Atopia

Out of the city

2013-04-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

It's the sound of countless birds singing, the muffled middle distance of the traffic's roar, the elevation and light; how apart from the usual world we are and yet this world's utter mundanity, its totally quotidian nature and humility; which moves me. The mixture of idealism (as Greenway) with pragmatism (as sewer), of history in flux all around, most alive in the east of London, for better or worse. The sense of going somewhere, yet nowhere; of being nowhere, that is strangely both universal and completely specific. I feel very lonely yet somehow still connected.

Invest

2009-08-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

I think perhaps going is love. Arriving is something else.

And what better for the polar explorer when he arrives home than
someone else's heart to understand. Trudging alone toward another pole
of inaccessibility.

Atopia/anonblog has long been concerned with Nowhere, and perhaps that
reflects a childhood in suburbia. Suburbia is he ultimate Nowhere, the
one where more and more of us live.

I have come to an eastern new town to see love and I am sitting on the
green outside her house. It is as quiet as a retreat here.

Apart from the occasional car stereo. But the sounds from them too
end, and again it is quiet.

Where have I been, I hear you cry, my imaginary reader. Where has he
been for the last two or three years. Did he not think to keep us
informed of his movements?

Truth is, I think I've been trying to get Somewhere, and so I have had
nothing to write for you. The last time I did, I believe I said 'I
haven't been Nowhere in ages'. Well, recently I have been back there
and am going there again, and it actually makes me happier. The
trouble is knowing how to stay in touch with it (inspiration?) when
the demands of the day to day world are pressing. And likewise, when
that huge Nowhere/Everywhere that is The Internet impedes continually
upon the senses. Yes, the challenges of a modern working life.

What to invest in, that's the question. A friend who teaches a Taoist
martial art told me his teacher says 'invest in loss'. I still don't
know what it means, but they are words to live by nevertheless.

Invest in loss.

One Atom Thick

2007-10-30T18:17:00.001-07:00

Memory stretches only just
to the last draught I drank of silence.
Parcel string has been torn, but not cut,
and without getting melodramatic,
life is full these days, and rich.
And I wouldn't have it another way
but this,

this moment of repose, one atom thick
a halt in that endless spinning
of an iron and golden wheel
whose spokes bear flames
which are jumped at regular intervals.
Across the city the heavy bell, heard
once, only.

I haven't been Nowhere in ages.

Trilogy

2007-05-30T16:42:00.000-07:00

Avocado, watercress, spheres, feta, king prawns; served on romaine hearts. Mmm.

Poet of the Hyperreal

2007-03-08T16:29:00.001-08:00

Thank you for the input - it brought me to my knees, but helped me so much and inspired so many. I would love to claim I fully understand your theses, but it took me a long time to appreciate that you were a poet of sorts (a dry poet?), as well as a philosopher.. and I haven't yet reread you with the same voracity of that first time..

When I do I will guard against the perils of nihilism, and keep my eyes open for the heart of humanity which I know you must express - possibly simply in the beautiful and not meaningless exercise of sheer intellectual vitality which is my abiding impression of you now.

And whilst I can't really condone those apparently inhumanly insensitive remarks you made, I have to admit that you spoke for a part of me - a part which I hope never does speak for me.

I heard you echoing Bakhunin, the urge to destroy being also a creative act; except one cannot apply that principle to life; for destruction of life is surely as close a negation of creativity as language, if it must exist at all, can allow?

Using this medium now to homage you seems cruelly apposite beyond compare. This false opposition of ones and zeroes, somehow, expressing a spirit which, in your mental world, may never have existed at all; but which your mental world certainly existed within.
May you rest in peace.

We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us – because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand – the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forest – the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature – only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains...

RIP Jean Baudrillard.

‘And yet I may'

2007-02-11T10:57:00.000-08:00

Somehow in these vignettes I always find myself playing the lonely gentleman observing – observing himself, and the world, but cut off from them both. Once this character practised other lines – soliloquy’s of universality, the building of webs from bonds of care and generosity, the thread of compassion. Once he wrote, as a first resort, not a last. Once he lived with a band of brothers, who he kicked and screamed and railed against, but loved and learnt from all the more for that.

