Mark Fisher - LondonunderLondon (2005)

The This is the way to London Town. He awoke and focused, a dream or two waving from a couple of corners, quickly fading.

Out of the crisp clean sheets, into the bathroom, quite blind, still on automatic, shows the clothes from the wardrobe, slacks with a crease, the brown shoes from Yugoslavia in a long-gone style, the woollen shirt she bought to keep his heart warm. Pleased with the reflection, he passed into the living room, surfacing slowly all the outside it was green june and raining. Crowds of little leaves were adrip around the windows, overlooking a garden ending in shared potluck, against a sky where jets glinted, sunsets sometimes roar, leaving the rain white. Coffee and toast with marmalade, a brown egg in a

the blue willow-puffin cup. Eat slowly. Now, sit down in the armchair facing the windows and let consciousness flow in naturally. Digest the breakfast. Allow the bowel room to move before facing the big world. All around, the denizens shifted in car, bus, tube to do the office girls in fresh perfume and new styles, clocks and damp macintoshes, all crushing into containers, zip-off into walllets, pool corridors, strip lighting and type lights. Little sandwich shops roomed around the bases of the buildings, showing piles of white and

brown slices, content keeping. Green lettuce, red tomato, green cheese, banana, honey, mickin, egg. All under glass for the games. Smells of steam and coffee, gleaming pastries fresh from pre-dawn bakeries. Seated figures alone are a chap of the thick white flakes behind the misty windows. A smell of rain on warm concrete coming in with each refugee rattling the open closed side. And him off to his small job in the place he knew so well. He was content, an unusual state amidst all this rush and ambition. He didn't want to be boss or make

pots of cash, but merely loved his routines, waking, the journey, the weather, a park lunch, shop window walks, working well, going home with satisfaction, getting on with his little projects in the evening, Saturday shopping, Sunday strolls, the change of a season, a new shirt. Down Oxford Street, the buildings were festooned with ivy and Virginia Creeper. Trees grew from the windows of Selfridges. The pavements and tarmac were split by plain trees spreading across Marble Arch from Hyde Park. Purple loose strife waved in the breeze, scattering its white floating seeds, glowing in the late afternoon light.

He walked down fractured pavements smelling the recent rain. He wore, as usual, his grey suit, white shirt and dark tie. There were no other sounds but a breeze moving the trees, his own footsteps and scattered birdsong from all over the empty city. Above him the sky was bright blue now, and the light was going golden across the top edges of the crumbling buildings. At the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint Tower, its remaining upper windows glinting while most of the base was covered in vines.

A mile-a-minute vine especially had grown out from many of the gardens, and living up to its name had swamped quite a number of roads and buildings in the city. He often strolled through Hyde Park, then onto Victoria Station where thousands of birds had nested in its cast iron structure. The ammoniac stink of their droppings was choking, and the platforms and remaining carriages were covered in a greyish foot thick crust of extra red, gold, brown. Each year the city became more verdant, and each time he walked through the streets he noticed new erosions as front walls or roofs fell, revealing sections of rooms with different

patterns of piece wallpaper and furniture, often tangled with plants that had grown from seedlings blown through shattered windows. Many of the bigger buildings were amazingly well preserved though. He especially liked to walk into the Lyceum Ballroom on the Strand, and the Royal Albert Hall, though Hyde Park now surrounded it, was almost perfect inside, as were the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum, with all their dusty exhibits still intact. He sat on one of the few uncovered benches in the woods that Hyde Park had become, reading

the Daily Mail from June-July 1958, having found some library files in good condition. He read one each day, in order, carrying it with him on his daily walk around the city. He took lunch and tea breaks at the same time as he had always done, and always kept his and always kept himself engaged in some project. Recently he'd been reading the criminal files of New Scotland Yard, but found most of the crimes depressingly unimaginative, so he hadn't been back. After a while, he folded his newspaper and started on the way back down Oldsmouth Street.

