Empire on Toast

Empire on Toast.

Somewhere towards the end of 1983 your embryo touched base with the energy of life. A spark ignited, and thought blossomed. Your cells divine under the collective consciousness through which we are all connected; a condition of our body and mind. Some months later, the 4^th January 1984 at 5:03am, to be precise, you entered the world screaming: A living, breathing, interaction with the world. You were hungry. Needless to say you have always maintained a healthy enthusiasm for milk.

You are me, and I am you; we are only divided by the flesh we feed, this single entity which we call me, and I shall call you.

Two babies were born in Birmingham that morning, a girl and a boy. You were supposed to be called Amy Susannah; likewise the other dawn-mother was convinced, not surprisingly, that she would be receiving a little Christopher Andrew. Consequently, a young lady of exactly your age is, if not dead, a living, breathing, interaction with the world branding your intended name.

You wear the exchange quite comfortably.

You do not remember this, but you will recall the room; the marching red walls, the shimmering brass boot, model push cycles and the leather horse; the one that sits behind you now, a true ornament amongst your clattered hoard. In that precious room, barely a toddler, you are elbow-deep reaching down past sharp Alsatian teeth, digging towards his belly. The dog is choking, crying, churning but never once gestures to bite. You are in a fits of giggles when your Grandfather hoists you free, and Laddie, the faithful hound does not leave. He does as he always does; stands sentry, a loyal guardian by your side every time you enter his modest kingdom. We have opened the gate, let the reminiscence flood; of your Grandparents’ small home in the shadows of the Villa ground, and Dandy Cycles, their humble shop at the end of the street, and your resulting fascination with ball-bearings, and the taste of sterilized milk in your tea. The dance of your Grandfathers eyes as he unveils the adventures of his army days fighting alongside the Gurkha, guiding you through the Burmese Jungle.  His mastery of storytelling, his pausing to smoke hanging on words, following the tattoo on his left forearm-  a Kukri, the infamous Gurkha knife- and the veins on the back of his hands that you are only now beginning to see on the back of your own.

You can’t trace back to your father at home, but have glimpses of being on an airplane with him, tossed around violently by thunderstorm en-route to Greece, the rest of the holiday drawing a void. Instead though trails, and you arrive at the paralyzing fear coursing through your body, as several liquid aliens scurry across the walls of your bedroom, morphing into humanoid shapes when still, and smelling, unquestionably, of Vix-Vapour Rub. Completely illogical but you relapse with fear every time you revisit these strange discords of mind. They are those moments of twilight before you have fully developed your true abrasion to consciousness; the self, yourself. Regardless, they swirl around in the dimness of the forgotten corners of your mind, amidst other strange sensations of powerful emotional translucency, but of discerning factual obscurity. You know you do not wish to explore this feeling, but from it you know you are responsible. You can almost sense the clouded spite of that murderous spirit; fierce and brutal, you fight its emergence. Who was it, what did you do, and why? A connection with evil you cannot place, only distinct remnants of the shame thereafter remain. The guilt of abolishing life on your whim; could it be me you have attempted to erase so efficiently?

Why is it then, that your first cloudless memory is so simple? You are riding you bike in monotonous circles anti-clockwise around the end of your street. You must be four or five, because the woods beyond the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac are still fresh with adventure, filling you with some indescribable feeling every time you swoop around to confront your proud army of trees. You pedal through dusk’s setting sky with your brothers by your side, unaware of the future landscape of your youth that lays behind; the fields, the bowl-swing, fossil mountain, and the slide- which was really just an extremely steep wall of mud- the bumps, the park, and the Donkey Pool, which legend told sank so deep into the earth, that it resurfaced as a bubbling bog somewhere in north of New Zealand.   Your hindsight of now is tempting you to fill this indescribable emotion with nostalgia, tainting its pureness, but you must try harder, and search deeper to find out what this memory really is and what it implies. Is it happiness, unadulterated through guiltless simplicity? Could it be the first time you truly valued the beauty of the world around you? Does it mark the beginning of your relationship with the sky? An adoration demanding that you be emotionally moved by it even at the dullest of times. The constant opportunities it supplies for you to take photographs by blinking your eyes, only wishing you had better storage facilities in your mind; your darkroom of fading sights. However, this particular image is imprinted; the vivid blue gently deepening, giving way only temporally, to the late summer sun’s last splash of smudged pastel colour. Bravely, as the street lamp stutters on, four brothers soldier into the night, anticipating their mother’s curfew call.

