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Chapter 4
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Patricia Farson Meets Charles Fort
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In 1988, after twenty-five years of love, care, and British Broadcast Television, I decided to run for the electrified barbed wire around that liberal nightmare called England, Home, and Beauty. We had no less than 15 idiot’s lanterns in our 25 rooms. It was a clear night with a full moon, I and I knew my time had arrived when all the programmes ran into one in my head, and Art and architecture, thrillers, serials and soap operas became some version of Terry Wogan and Come Dancing. Since I had never been able to tell Come Dancing from the Ten O’Clock News, I burnt down this doll-world upon April 9th, in the Year of Our Lord 1988, with ten-gallon tins of a liquid appropriately called White Spirit. The sight of Terry Wogan in flames seen from our 17th century private chapel full of my ancestors brought on a chain of multiple orgasms that has never been surpassed.
After that exorcism, I took to the hills and lived life to the full.
But life beyond the perimeter fence was not easy. My singed and blackened parents made sure that every policeman, private detective, and psychiatric social worker in Merry England was after me to try and correct my mistaken vision of what was real. Immediately after I escaped I was lucky enough to meet a fellow screen-smashers. I can recognize them from across the street. They have a lean and hungry look. They have always have always helped me. We are a tribe. Screen-smashing demolishes race and class, money and status, education and all social bollocks. People without TV are the unsung heroes and heroines of the modern world. My screen-smashing saviour was Bones Lambert, a black bouncer in the Old Colville Arms in the Portobello Road. His hatred of TV was the only nice thing about him, apart from his apparatus, which should have been rendered in monumental alabaster. When I first met him, he was a mite breathless after evicting no less than two score British Rail carriage cleaners who were out apparently on what one of them later in court called a birthday night out. Being middle-aged lesbians of great girth, this was quite a night in the annals of Portobello. I asked Bones if he knew of a screenless room to let, and after he had squinted carefully at the stolen five-pound note I gave him, he took me to 18 Powis Square. This Square at that time could be described as a cross between an old bombsite and a termite hill. It consisted of the last two strips of blitzed stucco before the left-liberal improvers moved in with their genocidal screens and enlightenment games. The last tribes split the city in ‘88. They left me behind and I’ve never forgiven them for it.
After kicking and threatening many cursing and lurching forms in the semi-dark of the stairway, Bones reached an upstairs room and pushed open a door that did not have a lock on it. Saying that he would be back in a week’s time for another stolen fiver, and God help me or any other tenant if such a thing was not ready to hand, because he made it quite clear that he did not take cheques, promises, or what he called “kind” of any sort.
I found another friend when I tried to throw a stained flea-ridden mattress out of the back window of my top floor room. This was what happened to such mattresses in those days of short-lived and naïve pre-screen escape. The mattress had patterns of human habitation on it as good as on any Tandori flock wallpaper picture from the Hubble telescope. With its generations of nameless human seepages, and blood streaks menstrual, arterial, and black, this mattress should have been sent to another planet as a kind of greeting card, an announcement of the vulnerabilities of mortality. Wearing thick gardening gloves, and with an old Civil Defence clip tight on my nose (used for searching for corpses under ruins, found in a cupboard in an old jam-jar), I picked up the mattress. The torn flocking tumbled out as if from a sheep shearing, yielding burnt incense sticks, an ancient cannabis stache, many empty bottles of obsolete multi-vitamins, prescriptions written in an almost mediaeval hand, and a large shrivelled salami quite welded to the interstices of an old sock. There was also a pair of wire-framed spectacles with cracked lenses straight from an early Russian black and white film. A desiccated rice pudding in a basin from a supermarket whose name was long gone into advertising antiquity was wrapped in a map of the Midlands that showed no M1 motorway, and had Leicester stuck with black pins as if for an occult ceremony. What kind of a man or woman (if it was a human being, for even in those days there were rumours of aliens living in Powis Square) lived here, I asked myself. And what kind of adventurer put their charms and spells into this prime candidate for multiple infections? I figured that whoever they were, they must have had a paranoid prisoner consciousness. Who else but a prisoner would stuff their food and small personal effects away in this mattress, as if their one terror was that some guard would open a cell door and stamp on these last memories before some dread small-hours beating and interrogation. I imagined this creature at night, perhaps under an equally filthy blanket, with an equally filthy small torch reading the forbidden texts of Timothy Leary, George Adamski, or Wilhelm Reich, after eating the rice pudding. I imagined him or her nibbling their salami and listening for the footfalls of the cultural guards and their “scientific” truncheons as he or she put a curse on Leicester. The little theatre of the mattress gave up yet more needles and bloodstained syringes, which I carefully put into a plastic bin. Syringes in those days were of the terrifying glass and stainless-steel professional variety, somewhat large items worthy of the pre-war black-and-white Boris Karloff films, which were still being shown as main features in the old Electric Cinema three blocks away. Amidst this scattered luggage for a late 20th century voyage I found a note scribbled in red biro. The note, in a bad hand, was addressed to one Martha and contained the unfinished sentence, “I am free, Martha, free…” Attached to the note by a rusting paper clip was one of the first Woolworths do-it-yourself cubicle photographs of an age of milk machines and a time when England made solid objects. Martha had a wan face, her long brown hair making her a dead ringer for Grace Slick of The Grateful Dead. On nights when the house was like a ship at sea, full of heaving lifts, groaning falls and straining timbers, I looked upon this washed-out early colour processing as others look now at sepia prints of figures of the Victorian twilight.
