the eclipse behind the cathedral

It’s a Summer’s evening. The Eclipse is a Tudor fronted pub, black beams, white plaster. Inside it has a low ceiling and a tiny bar. Tables always at a premium. It has its regulars, who prop up the bar and have their own tankards. Although it looks like a village pub, this is a city, albeit one which froze in size around the time of the Crusades, and The Eclipse still has an edge to it, a place from where late at night drunkards will spill out onto the streets keeping the locals awake. Outside, there are twin benches either side of the door, set into to the fabric of the building.

That’s where we are. It’s around seven pm. We’re drinking lager, because aged 19, it’s what everyone drinks. There’s only the two of us, myself and a man called James, known at school as Muppet, who will go on in life to become a long-serving employee of the Bank of England, a reliable dad, a resident of Surrey. All these things are probably discernable in his frame and demeanour now, to the soothsayer, but at this point in our lives he still carries other possibilities around in his back pocket. We’re both negotiating our way out of childhood, on holiday from university, back from the growing-up wars. Our friendship runs deeper than any we have at university, but it’s also at its zenith. These are the last things we’ll truly share, after six years of school. For the next decade we’ll remain in each other’s lives, slowly drifting apart, the ties that bind, the common interests, eroded by time, geography and the atomization of the late twentieth century. Because really there’s no reason why James and I shouldn’t still be meeting and talking Economics until we’re old men, cozy in the complicity of the conversation game. But we won’t and we don’t and that’s just how it is.

This particular evening there’s an edginess around me and there’s a reason for it. My girlfriend, the one from University, is not with me. She’s gone back to her stomping ground, the wilds of Hertfordshire. Only, on this day, she’s meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. His name is Masa. He’s Japanese. He’s a multi-millionaire who was part of the Japanese Olympic skiing team. He lives in New York. A week after she met me, she took down the photo of him that lived on her wall. Destined to be together, until I appear. They are meeting in London. At his hotel. I don’t know where exactly. Somewhere on Park Lane.

I’m too self-absorbed to be really worried. She and I have been together a whole academic year, we’re about to move into a little house with a yard with roses in a place called Dunnington. We’re playing out some kind of fantasy of coupledom which we both need and which is already turning sour. Nothing will interrupt this sequence, I know, and even if something were to, I would recalibrate my horizon, suffer the crisis which will arrive sooner or later, the world would have shrunk, but then the world is expanding all the time anyway.

Although the truth is I’m not even contemplating any of this. I’m just edgy. On adrenaline and lager. James, because he knows me, picks up on my edginess. I explain the context. Perhaps he asks if I’m worried or not. I don’t remember. James says something along the lines of: “It’s good {or unusual} to see someone so passionate about things.” His thesis doesn’t quite ring true. Later others arrive and the evening changes or becomes more drunken. For the next three years whenever we’re back and we go out it feels like the end of an era.

I never learn what happened in Masa’s hotel room and I never force the issue. There are things you know in the heart which are more important than the things that are actually lived. As decreed we will spend the next two years of our lives together in a house with a blue door and a yard with roses. Sometimes he sends her envelopes stuffed with money.

For two years we fight a lot then we split up. She goes to New York and marries Masa. James has a child called George. James and I drift apart. The Eclipse is still there. To the best of my knowledge.

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unfinished 4am poem, written in a hotel near barajas airport, madrid

Four in the morning is a transient moment in
A Spanish night. For some, the final minutes
Of a day which has ended in the soft
Enveloping grasp of alcohol and friendship.
For others in this functional hotel, it
Will be the last gasp of a day’s business
Which, far from soft, has gone on longer
Than was ever planned (twas ever thus),
And a night fuelled by lust for profit, or
A colleague, or mere security, which can
Only be attained at the price of nights like
This, a mortgage paid towards the family
Redoubt, the sound of your children’s
Exuberance of a morning still five years
In the future, a sound already heard as
The door is shut and you fall into bed, the
Fog of alcohol on your breath, an
Unfulfilled desire tempered by the knowledge
Of the investment you’ve made towards
The future you shall not dream about tonight,
But live one day, the day when the sight of
Your child in a sunhat playing beneath the
Pine trees beside the lake will trigger the
Memory of a bad joke, or the strange
Juxtaposition of pompous sixties
Architecture with the medieval wall
Hangings someone has chosen to adorn
The hotel’s walls. When your child trips,
And cries, you’ll smile at the investment
You’ve made to hear the sound of their
Bitter tears, and for a few perfect minutes
It will all make sense. Four in the morning
Is also the hour at which the earliest of
Risers make their way to the airport,
Wiping sleep from their eyes, leaving
Their partner and offspring behind to
Catch a bus, arriving as the lights come
On again, the bustle of international
Travel on the verge of spinning the world
Like a top; a world measured in the
Dead hours taken to trawl the very skies.

june 2010

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el pibe de 17 anos

Today, a footballer known to the world as Ronaldo retired. He's 33 years old. If you pay any attention to football he's been around for what seems like forever, in footballing terms.

