Ken Edwards
from WILD METRICS
For a while, the household consisted only of Des, June and K. A regular visitor and intermittent resident was Bode, a bearded South African whom Des and June had known when they were squatting in Bristol, and whom they regarded as something of a teacher. He looked like Solzhenitsyn. He had campaigned against apartheid, and as a result was now apparently persona non grata in his native land. Bode rode everywhere on a Honda 90 motor-bike. He was said to have a wife and children living in Dover, and his relationship with them was obscure. K conversed long into the night with Bode. He talked about keeping a journal and how difficult it was to make it reflect what was going on in his head; it seemed either to degenerate into a trivial day-to-day account of events or to become vaguely philosophical and inflated, but in both cases “reality” remained outside it. He speculated whether he ought to write down fantasies and things he knew to be totally untrue, and whether that would paradoxically nudge the journal further towards a semblance of authenticity.
Bode spoke at length about the necessity and difficulty of living in the moment. He called that Process. He was sceptical about scientific objectivity. He said if in the Middle Ages you were to question the Trinity you would (at best) have been laughed at; today, if you questioned the existence of the atom, which with its proton, electron and neutron was another “three in one” myth, you would get the same reaction. Nevertheless, Bode’s heroes were Albert Einstein (“One Stone”), Rudolf Steiner (“Many Stones”) and the Lord Jesus Christ. In truth, K did not know what to make of all this. And he was unaware just how it was to turn out, on that night to come when Bode teetered over the edge on which he had been balancing.
But meanwhile Bode was interested in K’s poetry, which he had been submitting to various poetry magazines, and collecting for a pamphlet he intended to print on the Roneo with a silk-screened cover by Des. Bode mentioned he had written poetry himself. He showed K a poem of his own – he called it a parable – that had been printed in a South African magazine a few years previously. It was titled “A Little Fantasy”:
The old man said, “Now that you have
dug up this understanding, see how dry
the earth is. I search the distant
peaks for rain clouds.”
I asked him, “Do you think that our
desire to know ourselves is our undoing?”
He smiled. “You ask so many questions,”
he said.
K was intrigued. It had a kind of Zen quality, obviously, but with an African slant. He wanted to see more of Bode’s work, for possible use in the magazine he was co-editing with his friend Robert. Bode said he’d dig some stuff out.
North Kensington, especially the area bounded to the west by Ladbroke Grove, to the south by Notting Hill Gate and to the east by Paddington, was in flux. Whole streets had been condemned, their properties set in abeyance pending redevelopment, either to be demolished to permit the erection of public housing or to be sold to the new gentry for tarting up. Tall Victorian or Edwardian houses, tired ones, rows of them, had fallen into disrepair, their original owners from generations ago having passed on, their half-lives while divided up as flats or houses in multiple occupation (the ranks of dead doorbell buttons by their front doors testified to this) now almost spent, but the funds to refurbish them as yet unavailable. Every street featured at least one skip by the kerbside, yellow, rusting, continually filled with rubble, bricks, planks, furniture, the remaining legacies of dead residents (battered suitcases spilling memorabilia nobody could find a use for), and also daily household rubbish opportunistically and illegally offloaded. Occasionally a skip would be hitched to a trailer by men in overalls and towed away, but soon another would appear in its place.
What some saw as urban blight others seized as opportunity: squatters moved in here and there, some organised, some political, some as haphazard in their movements and motivations as birds or mice. Most were white; the largely Afro-Caribbean population that had nestled around these parts since the 1950s continued to survive in the interstices and to live their lives and do their jobs somehow. The smell of ganja and the evidence of “culture” was to a great degree prized as exotic by many of the young incomers, especially the college-educated ones, but in truth there was not much real contact. Some of the council estates were still home to traditional white working class residents, who might or might not have made their peace with the Afro-Caribbeans but would have been largely hostile to the educated incomers. And some of the older white middle-class indigenes hung on in the area too, aghast (if they were owner-occupiers) at how the value of their properties continued to fall, contemplating the awful prospect of selling up at the bottom of the market.
