life in the day

'When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. Looking at the colours in an ice cream I caught my breath just as if I had jumped into cold water up to the waist: they had somehow been made fluorescent by the sky at Skegness: it had entered them. After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence. Most children feel like that, I suppose'.

*****

'So we went, as he put it, arseholing down the M6 with the radio turned up full: AC/DC, Kate Bush, Bowie's 'Station to Station' already a nostalgia number. 

How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field, between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination. The music is immanent in the light, the day immanent in the music: life in the day. It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how. 

Ever since Gaz had fallen off into the sea I had felt an overpowering, almost hallucinogenic sense of happiness, which this time lasted as far as Bolton'.

Extracts from M. John Harrison's novel, Climbers (Gollancz, 1989). 

For a fine article about Mike Harrison's work, see Richard Lea, 'M John Harrison: a life in writing', The Guardian, 20 July 2012, here. "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that."

Photo by muskrat

messages in the pulse

'To be empty, free. Doing nothing. Yet not quite. Little blessings arrive which they collect. 

For the most part these blessings are memories yet it is misleading to say this, for, at the same time, they are promises. They collect the remembered pleasures of promises which cannot apply to the future which they have gladly vacated, but somehow do apply to the brief, empty present. 

The promises are wordless and physical. Some can be seen, some can be touched, some can be heard, some can be tasted. Some are no more than messages in the pulse. The taste of chocolate. The width of her hips. The splashing of water. The length of the daughter’s drenched hair. The way he laughed early this morning. The gulls above the boat. The crow’s feet by the corners of her eyes. The tattoo he made such a row about. The dog with its tongue hanging out in the heat. 

The promises in such things operate as passwords: passwords towards a previous expectancy about life. And the holidaymakers on the lakeside collect these passwords, finger them, whisper them, and are wordlessly reminded of that expectancy, which they live again surreptitiously'.

Extract from a text by John Berger, read by him at the Serpentine Gallery's Memory Marathon, London, 20 October 2012