The long chemical light flickers and traces thin, very thin, outlines of bodies, profiles of movements, light traits left in the dark… and junkies look cool, no matter what they say, all style and no substance: slim and tight, tight skin hugging the bones and tight clothes hugging the skin hugging the bones. Smack heads and crack heads and drunks all a-quivering and a-twitching. There is no depth here, none of us even pretend that there is, we all stick out like splinters; nothing goes in, not even the needle, it all pushes out. Each twitch, every movement punches out, but never gets out – everything happens on and over the surface, everything is the surface. Bodies are like shapes pushed out of stretched rubber – voices, words, language, just the same, just shapes pushing out from the surface – love, hate, indifference, thought, not-thought, real, unreal, all come to pass on this slippery surface.
‘But what of the orgasms?’ they will ask, and, ‘what of the bone chiselling pain?’ Skin deep, skin deep, tra-la-la! If there are things lurking beneath the surface, what are they to us anyhow? the pain is not under the skin but over it, vibrating across it! In this light, pain is only a reflection in the wavey surface.
-I have a suspicion I’m mad. I can only talk nonsense… this makes no sense… people look at me as if I’m really gone, man… and she always wants me to bleed the radiators, but, the radiators work just fine and it’s the doors that will bring me right down… they only ever open to a quarter of their capacity… walls are always getting in the way… I am a door… walls are my enemies…
The long chemical light perpetually flickers and no one is real under these conditions… not real-life-real at any rate; we are dream-real: partially all there, but, totally fragmented.
I drift into the open air. The sea is as green as the morning. I smell that salty air and I am a child again, I am everything again, I am part of the world again… I can hear the pebbles rattling under the waves crashing and a small boat rocking – wood gently knocking wood…
[photo taken in Venice in the autumn, 2008]