Wondering about the infinitely lost Martha, I heaved the mattress out of the window, but just before it plunged to a new destiny, out from its dark interior shot a copy of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned. I didn’t dare touch it at first. I gazed at it I supposed like once upon a time some mediaeval English Friar might have looked in wonder at some ancient manuscript of Antiquity found under an ancient bundle in a room as decayed and doomed as the one I was living in. I let it lie there, with half its pages folded inwards, and with the imprint of the sole of a boot across the torn cover. The floorboards, void of all carpets and linoleum, were covered with ancient newspapers of some twenty years previous. I had found these piled in a drawer, the only piece of furniture in the room, and I had spread on them on the floor for lack of all else to spread on the floor. The newspapers were full of images of the last hours of the evacuation of Vietnam. Clinging to the landing struts of American helicopters for all the world like a string of trailing sausages, were officials, dope-dealers, prostitutes, panicking Vietnamese soldiers and police. Lower down the leg ladder, the peasantry clung to ankles and calves of their bosses, with suitcases and even pet dogs under their arms. The Book of the Damned, with its stories of rains of frogs, a crystal lens found in the treasure-house at Nineveh, and the discussion and listing of rains of almost every kind of substance was like this dissolving world of old Vietnam, the last bits of which hung from the landing struts of the helicopters. With these pictures coming up at me from the floor, I read of reports of the appearance of people from nowhere and the disappearance of people into nowhere; I read of vitrified forts, and footprints found in Nicaragua under eleven strata of primordial rock, paranormal abilities, glimpses of unknown species of animals, teleportations, psychokinesis, miracles, levitations, observations of both dark objects and semi-luminous objects, small and large, passing slowly in a controlled manner across the sun and moon.… I closed the book.
The floor stared up at me. Fort’s strange events became men and women releasing their fragile hold and falling across the face of burning Saigon. Babies, dogs, luggage, children, all fell as the helicopters lurched towards waiting ships and aircraft carriers.
Suspended between the images coming from the floor and the page I was transported to a world built entirely of illusory cracks and crevices, a world uncertain of anything at all, a world unstable, forever in transition from one state to as it dissolved and change, subverting even itself.
Once more I open the broken pages and read.
By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You’ll read them-or they’ll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstititions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
Still keeping the book in sight lest it should fly out of the window like Peter Pan, I lit the pot-bellied London County Council two-ring gas stove, an enamelled veteran of a thousand and one hurried meals when the devastating Heinkels were overhead. I noted with alarm that I had little tea left before my next dole cheque (called National Assistance in those more honest days – the PR men had not yet arrived with their new Newspeak phrase “social security”). I duly halved his ration, and like some shipwrecked soul on a desert island, I settled down to read Fort comparing leading scientists such as Lord Kelvin to Chief Sitting Bull, or telling of worked iron implements found in lumps of coal, a bell-shaped vessel with floral designs on it made of an “unknown” metal, blasted from a bed of solid rock,
Of course I had heard about the magical Book of the Damned but had never been able to lay his hands on a complete copy. The book was avant-guard literature with a vengeance. Not a single publisher had the courage and nerve to issue it in Europe before 1974. Before that time, I had seen bad photocopies of the rare 1941 Henry Holt collected edition, with whole chapters missing. I had seen also “blueprint” style early crude copying, the pages looking like a draftsman’s sheet from a pre-Xerox era. I had even come across modern black and white photocopies of hand-written parts of poor copies that Shakespearian scholars would call “bad” texts. Even properly printed pirate editions had come his way, but certain rich collectors guarded these with safes, dogs, and booby-traps. In none of these cases was I allowed to copy, just browse and glimpse these legendary almost-pages. Thus to many before 1988, Fort’s fragmented and corrupted Bigfoot texts existed rather like newspapers deteriorated under heavy rain. Almost certainly Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras reached Europe this way via Africa and Italy.
Thus did I encounter modern vertigo in Powis Square.