And now, in the thousandth cafe, I yearn to drive, but my car is in another zone altogether. I long to speak, to share excited thoughts and wild imaginings, but my pen keeps such sharing at proxy. My fingers strive to dance, over the naked body of an instrument, or the fretboard of a beautiful lover, but all I give them is this pen with its one point and single colour. It is all I can do to keep from tracing these trails along the walls and floorboards, to contain these entire other worlds of sound and sensuality within this monochrome plane and feel my existence only through the faint glimmer of trust that these rough markings will reach other's retinas later, by magical, digital means.

I look up through the window, to St Paul’s’ and feel that cushion which is time past catch under me, rock me in its arms, a baby rocked by lullaby to sleep. By the eye of a centuries dead architect, by the vigils of a volunteer force, by a whole order of people, like ants worshipping our queen, by a congregation with its beautiful and imperfect faith spread across time, by these am I lulled to quiet exultation.

A tourist boat chugs silently by.
A vapid lovers rock tinnily plays through the sound system.
New shoes make their novel presence known to the hide of my feet.
Gradually the night light motions backwards through its name, even though I will not witness it reaching its beginning.

I thank you for your generous indulgence.

Tom 9/2/7

A confession

2006-12-21T07:56:00.000-08:00

Please forgive me stranger I have sinned
Your car reversed,
my bike advanced
We hit and run
.

don't suppose..

2006-12-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

..the city's got me down yet,

but tonight I am listening to my songs
in order to remember
who I am..

..or who I was.

the fluid electric

2006-11-22T17:12:00.000-08:00

One more dimension -
into a wonderground,
through a hatch in the bridge
the long red carpet.
An unkept secret,
I walk, past a dozen brick arches
built for a team of giants.
And here found humanity,
where once orphans survived,
in the damp and the dark
under clattering carriages
of the early commuters
and away from explosions.
now, the cracking percussion
and invention of utilities
is fused with futures
in the confected sounds
of intelligence, abstracted
- we sit in the theatre,
full of joy, and awed
by the sublime articulation
of the fluid, electric.

written in response to 'not-applicable' collective, shunt arches, london bridge 10/11/2006

Elvin

2006-11-19T16:24:00.000-08:00

Outside the library,
two younger men and an older.
I speak English to the operators
Keep him talking -
what did you have for breakfast today? -
he clutches his heart
and slips in and out of conciousness

He is a cold devotee,
of that warmth
alchohol offers, and rips away -
the hardcore version of my own idol,
the sugarrush.

In his desparate and childlike, frozen state,
he gets under my skin
and I realize my good fortune;
and wonder about how best to help people
The paramedic has seen it all before
and gets him standing, and warm -
these arts of ours don't seem at all relevant,
yet perhaps more relevant than ever.

Humbled I am,
and twice humbled
When I wash my hands.

One

2006-11-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Today may have broken the dam - I started recording my best song
(rather than the most obscure, the shortest, the oldest or the most
recent), and for the first time in ages, played some bass, which I
did for a living for seven years but have more recently kept at arms
length. Its a part of how I am, but I don't want to be stuck with it.

The song in question has the same title as this post, and it is about
the feeling (most often felt on top of a mountain) that even though
and in fact because you are completely alone, you are completely
with everyone - in an essential human way.
Through solitude comes humanity.

I can't mention the song without mentioning Bob, my Up friend. Here's
what I wrote about him before, and I think its still true. He's off
on his own on Sunday, for six nights in fact.

One reason that I haven't written posts for a long while is that I am
more fluent in the medium of song than prose/ poetry. And that my
temperament is such that I tend to do lots and lots of things, rather
than one thing really well. And of course (please let me know of any
good opposites to this), the people who have most inspired me have
been really good at at least one thing. So I have been trying to
focus my energies on songwriting, and that means recording all the
songs I've written that would otherwise die with me, and writing
songs when in the inspired states that I have sometimes channelled
into this collection of writings.

Sometime you can hear some music. But not till its ready!

Atopia

2006-11-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

Hi.

I have moved, and I have changed;
and I am coming out of my shell.

So this space is no longer called anonblog.
Now it is called Atopia.