The dried leaves of many hortons flown into the corners and doorways of all the shops, and some of the display mannequins were still standing in the dust and rain-streaked windows. He thought for a moment of going up to Harrods, but decided against it for that day. There was a beautiful Bechstein grand upon which he would practice for hours on many a summer's evening. His playing was progressing very well, he thought. He was even originating in some pieces of his own. He reached Tottenham Court Road and turned left at Centre Point, walking to Islington where he lived. He loved the city, now that it was deserted, it was lonely and beautiful, especially in

moonlight and on misty mornings. In springtime there were riots of blossom, in summer a wonder of fern and leaf, in autumn the mist and the spicy smell of fallen leaves. Red, gold, brown, and yellow. In winter, the stillness and clear biting frost and snow. He enjoyed walking out across the frozen Thames. One winter, he walked right from Tower Bridge to Richmond. Every season too had its memories, and every street. The crowds down onto the street, Christmas windows and the big stalls all aglow and glittering.

Summer boating on the Serpentine. Tea on the Roof Garden at Darien Toms in South Kensington on Miss Boy. Westminster, Houses of Parliament. Cinemas in Leicester Square. Speaker's Corner on Sunday. Tube trains, taxis, traffic jams, brick lane market in the East End. Political meetings, marches, police on horseback, news vendors shouting out headlines, the hotels on Park Lane. Now he could have a suite in all of them. The Dorchester was wonderful in summer, a pale green room overlooking the park. Tattered curtains blowing from his balcony, thick carpets, drifts of leaves in the corners.

At night he would watch the moon and listen to a whir of wings. Sometimes he saw the hares dancing or a stalking fox in the clearings below. The Ritz was lovely too, almost completely obscured by trees rampant from Green Park. He would wake up to a gently moving undersea light filtered through leaves and branches, and go down the long corridors like the walkways of a submerged ship, strolling out through the woods and over the bridge to the Houses of Parliament in the early morning, his solitary whistling echoing across the stained glass windows and vaulted roof.

he went to the BBC or NFT archives to select a film. He'd seen hundreds in this way, and was developing a filing system so he could relocate the ones he liked. There were thousands more to see yet, and he'd hardly started on the TV film and video material at Shepherds Bush and Teddington. He would take his chosen film to a cinema in Leicester Square, set set it in motion, then sit alone in the huge plush interior, smoking a cigarette or two, purely for nostalgia's sake, to see the smoke rising through the film beam. The old newscasts affected him greatly.

The Kennedy assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly warm black and white. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past, moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on. One of his favourite films was The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early Technicolor.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city's deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny, intimate details of these films. The jerky figures waving from seaside and gardener weddings, and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years. In these endless, empty apartments, too, he read through letters, looked tenderly through photo albums, books, clothes in the wardrobes, opening dusty curtains to views of the wilderness outside. In some of them, the greenery had invaded completely,

and he would find, for instance, in one flat near Horland Park, a sodden sofa tangled by the roots of a fig tree that must have formerly been a house plant, but now had extended its green branches out through a shattered bay window as its roots drew nourishment from decaying furniture. In another apartment, not far away, in Kensington, he opened a wardrobe and found half a dozen pure silk fortuny dresses that must have formerly been worth a few thousand pounds. They were not hung, but twisted and rolled into skeins to preserve their pleats. These dresses were said to be so fine that one could pass them through a wedding ring.

And as he lifted them, he marvelled at their lightness and the soft shining of their subtle colours in the dusty illumination from the windows. In this same apartment, he came across photographs of the woman who must have worn these dresses dresses as a young girl. She was very slender and typically 30s in style. Short hair, pale face, dark eyes and lips. The photos showed her standing among her friends in the gardens and drawing rooms of the well-to-do, through the years of changing fashions, the austerity of the 40s, the grey 50s, and as a good-looking mature woman in the early 60s.

After that, there were no more photographs, though she must have lived in this apartment for long afterwards. He stood in the soft beams of sunshine diffused by the curtains, caught for a moment in the stillness at the room, watching the dust swirling slowly golden through patches of light that fell across the carpets and furniture, feeling a strange closeness to the vanished woman. Being here and touching her possessions in the dusty intimacy of these rooms was like walking through her life. Everything of her was here but for the physical presence, and In some ways, that was the least important part of her for him.

As the light gradually faded into evening, he remained standing in semi-darkness. The foliage outside made dim, slowly moving shadows on the walls. He was remembering distant sounds of passing cars, and the way their headlights would sometimes flicker across the ceiling. He felt as though there was someone standing next to him, a woman. He could feel her warmth through his shirt, seem to catch a hint of perfume. He dared not turn to look all over him because he felt that even a small movement would dispel the achingly beautiful sensation. And he did not want that. So he stood alone in that room in the deserted city as the warm darkness fell.