But Patchwork Housing Association had been set up as an honest broker, intervening with the council and private owners, offering a use for dying properties for periods of months or years, until such time as they were ready for permanent resuscitation or for sweeping away. Short-life housing, it was called: licences to occupy, emphatically not permanent tenancies. No guarantees, no long-term futures. Patchwork’s shtick was communal living. Every household they licensed had to be committed to this, or at least pay lip service to it. It was squatting in effect, it had a political meaning, that is to say it signified resistance to Power, but it was legal, and because of this Power found it quite convenient.
For the first few weeks, there was a great deal of work to do on the Sunderland Terrace house: making secure (some broken windows to be fixed), cleaning, stripping, replastering, painting and decorating. It was not, however, in too bad nick generally.
There was a lot of house there. Four storeys actually. No direct access to the basement, which was Sean’s fiefdom. After one or two initial encounters, when he shook hands with all the incomers – he was a squat, pink-faced man, like an over-sized dwarf, with big, chubby fists – Sean was then scarcely to be seen for weeks. He was either in Ireland or in prison, according to who you talked to.
The house had evidently once been very grand, but there were signs of more recent multiple occupation; for instance, a lockable door separated the flight of stairs leading to the top floor, which incorporated its own tiny mezzanine bathroom (though there was no functioning hot water as yet) and three rooms, one with a sink, which might have formed an independent flat. K commandeered the largest of these, which had a magnificent view over the rooftops to the east. The bedrooms on the floors below had dowdy fitted carpets, but this had bare floorboards, and the ceiling sloped. A double mattress had been acquired, and a number of bricks that had been found lying around downstairs, when stacked, supported the planks that were his bookshelves.
A small boy wandered in through the open front door while Des and K were painting the walls of the ground-floor rooms. He seemed happily loopy. Hello, he greeted K. Hello, he greeted Des. Hello, what’s your name? said Des, laying down his roller. Ollie Chalk, said the boy. What’s that?
He pointed up at a location in the room near the ceiling.
Des said: That’s a picture rail.
Picture rail.
He wandered into the other rooms, and they could hear him repeating: Picture rail, picture rail. Then, before he could be stopped, he scampered up the stairs. After a while, he returned. He reported that three rooms upstairs had picture rails but the others did not. He then felt obliged to re-check the ground floor rooms.
They heard a woman’s voice on the front steps: Ollie Chalk! Ollie Chalk! Are you in there? She darkened the threshold. Upon which the boy flew into a tantrum and would not move, until inducements by his apologetic mother softened him sufficiently to consent to being led out.
Each day, when he was finished doing painting and decorating in the house, Des retired to his workshop or went on excursions in the van either to carry out small removals for money or to scour the skips of West London for raw materials. The Patchwork workforce were meant to be doing most of the heavy or specialised labour to bring the house into a livable condition – plumbing and electrics – but they were rarely seen, and Des had to nag them. The house smelt of plaster dust and paint. There were ladders everywhere. Autumn was approaching, the evenings were drawing in, the electrics were still not functioning properly, it was dark and cold outside the ambit of the portable electric bar heaters and working lights.
Each day June went off on the tube to work at her office in central London. She did psychological assessments of disabled children and adults to determine their needs. She was talking to her employers about identifying disabled people who might benefit from communal living, but nothing had come of this yet.
Every other day, Ollie Chalk arrived to wander round the house and check out the picture rails. Picture rail, he would say authoritatively, pointing at each one before moving to the next room where he could still be heard muttering to himself. Eventually, his mother would arrive saying, Time to come home, Ollie Chalk.
Then one day he didn’t come, and he was not seen again.
That was the way it was.
K did his writing on an Olivetti Dora portable manual typewriter on a rickety table upstairs in his room, sometimes feeding in mimeograph stencils to run off later on the Roneo. He was assembling an issue of the poetry magazine he co-edited with his friend Robert. Sometimes he used the big office typewriter downstairs, the one Des had rescued from a skip. When you hit the carriage return lever, the long carriage slammed to the right with an almighty whump, almost catapulting the heavy machine off the table each time.
