It was also remarked by Grosley that "melancholy prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, at public and private entertainments. The merry meetings, even of the lowest sort, are dashed with this gloom." Dostoevsky observed the "gloom" which "never forsakes" the Londoner even "in the midst of gaiety." The wine sold in London taverns was also considered "to occasion that melancholy, which is so general." Even the theatre was held responsible for the unhappy distemper; one traveller described how the son of his landlord, after being taken to see Richard III, "leaped out of bed and, after beating the wainscot with his head and feet, at the same time roaring like one possessed, he rolled about the ground in dreadful convulsions, which made us despair of his life; he thought he was haunted by all the ghosts in the tragedy of Richard the Third, and by all the dead bodies in the churchyards of London."
Everything was blamed except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself...
The whole universe may be found within a grain of London's life. The "gate of heaven," in St. Bartholomew the Great, was located beside the shambles of Smithfield. But if it is a sacred city, it is one which includes misery and suffering. The bowels of God have opened, and rained down shit upon London.
The most abject poverty or dereliction can appear beside glowing wealth and prosperity. Yet the city needs its poor. What if the poor must 'lie, or be deprived, in order that the city might live? That would be the strangest contrast of all. Life and death meet and part; misfortune and good fortune shake hands; suffering and happiness inhabit the same house. "Without Contraries," Blake once wrote, "is no progression." He reached this truth by steely observation of the city. It is always ancient, and forever new, that disparity or disjunction itself creating a kind of ferment of novelty and inventiveness. It may be that the new protects the old, or the old guards the new, yet in the very fact of their oneness lies the secret of London's identity shining through time...
London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy — but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Alignments of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian sepulchres, collections of prostitutes' cards, torn and defaced promotional bills for cancelled events at York Hall, visits to the homes of dead writers, bronze casts on war memorials, plaster dogs, beer mats, concentrations of used condoms, the crystalline patterns of glass shards surrounding an imploded BMW quarter-light window, meditations on the relationship between the brain damage suffered by the super-middleweight boxer Gerald McClellan (lights out in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel) and the simultaneous collapse of Barings, bankers to the Queen. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high.
"I really prefer mythocracy to democracy. . . . Reality equals death, because everything which is real has a beginning and an end. Myth speaks of the impossible, of immortality. And since everything that's possible has been tried, we need to try the impossible."
"God calls the chosen by means of lightning bolts, shafts of sunlight, moving stars and celestial music, where the elect are dressed in robes and lifted to heaven by railroads, ladders and chariots."
As we know from previous experience, certain figures transcend the usual human script: John Lennon, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, and now Jackson. They radiate some analysis-defying “x” factor, crowd magick, mass appeal. This ability to be consistently forgiven. Failings and fallings and flaws overlooked. Look at Lennon – heroin addiction, support for the IRA, weird foreign missus, dabbling in avant-garde conceptual art, breaks up The Beatles... what more could he do to lose the love of his popular audience? But he remains the Lads’ favorite pop star, bar none: the love never goes. He preaches anti-materialism and mass togetherness but holes up inside therapy-occluded privation with only stock market deals and a freezer full of furs to keep him warm: they love him more. Puts out god-awful AOR sludge. Still the adoration increases.
Do we really need to adumbrate Michael’s own perplexing choices? The myriad ways in which he would seem to be the exact opposite of anything like contemporary black pride? His almost luminous propensity for bad faith and bare-faced lies? His progressively less urgent or pleasing or interesting music? The jacked-up psychopathology of Hubris: I AM THE KING. I AM THE KING.
- Ian Penman
