Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

Often I really want to buy into Iain Sinclair- he's so bald and referential. I always try, and then get so far, and feel a bit ashamed of my own world's lack of filthy texture and phatic stains. It's kind of the opposite of Emerson- it makes me feel too clean, healthy and optimistic. I don't smoke, and I don't really drink, not as a lifestyle, and I only collect books and references with the delusion perhaps of their utility, rather than as a enervating obsession. Instead I guess I should be looking through the flood damaged detritus of somewhere grimy like, I don't know, Hartlepool (if it floods there), to find that one lost fabled and besmirched copy of a Blake plate where he draws the map of London showing the plague pit where he buried his mojo. And then find that it is under the Olympic Stadium, but has been found and is being installed beneath the Millennium Wheel using lottery money. Or some such Robert Frippery.

I think the following sentence, the last in the introduction to his supremely depressing anthology, "London: City of Disappearances", sums up why I can only take Sinclair in small doses:_

'At the finish, even the cabinet of curiosities will betray us; all we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves in the dust - and the stories, the lies we assemble to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define.'

I can see how it's trying to be all Gatsby-ish, 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past', and I am extremely partial to a bit of Gatsby-business, but come on, give me a break. I can't let such unadulterated miserrimus win the day. What about Smarties? These will never betray us. And what about the stories of Dick King-Smith? Are these really there to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define? Please, Iain, let me have something as a sop, I worked hard in school, and was a good boy to my mummy...

Also, it is funny how every writer in the anthology starts to sound like Sinclair, there is totally not one drop of contrast. And I love a drop of contrast. Everybody is bookish and disappointed, a mage of wistful and bitter anti-nostalgic nostalgia.

Much better is the slewish glut of Russian absurdist satire that I am reading. Here, in the middle of the morass of human crapness is a precious and graspable seam (as all seams should be) of the dark humour which I find lacking in Sinclair's right-on spoddy superciliousness.

But to end more aptly with some Edward Thomas:-

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

But at least Thomas had the decency to be at the front in WW1 writing this, not in bijou Hackney buying fruit on Columbia Road. Still, to conclude, I am a big fan of Sinky, and will continue to be until he is forgotten and I can rediscover him.