While the hot water was still to be fixed (a problem with the Ascot heaters that had not yet been resolved by the Patchwork workforce), he visited his parents once a week for a bath. From time to time he took lessons from Des in basic practical tasks, for instance, plastering, which he did extremely ineptly – or often helped him with the removals business for a few quid. Once the two of them had to move a piano, which had not been mentioned in advance by the customer, down three flights of stairs. He was signing on every week at the SS, and cashed the resulting Giro at the bank or the local Post Office.
Bode had a room in the house, which he also used for writing in, but was more frequently travelling obsessively on his bike between London, Bristol and Dover. His absences were usually mysterious, and he was rarely available to do practical work. Then he reappeared unpredictably.
What was that poetry magazine, the one you co-edit? asked Bode.
Aardvark, said K, off the top of his head.
Ah, very South African.
No, actually, that’s what we were going to call it. We ended up with Alembic.
Bode said that suggested alchemy. Alchemy of the word. He liked that. K suggested he might submit some poetry for the magazine. He said he would, as soon as he was back from Bristol.
More people joined the household, but most of them didn’t stay long. A couple who seemed nice at first but didn’t participate in the weekly meetings or join the communal meal, became more and more withdrawn, spending most of their time in their room, and eventually disappeared altogether, owing their share of several weeks’ rent. They took with them a chest of drawers Des had lent them when they had had nowhere to store their clothes. Des, normally full of benevolent feelings towards the rest of the world, was radically pissed off.
A friend of Des and June’s from Bristol, Roger, who had been an architect of living theatre, also stayed for a few weeks, but later decided to return there to be with his kids. Before he left, they had a house party. Someone had scored a substantial piece of dope, and there was beer and wine too. June made some food. One of the rooms in the house was designated the anonymous room, and you had to wear a sack (with eyeholes) over your head when you went in there, but everybody cheated. Bode, Roger and another friend of Bode’s who had just been received into the Russian Orthodox church gave a performance of ethnic chanting and bottle-percussion. They were quite drunk and stoned by now (except for Bode, who didn’t indulge in drugs, and whose high was purely natural). Then Roger sang an improvised duet with June’s stuffed toucan, which had everyone in hysterics.
A nervous cat had attached herself to the household. June fed her, and so she returned frequently. She had had kittens that had died. Her stink filled the kitchen. One sunny morning, she met a tom-cat on the kitchen annexe roof visible from K’s bedroom window. Terrified, she arched her back, stiffened her tail, pressed her ears back flat against her head. The tom watched sleepily, unmoving. Then she began to defecate, her hindquarters shivering as she rhythmically deposited turds onto the slates. Finally, she yowled piteously and backed off. The tom turned and disappeared.
Five minutes later, both cats gone forever, a crowd of glistening flies fought greedily over the pile of shit.
For such a large house, the garden was surprisingly perfunctory. It was also in a pitiful state, and nobody volunteered to tidy it up. But there were fruit trees in it. As the winter slowly retreated, spring triggered tiny green, furry fruit on the tree nearest the house, which revealed themselves to be peaches.
Birds sang outside, and inside Eric Dolphy played flute on the hi-fi, which was working again.
As K was walking down the road one afternoon, remembering the passage he had read that morning in André Breton’s Nadja about “significant coincidences”, he suddenly conceived the idea of taking a photograph of the household members (such as they were at the time) grouped at the front door, and made a mental note to arrange this. Then, on turning the corner, what did he see immediately but a man taking a picture of a couple standing in front of their house. That evening, he told Bode, who was back from his travels, about this complex coincidence: the Breton passage leading to the symmetry of the thought and the act subsequently witnessed. Bode called it “synchronicity”, mentioning Jung. He said he experienced such things all the time. Once, he and June had encountered each other by chance in Oxford Street, just at the instant he was throwing a banana skin in one litter-bin and she an orange peel in another. He reminded K of the time he had first met him at a local jumble sale; on the way, in Des’s van, Des had been talking to him about K, he revealed, at the very moment that a woman crossed the road in front of them carrying a dog in either arm; behind her, a third dog. On arriving at the school hall where the sale was taking place, he had seen two dogs leashed at the doorway, one on either side. And inside was K – wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a howling dog. The third dog. K remembered that T-shirt: a black silkscreen image on a light blue background. He didn’t have it any more.
