Sinister: being taken places

[figure2 at xxx.net]

Here in a railway carriage: 06:30am; darkness outside; dark shaking sound and feel under: the rumble of unwoken bones and struggling machinery over metal lines seizing in frost-bitten contraction. A sharp rip of ticket from the role in the guard's shoulder-bag electrical dispensary, then a slight G-force as we all decelerate towards a local hault: a shed and short platforms affair in a former spa town. '"Her name is *Rene*/ If she told you her name was Alice, she was lying"/"What the **** is...[the rest is unintelligible]"/I want to take you away from here/...' sings Gavin Henderson*
Maybe because these carriages are hurtling through only a black, with a low moan and chattering asides, I'm thinking to see made-ups. A film I saw once, say, that featured an encounter between the painter Egon Schiele and his Viennese mentor Gustav Klimt in a scene of studied decadence: a wintergarden furnished like a merchant's house by the Bosphorous: the soft beauty of golden beading on the edges of expanses of crimson velvet; decanters; tobacco through various contraptions;  freckles of lapus lazuli and elephant-ferns intermingling with her shock-tresses: eyes flashing like those of a wild animal in a Blakean forest of the night.
The reflections on the window fade to a new focal depth. From the Forth Estuary, the foreshore of the current horizon, rises a flame some 100 feet tall; the product of an oil pipe from the far north; prehistoric fossil-crushing; titrations and filtrations in submarine-technical spaces; heavy industry powering distant agendas; spirits millions of years old finally escaping skywards from their underwater strata. 'Before you eat me',said the graptolite to the orthocerus, 'shall I say we'll meet again one day, in a flame?'
" Oil was discovered in Iraq on October 14, 1927, in Kirkuk. As so often happens in the Middle East, the event was violent and unexpected...Shortly after midnight, a worker decided to lift the drilling bit from a 1,500ft hole [so as to clean it]..."** He got 140ft worth of black stuff at a rate of 80,000 barrels a day. The cleaning was put on hold.
I can see a BMW 3 series out of the window, recogniseable not from the form of its bodywork, which is shrouded in the pre-dawn, but by the configuration of its break and tail lights swerving in a chunky turning circle by the track. It's an assignation with a transit van, one of whose white flanks is rendered by the light pouring out of this train. And gone again.
Pear-infused grappa is settling into my brain now, and the images of a now indolent artist's model leaks into myself and an arc of lights which are the streetlamps of an urban connurbation and the memory of phosphorescent plankton on hebridean waters. Reducing further, perceptions and articulations veer towards sleep, but in a nether state, before dreams gain their own logic. 'The curse of the West' says the Russian writer Andrei Makine, [I paraphrase] 'is the curse of words; when words prematurely replace that which they are employed to represent'. So I'm content almost uttering interverbalisms like a chanting of the mad; begningly hypnotic prefaces to sentences. I'm content to betray these words and descriptions because even caged in  argument and counter argument, there are tangentials which make the cage itself part of the scenery, rather than the nature of the situation. The situation is mysterious, child-like, life-like.

Gordon 

* 'Words and Music', Sympathy 7, Starfish Records 2001, SRDC001 [Edinburgh Band]
** 'The Middle East: The Arab States- in pictures', Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., Two Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016, 1978

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