There's a famous story which I found myself repeating about my first night on Latin American soil. I was taken to see a football match. I was hugged by a fat, sweaty man on the terraces. Thanks to him I learnt my first Spanish words the hard way. Saltar. Cantar. It was a fitting introduction to what was to become the other side of my life.

What I didn't realise, when telling this story, was that there was a kid of 17 playing for the Brazilian team, who scored two goals and ended up on the losing side. Because he was young, he wasn't famous in Europe at the time. There would have been no reason for me to have heard of him. His name was Ronaldo.

It's only this evening that I've worked out what team he played for in Brazil before he went to play for PSV in Holland. The same team that was playing against Nacional, in the Estadio Centenario, that night. The 28th October 1993.

The details of the match itself have always been hazy. I know Nacional won. Largely because of my capacity to learn in no time at all what the Spanish word for 'to jump' meant. I remember there were penalties involved. But not how many, or how decisively. Though now it comes back to me.

On that night, I was still a 'pibe', albeit of slightly more than 17 years. I had long hair and honey coloured skin. I didn't have the faintest idea that the internet existed and that it would become part of my life. Therefore I had no way of even conceiving the fact that one day I would be able to rediscover that night. That I would rediscover my first night in Latin America on the day that the kid who scored two almost immediately forgotten goals would eventually choose to retire.

Thanks to this thing called the internet, I would see the faces of the people who were all around me again. Hear the sounds of the stadium again. It's the sounds which, above all else, remain familiar. All of which I rediscovered here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvjtFM4vKrg&feature=related

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This match was the quarter final. In the semi final, I learn, Nacional were eliminated by Flamengo. The game was "Suspendido a los 77 minutos por incidentes." I suspect that translates. I wasn't there to saltar.

Ronaldo and the internet and myself. And everyone else. We've all been a long way round the houses since that mad, spectacular first night of victory and defeat in Montevideo.

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24 hours in buenos aires

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I was told by the taxi driver, a taxi driver who I later realised had succeeded in charging me double the going rate for the trip, that Boedo, the barrio where I was staying was the ‘barrio de tango’. I didn’t realise it, but his remark at the start of a flying visit to Buenos Aires presaged a quest to discover whether tango, a slightly anachronistic seeming rhythm in a world of beats and salsa, was more than just a museum piece. Driving down 25 de Mayo, the city’s main artery, with all its billboards and its grandeur, it seemed hard to imagine that this was still a city of immigrants, nostalgic for the motherland, singing sad, lilting songs of loss. A meal in an authentic Italian restaurant, with homemade pasta and pictures of the 2006 Italian world cup winning team on the wall offered a hint that it was out there somewhere, and the next day, the girlfriend and I set off on a haphazard exploration of the city, with the unwitting ambition of discovering if tango was alive and well.

We had started in appropriate fashion. By arguing for most of the night. Finally sleeping near dawn and waking after 11. Sun dappling the windows of our hotel room, suggesting that no matter what the grief might be, it would still be worth our while heading out. If tango is a dance of lazy passion, an understated hysteria denoted by the flick of a leg or a sudden shift of rhythm, then it makes sense that we began the quest in a woozy, desiccated state of mind. Fortified by café au lait and finger sized croissants, we headed out into the back streets with hope in our hearts.



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To begin with we drifted through the leafy streets of Boedo which, save for the odd mural, offered precious little in the way of tango. Admittedly it was far too early for any kind of serious tango activity. (It’s only down in San Telmo they dance for the tourists all day long). After a while, the leafy ‘barrio of tango’ began to give way to a seedier vibe, as we moved from Boedo into Once, which is all warehouses and shops. Our route took us across the train lines into the commercial zone. Suddenly, tranquillity gave way to a feverish shopping street.