This was part of Process, Bode explained, and one had to submit to it, not try to contain or own or explain it. This was a major theme of the book he was writing. K had the impression Bode’s book was a doomed attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. The book was provisionally titled The Statement or A Statement. Making a statement was for Bode a political commitment, for instance making it clear where you stand on apartheid. But authentic living in Process meant no statement could be finally valid because of the implication that all potential had been fulfilled, that there was no more to say. So a statement could only be an affirmation or enactment of one’s current state of consciousness.
Des, who had entered the conversation, interrupted excitedly, saying that was Theatre.
K said it was Poetry.
They all agreed that nothing was ever fixed.
K wrote: “The mode of being I call living-on-the-planet is the mode of being of the poet. It’s impossible to describe, but it has to do with feeling the natural cycles, the rhythms of the planet/body. During the last fifteen months I’ve learned a lot from my academic friends (for instance, Robert) about structure and methodology, and it’s made me more self-conscious, in the best sense of the word, but that’s only half the story. I would like to write more open poetry, poetry whose structure is what it says, poetry which enacts in words the living-on-the-planet feeling.”
He stared at this for some time. Then he sighed, and crossed it out. He began again.
For a while, the household consisted only of Des, June and K. A regular visitor and intermittent resident was Bode, a bearded South African whom Des and June had known when they were squatting in Bristol, and whom they regarded as something of a teacher. He looked like Solzhenitsyn. He had campaigned against apartheid, and as a result was now apparently persona non grata in his native land. Bode rode everywhere on a Honda 90 motor-bike. He was said to have a wife and children living in Dover, and his relationship with them was obscure. K conversed long into the night with Bode. He talked about keeping a journal and how difficult it was to make it reflect what was going on in his head; it seemed either to degenerate into a trivial day-to-day account of events or to become vaguely philosophical and inflated, but in both cases “reality” remained outside it. He speculated whether he ought to write down fantasies and things he knew to be totally untrue, and whether that would paradoxically nudge the journal further towards a semblance of authenticity.
Bode spoke at length about the necessity and difficulty of living in the moment. He called that Process. He was sceptical about scientific objectivity. He said if in the Middle Ages you were to question the Trinity you would (at best) have been laughed at; today, if you questioned the existence of the atom, which with its proton, electron and neutron was another “three in one” myth, you would get the same reaction. Nevertheless, Bode’s heroes were Albert Einstein (“One Stone”), Rudolf Steiner (“Many Stones”) and the Lord Jesus Christ. In truth, K did not know what to make of all this. And he was unaware just how it was to turn out, on that night to come when Bode teetered over the edge on which he had been balancing.
But meanwhile Bode was interested in K’s poetry, which he had been submitting to various poetry magazines, and collecting for a pamphlet he intended to print on the Roneo with a silk-screened cover by Des. Bode mentioned he had written poetry himself. He showed K a poem of his own – he called it a parable – that had been printed in a South African magazine a few years previously. It was titled “A Little Fantasy”:
The old man said, “Now that you have
dug up this understanding, see how dry
the earth is. I search the distant
peaks for rain clouds.”
I asked him, “Do you think that our
desire to know ourselves is our undoing?”
He smiled. “You ask so many questions,”
he said.
K was intrigued. It had a kind of Zen quality, obviously, but with an African slant. He wanted to see more of Bode’s work, for possible use in the magazine he was co-editing with his friend Robert. Bode said he’d dig some stuff out.