The prospect of having a whole entire copy of The Book of the Damned was a source of wonder to me. I was damned as my circumstances and environment were damned in turn. The place I lived in would have reminded Fort of his own life-long poverty. Of course the Heinkels that the gas stove remembered were long gone by 1988, but I had my very own nightly blitz amidst fires, death, shrieks, endless police sirens and raids, and bombed-out residents, some with figures like Belson skeletons. As I read through the Book of The Damned, hypnotized, fascinated, and inspired, I felt the same tidal flow of anomalies about Fort as he read of countless reports from all over the world of material falling from the sky. Salt, vegetable substances, coal, sand, fibers, red worms, alkaline substances, also fell, together with rains of blood, tons of spider webs, and shards of iron and quartz. Most of this material could be named, but the technical identity of some of the material was never completely settled. Indeed, some of the stuff could not be named at all because nothing like it had never ever been seen before. Then there was that material which could be partially identified, and also the stuff whose almost-identification caused controversy amongst the many scholars and experts of the time. There was also the material which disappeared in a manner as mysterious as it came, such as the countless strange mushroom formations, jelly-like substances and curious mould-cultures, all of which appear to have fallen from the sky in a partly-developed form. As if lacking proper credentials of perfect solidity, these events were “damned.” They were cast out, like Milton’s Satan, from those mighty courts of proper affairs that were busy building the great 19th century systems of cultural reference, of which ideas of moral certainty and scientific determinism were the keystone. Such events as Fort describes were almost always officially declared never to have occurred, or if it was acknowledged that something very strange did occur, then frequently it was said to be of no importance to anyone. Fort was the first to point out that this was the kind of ultra-professional vanishing practiced in almost every society as a crude form of imagination-control, and hence social control.
Fort thus conceived of the universe as a massive tragic-comic dump. This of course was in direct opposition to the WASP view of the universe as a tidy machine with inputs fixed to outputs, a machine that worked according to fixed deterministic trading laws. In Fort’s universe, you often didn’t get what you had either paid for, expected, or liked. That the universe did not add up to the laws of Protestant accountancy was the Good News.
There were non-literary bonuses in Powis Square. Sometimes the beautiful Indian-robed nubile hippy girls who lived in the limitless 10-to-room warrens below, would dance and chant stark naked through the untold spaces of the house for all the world like the “impossible” events described by Charles Fort. This particular group in Number 19 called themselves the Last Wave, and they could not have known then how prophetic that title was going to be. They had a printing press turned with a handle, and had meetings to chant mantras and discuss ancient prophecies. Other impossibilities were the ritual cursing of Brimer, the neo-Nazi landlord, who fell extremely ill. The curse affected his minder, the dangerously violent Bones, who one week didn’t turn up to collect the rent, and as no-one ever replaced him, we viewed the wide empyrean without charge for many a glorious year. Thus, as a suicidal romantic, did I enter my first paradise with the Book of the Damned held before me as a friend, guide, and protector.
It struck me then as now that the really great and true books of the century were always found in such places as his magic mattress, now rain-soaked in the cat-infested shrubbery below, and soon to be covered with milk cartons and old clothing. I found out one day that it had even acquired an occupant whose feet could be seen protruding on fine days. He was a half-mad alcoholic tramp, a black man, nicknamed Helmet because he always wore a child’s cardboard policeman’s helmet on his head. One night, I woke to find the mattress ablaze. The fire brigade unearthed poor dead Helmet, and it was long suspected he had been petrol-bombed by one of the neo-Nazi groups prevalent then in the area, with whom the house had had many punch-ups. Finally poor Helmet was carted off in a “special” vehicle after the briefest of on-site autopsies. A few tried to find his name, but there was no trace at all. He was gone into nacht und nebel, burned alive like quite a few other late twentieth-century adventurers in the surrounding district.
In the days that followed, I found other precious bibles in darkness, under rain, fire and flood damaged almost as if the entire straight culture had conspired their destruction. Cut off from all support, and poor to my very bones, I stole, begged and borrowed the books of the great Outsiders: Henry Miller, the Beat poets, Timothy Leary. I found them in rubbish bins, in the Portobello gutter, or almost given away coverless by bookshops. Like the Book of the Damned, these were all the books it was not possible to talk to my pre-electric Cambridge Tutors about. I starved for these books and all such authors who blew the whistle on the stupid world and showed that the much-vaunted “reality” of straight folk to be a massive bullshit machine whose tricky hallucinations were corrupt beyond all belief. The only books left reading were the books of authors who had been through the concentration camps in their heads. No author with bourgeois fat on his bones or his mind was worth a cat’s fart. Author’s had to be scarred and to have gone through the valley of the shadow of death and out the other side before my particular generation would or listen to a syllable they uttered, if only because all Western moral history before 1945 stood condemned to death in the dock with ashes in its mouth, and its mouth taped shut. Who could talk about “improving” humanity after seeing photographs of naked and skeletal gipsy children, some blind and crippled, many become insane with pain fear, moving from Auschwitz railway station to gas chambers and experimental laboratories?