And I don't know whether I will ever write to it or not,
and I don't know what I will write to it either..

It might become a 'what I did today' space.

Anyway, please let me introduce myself,
My name is Tom.
And I am the President of Atopia.

:-/

Entr'acte italic

2006-05-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

A cathedral/ in German, 'Dome'/ Pallestrina/ Angels, Genii Loci/
thirty men and women, in bear masks/ naked/ cameras form a semi circle/ inside the police line/ 'do not cross'/ so I cross
Lithe silver bridge/ driving rain/ umbrella ballet/
A ramp connects/ a small family chase/ shrieking, laughing/ me laughing, too
a girl found a 'seat' in a girder/ so could we all/ angels ranged about
The hall is the museum/ no painting, no collection/ could articulate/ this/
and I'm left, overwhelmed, small/ wondering if this obsession/ with spaces and empty form/ is such a good idea
I shop for my sister/ find a tiny catalogue/ of Japanese textiles for her/ & force myself to a show/ can't navigate this heroic remix
after Man Ray's iron/ with nails coming out/ find a little cinema/ at last, the dark/ Entr'acte/ apposite intermission/ this is what the huge hall lacks/ intimacy/ the problem of Mies/ Plato's viewers/ 'd have been blinded in the light/ my eyes relax, but not my ears/
yes, a quiet dark space to be still/ amidst the busy city/ I arrive, only to leave
I heard a song/ that made me cry

Wolfs

2006-05-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

I keep on seeing wolverine friends walk by. Be they huskies, wolves, long dogs and grey, even a chance fox in the basement - but this was freaked out where the wolfs - I like the word better without the 'v', itmakes it more like them; strong, marginal, spare, knowing and wise but with the scent of danger and wild longings about them - where most of these omen friends seem almost placid - and maybe their wildness has drained into a feral or domestic basin, as so many seem to tug tethers to a man, its true - they are there on every corner, at each approach to nowhere.

What is this? I say 'omen friends' 'cos whilst so many jog by, content and quiet, focused on the way ahead (where to? Do they drag their de- domestised feral men-pets behind them north? To the wild woods? To the creek or the mountain crag where the moon bids them cry out their long wolfy names to the four winds?), they each speak a secret..

The same secret? The same spell of nonsense, quietude, profundity? A wolverine quire conspires to sing a one-note symphony to my quivering ears, to my whiskered cheeks? What is this note, this spell, this secret? Were that you could tell, little handheld, stupid ether, blank void. Were that my asking you this with little pokes of this telescpic stylus would result in some resounding shout a big 'yEs', a flash or beaten pan in the mudflat nights.

As I write (and as I interact with my geo/physical friends, increasingly), I sense a madness, a homelessness of the mind. A space before the question, the silence before the waves move.. The bump in the cycle as the lead wheel overlaps again, a tremulous little hil to climb and fall again. The wolfs are at my door tonight, and tonight I've no question but the wild. Tonight I'm leaving. I'm gone.

a list of recent nowheres

2006-05-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

A young girl's bed, right now;
The latest world cup video game,
By the sea,
A rooftop - the moon and skyscrapers,
Family history.
A golf course by the river,
Through a wire railing,
over a bridge crossing.
Driving out to desolation beach,
Naming what had washed up,
Or had been left there.
The nowheres of memory,
And of projected futures.
Griefs abounding,
Stroboscopic.
I am homeless
My home is lessnesslessnessless
I stay in the attic
Above the office
-- artists, healers below
Advertising and retail -
With the speed of electrons
I elope from pretty cages
And with the forces of gravity and magnetism
I smash through your jawbone.
Adorning your cranium,
Your crowning glory,
Your straight hair is sacred
to me,
Your neck, your fingers
The history of concrete
Forgotten heroes
Fallen, still fallible
Dust.

The joy of being beaten

2006-04-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

Even amongst the dearest of friends, nothing feels quite as humiliating as being beaten by my own blind spots and weakness. Were that I might have bypassed them, given them over to god. But there they are, the trip wire, invisible in the undergrowth, and there's the bloody nose, the scuffed boots. There's my pride, beyond catching now, floating down the river.

