It has something to do with judgement. With the rightly-wrongly arbitration that writing-recording seems to carry.
I deem such-and-such worthy of record (and such-and-such not, leaving it unrecorded).
Even if the poetics of the record, quote unquote, attempts to clean what’s recorded of its judgement, there's still something judgemental there, it feels like.
I was walking in that dark passageway, footsteps behind me and the shapes of bodies in front, all of us moving quickly between the escalator and the platform at Highbury.
And I knew where I was. I know that part of the network well, though it’s dark, and I was feeling, I don't know if it was a premonition, but there was (there’s always) a sense something might happen in that corridor, maybe just because it’s a dark place, and there are so many people moving together.
And there are those stairs, almost hidden.
It's not a perfectly straight passageway, either. It snakes about, and it’s very small, and if a person walks too close to the walls and they're of a certain height, they're likely to whack their head because the walls curve inwards.
I kept my cane tip running in the crevice between floor and wall, grating it against the tiles, in the grouting, in the gutter, I thought.
In the gutter.
Those were the words.
So we walked along the passageway, all of us, and I approached those hidden stairs with caution and premonition and (not) to my surprise a gentle, low-toned, North American voice spoke up from behind me, on my left as I was towards the right of the passage. And the voice said
careful now there's someone there on the stairs there's someone set there on the stairs.
The elegance of the phrasing struck me. Not too cautious, nothing escalatory. I didn't lurch with anxiety. Above all it was the repetition, the way the voice passed over its meaning twice, with variation, like fingers.
I turned my face in the direction of the voice and said also in undertone
thank you very much
and as I spoke I heard someone in front of me on the stairs, and I almost saw the dark shape of them, as if the voice’s spoken warning had conjured their form, and I assumed it was someone who’d set up there to ask for money, a strange assumption as I’ve never (not once) come across that happening at the top of the stairs on the underground.
It's always at the bottom of staircases, when it happens, that you find them, for safety, for everyone’s.
The shape in front moved and the voice that came out of it was middle-class and white, if I had to guess, and soft-toned, so I thought woman, quote unquote, and the shape made sounds like rustling bags and moved themselves and left their spot and seemed to hurry on their way, and their voice was rushed and slightly flustered as they made their apologies, because of the inconvenience and the danger they’d interposed, they presumed, such that someone as a matter of fact had felt it necessary to speak up and deliver a warning, to inscribe a judgement into the thin passageway air.
Yeah. That was how it was.
And I said into that thin air, to the North American voice, the one who’d warned me,
that would’ve been painful for them
meaning that if I’d walked into the shape on the stairs with the cane it would’ve hurt them, and the voice replied
painful for you both.
I didn't know what to make of that, though there didn’t seem to be any time or need to say something further because we all three of us were then walking with the rest of the crowd down onto the platform, with the train pulling in just like that, as it so often does, beautifully on time from our perspective, and the carriage doors opened in front of us such that we didn’t even need to break our stride to get on, where then the train doors closed and the carriage jolted forward to move us down the line.
On the train, in that carriage, even though I was only going one stop, there was a man sitting with white hair, blue or black white-checked shirt and some kind of grey cardigan over the top, a tesco bag with a bottle of water or something in it, and he with the kind of expansive forehead, button nose and pink complexion of a white-man-in-his-sixties, as far as I could see.
He could’ve been, in some other life, an academic or a grandfather or a farmer, I thought, but here on this carriage he was an evangelist and maybe also schizophrenic, quote unquote.
That’s the word my mind found. I record it here. That's how it was.
And maybe he was those other things too, academic, grandfather, farmer. But when I got on the carriage I thought crazy person, quote unquote, because he was speaking loudly and I didn’t dare look him in the eye.
No. That wasn't it. At first I thought activist, quote unquote, talking about Gaza, I thought, because he said
the occupation by an armed force, a foreign armed force, the occupation of a land, armed forces moving in a foreign land,
is there any love in the train?
is there any love in London?
no?
well I've got love
I've got love
and he took a swig from his water bottle or whatever and said
I am Jesus Christ
I am the light of the world
and it struck me, the poetics of this, the poetics, quote unquote, with its characteristic shifting of perspective, the first-person I used in quotation or in madness, no judgement, as if possessed.
Superb!