There was this room or two, or a few more, long ago. Stank. You walked in under the red neon sign, and down stairs that were so slippery with rain and age and fag ends, so slippery, but you probably had heels on that you shouldn’t and who cared anyway? And it’s airless and damp at the same time and frightening, not in a safe scary way, but rather because someone might well try to split your head open. Scary, but in the only way that actually matters, when fear that is an exchange between ourselves and that which is not ourselves.
And we hand over our shaking nerves and self image and we get something new and hard to name in return. It looks at us from that godawful mirror, above the overflowing filth, and it smirks, eyes a bit too wide.
How can it be airless and damp in here at the same time? Everyone’s smoking, smoking for life. God, I miss smoking so so much!
Other rooms. They’re all the same really, I think? All the same night spaces. I can’t remember which was which. It’s always stairs, isn’t it? Usually down, into the oldest spaces, the cellars that were once the workshop basements or the stockrooms. Sometimes, it was up stairs, needle thin wooden creaking passages, so you arrived breathless and stayed that way, if it was a good night.
You know what I’m choking on now? Nostalgia. I need to open a window.
Dreadful thing, nostalgia. I created this space to be all about stealing haunted futures and here, all I’m doing is rolling about in the gutter past. If I’m stealing a future, it needs to have its roots here, maybe, in the colours, in the iridescent black. But the red neon, I made that up, so it’s something that is yet to come. Something I’m stealing back from the world that isn’t yet.
I want a future for this city, and I think I can see the shape of it, but it isn’t clear yet, it’s all shades of probability. I can see neon and Saturday night and glittering black, but the rivers of Saturday morning light too, and the sun on rainy Tuesday pavements when the clocks go forward. And that’s why I see the death that’s inherent in nostalgia, the voice that says that life is over and only the broken biscuits of memories matter, as if all that we are worth is a few moments around midnight once.
And that’s a lie: You, you reading this, I hope to god that you know that you are so, so much more than one long ago lost triumph, because I don’t always know that for myself, and it hurts to forget it.
And that lie can get fucked. It’s poison, and each generation gets it hard coded into them and I’m sick of it. The past needs to savage the present, it should be what drives us to our stolen dreamlands, not be reduced to the lullaby chant at bedtime. I want to walk till my feet bleed, and listen to every future getting born, and make this place be what it needs to be.
I have literal dreams of this city, of the future it will be made of. In those dreams, the sun rises and I’ve never seen more blood red light in my life; the buildings are jagged and black, and they belong to us all, above roads that have become canals and studded with hidden codes in streetlight patterns. And I wake up so happy, because if you can imagine something huge and terrifying and so, so good, then it’s already started to arrive.
Crow Violets 