and chicken guts.
For the next 4 days we rehearse in the morning, demo in the afternoon, and go for a take in the evening, which we would invariable improve upon the following morning, fresh after sleep and with the songs further settled in our minds. Giles and Ash - two gents very easy to work with and full of ideas, fun but focussed, the distillation of songs is our charge.
We find ourselves with a good half day free on the final Friday, and we venture into Krakow’s old town for the first time, previously only a brief trip to the Kazimierz Jewish district for dinner had been possible. The week had seen shin deep snowfall, but on this day bruised slush abounded, and wet sleet angled into the eyes. We all felt cold, and I was disappointed not to be able to fully showcase my adopted home city. Our guests, though, cheered up after a nice meal (soup served in a bowl made of bread). They returned to the UK on Saturday. Hugs. I’ve become a hugger. I sit looking out of the window, calm, but with an eerie absence crowding. I think I have a title for the album. Not telling though, like an imaginary friend you’re reluctant to introduce through fear of evaporation. Who knows when the album will be out and about, but we seemed to capture these ghosts, join me in waiting, be aware and look alive.
Nothing days and the darkness of light – between Christmas and the new year
I’m tempted to say that these are the nothing days. OK, days of shelter, food, heating, light to read by, everything we need, but these are the few hollow, widening days after Christmas, the expanses of the year already receding into blue-bruise shadow, the gems of its crooked diadem, like snowflakes dissolving instantly upon contact with leaf, bough, root-veined earth, like closing eyes in the flowering dark. All is well, no discomfort, no pain, no outer conflict, but then I do have this shame of inaction. I listen to the snow, the sibilance, someone walks past the window. The creaking underfoot like stretched leather or the opening of a succession of doors. I reflect for the merest of moments on the arbitrary miracle of life and I think of comets, city-sized, revolving through space for mindless time – the seed of our doom sown into their trajectory towards us, coming to Tunguska us, comb us flat.
I switch on the computer and head directly to computerchessonline.net. I’m always black and have promoted myself from ‘beginner’ to ‘casual’ – I have won only twice on this setting (around a 5% success rate – it’s the king of games and it’s a slow fight.
Then onto Youtube and its darkness of light. I’m afraid it spews what makes us tick. In order to get an accurate view of the human race look no further, I’m afraid – our violence, our greed, our imaginary, sanguinary gods. We are sometimes funny, sometimes falling, balling, warring and whoring, shooting, looting, stoning, owning, recruiting, talking, hawking, inspiring, lugubrious, scurrilous, oil-sucking, accidental, elemental, elementary. These are my chimneys for eyes. Here I am, inert and numb as a dead man staring dry-eyed at the flicker of day and space, as the deeply exterior universe expands like lungs in every direction. OK, we are hewn from the clay of light, but who can know their momentous heart?
I’m not even in the mood for music, because this, like reading, is not passive. Sometimes it takes effort to open the door for the shoal of one’s soul to whip, warp, morph and bleed through. But for now it peers, million-eyed, through its tank of cracked-glass cobwebs, for the moment suffering weightlessness, away for the gin-crystal jewellery of music hung briefly in the dark air like a northern aurora.
These are the nothing days, but they’re OK, very OK, although hollow and flat, a bowl-like depression in the land between two cities - the city of the past, the city of pity, and the the future’s city – the city of lights. Under the frosted grass like silver hair Spring waits like an amulet, waits to riot greenly in the humming blood of flowers.