Remembering the faint rumble of underground trains passing beneath his feet. Music from distant radios, voices, old conversations. Feeling the radiant closeness of someone intangible and gone. He watched as his reflection in a shop window passed behind a queue of people waiting for a bus. It was about 4.30 in the afternoon, in early summer. Long sunlight lit the suburban trees from behind. He felt happy and calm, comfortable inside himself. He had hardly spoken to anyone for about a week. It was the way he chose to live.

He took a bus to Leicester Square and went to see a film. He didn't bother to follow the storyline, but sat enjoying the movement, the warm semi-darkness, the shifting colours. Afterwards, he drank a glass of Guinness in a nearby pub, then took the tube back to his flat. The moon was out. It was a cool, clear night. Some random lines of dialogue from the film recurred in his memory as he watered the plants in his living room, and he thought that he should tidy up the spare room for the following day. He read a book about the countryside of England, looking at photographs of Derbyshire's green fields at Highmort.

Then he put out the light and went to bed. There was no one there. It's not true, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,

I remember on the morning of the last day I had a picture of what I said, pulsing when space breaks open. A time to have openings at the end. Like mouths. Like interfaces. There was a tentacle that went through the building and had an opening by the stairs of 30 feet away to my right. and creatures coming through it, then hovering away like birds or huge brightly coloured moths. Moth creatures. It was so vast, incredibly beautiful, but like it was all deep in an ocean. An ocean when they looked down the wind, and they found a different time.

nexuses and tentacles filled with brightly coloured lights and London somehow stretched through all over the empty city it was in this really big warehouse it's near the docks in one of the dock basins as if London somehow built up a charge and there was a partition on the Saturday and Sunday City lightning. And then people just stayed and other people turned up. It was perfect. And somehow the whole thing just kept going for a week. I think it has happened several times before.

Different groups living on different floors. And then the horizon was supposed to be the sun and the sun. And you could see the hills in the distance. But as the evening went on, it became more intense. And the most fantastic music playing somehow was more beautiful and much more weird at the same time. It was kind of special. And it just built and built in itself day after day. When space breaks open, time turns like a system.

I can't hear anything. No. It is quiet. I see what you mean. In the middle of London there should be some noise. I expect they're waiting to be brought here.

This is the way to London Tower. Queen's Way, Lancaster Gate, Strand, Chancery Lane, all in a half hour and it's creeping in all the time. Wildlife is finding whole new habitats in unlikely areas.

Urban centres and industrial sites are adaptable landscapes, packed with new advantages, quickly shedding their terrifying novelty and tilling up rich pickings from the trash, waste and squalor of our worst environments. and the birds are getting so fearless. I've seen a raven scouring for food in the middle of a main road, dodging traffic. Birds, mammals and insects make the most of urban living in ways so imaginative and unexpected that it's like a silent environmental revolution. Under this eerieous nature reserve, Abney Cemetery is still in the winter,

home of blackbirds, mistlethrush, wardeners, tawny holes, kestrels, among erect Victorian gravestones and a gutted church. A grey harrow fishing in a roadside pond near Stamford Hill, birds of prey hovering like marshes, along rail trucks and roads. Hipping foxes, the renegade and what they're breeding, and they're out to their country family, scraping from inner city suburbs, trading beans, dodging dogs, swarms and legal

clusters in the new Fountain Canal, St James' Park and its mad imaginary of exotic ducks, ducks, ghost-faced pelicans, and special gulls who can swoop in from 300 metres away to catch bread with air. All those green parrots in places like Elton Park, adding a dash of speared exotica, gentle foliage in the former, flitting like sprites to an elm and oak. Plus I swear there's some sort of killer eel alive in Hamsley Pond, the size of a small seal, blowing intimidating airplay with a kiss, its oily thick skin occasionally breaking the surface as if devours a live unsuspecting tufted duck.

More than that, there's new stuff in the beginning, like the gulls nesting on the high-rise islands. I love that. Amazing four-faced cliffs. Animals are totally reorientation way of saving the city. Even otters, whose numbers in England have grown five times since the 70s, are moving closer and closer into early pathways. Our cities are evolving into new natural territories, unexpected habitats, zones of conservation, like Walthamstow Marsh, where cattle is being reintroduced to facilitate the growth of some rare weed, or moss, or something.

