as i record these words; [these black hieroglyphs of a language which, for all i know, is indecipherable to those on the other side of the {interface}]; as i record my thoughts another language plays to a soft array of colours on the surface of my space: music.
music which i have drawn from deep within the system that constitutes my environment; music of spheres; music created from the memory and from moods remembered; from golden sunrays and summer silence; from moments of peace and from moments of ritual’s passing; music containing lyrics relevant not only to the world now gone but also to the me that lives on; music containing mood triggers and trance enhancers; creative reference points beyond the power of language; colour from and alien palette; landscapes of the mind; structures remembered from cities of sound visited on the fly; a past where earphones plugged reality evoking colourful melancholia in the grey dread of travel; faces averted in the bustle of city life.
this is how i remember.
the sense of smell [being in life a trigger for memory that short-cuts directly to the experience] is the most difficult to emulate in this space where the body does not require maintenance.
but if i work really hard at the music i can sometimes evoke the perfume of the memories – a backward experiment indeed – reverse engineering for a vampyr.
Because currently I’m working on a book about my memories of when I was young in Liverpool I have inevitably been thinking a lot about my childhood. One weird thing that has struck me was my parents attitudes to toy guns. Although they were Communists, in some ways my mother had some quite hippyish opinions, even though this was before the time of hippies. At first she wouldn’t allow me any toy guns at all, because supposedly having a plastic cap gun might turn me into a violent psychopath. This was despite her as a Marxist believing in the violent armed overthrow of capitalism and also that the main determinants in a child’s development were econonomic and social rather than what sort of toy they had.
Anyway it didn’t work, I started making my own toy guns out of bread, what I would do was I would chew an L-shape into a slice of Hovis, then I could run around the streets shooting other kids with my wholemeal pistol. As long as it didn’t rain I was fine.
After a while they gave in but in an echo of the arms limitation talks the US and the USSR were engaged in at the time I agreed that I would only have toy revolvers and rifles. This left me forever one step behind in the arms race in our street, I never obtained automatic weapons and there was something called a “Johnny 7” which was a combined raygun, machine gun and rocket launcher with which I could never compete. It also meant that I have been fascinated with real guns ever since.
Before it was made illegal I used to shoot handguns at a range in south London and I owned a 12 gauge shotgun for clay pigeon shooting when I had a house in the country. When I’ve worked on movies I’ve used all kinds of weapons, there was a piece of nonsense on the other night on TV called “Deadly Currents” that I made years ago. George C Scott and Bill (CSI) Petersen were in it but I can’t remember anything about them, I only recall that I got to use a 9mm Ingram Mac 10 machine pistol. That’s why I was so looking forward to “In the Line of Fire” on ITV1. It was all about the Met’s CO19 squad of armed officers. Whenever I see an armed policeman at an airport or guarding a politician’s house I want to chat to them about their weapon. To say “I see you’ve got the new 5.56 mm Heckler & Koch G36 there, how do you feel about using what is basically a military round in a policing situation?” But I’m worried they might shoot me.
Anyway ”In the Line of Fire” turned out to be mostly white people kicking the crap out of black people which I’m not sure is the type of publicity the Met were after. I also noticed the narration was done by the Scottish actor Ken Stott in order to give it gravitas and I think because he has played so many policemen during his career.
There used to be a nest of swallows at my house in Spain and I was able to name each of them after a policeman Ken Stott had played in a TV drama, “Hello Red from “Messiah,” I would say to them as they swooped around my car as I approached the house “...hello Rebus, hello that copper from “The Vice” Hello DI McCall from the film Shallow Grave.”
Incidentally the Sunday Times are printing a short story of mine called “A Friendship” on March 8th.
When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favourable - well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, "politics", included comments such as: "This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they'll never be."
By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The Deer Hunter which, according to Time, "articulates the new patriotism". The film celebrated immigrant America, with Robert de Niro as a working class hero ("liberal by instinct") and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots, or "gooks". The dramatic peak was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam. "I have this insane feeling that I was there," he said. "Somehow... the line between reality and fiction has become blurred."
The Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic critics. "The film that could purge a nation's guilt!" said the Daily Mail. President Jimmy Carter was reportedly moved by its "genuine American message". Catharsis was at hand. The Vietnam movies became a revisionist popular history of the great crime in Indo-China. That more than four million people had died terribly and unnecessarily and their homeland poisoned to a wasteland was not the concern of these films. Rather, Vietnam was an "American tragedy", in which the invader was to be pitied in a blend of false bravado-and-angst: sometimes crude (the Rambo films) and sometimes subtle (Oliver Stone's Platoon). What mattered was the strength of the purgative.
