ASSIGNATION
Away from the wrought-iron pier, with its view across the bay to the city with its one tall building white against greying skies, there’s a tea-room where piano music plays and the early Fifties returns like the vaguest of scents. The shabby mascots of the pier look on from the outside, and Exmoor’s a flat line in the distance. The twin breasts of the Mumbles – from the French, mamelles – protrude as I sit in a jacket, open-necked shirt and cords and await the hourglass figure of my beloved in a film that could either be a romantic comedy or a tragedy laced with melodramatic orchestral music, Dream of Olwen territory. But sadly, I conclude that my beloved is sixty-five years older than I am and a mere quintessence of dust. This persuades me to head back along the curvature of the sea-front, to Oystermouth where, at exactly noon to the second, it begins to rain… we could have walked in that rain to the end of the pier, and pledged our undying love, but love has been cancelled for the day and the shabby mascots, rhinos, seals or whatever they’re supposed to be, have the pier to themselves. Earlier, a man who couldn’t stop saying the word Fuck handed his partner a purple ice-lolly, from his shopping bag, at ten AM in the bus-queue and that, I conclude, is the closest that I’ll come to an assignation all day. A dark cloud shaped like a piano is all I need to see me back to my hotel, via the indoor market where sheets of water cascade across a roof of glass in the presence of cockles and laverbread.
BOLERO ON THE WESTERN GHATS
It’s a smoky tea-stained morning… mist rises from the Kodakanai sleepers, ethereal as their snores. I make my way to the veranda, where an immaculate breakfast is laid out and the waiter calls me Sir for the first time in my life. The air is dense and the gables of a place that could be in Surrey or the Scottish Highlands make me nostalgic… alas, for a past that I have never experienced. And, whilst I sit at the table downing chai after chai, working my way through toast like a caterpillar through privet leaves, the music in my head is incongruous… ʹBoleroʹ by the French band Heldon, relentlessly sequenced acid-rock from the sadder end of the Seventies. I hallucinate a Parisian suburb full of odd-shaped concrete constructions and a future that made sense four decades ago. Richard Pinhas’ guitar is coiled, astringent, a snake that winds its way through the undergrowth but has neither head nor tail, no after-snake to give it definition. The waiter asks me if I’ve finished and if I’d like to make my way to the high plantation to watch the tealeaves being plucked. At that moment a friendly mountain-goat, a sahr, appears and begs me for the remaining slice of toast. I apologise for all the English bastards who claimed its forebears as trophies… and stride into the verdant upland as Pinhas wields his axe.
BRIEFLY, THE AEGEAN BECOMES VISIBLE
The tintinnabulation of the masts in Sutton Harbour stipples the evening. Ghosts drift through the aquarium as sea-bass glide on autopilot. There are smells of iodine and musk on this July evening when separation from the south is impossible. So you follow that sightline from Fisherman’s Nose and brush the Hesperides on the way to the equator. Turn left past the Pillars of Atlas and enter the wine-dark sapphire-encrusted sea. Follow that line past Sicily’s impossible ruins and the steaming shadows of Etna.
Suddenly, there is a filigree of islands whose blazing stone imprints itself upon the eye. Blue-washed buildings are laced with scents of olive and thyme. A sharp moon sinks and night is pungent and rich. Follow the track from the hilltop village, through the broken crockery of the field-walls, to the summit of the most miraculous of islands where, if the lure of legend holds, you will see out your days in the strangest of exiles.
Back home, there are costumed figures entering the mall with scythes and unkempt Maenads keening to predict the end of the world. And predicting the end of the world was always the surest of prophecies as the only question is When? But as you sit on a rock to contemplate the marriage of earth and water, the fornication of azure and marble, the assassination of time by halberds of pitiless light, the shimmering intensifies and sadly/gladly you are back there, standing on the Mayflower Steps ten minutes’ walk from home.
You look up at the prawn on its plinth and smile at the sight of it, listening to the tintinnabulation of the masts and the hydra-tongued tourists and knowing, once more, that anywhere is everywhere on a finite world.
EXPERIENCE NOTHING
Walking through broken shards on the battlements of Monemvasia, I remember that I have a life to return to. I make my way through narrow streets of the old town, past Yannis Ritsos’ birthplace. There’s a faint smell of lemons and a dog is standing on its hind legs in a courtyard. A stork flies overhead with a melon in its mouth. I listen to a thousand obscure languages… all sound like Greek but all are different. Europe stretches all the way to Nordkapp, Eurasia to the Chukchi peninsula - I stretch back to my birth in a measureless sequence of silhouettes. Ahead, the road descends into the road and I must go down to a place where I am expected to shed my name, where experience becomes as invisible as last year’s trampled fruit and shredded leaves. Monemvasia would have been a perfect hideout… there are fewer people living there now than in the year 1400, so I could have taken the place of any one of thousands. But there’s no future in being a Greek medieval revenant, crossing myself by the minute and watching mastic bob up and down in a glass of increasingly sticky water. And as I conclude that I must leave the stork drops the melon, an amber arsenal exploding at my feet.
IF THESE ARE THE END TIMES
Night’s aromas shape the island, on a soft spring night with a pulchritude of stars. I descend to the back streets of the hilltop settlement, listen to scents of thyme and lavender that tint the air around closed doors. The sea conceals its monsters, the sky conceals its gods. The only difference is one of direction. And what if this all came to an end, this island in the Aegean that I prowl in pure shadow, this landlocked sea that contains it, this continent, this world, this universe? God might decide on one of His days that he has no more desire to prove Himself by exerting his energies, His essence being sufficient to recline in… a less judgmental judgement but no less lethal. In the back streets of the hilltop settlement, a hundred steps above the monastery that shelters a recess in rock where time slammed shut, my shadow contemplates the absence of all shadows, a permanent noontide as pure as the darkest night.