You are gripping on to the doorframe with all of your might, wanting so desperately not to spend the weekend with you father, but instead discover your new neighborhood with your new brothers, who are too visiting their dad, who is now your new dad, or Mick, as you prefer to call him.

You are staring at the sun again. It’s like you’re in a fish tank, that gigantic tempting window of your reception class just begging of your respect more than Miss Bookmaster and her alphabet.  “A is for Apple, rosy and red”, you are supposed to repeat, but instead you gaze steadily until the white wash eclipses everything, including yourself. Feeling wholly dizzy, reality softly seeps back inducing black and blue blotchy floaters across your vision, “S is for snake” the other children say. You know the names of all of the dinosaurs before you can spell your own name. First you refuse to read because you can’t see the words, a pair of glasses later and you’ll hide your books almost anywhere, neatly posting them down the back of radiators, anything to avoid having to participate in school on any other level but a social one. You pretend to sing the hymns and pray, imitate writing when you have to work, and feign interest in much about everything but conversation and farfetched dreams.

You like to talk. You like to talk about dreams. For example, the dream that strikes you when you are ill, the one you always have, you scuttle around, collecting something of grave importance which you can never recall once awake, fleeing under breath of savage giant’s chase. Or, those nights waking on your knees, clutching your throat, and choking on imaginary teeth. You will always be affected by your dreams, they relate to you an importance you cannot lay a finger upon without immediately lifting it to taste. You are a dreamer, and this is your dream. You dream awake.

Watching butter sink into a hot slice of toast you examine it closely, oily-steam greasing your glasses. You imagine each tiny grain as an individual soldier crammed in on a bready battlefield. You see an obvious distinction, dark and light, sinister patches refusing the butters soak, merging gently though yellow pastures until almost white. You take a bite eating by design, giving the light side- those many millions of brave little fighters- a fighting chance, but alas, you have gnawed to the end. The war is won, and with it, your victors falls to the plate; you are unable to submit them to their enemy’s fate. Because on this particular day you have chosen the night-side to prevail, until that is, you reach across the table for another slice.  Do you recollect when it was that you stopped playing with your food? Do you still meticulously nibble around the cows’ edge on malted milk biscuits in hope that one day you will achieve the ultimate precision in tooth carving?  

You were in love with the world. You wanted to save trees, children and animals. A devout vegetarian once you realized genuinely what one was. You’d carry a world map everywhere with you, religiously unfolding it and adding flight lines to your crusade of love. What happened to saving the world Christopher? When did that die? Was it when the map got cooked slowly along with a pepper inside your bag, which lay for a good hour in the sun mimicking a goal post on a school dinner break? The pepper too, you discovered useless upon pealing its mushy aftermath from the catastrophe on your map in art class; concluding it to be an impossible model to draw. Are you still in love with the world? You carry no map, but do your ambitions still carry the same torch? Or are you just like everyone else, in love with yourself?

A mix-tape from a girl and two years of it accompanying you invariably as you float along the same old paper delivery route, compounded by every new sound. You have heard music before, you have enjoyed it, sometimes a lot, but this; this sings of soul. Your love begins with imitations, slowly pealing back the veneer to uncover original. A late starter, with passion driving your ability, imitating to become original: yourself. She and other bearers of tapes come and go, but the true of mistress of your life has taken hold. You are in correlation with her, riding her blue notes, absorbed in her crescendos; her triumphs and falls. There is no such original in truth, there are only those found her first, those who leave behind her language for us to continue the conversation; influence. For this you take the big bang theory literally; a huge instant explosion of sound, a constant source of subsequent pulsations, every atom our strings vibration, instruments as we connect and worship through practice of sensation. It is our way of taking the very nature of life and manipulating our own beats of emotion in glorious plateaus of sound, using the source of existence to express existence, to be soothed and inspired by her; a cathartic blessing. We are living compositions, we are Zeppelin’s, ‘When the Levy Breaks’, we are The Beatles’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’, Eric Satie’s most crushing of chords, Fitzgerald’s scat, and every little bit of ‘Tenderness’ from Otis himself. Each swell of emotion we share and possess; an alleviation of self, for creator and those who dwell on what is created. Music becomes truth.