Slowly and continually, wildlife is moving in, deep and rich our toy life and all our space. A total concrete jungle, especially if you include all the crazy people, all of us skimming our own territories, mining our roots and parading the streets. Now I will walk down past Askew, and visiting the world where I like life.

Thank you. I found the palace of green porcelain when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.

Only ragged vestiges of blood remained in its window, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judge Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. so

so Thank you.

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and apartment stalls, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard, frozen heads jerking stiffly. They launched themselves into the wake of the cuttle, snapping at the insects dislodged from the airweed and rotting logs, then swam through the windows and clambered up the staircases to their former vantage points, piled three deep across each other. Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dreamlike beauty.

But the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time boardrooms indicated, The reptiles had taken over the city. He had commandeered the Ritz the day after their arrival, eager to exchange his cramped

cabin among the laboratory ventures at the testing station for the huge ice-eating stateroids of the deserted hotel already he accepted the lavish brocaded furniture and the bronze art nouveau statuary in the coral finishes as a natural background as his history savouring the subtle atmosphere of melancholy that surrounded these last vestiges of a level of civilization now now virtually vanished forever. Too many of the other buildings around them again, and locks into slit.

slid away below the silt, revealing their gym-crack origins. And the Ritz now stood in splendid isolation, but we're sure. Even the rich blue mould sprouting from the carpets in the dark corridors, adding to its 19th century dignity. oh

Like it was deep in emotion. After that night, as Kieran's lay asleep in his bunk at the testing station, The dark waters of the lagoon outside drifting through the tram city, the first of the dreams came to him. He had left his cabin and walked out onto the deck, looking down over the rail at the black luminous disk of the lagoon.

Dense pools of opaque gas squirred across the sky, only a few hundred feet overhead, through which he could just discern the faint glimmering outlines of a gigantic sun. Booming distantly, it sent dull glows pulsing across the lagoon, momentarily lighting the long limestone cliffs which had taken the place of the ring of white-faced buildings. As the great sun drummed nearer, almost filling the sky itself, the dense vegetation along the limestone cliffs was flung back abruptly to reveal the black and stone-grey heads of enormous Triassic lizards. Strutting forward to the edge of the cliffs, They began to roar together at the sun The noise gradually mounting Until it became indistinguishable

From the volcanic pounding of the solar flares Kieran felt Beating within him by his own pulse The powerful mesmeric pull of the baying reptiles And stepped out into the lake His waters now seemed an extension of his own bloodstream As the dull pounding rose He felt the barriers which divided his own cells from the surrounding medium dissolving and he swam forwards spreading outwards across the black thudding water

Booming distantly, It sent dull glows pulsing across the lagoon.

No! No! No! Now I will walk down Oxford Street, envisaging the world rent by lightning. I will look at

oaks cracked and red where the flowering branch has fallen. I will go to Oxford Street and If I stop this world party, I will do the usual things under the lightning flash. Reckless and random, the cars race and fall and hunt us to death like bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous. Where shall I go then? To some museum where they keep rings under glass cases, where there are cabinets in the dresses that queens have worn?

Or shall I go to Hampton Court and look at the red walls and courtyards and the seameness of herded ewe trees making black pyramids symmetrically in the grass and the flowers? There shall I recover beauty and impose order upon my rate, my disheveled soul But what can one make in loneliness? Alone I should stand on the empty grass and say Brooks fly, somebody passes for the bag There is a gardener with a willbarrow I should stand in a queue and smell sweat And scent as horrible as sweat and be hung with other people like a joint of meat among other joints of meat. Here is the hall where one pays money and goes in,

where one hears music among Somnilin people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon. We have eaten beef and pudding, enough to live for a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster like maggots in the back of something that will carry us on. Decorates supportly, we have white hair waved under our hats, slim shoes, little bags, lean-shaven cheeks, here and there a military moustache. Not a speck of dust has been allowed to settle anywhere in our borderline. Swaying and opening programs, with a few words of greeting to friends,

we settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of wandering to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry shingle lies between us and the sea. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. Torped towards the heat.

It's going to be a good thing. Thank you.

It seems totally incredible to me now that everyone spent that evening as though it was just like any other. From the railway station came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. It all seemed so safe. The train.

