His hair was flame coloured and devilish; his face was calm, composed. The goatee burned about his mouth uncertainly, like a smouldering ember that had jumped from the fiery ginger of his tight-kept hair onto the cold calm stone of his expression. All this gave him a look of peculiar intensity that drew her eyes to him again and again, irresistibly. She stared at him even when he noticed and smiled bravely at him – flirtatiously, passers-by might have said, in the way that young women do, sending subliminal signals of desire and attraction in the flicker of a smile, without really meaning to, without being aware that this smile was a flirty smile, this look a knowing look, these eyes come-to-bed eyes and so on. They only realise their earlier power, their earlier coquettish mannerisms when they are mature women, when flirting is much harder and the flicker of a smile will oft go unnoticed.

He did not smile back. Instead he looked at her with that intensity and she looked away. She got out a book from her bag – Orlando, suitably intellectual – and pretended to read it. On the bus she sat deliberately, provocatively in front of him. She was too nervous to say anything, so she continued reading and ignoring what she thought was the burning gaze of his eyes on the back of her neck.

“That looks complicated,” he said, and she turned eagerly.

portrait on the tube

Her eyes were silver and slow-moving, orbiting around their sockets, observing all corners of the room. Her cheekbones held rings of fatigue under her eyes, tiredness pooled there in circles like moonlight. These dark lunar rings betrayed her late nights; the moonlight that had kept her company through the wee hours had left traces around her eyes.

They were rimmed with turquoise eye-makeup, meant to disguise the shadows. Her lips were sugary with the fake mint of chewing gum. She was a creature of the rainforest, this luminous woman with her inner strength and tribal loyalty. In the inhuman jungle of the London underground she did not bat an eyelid.

German Poetry lecture, may 08

Sifting through siderooms and pub club insanity pours into the precincts of my academic self, sharpens my intellectual instincts, as I release ideas into the tidal wave of meaningless drumbeats pouring from the soundbox, drowning out my thought box rocking my not-yet-washed student socks. This is the life, they say.

the couple at Waterloo station

He took her hand and they strode onto the escalators, so confident and sure - so in love, so hopelessly in love. On the escalators they held hands and their burning fingers intertwined like interlacing stories, hands crumpled together like the discarded pages of lost books.

He swooped a printed kiss onto her open face, like a word of tenderness scribbled on the page of a notebook. Here. Now. They were writing their own histories, unfolding them in the damp grey morning at Waterloo station, London. There had been lovers before them, and there would be lovers after them, and in some ways they were no different. They were simply another couple on the platform stage, acting out their roles.

And yet: there would be no two people who kissed like this ever again, who looked like this ever again, who felt the same rush of love and pain. On the surface, they were the same as any young couple have ever been; yet they were also two lovers unlike any others, experiencing emotions so new, the world had no words to describe them. For all the critics and their cynicism, for all the linguists and their poems, the English language cannot adequately express love. It cannot reflect feelings in the way that lovers' faces do – in the way that his face did in that moment to hers, in the way that it shone.

don't blink on the tube

“Before buses, railroads and streetcars became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in the position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word.” Georg Simmel.

So I got on the London underground, took a train which sank into the darkness of the tunnel. It was decked with businessmen, prawn faces poking from their crusted suits, swaying as the train swayed. Sitting were women of various sizes and ages, all variations on the same theme: cropped City shorts, blond highlights and tiny handbags. Sitting in rows opposite each other they looked like a baking tray of tarts plumped in the oven.

It suddenly struck me that this was it.
This was the epitome of civilisation: humans jostling in the jaws of this monstrous train, decomposing slowly, trapped in their own technology. Desperate to leave and yet resigned to this dystopia.

No-one moved or smiled. All we acknowledged was the slow grey crank of the escalator, moving us slowly towards the light; all we knew was the hopeless grind of the train. Don't smile, don't catch someone's eye, look away, be ashamed to exist. Remember we live in a bubble of personal space. Burst it and you break the silent code of this cruel city.

on paris

We chatted. We laughed. We bridged a temporal gap - le temps qui coule sous le pont Mirabeau - through talk and laughter, to reconnect in the present. We talked of love, life and literature, of history, hopes and heartache. We saw Picasso, ate dried apricots and sundried tomato-stained bread and bought expensive shampoo and skipped on dinner to make up for it. We made collages on the floor and she smoked on the balcony. we fell asleep and woke up to the Eiffel tower, to days filled with possibility but lacking direction. we left the flat at 1pm and stayed awake and out till 6am, used coffee and bars and theatres and Paris streets and staged our last day on these platforms…

http://www.purplestainedmouth.blogspot.com

currency

Currency

Words are valued for their age and beauty, for their permanence and their origin. Words can be given as gifts, are free, can be used by all, and evoke all the wonder of the world. The most valued words are the oldest, most evocative and historically resonant ones – for example, chalice is much more evocative than glass, treasure instead of capital, love instead of crush, court instead of flirt. These older words have been used in more contexts by more writers across more centuries; they thereby become richer, acquire more resonance than new words which are exciting, because they are new, but still rather flat.
Capitalism uses money as a currency: paper notes that evoke nothing more meaningful than numbers, that are not freely available to everyone. Capitalism is a system within which the things that are valued are those that are desired by the greatest number of people and available in the smallest amounts (greatest demand, smallest supply). Things which are of value in the capitalist system are often material, having clear physical worth.

Artefacts are interesting, because they hold value in both the capitalist system and the cultural system. The capitalist system deems them valuable because they are rare, in small supply. They also have clear physical worth and are attractive; therefore lots of people want to collect them.
However, artefacts are also valued by poets and authors, in their world of words, for their permanence, and their historical richness. They are aesthetically pleasing and from the past and yet strangely timeless, in that they are accessible to any future generation. They reveal truths about humanity.