In common with every American city, Buenos Aires is a city of immigrants. The majority of Portenos, as the citizens are known, have either Spanish or Italian descendency. But there are also large communities of Germans, Eastern Europeans, Russians etc. The only Porteno I know in London has red hair and the surname Rattagan, his ancestors having come from Ireland. Tango emerged in the early twentieth century on both sides of the Rio Plata, in part as an expression of nostalgia for the motherland. However, the mass influx of Europeans ended over fifty years ago. Their descendents are all Argentines now. Nostalgia for a lost paradise is more of a symbolic than an actual phenomenon. Which is where the bustling activity of Once took on an extra dimension. Because the shoppers and the shopkeepers are all, by and large immigrants. The new immigrants – Bolivians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, as well as Chinese and even Nigerians, are economic migrants, hoping that the biggest city in the South of the continent will offer a higher standard of living. They have taken over Once, with streets full of Andean restaurants, money changers, any commercial opportunity. Perhaps here is where the modern day tango is most likely to be found. Except for the irony that the Argentines resent these modern day immigrants. They don’t want to integrate them into their culture. Instead, like immigrant communities the world over, they are blamed for rising crime and other social ills. The spirit of tango might exist in Once, but its not a song that’s getting heard.



So we left Once, crossing Avenida Corrientes, heading into Abasto. In a matter of minutes the streets were cobbled and the houses, theatres, garages and pizzerias painted with vivid, floral designs. This seemed more like the traditional image of Buenos Aires, and it came as no surprise to stumble across the home of the greatest tango singer of them all, Carlos Gardel. In his day, before his untimely death in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935, Gardel’s fame took him far from his Rio Plata roots. He was an international superstar, big in Europe and Hollywood. His modest house displays a quote which says that a homemade stew cooked with care tastes better than the finest meal in the finest restaurant in the world. A clip from one of his films shows him waking up in his New York penthouse, with four platinum blondes lying around to whom he promptly croons an appreciative ditty. His house has become an unpretentious shrine, and the spirit of tango flickers throughout Abasto’s pleasant, low-key streets, where some of the houses are painted with lyrics and notes from Gardel’s greatest hits, as well as a stream of Gardel murals on seemingly every corner. (Warhol Gardel; Lichtenstein Gardel, Impressionist Gardel etc.)

However, for all the murals and street art, there’s something of the heritage industry about this veneration of Gardel, who died over sixty years ago. If anything, it seems to imply that the phenomenon has atrophied. A short stroll towards the historic centre of Buenos Aires takes you to the Plaza del Congreso where the offices of the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo are located. The offices of the Madres, which continues to function as an NGO, are open to visitors. On the walls are photos of those who remain disappeared, a quarter century after the fall of the dictatorships and the return to democracy. Rows of faces, captured in the aspic of their seventies haircuts, are testament to a time when, along with its human rights abuses, the nation suffered a period of cultural devastation, its musicians and artists banned or forced into exile. Argentina, along with the other Latin American nations which suffered political repression in the latter half of the twentieth century, has moved on, but the walls are a constant reminder of the lasting scars.

In the Plaza de Mayo itself, there are more reminders, with a demonstration by veterans of the Malvinas. One banner says ‘No more fake veterans’. However, the demonstrators share the square with a christian rock band, and the mood is relaxed. We decide to cut short the expedition and head back to the pension. The search by day was always likely to be fruitless. A hunt for the real spirit of tango has to take place by night.

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A few hours later we made our way to La Boca to see El Fulgor Argentino. The show recounts a hundred years of Argentina’s history, in its own theatre, the Galpon de Catalinas. El Fulgor Argentino has been running for 13 years, with the ending constantly being rewritten. There’s a cast of approximately a hundred – it varies from night to night – made up entirely of local residents from La Boca. This is their theatre. Outside, vast grills serve up chorizo sandwiches, beer and cake. All of which can be taken into the theatre. The audience is a mix of the well-heeled, venturing into the badlands of La Boca, and locals. The theatre’s full and the audience’s enthusiasm grows as the tale unfolds, a mix of satire and music, including comedy tanks and generals, the rich and the poor, culminating in a hundred people on stage singing a rousing finale.

Obviously a show dealing with a hundred years of Argentina’s popular music has to include tango, and there’s one wonderful scene where a series of actors dance with giant puppets, whispering sweet nothings as they do so. But the show also demonstrates how tango would appear to have been displaced, by salsa, rock, pop, you name it. As each new dance craze hits the stage, a lone couple continue to steadfastly dance tango, resisting the tide. If anything El Fulgor Argentino would seem to confirm the fact that tango is nothing more than a museum piece, in a society which now looks both to Europe and the rest of Latin America for its cultural infuences.