None of this, of course, was new; it was how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native-American; and how the Second World War has been relentlessly glorified, which may be harmless enough unless you happen to be one of countless innocent human beings, from Serbia to Iraq, whose deaths or dispossession are justified by moralising references to 1939-45. Hollywood's gooks, its Untermenschen, are essential to this crusade - the dispatched Somalis in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down and the sinister Arabs in movies like Rendition, in which the torturing CIA is absolved by Jake Gyllenhal's good egg. As Robbie Graham and Mark Alford pointed out in their New Statesman enquiry into corporate control of the cinema (2 February), in 167 minutes of Steven Spielberg's Munich, the Palestinian cause is restricted to just two and a half minutes. "Far from being an 'even-handed cry for peace', as one critic claimed," they wrote, "Munich is more easily interpreted as a corporate-backed endorsement of Israeli policy."
With honourable exceptions, film critics rarely question this and identify the true power behind the screen. Obsessed with celebrity actors and vacuous narratives, they are the cinema's lobby correspondents, its dutiful press corps. Emitting safe snipes and sneers, they promote a deeply political system that dominates most of what we pay to see, knowing not what we are denied. Brian de Palma's 2007 film Redacted shows an Iraq the media does not report. He depicts the homicides and gang-rapes that are never prosecuted and are the essence of any colonial conquest. In the New York Village Voice, the critic Anthony Kaufman, in abusing the "divisive" De Palma for his "perverse tales of voyeurism and violence", did his best to taint the film as a kind of heresy and to bury it.
In this way, the "war on terror" - the conquest and subversion of resource rich regions of the world, whose ramifications and oppressions touch all our lives - is almost excluded from the popular cinema. Michael Moore's outstanding Fahrenheit 911 was a freak; the notoriety of its distribution ban by the Walt Disney Company helped to force its way into cinemas. My own 2007 film The War on Democracy, which inverted the "war on terror" in Latin America, was distributed in Britain, Australia and other countries but not in the United States. "You will need to make structural and political changes," said a major New York distributor. "Maybe get a star like Sean Penn to host it - he likes liberal causes - and tame those anti-Bush sequences."
During the cold war, Hollywood's state propaganda was unabashed. The classic 1957 dance movie, Silk Stockings, was an anti-Soviet diatribe interrupted by the fabulous footwork of Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. These days, there are two types of censorship. The first is censorship by introspective dross. Betraying its long tradition of producing gems, escapist Hollywood is consumed by the corporate formula: just make 'em long and asinine and hope the hype will pay off. Ricky Gervais is his clever comic self in Ghost Town, while around him stale, formulaic characters sentimentalise the humour to death.
These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically.. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove. The partisans who tunnel out of their prison in Gaza, bringing in food, clothes, medicines and weapons with which to defend themselves, are no less heroic than the celluloid-honoured POWs and partisans of the 1940s. They and the rest of us deserve the respect of the greatest popular medium.
They wore the masks of Easter island
Stitched their lips to keep the silence
They could see it coming from a lifetime away
They could hear the voices echo from where the giants held sway
The smell of cordite cold in an empty head
The taste of rust collecting on the inmate’s crumpled bed
They swam the reefs of coral teeth
Dreamt the words that lay beneath
Gunmetal tangents red held the night at bay
Green laser night sights translated what the moon would not say
Silverfish bookmarks for tales they’d never read
Sand in the eyes of peacemakers and the recently un-dead
They drank the potion of soon forgetting
And slept the draught of ships once passing
Corporate keys unlocked canyons of the day
Children of the golden calf (their childhood to betray)
Kneeled to worship the torturer’s hand it’s said
Kissed the yawning abyss and drank from rivers flowing red
i remember before the advent of shapes and of colours retrieved; before anything other than the memory of pain etched hard as rust in my psyche; and the relief brought on by the physical absence of that pain.
i reclined in my space, and i took time to examine my body.
the body of a middle aged man.
it showed/shows no sign of the ravages caused by my illness.
not a perfect body – there is evidence of age and the minor scars of a life lived – but by no means an offensive body; especially since it is now a body without needs.
no hunger, no digestive process with all its decay, no pain, no sexual desire.
no sense of touch or smell.
hunger is no loss, but the senses are vital elements that drive the mind.
i have worked hard to develop mental substitutes for these functions.
aesthetic needs and visual triggers; needs i have had to construct and develop from the memory of pain in order to allay the darkness that yawns at my core.
as i became familiar with the {interface}, i experimented with methods of clothing this body with elements of thought that more than compensate for the loss of physical self.
it was a small but significant progress; for it allowed me access to the extent of my mind’s power.
but always it is the pain remembered that is the strongest element in my laboratory – the mind’s alchemy requires pain to progress
In dustbowl toil the grey wind blows
Across the inner plain
And mirage lake in heat haze glows
To mock the lack of rain
Through ribcage beams these ancient chords
Hum their tune for none
For jaws won’t serve these wasted words
From a tin-ear lexicon
And phantom clouds translate the sky
From bone to blown asunder
Plasma curlicues sketch to defy
The eye its sense of wonder
Now you can’t stop your flight prosaic
On pedestrian wings hard-earned
Circling yet the pixel ruins, the Icarus mosaic
You find your thoughts have turned
To coloured flags you cannot follow
Armies on the march
Hats and hearts of hateful hollow
And uniforms of starch
To knots that cannot be untied
And fingers in the till
To hearts that won’t be unified
Rocks that roll the hill
And yet…
This sacrificial plan will not allow your pain
Access to the inner door
Where ancient creatures stare in mirror vain
Fossils on the killing floor
Isabella and the Pot of Basil ~ Alexander John White
She watched them move through the alleyway below and wondered how long it would take them.
