Daidō Moriyama's 'Stray Dog' Looks At You

Stray Dog by Daidō Moriyama

As a dog you are dead

But as a look,

A spirit shine in the eye,

With what passes to humans 

As a wan smile

Cast back over a 

Trunk of uneven fur

You ask hard questions 

Of us for years to come.

Walking In

 

'Hostilities on Hold' 2021 by Jen Orpin

When you cycle, you are out in among it, observing, but you have speed on your side; you are in the thick of it for seconds. On the bus, you join a new colony for the journey, all looking out the window believing themselves safe from it. If you drive you may as well be in space, caged in your metal box. Walking is being out in it. You’ve no choice but to move through it and around it as it comes to you down the path.

Set out on Church Road. Almost autumnal morning. Still in my little shorts. Church Road is one of those that feels like a great artery in the city. Connects some distant land to something bigger. Others in the city, maybe Gloucester Road, Old Market (but it’s very small) The Hartcliffe Way, Whiteladies Road. You start somewhere and are taken away from it all.

I feel like a psychogeographer would love Church Road. A long road that goes through at least three distinct neighbourhoods; St George, Redfield, Lawrence Hill. A train line goes under it. An Aldi and a Lidl, a couple of small other big chain pop-in shops but then loads of local markets. The Bristol- Bath cycle path goes underneath it, secluded from the hustle and bustle. There’s an old fountain at the top adjoining an ancient and closed public loo.

There’s what I like to think of as ‘international stretches’- East European & Polish at the St. George end, and East African in Lawrence Hill, and paradoxically the Hell’s Angels last pub in Bristol by Lawrence Hill station. Sometimes they come in their droves up the road for a meet or whatever. Abandoned buildings throughout where the owners are holding out for more money on a sale. The only Miss Millies (famed Bristol chicken shop chain) in East Bristol. A self storage with a spitfire in the lobby. At the end is the great bowl of the Lawrence Hill roundabout, with its green slopes and clusters of trees and wilderness. The cider cans torn to shreds by the council mowers. In the dry summer a couple of years ago a bit of the long, dry grass caught alight.

Outside the Machine Mart by Lawrence Hill station a Northern Irish guy tells me he’s desperate and I say I don’t even have my wallet on me. He’s twice shown me a scar on his chest and said he’s just had surgery and is sleeping rough. A year apart. Another time in the same place a van was parked up and a massive dog leant out the passenger window barking and snarling and going mad at its reflection in the wing mirror.

Not long and I’ve hit Old Market. At the top end there’s a strong, nutty, woody smell outside the unopened Bulgarian grocery. A warm, inside smell. It strongly reminds me of Greece but I can’t place what or when or where. Graffiti by Long Bar reading ‘Louis got Oasis Tickets’. Is this the new ‘Yer da sells Avon’ now Avon are closing? As I walk through Castle Park I’m struck by the sight of huge fig tree growing out the wall by the river. There’s even fruit on it. I wonder if it has grown from some plant material dumped with a load of ship ballast.

Coming home later I think I’m taking a short cut through Broadmead but when I look at a map I realise it’s actually a longer route. A plethora of negative thoughts as the whirlwind strikes around me. Junkies can’t half move fast when they want to. The place is a dirgetown. Hamburger alley from start to finish. Somewhere for plagues to cut their teeth. I’d ask “why do we do this to places’ but I don’t think termites feel bad looking at the wood they intend to colonize. I had similar feelings as I passed through Torbay, Torquay and Paignton on a summer bank holiday. The fair grounds and tourists and madness. How a place can work on shitting on itself.

The next time I come through Castle Park instead which is more direct and as I come down a set of steps I find a fiver in among a smashed and trodden bouquet of cheap flowers.

Filtration of Grand Contamination Utilizing Existing Local Natural Resources

Evacuated in masks

Police waving us through

Behind, the empty maze of the town

The tree-tops and church spire above the smog

 

Its up to them now

Left in the small and seldom parks

Token plantings or contested

Borderlines rife with sycamore and ash.

 

Cemeteries, those left-lone tomb walks

Under the grand span of holm oaks

And cedars around the walls to block off.

Now each crack and cleft

Is for seed and root;

Each mausoleum corner waiting

To host shoots.

 

Gardens; how easily the delineations of property

Will be broken, eaten, slipped through.

Pavers obscured by the tide of green to come;

Where bramble will rove over fences it shall protect

The giants of tomorrow germinating underneath.

 

Their offspring

Sure to rise hungry for air

Vagrant in once-fussed lawns

 

Once harangued,

Always cut and poisoned

And bled and eaten and pulled

Now, Emperor.

 

Surrounded by concrete and none

With the power to freedom

But themselves

 

Though the smog blocks light

They rise above;

Weaknesses none, save staticity.

 

 

Though they, our half-thought

Grand-forebears, are saviours of breath

The engines of their pores and photosynthesis

Pumping overbearing carbon into oxygen and moisture

And locking or digesting impurities

 

I am not so sure

They will be happy re-contained

When we are given

The all-clear.

 

Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing

The UK editions of Cormac McCarthy's work
are unfortunately very ugly

 I've been quite a McCarthy fan for a while now- I'd put my top three as The Road, Blood Meridian and Outer Dark. I found it rare so far (though I haven't read everything the late author wrote) to dislike one of his novels (though I didn't feel much of a spark with The Orchard Keeper.) This text, The Crossing, took me a long time to finish. I personally kept becoming detached from certain threads of the story and then at another attempt became swept up again.

    Despite being the second in the Border Trilogy it's stylistically and thematically very different from All the Pretty Horses, and felt like, despite great moments of violence and evil among the beatific wild countryside and romance in ATPH, a trek towards a lonesome mountain populated only with hidden darknesses and the philosophical grit of those who have had to bear witness.

    In these short reviews I attempt to give my honest take without spoiling much in the hopes you will be enticed to read- but at the same time, if you have read the text, that you will find something written here to compliment your own readings. 

   The first main section concerns Billy Parham taking a wolf he has trapped back into Mexico. I found this section really rubbed me the wrong way; the whole ordeal comes across as immensely uncomfortable, painful and maddening for the poor wolf, and we are never given much of a solid reason as to why Billy feels such a need to disappear for so long without telling anyone to take the wolf back to where it had just come from. America, the land across the border, then is the place where wolves can't be, where they cannot belong even though this wolf has made it, has naturally ranged into the territory. National borders mean nothing to such an animal. The permeability and nonsense of the border becomes more and more apparent as the text continues. Reading the story of the wolf, I thought many times of Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac, especially the essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain' in which Leopold comes to recognise the importance and wonder in every animal and how they fit into the natural world. 

    After the wolf's story, Billy wanders deep into Mexico, meeting proper wildernesses, human evils, and hearing of a nation racked by war and revolution. Everytime he re-emerges in the States, he finds that the border does not necessarily define a land where these things happen from one where they don't; on one of his later re-entries of the US, he learns after a time that America has joined WWII. I don't know how to explain it but in this book and also All the Pretty Horses I feel as though Mexico is portrayed as this older country, and the USA as younger, a whippersnapper. Perhaps in The Crossing it is in part because Billy meeting veterans of a previous war, only to emerge stateside and meet the young men newly enlisted; he has met their destinies in reverse.

    A random note, but, despite having grand moments of pain, anguish, hunger, and strife, generally when people meet Billy he is given extraordinary hospitality, often even from some of the most poverty-stricken people he meets, and in some cases even though he may not behave honestly back. Perhaps he appears as angelic, a very young white boy in rags on horseback- or, like the wolf met unto him through but a look in the eye, when they meet his own they can see the eye of the storm that sits within him.