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.

Emperor's Last Wish

I wrote this piece while fresh out of university, seemingly unemployable, angry and sad. I was working at a venue cafe/bar and sometimes for a catering company, both zero hours. We'd just moved to Bristol. I had so little money, and way too much time on my hands. I have edited it here and there for readability, but have kept a lot of it as this is what I was feeling then, no matter how silly it is to read back all these years later. 

(April 2024)

Emperor’s Last Wish

 

Through the condensation,

I see him stood still, too still in that room.

Oh my boy, my son’s son,

What hath befallen the house.

 

I wander the palace

With my robe open and my crown gone

My mumblings echo around me.

2017: I’m earning less than minimum

to keep payments up

water                 TV

electric             rent

gas                      tax

to keep living in this mouldy flat,

the books mouldy, the woodwork, clothes,

shoes, plants. The corners green and puffy

The kitchen, an expanded cupboard.

the air ripe with moisture and spores.

Eyes are peeling from screens.

 

The palace is cold; outside it snows

But here no fires are lit. I know nothing of the Empire

(never had one)

my advisers and cohort are in flight

(23, masters degree, sit around all day)

don’t answer the phone,

barely wash. Can feel

my back curl over and in

on itself, a snails shell building

for me to hide my digestion in.

Mouth cannot fathom

Conversation.

Perhaps it is I who

Lurks in the freezing palace, listening

To the Emperors bare feet slap pathetically

On the marble and stone.

No jobs, barely a plight of career.

I look back on my diaries in youth

And to the unrealised dreams and futures around me.

Had such dreams, destined now to grow into

An old man heating a can of ravioli alone in a boarding house.*

Even that old man must have a blade for this emperor endling?

Mad with incestual nobility, his fingernails long and varnished

His body scarred with many idle and odd habits

Despite it all, despite everything,

Out there the farms grow

Small things find shelter in woods

And deep animals bray and buck

Strange, odd, despite it all.

 

2017: never been to America

can’t speak no languages.

Feel myself getting paler day-by-day

The Emperor hasn’t spoken in weeks.

Today I have seen the sun rise and set

From the pearl light of the main room window.

Car horns, reversing tones, seagulls, bicycle brakes, sirens.

The Emperor can’t find the exit

And even if he could he’d be lost

In his rotten, unattended gardens. He never sleeps, merely fumbles in fugue and delirium.

23… People my age have sailed the world

and invented life saving devices.

5 years ago 18. Big dreams burst hard, slow.

Since August I’ve killed time wishing I were dead.

The Emperor’s best knights have smithed their swords into plows

Their armour to spades, their shields to barrows,

Their warcries to coos and trills over their children

And calls to the sheep dog, the hunts dog,

And the calming ‘woah’ to horse and cattle.

Court jesters and servants have become tyrannical barons

Swollen on the wealth made from stolen palace jewellery.

I cannot make next months rent; I sell all but a pair

Of my shoes, all my books.

I somehow know, despite his incoherence,

That the Emperor has a final wish.

Strange to think this is the same Emperor

Whose mother stood like iron and traded

With all the Empire’s strange and alien neighbours,

making sense with councils and senates

while she harboured cannon and spears in the borderlands.

Strange to think I haven’t left the house all day

I know what I need. My hands need to meet soil. Take root.

Or give myself to ophiocordycepts unilateralis

Or lencochloridium, to be proved finally useful, nutritious,

Sustainable. The Emperor’s old knights step out their homes in

The first frosts of autumn, see their breaths, and feel good.

Good harvests are soon to come. Great migrations have occurred,

Across mountains, across seas. They are looking for peace.

I moved from the coast back West. I need the sea, to give

My world a full stop; the tide line an assuring stitch.

Woods retake old fields of wheat, consuming the hedgerows.

The Emperor has not made it outside;

Hear him gasp and struggle,

Slips on the hem of his robe, wriggles on the floor,

Long talon nails bend, splintering yellow and brittle as they are.

I sleep and wake with no difference;

Like a damp candle I treasure little energy.

The Emperor, his fluttering mouth blinking,

His raving eyes screaming,

Finds me in the throne room (he has made a full circle)

Where I await him with his mother’s sword.

I know his final wish as I know my own, and

Here I am, in impossibility,

Eager to meet it.

 

 Cotham, Bristol 2017

*Line taken from a Noah Van Sciver diary comic.

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.