North Kensington, especially the area bounded to the west by Ladbroke Grove, to the south by Notting Hill Gate and to the east by Paddington, was in flux. Whole streets had been condemned, their properties set in abeyance pending redevelopment, either to be demolished to permit the erection of public housing or to be sold to the new gentry for tarting up. Tall Victorian or Edwardian houses, tired ones, rows of them, had fallen into disrepair, their original owners from generations ago having passed on, their half-lives while divided up as flats or houses in multiple occupation (the ranks of dead doorbell buttons by their front doors testified to this) now almost spent, but the funds to refurbish them as yet unavailable. Every street featured at least one skip by the kerbside, yellow, rusting, continually filled with rubble, bricks, planks, furniture, the remaining legacies of dead residents (battered suitcases spilling memorabilia nobody could find a use for), and also daily household rubbish opportunistically and illegally offloaded. Occasionally a skip would be hitched to a trailer by men in overalls and towed away, but soon another would appear in its place.
What some saw as urban blight others seized as opportunity: squatters moved in here and there, some organised, some political, some as haphazard in their movements and motivations as birds or mice. Most were white; the largely Afro-Caribbean population that had nestled around these parts since the 1950s continued to survive in the interstices and to live their lives and do their jobs somehow. The smell of ganja and the evidence of “culture” was to a great degree prized as exotic by many of the young incomers, especially the college-educated ones, but in truth there was not much real contact. Some of the council estates were still home to traditional white working class residents, who might or might not have made their peace with the Afro-Caribbeans but would have been largely hostile to the educated incomers. And some of the older white middle-class indigenes hung on in the area too, aghast (if they were owner-occupiers) at how the value of their properties continued to fall, contemplating the awful prospect of selling up at the bottom of the market.
But Patchwork Housing Association had been set up as an honest broker, intervening with the council and private owners, offering a use for dying properties for periods of months or years, until such time as they were ready for permanent resuscitation or for sweeping away. Short-life housing, it was called: licences to occupy, emphatically not permanent tenancies. No guarantees, no long-term futures. Patchwork’s shtick was communal living. Every household they licensed had to be committed to this, or at least pay lip service to it. It was squatting in effect, it had a political meaning, that is to say it signified resistance to Power, but it was legal, and because of this Power found it quite convenient.
For the first few weeks, there was a great deal of work to do on the Sunderland Terrace house: making secure (some broken windows to be fixed), cleaning, stripping, replastering, painting and decorating. It was not, however, in too bad nick generally.
There was a lot of house there. Four storeys actually. No direct access to the basement, which was Sean’s fiefdom. After one or two initial encounters, when he shook hands with all the incomers – he was a squat, pink-faced man, like an over-sized dwarf, with big, chubby fists – Sean was then scarcely to be seen for weeks. He was either in Ireland or in prison, according to who you talked to.
The house had evidently once been very grand, but there were signs of more recent multiple occupation; for instance, a lockable door separated the flight of stairs leading to the top floor, which incorporated its own tiny mezzanine bathroom (though there was no functioning hot water as yet) and three rooms, one with a sink, which might have formed an independent flat. K commandeered the largest of these, which had a magnificent view over the rooftops to the east. The bedrooms on the floors below had dowdy fitted carpets, but this had bare floorboards, and the ceiling sloped. A double mattress had been acquired, and a number of bricks that had been found lying around downstairs, when stacked, supported the planks that were his bookshelves.
A small boy wandered in through the open front door while Des and K were painting the walls of the ground-floor rooms. He seemed happily loopy. Hello, he greeted K. Hello, he greeted Des. Hello, what’s your name? said Des, laying down his roller. Ollie Chalk, said the boy. What’s that?
He pointed up at a location in the room near the ceiling.
Des said: That’s a picture rail.
Picture rail.
He wandered into the other rooms, and they could hear him repeating: Picture rail, picture rail. Then, before he could be stopped, he scampered up the stairs. After a while, he returned. He reported that three rooms upstairs had picture rails but the others did not. He then felt obliged to re-check the ground floor rooms.