Oh, how you struggle for songs to comfort you; to understand. You sit day after day behind a desk, at first making tea for others or sticking together a map, and later making tea for yourself, a new start helping people with problems, or usually to find job. You are ’employment’ and you despise it. You are sure of a system, a sort of trick to life, comfortable, yes, but numbed out of your mind. The system inhabit, the debts you accumulate, you are simply a young adult living, breathing; trying to enjoying yourself, nights get longer and mornings wearier. You smoke, you drink, don’t eat, take drugs, don’t sleep; thinking if you must work you may as well do something good, where you can help people who fall off the track, but secretly you construct incoherent outcries behind your desk, composing stories of precious nothings, your precious nothing, scrawling lyrics on post-it notes of tales of the prison you see as a mental trap, your lack of understanding to understand yourself. Then you meet Cat, the New York child picks up her routine rat, shakes him about and then puts him back. You shiver for three days straight returning back to your cage, unable to contemplate what it is that rushes through your veins. Money will ensure you will pay for your mistakes, it’s foolish to become an adult whilst still dreaming awake. Seventy-five hour weeks and sleeping awake, waiting on tables, and becoming debts slave. Dedicated to a love out of control but for her sedate, and with inconceivable distance you wait. But you cannot just wait. Your creativity is AWAKE, accompanied by your confidence and distain. The more you earn the more the banks want to take, rubbing their hands, “THERE IS NO ESCAPE!” You need to get out, so you play the system at his own game; an education, time to examine, but more fundamentally to create.

How things change, how you first see the system, become distasteful enough to become active against, only to submit that you are, in at least part, of the system that you hate. A living, loving, product; confused by a society in a social rage against victims of passing phase. How unnatural our existence, and the measures we adhere to keep it sustained. Afraid, petrified by the prospect of change. Society’s only enemy is itself.  Sitting up so high, King Harold’s view is fine; positioned here you can see his enemy well. Take out the poison arrow buried deep within your soul, which has split you like an atom, distorted how you behave. You must fight to break these conditions that we believe are stuck in stone, you long to fire this poison arrow into the heart Harold’s throne, to split the eye of the king himself, yourself, the self.   

Your eyes blur, the child in you is staring at the sun. Reality presents to you a dull blanket sky as grey as your mood, and the child begins to aimlessly orbit on his bike. You sit and inhale. Deep sensation filtered through filthy air. You breathe your own dirt; your own squalor. You feel you should lick your wounds like a dog, a loyal dog, but you bleed inside, out of reach of tongue’s lick. How can you feel so alone? You are not a biological entity of an empty individual evolution. No, you are but a co-operation of cells divine under life’s energy. An embryo that has since forth connected with a stream of consciousness; a shared consciousness. Your body is yours, your mind also exists as you, as implicitly our language dictates, but you are not just you, you are me, and we are driven by the same force. I am corrupt, we are corrupt. Our very communication has severed our control over running our course.

 We stand alone, ignoring our own cries, we are but individuals bound by time, standing in a system that we have designed, we turn to human nature to excuse this divide. Struggling upward, through the self we provide, we live to serve conditions that our history implies, conditions we don’t conceive as our own lies, thus we undermine the very essence of being alive.

Should I be justified, to call for a readjustment of all of our eyes, a universal re-focus on a vision that diverts from our catastrophe of lies, a vision that purifies, and dignifies; sets into motion an understanding of our collective minds; I call upon our rational minds. That when unified, are capable of re-shaping conditions, a leap of faith, a true realization of ourselves as our own guide, but alas, we are the system, you are the system, the system by which I am crucified.