To us, the world was a warm place to shit in, and little else.
And of course as is the tragic-comic way of things, I fell in love with a media wanker. In the days well before user-friendly videos, he tape-recorded Powis Square, and in doing so, as in the fairy-tale, my lover betrayed my magical community. Yes, he made a programme for BBC. And I helped him.
Years later, after I’d tossed him back to Hampstead and the Colour Supplements like a minnow from a net, I still have sleepless nights about that. I helped him sell the beauty, the chaos, and the filthy glory for thirty pieces of silver. Media is no good. Its sends everything to earth. In imaging, modern Media is ancient Sin. But in 1988, the idea of Sin was still a bit pre-electric. It still had a real ale taste to it and didn’t seem to have much to do with actors and advertisements. His programme was not a success with the inhabitants of the house. They made sure than they now regarded both of as mere visitors to their world, and not inhabitants. Our attempts to be white Guardianistas had failed. John, pissing against the wind, tried confession and expiation by giving his BBC cheque to the Salvation Army and his stolen tape recorder to the Grand Union Canal at midnight. I was offered other programme commissions but I destroyed this offer of a career as I was to destroy other careers like the flea-ridden piss-sodden mattresses they all were. But like my deliberately sabotaged careers, the world of Powis Square was doomed. The social-scientific democrats were gathering with the wretched plans for their so-called never ending “improvements.” Like the media dolls, they were taking over, and their promises were equally as terrifying. Bodies would be more clean said they, stomachs more full, and minds more properly inspired. The people were now not so much people as viewers. We were all to be re-socialised, re-educated not savagely by Maoists, Communists, or Nazis, but by technology and television. Instead of reading scraps of burnt texts by burnt authors, we were all being carefully prepared for sitting down and watching the doll’s house. Though we all lacked sets, we were all to be casualties of these billions of noiseless Hiroshimas in the head. This time, as distinct from the fascist experience, there was to be no OFF switch. A quite new figure of twentieth century death had appeared. The TV Presenter. And lurking behind this person was the Actor, always the last figure before the curtain comes down and the cultural lights go out. The naked dancers of Powis Square disappeared with the entrance of the Presenter. Door were fitted with locks, and firmly closed so as not to interrupt the viewing.
If this was the collapse of civilization certainly nobody noticed or cared. Not that anything could have been done about it if they had noticed. Inexorably, the flickering sets moved into Powis Square rooms and the dancing stopped. Doors that had not shut for a generation were now closed. The nakedness and madness were gone, and the escape routes covered. The burnt-out authors and the burnt-books against TV tarts with the shoulder pads and hand-held microphones and men wearing make up who read some total absurdity called The News at Ten. Soon, all the wannabe white Guardianistas were sitting down watching the commercial breaks, the equivalent to squatting on the edge of a death pit and waiting for the bang from a small-calibre pistol at the back of their head. And they were the lucky ones.
What happened to Martha? I had wanted to deliver the note to her and to tell that someone she knew had found freedom. I later found that the said Martha had been living round the corner, but I was too late. Martha died of starvation in India, and the writer of the note, an ex Royal Marine had died of an overdose in a Piccadilly toilet.
Some ten years later, I am still living very near Powis Square, still reading Charles Fort. My old house of wonders has been re-built three times, and the single loo and bathroom for forty people is long gone, as is the magic mattress. But on nights when the moon is full and the wind is high, Martha comes back, and the old house sheds its “enlightened” re-reconstruction and he see Martha and her friends dancing naked through No 19 with their braided hair swirling by candlelight and incense-cloud. This lost host of hippy dancers, these fragments of wind-blown human gossamer were the only family I ever had, gone alas as a wave on water. The last survivors suffered the perils and ignominy of being rescued by the so-called enlightened. As the numbers of bathrooms and lavatories increased and the socializations came along with the rationalizations, the fairies fled from the mound-houses of Powis Square as they fled before Christian churches of old that were dumped right on top of the old barrows and tumuli.
Thus did I witness the death and degeneration of my first fairy world, destroyed by time, screens, and the straight folk. Time I could forgive, but not the straight folk. They came and smashed the only community I had ever known. I know that on a certain day, some old stone-age bushgirl within me will look up and scan the sky for smoke-signals that will tell him where my tribe are hiding in the hills.
Me? I am not very good at dying.
But I suppose there will come a day when I will drop everything and head for the old straight track, with Fort’s Book of the Damned tucked under my arm.
I will not look back at the burning towers behind me in case I turn into a pillar of salt.
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