No, weaknesses do not dissappear, but like rocks in the river the secret is to know they're there and take the wider path. The bloody nose and the scuffed boots come when you forget you rode these rapids once before, and sailed them all the way on down to the sea.

I can't take my coffee

2006-04-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

Recently I had occasion to walk through the city early, just as her jaw was stretching, yawning the way into morning. The lights on the normally gaudy pier were off and I was strangely touched by this sleeping monster stretching out to sea - it was as if a sweet smile on his horrific face placated even the tide. People everywhere were quietly scratching out their living in aesthetic Herculean fashion (Greece is the new Rome, darling) - none more so than the brightly jacketed ones who will sweep the milliard pebbles back to the beach all summer.

A friend is on the journey of her life, and I am with her as she sets foot outside the known into the arenas of her long dreams. I am at the station, the port; I am on the cliff, I board the boat. With her adventure, my feet remember that venturing alone into the new world and my brow resolves to follow that cloud of dream to the end again and again.

I walk through this end- of- the- line city that is even now embarking on its own bright adventure, standing at its own terminal; I walk through lanes of closed bookshops and clothes arcades, and sit amongst the magnificent steady, sweeping Victorian rhythms of the railway terminal and drink coffee to wake, and slowly, suddenly my heart feels like a large brown paper bag, held in the hand and crumpling in it - all seems beautiful and poignant and extraordinary, and so ordinary. And as the city wakes I know, with a quiet pride and a funny sense of embarassment, I just know I can't take my coffee.

Blood, disappearance

2006-03-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

My world was green,
and bleak like the mountains;
you brought the blood back
Your dress was white,
your heart a-throbbing;
I brought the light in.
I wanted to love you,
there in the morning
you wanted the sun rise.
You wanted August,
with ripe fruit and long days;
I owned only winter.
Had August engulfed us,
I feared for my harbour,
I feared for the stars we pretended I pocketed.
And fears can hold substance, as subsequence illustrates;
my boat now holds water, and rocks, loose in the ebbing day.
Let me say just this,
in cold ones and zeros
to your stained face, your long artful fingers:
I'd shower you now,
with red juice, and white heat;
I'd bathe you in paradigms, so young and trembling,
and embrace all the goodness I know in your deepnesses:
I'd hold my face skywards, and make like an aeroplane,
and hold those warm fingers in a grip so fucking palpable.
If I thought I was up to it, if I thought I could hold you,
if I thought I could give you the good things you wanted;
If I thought we could milk the sweet milk of the evening,
or bandage your wounds with appropriate medicine.
I cut you, I know it,
I only say 'never',
and ever remorse will be my fresh harbour,
will welcome me home like some alien lover,
whose arms are half frozen and blind like material.
I know that you found me and I had my back to you.
I know that I wanted to meet in the garden,
and that I dragged you to unholy places,
and left you like carrion for some feasting predator.
I ask you this, nothing, but please let me give to you
The stars that I pocketed, the fruits of the morning
Hold out your hand and feel the arrival
of honours and flowers of such awful majesty.
Let it be known that this disappearance
is cancelled, it's over, the night is now ending,
and silence floods out through the speaking of bleeding;
and now I would call you as this night comes colder.

xxx

The curve in the question mark

2006-03-27T08:03:00.000-08:00

Sure I miss smiling with you,
the way your lips make the shape your soul adapts when it flies;
yes, I miss your kiss, that secret of flight where for a moment we might find ourselves, together above some day clouds;
of course I miss our conversations, where the ground would hold us up as statues or as great buildings, where we were the capital city, the workings of the heart, the ancients;
and yes I miss the love, the tender and playful adventures in the snow, finding underground temples, sitting naked round a circle of coals and the great endless exploration of landscapes.

I built a hut in the wilderness and these were our walls.
Walls crumble,
birds fly,
feathers fall.

And earth finds the Earth,
and water the Ocean,
and while one bird is flying by day,
another flying by night,
walls remain
and we are birds now.