It’s midnight by the time the show finishes. There’s one last stop to be made. We flag down a taxi and head back towards the centre. Our destination is La Catedral.



La Catedral is a vast hanger. You climb some stairs and enter a cavernous space, with a bar at the far end. The lighting is subdued. As, at first, seems the atmosphere. It’s gone one in the morning and people are dancing but there are no beats, no flashing lights. Gradually the mesmeric rhythm of the tango starts to get under your skin. On the dance floor, a dozen couples are weaving their way around, lazily changing pace as the music picks up and recedes.

Tables surround the dance floor. They are occupied by a mix of age groups and demographics. Sixty year olds dance with twenty somethings. Domination of the dance moves provides the democratic key to participation. On the sidelines, there’s no pressure to join in. A milonga is an opportunity to observe the dancers’ talent, with no need to make a fool of yourself trying to emulate them. Unless you feel like it.

If one were to say that an atmosphere can be dream-like, then La Catedral would embody this atmosphere. No-one is in a hurry. No-one makes too much noise. The environment is both resolutely contemporary and absolutely timeless. The dancers could have been there for decades, centuries, picking out steps, lurching against one another in a parody of desire, staggering or skipping, graceful swans then, by turns, clumsy swans, all at a time. Here is the pulse of tango, alive and well in Buenos Aires.

Later a singer comes on, a small, fiery woman with a low-key band of four. She sings tangos which the audience knows and tangos which they don’t. The most confident couples join her on the dancefloor, cutting through the space like lasers.

The very word ‘tango’ in English is a strange, almost comical one, an alien sound for an alien dance. This is the music of old Europe, displaced, distorted, disturbed, remade anew for a new continent. In La Catedral, of a night, that time when the dawn is still distant but the night is already old, it’s possible to glean what tango feels like, what tango was and is and always shall be.

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the arrow maker who gives birth to a new century

The most extraordinary festival of all those celebrated by the Indians of America was surely the Toxiuh molpilia (the binding of the years) which took place at the end of every century, at the end of a cycle of fifty-two solar years. This was the festival of the new fire... It was the most beautiful, the most tragic, and the most meaningful of festivals, since it took place at the time when, according to the Indians' counting of time, all the stars having completed their cycle, the entire cosmos would begin again the revolution which lead it from the year One Rabbit to another year One Rabbit.

...

There was something tragic and dreamlike in that terrifying wait for the end of the world which the Christian Sahagun could not accept, because for him it has the inevitable sense of a damnation: it was, he says, "an invention of the devil so they would renew the pact they had made with him... by plunging them into terror of the end of the world and by making them believe he was prolonging their time and was having mercy on them, by allowing the world to continue."

...

The priests then arrived, each one wearing the insignias of his god, and they began to walk slowly, silently, "and they were then called teonenemi, which means, they walk like gods".

Then, at a given moment, a man was sacrificed, enabling the entire universe to continue on its course. They chose a warrior, captured during combat, chosen from among the most courageos, who had to bear, by the date of his birth, the name of his destiny. Born on the first day of the year, he was called xiuhtlanin, he who arrowed the new year. The high priest placed a stick of wood upon his chest and quickly rubbed the tapered stick between his hands, thus producing a spark. When the fire caught "the captive's chest was immediately opened, his heart ripped out and thrown into the fire, which they kept fanning, and then the whole body was consumed in the flames". And all around the people who were waiting in anguish, seeing the fire rise up, "immediately cut their ears with knives, collected their blood and threw it in the direction where the light had appeared"; fire was taken to all parts of the province by runners carrying torches and, says Sahagun, "it was an admirable sight, that multitude of fire in all the villages, so such a degree it seemed to be daylight." The last ceremony of the new fire took place in 1507, according to Sahagun, "they did it in complete solemnity, for the Spanish had not yet come to that land".

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From The Mexican Dream, J.M.G. Le Clezio, p54.

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it could quite reasonably be argued that we inhabit -

- A world cursed by the fascism of perfection.

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cash flow

Money is just an opportunity cost.

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For what you gain from the having of it, you lose from those things you might have gained from the not having of it.

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salisbury

Modern theatres have the architectural feel of airports: points of departure (in theory).

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Looking at photos of past productions reveals a flock of actors and writers whose day came, went, and is now little more than a scarcely glanced-at photo.

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Exceptions for my generation are: Rossiter, David Hemmings, Ronald Harwood, as an actor. All now dead.

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Theatres in other countries with photos of actors whose moment of glory has gone.