They heard a woman’s voice on the front steps: Ollie Chalk! Ollie Chalk! Are you in there? She darkened the threshold. Upon which the boy flew into a tantrum and would not move, until inducements by his apologetic mother softened him sufficiently to consent to being led out.
Each day, when he was finished doing painting and decorating in the house, Des retired to his workshop or went on excursions in the van either to carry out small removals for money or to scour the skips of West London for raw materials. The Patchwork workforce were meant to be doing most of the heavy or specialised labour to bring the house into a livable condition – plumbing and electrics – but they were rarely seen, and Des had to nag them. The house smelt of plaster dust and paint. There were ladders everywhere. Autumn was approaching, the evenings were drawing in, the electrics were still not functioning properly, it was dark and cold outside the ambit of the portable electric bar heaters and working lights.
Each day June went off on the tube to work at her office in central London. She did psychological assessments of disabled children and adults to determine their needs. She was talking to her employers about identifying disabled people who might benefit from communal living, but nothing had come of this yet.
Every other day, Ollie Chalk arrived to wander round the house and check out the picture rails. Picture rail, he would say authoritatively, pointing at each one before moving to the next room where he could still be heard muttering to himself. Eventually, his mother would arrive saying, Time to come home, Ollie Chalk.
Then one day he didn’t come, and he was not seen again.
That was the way it was.
K did his writing on an Olivetti Dora portable manual typewriter on a rickety table upstairs in his room, sometimes feeding in mimeograph stencils to run off later on the Roneo. He was assembling an issue of the poetry magazine he co-edited with his friend Robert. Sometimes he used the big office typewriter downstairs, the one Des had rescued from a skip. When you hit the carriage return lever, the long carriage slammed to the right with an almighty whump, almost catapulting the heavy machine off the table each time.
While the hot water was still to be fixed (a problem with the Ascot heaters that had not yet been resolved by the Patchwork workforce), he visited his parents once a week for a bath. From time to time he took lessons from Des in basic practical tasks, for instance, plastering, which he did extremely ineptly – or often helped him with the removals business for a few quid. Once the two of them had to move a piano, which had not been mentioned in advance by the customer, down three flights of stairs. He was signing on every week at the SS, and cashed the resulting Giro at the bank or the local Post Office.
Bode had a room in the house, which he also used for writing in, but was more frequently travelling obsessively on his bike between London, Bristol and Dover. His absences were usually mysterious, and he was rarely available to do practical work. Then he reappeared unpredictably.
What was that poetry magazine, the one you co-edit? asked Bode.
Aardvark, said K, off the top of his head.
Ah, very South African.
No, actually, that’s what we were going to call it. We ended up with Alembic.
Bode said that suggested alchemy. Alchemy of the word. He liked that. K suggested he might submit some poetry for the magazine. He said he would, as soon as he was back from Bristol.
More people joined the household, but most of them didn’t stay long. A couple who seemed nice at first but didn’t participate in the weekly meetings or join the communal meal, became more and more withdrawn, spending most of their time in their room, and eventually disappeared altogether, owing their share of several weeks’ rent. They took with them a chest of drawers Des had lent them when they had had nowhere to store their clothes. Des, normally full of benevolent feelings towards the rest of the world, was radically pissed off.
A friend of Des and June’s from Bristol, Roger, who had been an architect of living theatre, also stayed for a few weeks, but later decided to return there to be with his kids. Before he left, they had a house party. Someone had scored a substantial piece of dope, and there was beer and wine too. June made some food. One of the rooms in the house was designated the anonymous room, and you had to wear a sack (with eyeholes) over your head when you went in there, but everybody cheated. Bode, Roger and another friend of Bode’s who had just been received into the Russian Orthodox church gave a performance of ethnic chanting and bottle-percussion. They were quite drunk and stoned by now (except for Bode, who didn’t indulge in drugs, and whose high was purely natural). Then Roger sang an improvised duet with June’s stuffed toucan, which had everyone in hysterics.