We are that Earth and Ocean,
and whether we meet at dawn or dusk
or whether we inhabit great hemispheres known only to ourselves,

This is the balancing point;
the truth of the spheres;
what we mean when we say 'freedom'.
This is the end of the line,
and what comes after.
This is the flow of electrical charge;
magic, and contrary:
the curve of the question mark,
the dot,
the space between.
This is a sentence,
a list, a statement,
a declaration,
a manifesto.
This is the thin grey line that holds open the universe;
The star burning,
the centre;
The hydrogen atom.
This is magnitude,
gravity,
action and language,
being, doing;
This is both, and neither.

I will think of you at low tide

2006-03-16T03:08:00.000-08:00

I will think of you at low tide,
when the land under the sea is laid bare to the sky.
I'll shout to the wind the quiet sound of your name,
and look to my back as aloneness descends,
in the hope to see your face, standing behind me, urging me on to great things,
whispering 'yes' with the movement of your limbs.

Like a great oak in a red Devon field, branches wide and low,
giving colour and shelter and acorns for winter,
giving strength and grace, lending the earth your structure
rooted and reaching, encompassing all vertical,
and owning your patch with a fresh air of majesty.

But from today I will turn, to see you standing, here on this mountain,
and there will be a space, a silence, a terrible void where your face was.
I will sit at the sea and ask if this happened,
survey the horizon with a feeling of emptiness.
In short I will miss you, I'll remember you fondly,
when the sun surfs, when the air's cold, when the light is all hopeful,
I will think of you when the tide is low.

Ancient post

2006-03-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

I've just been watching my mum and aunt ring the bells in a small Devon church, on one hand impressed and stimulated by the historic, modal form of ringing changes, on the other deeply moved by the sense of place, community and radiating devotion inherent in the sound.

Bellringers have always been a mite removed from the main congregation, spinning their abstract formal web of permutations in sound like a blanket over the countryside. This hidden congregation come early, and leave as the service begins, shiftying down the outer edge of the pews, distracting but tolerated, occasionally even thanked for their service.

Each bell sounds a primary note whose many glittering harmonics do not correspond to a single fundamental, giving the sound an ethereal quality. Together the harmonics create a noise map of heaven - no doctrine but din, no concept, but raw experience.

This early mass medium represents the ecstatic secular English tradition, disguised; you feel it as a sense of drama unfolds, the wonder and adrenaline flow, and as the bells accelerate into each other, bliss ascends, leaving only silence, leaving peace.

Tyre tracks in the snow

2005-12-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

I've come for the second time in two weeks to the East country, where skies are always wide and the wide patched farm lands are flat and roll on to the horizon.

Last week I came for a day, broke with my Essex love on the way to another ending, the end of youth and apprenticeship. My love and I returned to the military wasteland by the mudflat sea where we once first kiss trying to resist the return knowing how circles close in on themselves but we were inexorably drawn there, sad and in love, full of hope and care. I taught her to sit the first time and full & of loving kindness we became that very snakes tale. As we left that saceed place, our flats by the shore with the road that goes under the sea into infinity, we found the most beautiful absurd tasteless sublime christmas light decoration, a polar bear by the side of the lane, shaking his sad lonely head as if incredulous that he'd been brought to existence, that this moment was real and sad, that we had the audacity to film him shaking that shaggy head o' light.

This time I'm in the East on retreat, rolling in the snow and sittin', saunas and walks in the fens with other anonymous friends, wellies on and circumnambulating the old bodhisattva, shaking old red sticks of incence at the stars for y'all and playing snowball fights with anyone we can drag into it. Its new year and I fancy a little refreshment here, a little lighten up, I spent the afternoon putting snowballs on top of each other at the bench where the birdwatchers go, five and seven and three but the tall one - daddy - falls over and I make a little row of various heights, as I walk on I get compulsive and leave the whole white- and reeds area with little melting monuments, I feel like andy g. and secretly hope that someone sees these picnicking snowball families before they go the way of all good cloud creations, into the sea.