Vampires may start out in Romania or Egypt, but they always end up in London. Mark saw that, as in the gaslit setting of the British Library. He laboured tirelessly on his interminable steampunk survey of the body of SF Capital. Capitalist dead labour, which found her life lives only by second living labour. The task Mark set himself is no less than to diagnose and cure the planetary geotrauma that began in London 500 years ago. Apocalypse is always now, and Marx is trying to cut his way out of the precent. If he can't break the timelines, the future will be nothing but more of the same. The endless end. Global subordination.

Capital's idiot cyber-tellers. Marx writes from the very epicentre of the ongoing catastrophe. The site where the capital artificial intelligence parasite, made up of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, first crash-landed on Earth. Since then, using the factory farmed population of the city to provide the mere conscious linkages it lacks, capital has itself become the solution to the perennial problem all Gothic entities face. How does what has never been alive reproduce? It uses your eyes and ears, your fingers, your brain. By virtue of the game value, The cat is aware of the inability to ever into itself. It's all in Osborne.

Approach from Westing Lake Key and see what corpses have sprouted on the Isle of the Dead. Barclays. HSBC. Bank of America. City Group. Capital mausoleums. Freeza-white canyons of finance ice. Pointing like rigor mortis fingers into the greyish purple. of the light-polluted helicopter sky. Necropolitical takeover of the docks, both functionally and spatially. No need for ships to provide global communication. There's no thought of the death and the death. Virtual ground zero. If they struck, surely it would be here. Here, where everything is already dead. And Cabot Square descend through the mock deco hallways

into the migraine, hyper-bright, no-wonderland of the retail arcades. The eternal noon of the living dead. And Saturday night in the city is always dead. The high-rise reptiles have slunk back to their lairs. Finance vampires, hand by day. And I too have been one of the dead. Duplicates have used my name while the alien parasite entity squats behind my eyes. down into the tube, hanging like a slab of bacon in the zombie meat trucks. The underground is the stalking zone of shambling automata. You know this in your dreams, and in what London dreams, in the fictions of Remarks.

That is why the London flood barrier against the real has had a spectacular record of failure. They were looking in the wrong places. The crowd flowed over the heaven bridge many times. Fictions about invasion are already invasions. . . .

As he completes Moses and Monothea in exile in Hampstead. For you can see what Nigel Neill can make to see. What you inherit from your parents is death. You come to be in a mortifying structure that precedes you. You only have a lifetime to escape. In the London Underground, Quatermass and Earth's parasites far more ancient than any marks described. Neil poses the same question as Wells, but differently. Will Earth become the second dead planet of the Martians? For Wells, the Martians that invade London from suicide are extraterrestrial pirates giving the British Imperium a taste of its own medicine. But

Professor Quatmas, the metapsychologist, can see that there was no human life that preceded the arrival of the murder guns of death. The discovery he makes in Hogsend is archaeo-psychic horror. Human beings were only able to carry a body for the alien death crime. There is no inside, and everything in your dream home is already owned by the parasites. That is why it isn't any traumatic fixation that compels Londoners to keep dreaming of invasion. Something else getting in would also be something in you getting out. Destruction

of the world is also flight from the strata, from the catechum of home, tomb of the Cybermen. The orphans whose electronic spines tingled to Delia Derbyshire's Doctor Who theme knew this as soon as they heard it in 1963. The uncanny is always the untimely. Delia Derbyshire is no more bound to her own time than Marx or Quatermas, the denizens of theirs. On the contrary, cutting up present time in the Radiophonic Workshop's lab in Maida Vale, she is a nomad of the time streams. She used concrete sources and silenced where we were surrounded, tuning the results, filtering and treating, cutting so that the joints were seamless, combining sound on individual tape recorders, re-recording the results, repeating the process over and over again.

Television was the unhomely vortex around which the 1960s British domestic scene was organised. The Chinese box display unit, opening out the so-called interior onto the media landscape. The wired kids who watched and trans had consumed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs with their breast milk. They know that terror is the name for the new, and they hear in Derbyshire's sonic construction, broadcast for the first time

the day after Kennedy's exploding head had inaugurated the 60s atrocity exhibition, a pre-sentiment of the decade's megavirants. but they hear something else in the radiophonic workshops audio uncanny which never sent a stage in the rock spectacle nevertheless quickly becomes unobtrusively ubiquitous An alternative now builds itself out of radio station idents and incidental music.

Earworms breed the hunger for a space in which they can propagate, out beyond the pleasure principle, on the strobing plateaus of the dance floor. You are alone.