Behind her, looming large in her mind, the heart murmured to itself in its crystalline cage.
Endocrine wished it didn’t have to be so difficult: matters of principle always seem so simple in the beginning, but they never take into account the complex chains of events formed by the intersection of diverse belief systems.
She turned to watch the heart for a while, trying not to let its murmurs interfere with her soul pattern.
She heard them on the echoing stairwell; their heavy boots thumping and armour rattling; and realised that she did not have much more time to decide.
Endocrine wondered why difficult decisions are always left ‘til the last minute; as if by applying that added pressure the best result would be ensured.
She lifted the cage and peered in at the heart, marvelling at its intricate structure, the whirring mechanisms and delicate workmanship.
The wind was already rushing past her face by the time they imploded the door.
Endocrine clutched the heart to her chest, feeling its tempo increase in direct proportion to the pulse that throbbed in her ears.
She turned in the air so that she was looking directly up at the thin blade of studded black sky that sliced the sheer faces of the buildings bracketing the alleyway.
She wondered about those stars: all that heat and energy expended - by what principle would their light be extinguished?
The air pops in his ears, sucking sounds away to the laboratory of progress.
There is a sliver of a moment, infinite and fleeting, when all futures come to nothing.
He holds his breath as if he has no choice.
Particles of dust hang in the air - anticipating gravity.
Still as the heart that has no companion.
The cat, each hair on its tail standing out in paranoid clarity, tenses its haunches in preparation for flight.
Still as the mind that has scaled the face of everything.
The hair on his arm stands upright and sways to the lullaby played out on scales infinite and absolute,
Still as the sap that will boil in the tree.
The air becomes solid, sculpted in time suspended - all history denied.
There is an inrush of sound returning to the room: the ticking clock, the humming fan.
He draws a breath, a breath that is soon sucked from his lungs as the world itself inhales.
Particles of dust accelerate outward toward the boiling core.
A breath so deep as to bow the wooden door.
As anticipated, the cat takes flight against the current; ears flat against its head, heading elsewhere.
A breath to declare all previous breathing wasted.
His hair whips across his face - it smells like rain.
A breath as deep as no tomorrow.
the description of time in a place where there is no measuring of time available is difficult.
the retrieval of memories came after a time of discovering the limits of the spherical space in which i found myself; a time of dreamless sleep and comfort; a time of boredom. i began to notice that the pictures that formed in my mind had begun to migrate to the inner surface of the sphere. at first merely arrangements of colour; swirls and patterns and eventually after another time of enjoying the relief from boredom, they began to form into faces and figures; and later still to fill in with background information; landscapes; interiors; the city.
it was not long [in relative terms of time passing] before i realised that certain faces reappeared on a regular basis and these faces took on a familiarity beyond the repetition factor. names swam into my awareness; names inextricably linked to these faces; names and faces combined to cause stirring in my mind. The stirring brought association that could not be illustrated with the visions or the sounds that now began to emanate from these visions.
it became apparent that there is more to my life than the confines of my space.
and so my euphoria at the release from pain now passed into a period of ache; of mourning for my loss; for the loss suffered by my loved ones.
strangely [if strange be a word that could possibly contain any residue of meaning in circumstances where strange is the norm] strangely, all bodily urges have, along with physical pain, ceased to hold sway. this does not, however preclude anguish, for anguish is a pain product of the mind rather than of the body.
my space is spherical and vaguely translucent. the light is soft and warm; like sunlight through the window on a cold day.
with the exception of the basic shape, these parameters can, if i so choose, be changed.
suffice to say that within my space there are an infinite number of possible activities; restricted only to my own imagination and by my ability to learn new skills.
and it is the learning that takes time [a resource of which i seem to have a lot of], given that there are no instruction manuals for that which you do not know that you do not know.
i remember the moment i opened my eyes to my new berth, remember my immediate relief at the absence of pain; for pain was the only memory i carried with me.
this euphoria lasted for i don’t know how long; at least until i learned how to retrieve the memories of my past; and perhaps some time beyond that.
my past with all the months of clinical pain and sleep riddled horror; family faces etched with concern, anger and later unspeakable acceptance of the inevitable.
pain, pain and morphine layered pain.
all gone.
but i get ahead of myself in the tumble to record my thoughts in this electronic journal that i have created from the rules that, in this space, govern thought and allow the transition from thought into form.
it has taken aeons for me to understand this process; to master the {interface}; for each new skill leads to yet another room in the labyrinth of my existence.
