Sunday, February 18, 2007

UPSIDE DOWN, INSIDE OUT, BACK TO FRONT

Bug Eyed Peter once told me that he’d had an acquaintance who said that he understood every word he had ever read. My suspicion on hearing this was that it must be a really empty, hollow experience, cold in the extreme. Too heavy on cold, clinical analysis. Peter told me that he, Bug Eyed Peter, never ever understood every word he cast his eyes over, but felt them all intensely, lived what he read. I think his acquaintance had evidently employed the wrong kind of agent.

Shut down the scene and a good agent is already home dry with all the necessary information. Bug Eyed Peter’s agent bears a remarkable resemblance to Peter himself , but you’d be hard pressed to be able to put your finger on any exact detail or reason why. Shut down the scene, close the book and the agent disappears, as does a wisp of smoke from the glowing end of the detective’s cigarette in a memory of a nineteen fifties black and white movie.

It’s Saturday, so early that most normal bored grey humans would unconsciously still consider it Friday, and I’m on a job. A mission. Saturday and there’s been no sleep for me on this job, and nor will there be ‘till it’s over and the book is closed on it all.

I’m well hidden behind a tree that casts a black green shadow that gives me excellent cover. The street light is between me and the direction of my gaze. The two caped nurses who passed through the garden had no idea I was there at all, not even a shiver of an idea. I’m in a London garden square, fenced in by black cast iron spears, all of which gives me the impression that someone planned this to keep the majority of humankind out rather than to keep me trapped in. But I’m not here to speculate, to air my personal observations. I’m an agent out on a job. I’m dead to feelings.

There’s the Post Office Tower over my shoulder somewhere and I can hear the tearing roar of a disintegrating jet turbine, but a characteristic muffled knocking sound (characteristic for an Englishman anyway) of lead counterweights falling as a sash window was lifted, means I’m concentrating on a second floor window. There in the window is framed the shadow of a man called Henry looking out and up into the night sky. He’s a neurosurgeon, brain surgeon my generation would have called him. He’s deep within himself, deep in thought.

None of his Banham locks, tempered steel chains, or alarm systems on the front door have kept me from his bedroom, from observing his wife Rosalind from the other side of the bed to the window, or from standing by Henry’s shoulder, overlapping the both of us, in space and time, watching the fuel fed fire help pinpoint to us the source of the roaring noise. For an instant I was a passenger too. Henry’s thoughts took me there. Here I am sharing Henry’s space, looking out at where I was, where I had been and where I am. As an agent my job is to be a voyeur, transmit what I see, and that is all, and more than enough. I am here and there and these things happen.

However much I might have delighted in handing Joan and Laura’s torturers the instruments used on them in the underground ruins of New York years ago, I didn’t, I remained the observer, the medium for he who sent me to New York in the first place to witness the revolution. It was his job to get all emotional, all excited, not mine. Tipping the cards in Pozzi and Nashe’s favour when I was in Pennsylvania never even crossed my mind, however much it might have helped them out. I was there to live their entrapment not save them from it. It was my job. I had my orders.



Keep Waltzing Matilda and the Sexy Boy apart for their own good? Take the fuses out of the Electric Chairs? Step on Dr Benway’s toes? It just was, is, not my job, I’m part of the furniture, not even that, I’m the spaces between the furniture. I was projected into the scene, I was here and there and these things happened and it is not my job to care at all.

You see, there is a strict rule for us agents;- NO MEDDLING. We are as unobtrusive and as apparently silent as the gaps between the words on the printed page, yet we are here there and everywhere, hard at work. It is for us to report back, which is something we do, if we are employed as we should be, instantaneously, so that our information becomes part of the fabric of the situation. However much we might like to be more than what we are, we are just a medium flowing through existing situations and are strictly forbidden to take a part in the action.

I’ve shadowed The Born Again Priest on what he thinks of as his “mission”, stood over him in the bus, an Albion Valiant, looking over his shoulder at his roadmaps and annotations. I’ve looked over his shoulder, overlapping with him in space and time, while he was taking vengeance on beauty and I’ve heard the pleadings for mercy, but I’ve never crossed the line and never will, for I know that if I ever did Peter would never get the message, because that’s the agent’s ultimate responsibility, to get the message through.

Shut down the scene, close the book and the agent disappears, like the wisp of smoke from the glowing end of the detective’s cigarette in a memory of a nineteen fifties black and white movie. Shut down the scene and the agent disappears, unless he’s meddled.

On a bad, a very bad day he might inadvertently become the action, which means a perfect psychiatric, if not criminal case, because he is then truly visible to all the parties involved. If he’s crossed that line then the switch has clicked on a sudden synaptic collapse and it’s inevitable that there’s no disappearing left to be done. He’ll have taken his employer with him, both employer and employee together, face to face, side by side, back to back, back to front, upside down, hand in hand, best of friends, worst of enemies always together and always in discordance and then there is no turning back. All the bridges are burnt and you had better get in touch with Henry Perowne because it’s definitely too late for any other kind of treatment.













THE MISSION ARCHIVES:-

“Saturday”, Ian McEwan
“Project For a Revolution in New York”, Alain Robbe-Grillet
“The Music of Chance”, Paul Auster
“Street Hassle”, Lou Reed
“Electric Chair”, Andy Warhol
“The Naked Lunch”, William S. Burroughs
“The Born Again Priest”, B. Sherpa