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My own friend himself captivating of a night, emphasising the value of the ephemeral in the face of eternity.

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through a glass darkly

Sometimes it's possible to recapture everything you need to know about a dream, in terms of how it made you feel, without being able to remember even so much as a single detail of what occurred within it.

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stating the obvious

If you don't fight you're not a fighter.

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If you don't write you're not a writer.

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barcelona pensamiento 1

The state of poeticism, (so to speak), is a state determined by the expectation of death, which is also to say, a heightened awareness of the transitory nature of life. There are many different ways of allowing this state to influence behaviour, all of them poetic, (so to speak), and none of them particularly useful in the business of perpetrating the human race, or business, or plain day-to-day living (something conditioned by the ability to wipe this state from the daily slate). However, poeticism, like death, is unavoidable: we all have a poet within us; our consequent choice is how much attention we choose to pay her, or him.

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on reading

Reading is a process of curiosity. One turns the pages in order to have something revealed that wasn't known before opening them. Whether that be the end of the plot or the shape of the universe.

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Every time we open a book we do so in the hope that we shall meet someone with something to say, something we have never heard before.

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the un-randomness of it all

Barring acts of god; (unless one is of a religious disposition):

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Events have a way of happening to us as a result of our susceptibility to those events.

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Even though they might seem like the most unlikely of occurrences.

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the sunken italian garden in priors barton

In my dream I looked out of the window and the sunken garden was being dug up. It was being excavated from the edges into the middle. An old chapel or chamber, with filigree lead glass windows had been discovered underneath the garden. My mother and I ran downstairs. By the time we got out to the garden, the area around the excavation had flooded. The chamber could be seen through the clear water, but what lay inside the chamber could not be discerned.

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the long haul

Whenever a deep-rooted attachment comes to an end - a love affair, a friendship, a home, a place or a task - we learn a little more of what it will mean to die.

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an apology for idleness

For years people measured their worth and their self-worth according to their labour.

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The idle man or woman was an unproductive drain on society. Creating nothing, generating no wealth.

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Now, we might be on the cusp of a world where the idle man or woman is the most worthwhile member of society.

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The one who has consumed least, polluted least, destroyed least, been the least precipitate in the rush towards the annihilation of the world as we know it.

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If the whole of Western society had been blessed with idleness, the air might still be clean, the seas full of fish, the jungles green worlds of their own.

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the artabatirae

"towards the west [of the Aithiopian kingdom of Meroe] are . . . the Artabatirae, who have four legs and rove about like wild animals" Pliny the Elder, Natural History

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It should never be forgotten that the power of the image is far greater than the word.

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The creation of moving, reproducible images might have changed the world more than any other invention.

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The image is seductive. It beseeches covetousness. The eyes swallow images like candy.

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Nothing is more likely to make an individual want to change their life than the sight of an image.

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Even though, no matter how authentic the image appears, it is never anything more than a rumour.

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a dream

I'm in Montevideo. I go to the bus station to catch a bus to Valizas. There are other English backpackers there, who don't really know what they're doing or where they're going. I ask in Spanish, and the sales assistant smiles at me. My Spanish is just about good enough.

I arrive in Valizas and make my way to Polonio. I find a spot beside one of the little ranchos. There's a lot of people there. It's busy. Evening arrives and I head off for a walk. I walk down towards the sea and put my foot in a marshy spot (which would not exist) and a baby crocodile snaps at me but misses.

I head off along the coast. It starts to become built up. I run into Raquel. She's been there a few days. I tell her there's a good bit further down the coast. But as we walk it becomes more and more built up. There are cars on roads. I tell her when I was there last, there were no cars. There's a fancy hotel. The place looks more like Punta, or Brighton. I say we should go and see the sea lions. The sea lions have had a special sea lion run created for them. It's concrete, and shallow, so they can bask there. A building crosses overhead. They seem happy enough, but it's all one great big tourist trap. Raquel holds out something for a sea lion to eat. I tell her that they're dangerous, she shouldn't, but the sea lion just lifts it out of her hand, a trick it's perfected.

There are hundreds of tourists. TP arrives. At one point, I spot a little crevice full of broken up crates, rubbish from the sea. I tell them - look there, that's what Polonio used to look like.

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our pledge to you

If you want your life to be a self-fulfilling prophesy -
That can easily be arranged.

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how the mind works

In a dream, you get the answer you were looking for.
When you wake up you distinctly remember being given it.
The trouble is you can't remember what it was.
In fact, you can't even remember what the question was.

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