A nervous cat had attached herself to the household. June fed her, and so she returned frequently. She had had kittens that had died. Her stink filled the kitchen. One sunny morning, she met a tom-cat on the kitchen annexe roof visible from K’s bedroom window. Terrified, she arched her back, stiffened her tail, pressed her ears back flat against her head. The tom watched sleepily, unmoving. Then she began to defecate, her hindquarters shivering as she rhythmically deposited turds onto the slates. Finally, she yowled piteously and backed off. The tom turned and disappeared.
Five minutes later, both cats gone forever, a crowd of glistening flies fought greedily over the pile of shit.
For such a large house, the garden was surprisingly perfunctory. It was also in a pitiful state, and nobody volunteered to tidy it up. But there were fruit trees in it. As the winter slowly retreated, spring triggered tiny green, furry fruit on the tree nearest the house, which revealed themselves to be peaches.
Birds sang outside, and inside Eric Dolphy played flute on the hi-fi, which was working again.
As K was walking down the road one afternoon, remembering the passage he had read that morning in André Breton’s Nadja about “significant coincidences”, he suddenly conceived the idea of taking a photograph of the household members (such as they were at the time) grouped at the front door, and made a mental note to arrange this. Then, on turning the corner, what did he see immediately but a man taking a picture of a couple standing in front of their house. That evening, he told Bode, who was back from his travels, about this complex coincidence: the Breton passage leading to the symmetry of the thought and the act subsequently witnessed. Bode called it “synchronicity”, mentioning Jung. He said he experienced such things all the time. Once, he and June had encountered each other by chance in Oxford Street, just at the instant he was throwing a banana skin in one litter-bin and she an orange peel in another. He reminded K of the time he had first met him at a local jumble sale; on the way, in Des’s van, Des had been talking to him about K, he revealed, at the very moment that a woman crossed the road in front of them carrying a dog in either arm; behind her, a third dog. On arriving at the school hall where the sale was taking place, he had seen two dogs leashed at the doorway, one on either side. And inside was K – wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a howling dog. The third dog. K remembered that T-shirt: a black silkscreen image on a light blue background. He didn’t have it any more.
This was part of Process, Bode explained, and one had to submit to it, not try to contain or own or explain it. This was a major theme of the book he was writing. K had the impression Bode’s book was a doomed attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. The book was provisionally titled The Statement or A Statement. Making a statement was for Bode a political commitment, for instance making it clear where you stand on apartheid. But authentic living in Process meant no statement could be finally valid because of the implication that all potential had been fulfilled, that there was no more to say. So a statement could only be an affirmation or enactment of one’s current state of consciousness.
Des, who had entered the conversation, interrupted excitedly, saying that was Theatre.
K said it was Poetry.
They all agreed that nothing was ever fixed.
K wrote: “The mode of being I call living-on-the-planet is the mode of being of the poet. It’s impossible to describe, but it has to do with feeling the natural cycles, the rhythms of the planet/body. During the last fifteen months I’ve learned a lot from my academic friends (for instance, Robert) about structure and methodology, and it’s made me more self-conscious, in the best sense of the word, but that’s only half the story. I would like to write more open poetry, poetry whose structure is what it says, poetry which enacts in words the living-on-the-planet feeling.”
He stared at this for some time. Then he sighed, and crossed it out. He began again.
Copyright © Ken Edwards 2019
Ken Edwards’ books include the poetry collections Good Science (1992), eight + six (2003), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-95 (2006), Bird Migration in the 21st Century (2006), Songbook (2009), the novels Futures (1998) and Country Life (2015) and the prose works Bardo (2011), Down With Beauty (2013) and a book with no name (2016). A new novel, The Grey Area, will be out in 2019, and right now he is working on a memoir of the 1970s, with flash-forwards, Wild Metrics, from which the piece in this issue is extracted. He has been editor/publisher of the small press Reality Street since 1993. He lives in St Leonards on Sea, where he plays bass guitar and sings with The Moors and Afrit Nebula, bands he co-founded with Elaine Edwards. His first appearance in Molly Bloom was in 1982 in the second print issue.