Last week I had a curiously psychogeographical day in London. It was also curiously satisfying. First, I went to get a readers card for the British Library. When I first came to London, in 1985, I also went and got myself a readers card. Back then, the British Library was in the round room in the middle of the British Museum. It was a wonderful secret space, and my readers card gave me access to a world that seemed scarcely possible. Karl Marx had sat over there, at that very bench. The dome rose above us like a church. It was silent, scholars sat (and sometimes slept) in the radial desks. It was bureaucratic and old fashioned and very English and I loved it. I was researching a speculative book that never got written, but it was part of my introduction to London, before I knew that I would become an art student or an artist, and long before I knew the internet existed (well, not that long before, actually). Anyway, I went back to get a new readers card because I’m once again researching a speculative book. I hope this one is more likely to come to fruition. I don’t imagine at this stage in life there are so many wonderful distractions to get in the way.
In 1980 I went with two friends to Crete, to work in the tomato greehouses. One of my friends was my best friend and the brother of my partner. Life is long and complicated and wonderous sometimes. We went by the cheapest route possible, on the Magic Bus, a hangover from the groovy end of the seventies. The bus took three tortuous days to travel from London to Athens, but it was a wonderful three days during which friends were made, stories were recounted and, for all I know, babies were conceived. It was setting off on a journey in the best possible way, not knowing what you would encounter or where you would end up. The bus left from a huge walled car park, a derelict site hard up against St Pancras station. It is the site on which, eventually, they would build the new British Library to where I would, eventually, travel to pick up a readers card in order to embark on a new journey. And so I did.
After picking up my card, I travelled south, right down to New Cross and my old college, Goldsmiths’, where I joined their library. I can do this as a graduate. I took along my degree certificate (Fine Art BA, 2:1, since you ask). It was the first outing that certificate had ever had, and it was the first time I had been to Goldsmiths’ for over twenty years. The place hadn’t changed much, but the library and the computer centre had got a lot better. I worked in the old computer centre for a few years after I graduated. In those days it was housed, literally, in the old science labs, on the old science benches. There were even sinks and taps still set into the benches. So, after twenty years, I went to sign up for my library card, and the woman who did the paperwork looked at me and said, ‘Did you use to work in IT support?’ Incredible.
My third, speculative, port of call was to visit a journalist to try to find a copy of a crucial article from the eighties, for my speculative book. She invited me down to her house. I travelled into central London and tracked down the address. I was literally next door to the British Museum. Honestly, the last house, the only house, on the left of the museum fence, right up against the museum walls. So I had come full circle, right back to where I went to pick up my first British Library readers card twenty-five years ago.
I’m thinking the signs are auspicious and that this is going to be a great book.
readings
Patti Smith in Ethiopia
I’m reading Patti Smith’s bio, Just Kids:
“One afternoon I fell asleep on the floor amid my piles of books and papers, reentering the familiar terrain of a recurring apocalyptic dream … I plowed through revolution and despair and found, rooted in the treachery of the withered trees, a rolled leather case. And in that deteriorating case, in his own hand, the great lost work of Arthur Rimbaud.
I awoke with a sudden revelation. I would go to Ethiopia and find this valise that seemed more like a sign than a dream. I would return with the contents preserved in Abyssinian dust, and give them to the world. I presented my dreams to publishers, to travel magazines and literary foundations. But I found the imagined secret papers of Rimbaud were not a fashionable cause in 1973 … I truly believed I was destined to find them. When I dreamed of a frankinsense tree on a hill throwing no shadow, I believed the valise to be buried there. I decided to ask I decided to ask Sam [Shepherd] to sponsor my trip to Ethiopia. He was adventurous and sympathetic and was intrigued by my proposition. Robert was appalled at the idea. He succeeded in convincing Sam that I would get lost, kidnapped or be eaten alive by wild hyenas. We sat in a café on Christopher Street and, as our laughter mingled with the steam of many espressos, I bade farewell to the coffee fields of Harar, resigned that the treasure’s resting place would not be disturbed in this century.”
Earlier this year I wrote a play, Arthur and Paul, about two people who are mirrors (sort of) of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. The play starts in London in 1977 when, as art students, they come across the house in Camden where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived for a while. It ends with the Arthur living in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) having found
Rimbaud’s ‘lost’ work. Paul turns up, a successful poet, on a British Council jolly.
It’s a fantasy, probably commonplace, that Rimbaud went on writing in Africa. It is hard to
believe that he just stopped when he was 18 and never wrote again.
The play is sitting on my hard drive waiting to go somewhere. I guess it’s the dream of anyone interestd in Rimbaud that more work will be found, but in 1973 hardly anything would have been published about his time in Africa.
Now I have a new play to write – Patti Smith in Ethiopia