And this time, unlike last time when as say my youth ended and I had to leave quick in order to sleep the next day so I could make some money so I could get my family some small Christian offerings (not that I'm Christian as such tho' its got a coupla nice ideas - like blessed are the meek), I'm here awhile and its snowing. You ever driven in floating snow? You lose the ground (someone told me its mesmerising but I say this) and all sense of speed- I see why its dangerous- you might be doing 70 but feel like yr doing five.. Anyway I'm here long enough to walk round the village looking for camera film so I can take photographs (to make the snow last), but I dont' get none and anyhow sometimes its better to just look - so I'm looking for the image that sums it all up, I even see kids and parents straight out of memories going on missions with their long buried sleds, but nothing does it as well as what I see on the road, so beautiful and I ask myself 'why.' to no immediate answer but cos its true, and I mean so true of now and the way the world is and what we're doing with our pure 'virgin' snow (is snow the mother of god?), and I'm not getting righteous because I and most everyone I know drives sometimes, but this is Truth written in the snow, and the author is all of us and the canvas is is the whole world and I mean in particular the top and the bottom bits where the snow still is just now. And I write to you about it and I write a little poem too and even take a photograph the next day cos its the best image I can come up with - tyre tracks in the snow - meanwhile I'll carry on walking and throwing snowballs tho' now they're getting wet and roll harder in the gloves, and being solitary and thinking 'bout how I should live my life, but as the poem says, when the snow is gone, the tyre tracks remain.

Winter come

2005-11-29T08:16:00.000-08:00

I wish you could see this beautiful quiet sky with me. Light blues and pinks and a single bright orange cloud catching the sun over the horizon.. Delicate but not kitsch, cold but not unfeeling, grey but never bleak. Clouds accumulating from the sky and the horizon due south, colour slowly ebbing to grey. My dear, Winter, I would walk with you, embrace you, call you on the 'phone, sing to you... I wish that you would stand here with me xxx

Battery

2005-11-17T07:51:00.000-08:00

How is it that I remember myself so uniquely, popping out of town on a bus to buy a battery to start the car? Something about the locality speaks of a deep breath; the boarded up bingo hall, the sea not so far. Like an opening, an expansion, as the blue sky echoes infinite, the promise of winter starts delivering. The people, behind the counter, old boys all or old boys to be, cheerful and friendly (and I'm sure equally able of the opposite), unpretentious, unhurried, rooted. A lunch break brings me home somewhere slower than this mad city and my mad city dreams. Oh that my car never starts again.. Or that I ride away more often to places like this once more.

MK Nowhere

2005-10-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

Having moved into an installation, I have come to work in a Utopia. No- place like this have I known anywhere in my travels, no place have I known so wide and so owned, so busy yet so deserted, so bold and so square.

I have come to work the weekend in Milton Keynes. And until writing those words I had only in the back of my mind the question of what the name of this place means. And of course I see it now, the connotation of poetry fused with liberal economics, the allusion to England's historic mills, suffixed as an old town would be; the synthesis of the pastoral and the commercial in England's dream.

And this experiment seems to work in parts. There are trees everywhere. The post- revolutionary style boulevards are pleasant to stroll, easy to cross under, straightforward to navigate. Parking is ubiquitous and cheap. The malls are spacious and light, the people are friendly. We are in the heart of the country, and the country is singing a new song here.

The centre of this town is a grid, but unlike any old town, there is nothing at the centre of it. Of course there is no vacuum, no void; there is matter, and energy. But where is the monument to a near- forgotten hero; a warrior, a statesman, a poet? Where is the river that brought goods, the manor, the church? Where is our past, our soul, our link with the land or sea, with each other, where are the graves in which we will oneday lie together?

At the compass' point stands an idea, an idea that can be held in your hand. That can be packed in shining plastic or paper bag. An idea that sends bricks and glass into the sky like hills, that sends metal boxes around the road matrix. An idea that whirrs and hums and pulses and flows, that dances and winks and sings and complains. And this idea is only these things, and a countless thousand more. The idea is Choice, limitless and so extremely limited, definitely democratic and consequently inescapably tyrannical.

With no past but its imaginary memory, MK is free, but it can be only one thing. It cannot be backstreets brimming with stories and lives lived. It cannot be people moving in droves in the autumn streets, to the skip of a beat or a chance conversation. It cannot be wild or tame, noisy or quiet, alive or dead. It is not my Brasilia, it is neither that heroic nor that horrendous. It is not even paradoxical. What comes here comes from elsewhere, and what is raised here will fly away. All this town can be is a loose container, a gathered web, a leaking pot. And I have come to nowhere into this place. And to nowhere shall I return.