I Wanted To Believe

They don't want to think about this; they just want to sit, half-asleep and blurry-eyed , in front of the TV while the city carries on outside. Some of us never leave here, fearing that which beats upon our doors every day, frightened even of the gentle stream of warm sea air that falls on our windows and so we keep them closed, our homes sealed against the growing collection of conspiracies and evil-doers. I sit and think of distant places, uninhabited forests and empty grasslands, untouched since the Romans ruled us. Each night I hear the gentle patter of rain on leaves and see through my closed eyelids the not-quite-black of late summer midnight as I put myself in these places. They have always been here, direct links back from now to those ancient times, as clearly a part of history as the trail of DNA that links how we look to those ancient invaders. It's all poetry, rhyme and excited writers, imagining things and places that never will exist and knowing how important it is to keep these things alive in our minds.

From up here, this city is just gentle ambience, a distant thrum of traffic and air-conditioning, sounds which fill this tastefully-lit space between skyscrapers. They keep our rent down and somehow seem to want to look after us and yet we think of them as enemies. We turn to notes to refresh our memories which fail more and more now, broken to fragments of images and sounds by the invisible vapours that filter up from the ground. And so I still dream of the clear, cool night air in those imagined places. And while we fade from childhood to those last days in forgotten corners of white-tiled institutions, we steal the strength of our society, forming bands, arguing points we know we cannot win, inhaling things to make us forget, training our minds to make us remember and failing in everything we want to start. We were a band - we ARE a band, not because of our jabbering, spiky sounds but because we are together and behave like a band, sitting in this van believing in our own futures and that of the world we know we will make better. And all the rest is made of short, meaningless sentences that mirror our music with pertinent observation and deep felt pleas for fairness. And of course lots of money and all that goes with it. I sometimes cannot tell how many of us there are because, to be honest, it all still seems so undefined, that I cannot believe that any of us really exist. Oh - you are thinking that maybe with the money comes drink and drugs and distracting objects of desire and maybe you are right. Certainly I remember forgetting things and feeling as if I had missed important events in my own life. But looking back on everything that has happened since I can first remember things, it is still clear that they really happened and have not just been seeded, planted, forced into my head by shady therapy that reverse bootstraps its way out of memory, leaving me with memories of things that just didn't happen.

It all seems to fall into place too easily though doesn't it? It's like a huge piece of music or writing which must, for balance and euphony, end on particular note or key, or a stressed or unstressed syllable. And then someone comes along and takes out your carefully-crafted ending and it all falls apart - becomes run-of-the-mill - a piece of Hicksville journalism, made so by a single crass use of blue pen. All is poetry - rhyme and rhythm broken down to meaning and beauty and then killed in a single ejection. The world is full of such things. And yet, taken overall, our lives have a train of meaning that no bad ending can destroy. We are a band and we will break up, blown apart by the wind that makes the rain or other meteorological misfortunes - split by the everyday that gets into our idealistic drives and promises and makes us into unresponsive adults, forgetting that we were young and always happy no matter what happened to us.

A single indefinite article too many or too few, and the whole piece fails, leading to foul-mouthed recrimination and the forgetting of all else. Under the feet of marching Romans, in the waters taken in spa towns, between the pages of Doctor Johnson's opinionated manuscripts - in all these and everything else we can imagine existing at any time - we may find fragments of the bones of the people we came from. Remember those links and remember those forests in your visualizations and whatever else your 200-dollar-an-hour shrink recommends to stop the voices and the fears. The air gets into the house no matter what you do, no matter how much you block up the gaps to stop the gas. Today is colder than before, one more day gone. But in a universe without time, you are no older today than you were yesterday. Colder but not older.