A Postcard From London: Zero-Hours Watch-Face

Dear Magician,

The Sun: a kinetic sculpture by Rob Moore, part of his show Solis that I saw in a shop window in Bloomsbury. (Yes, I have now worked out some convoluted digital fiendishness to get photos into my posts.)

William Blake:
“Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done…”

---

Hemispherism / Desynchronicity

I must be over my jetlag, because I’m waking up in the morning with sentences forming in my mind. (It’s 6 a.m.; 1° outside.) Jetlag is a serious business, and what I have done is the full 180°,¹ about as opposite as it’s possible to get. I imagine my Grandfather’s Grandfather, coming on a ship that took a season to cross the ocean: a slow, gradual shift between one time-scale and another, like a diver surfacing gradually to avoid the bends— whereas the wrench that occurs when a person goes halfway around the world inside a day and a half is literal time travel, not so far removed from the kind shown in films, entering a spiral-walled wormhole and being spat out… Elsewhere… groaning and puking.²

I wrote in my journal, on the plane(s) / time machine(s): I’m in this weird day; I’ve fallen out of time & into space.
Travel is a thing people can do with their bodies. It boggles my little bodymind. My body’s rhythms continue in their accustomed grooves, but the very world leaps sideways.
I keep coming back to the body, untethered in timespace, dumb animal self. I keep thinking about terms like ‘cattle class’ (is there a more entitled, snobbish phrase?) & ‘red-eye’.
The plane is like a world outside the world— totally unreal. I want to say irreal, but the word is probably surreal.

On the first plane I had a window seat, but on the second and third planes I was in the planes’ guts, a placement that severed me from even seeing; severed me from the land entirely, rendering distance purely theoretically, as time-endured. Such time! A stretch like a desert of weirdness to be crossed. I kept thinking about my usual method of travel— on foot, and by public transport. The idea of travelling halfway round the world was literally incomprehensible. By the end of the flights, I had worked out that it was possible to watch a scrolling virtual map, or the feed from the camera set into the plane’s bellybutton like a jewel;³ to see, in an entirely abstract form (a grainy image on a tiny screen) where I was— to see, anyway, which lands were below me.

What did I dream, in liminal midair? I dreamed a kind of collective travel-dream. I dreamed I was on a train, sitting on the very front of the train as it raced through tunnels, ‘home’; & I dreamed we passed through places I guessed at— was this Switzerland, with its goats? Then the plane was touching down in a rainy, bricky place. [In fact, when I landed in London, it looked very much as it had in my dream.] Simple dreams, childish, but it’s an infantile state, being a passenger: you sit in your little seat & they feed you things.

My friend Philippa, a chronobiologist, says that even single-celled organisms have a day / night cycle. At Wellington Folk Festival she remarked to me that there were far too many (bright, artificial) lights: unnecessary. (As it happens, I agree entirely— I love the dark and the kindly half-dark— and I’ve noticed this supermarketish flourescent light-overload at Wellyfest many times. I keep meaning to bring a few standing lamps along. Light is vibe, basically.) Anyway, the day / night thing: most modern humans live lives regulated by clock-time, whereas I try to attune myself to natural rhythms as closely as possible— so I occupy a privileged little animal niche somewhere in between the single-celled organisms and the modern humans. I can’t really tell whether that made my jetlag worse, though. Josh, who lives his life slipping between time-zones, reckons it takes a day per hour of difference: that is, eleven hours difference between time zones will take eleven days to recover from. When I was in my first deluded flush of ‘Jetlag?! What jetlag?’ he patted me on the shoulder and gave me a 10mg melatonin from America, like Oh, you’ll see, grasshopper.

I’ve endured enough insomnia in my life to be familiar with the particular dragging, gritty texture of night-hours endured, the weary length of them— so I’m happy to be finding a new rhythm a few weeks in, just as Josh predicted.

I was going to write this to you on the back of an unfinished-Michelangelo-carving postcard I got for 50p in a charity shop in Tottenham, but I changed my mind. I’m writing it on one I didn’t even buy but only saw in the Socialist Bookshop in Bloomsbury, Bookmarks. I had been on a pilgrimage to the London Review Bookshop, where I bought a current issue of the London Review of Books. (I love the LRB, and subscribe on and off, but the issues are always weeks out of date by the time they reach the Antipodes, so to buy it hot off the press was a pleasure.) When I said his bookshop was one of my quests, the man behind the counter gave me a free tote bag with mauve handles and told me that one of his favourite poets is from Wellington: Bill Manhire.

My constant experience in London is one of overwhelm, and the London Review Bookshop was no exception. I just don’t have enough time to immerse myself fully. Any one of these places I glimpse would absorb a week’s perusal. Furthermore, finding-headspace / deep presence arises only from the internal spaciousness of feeling like one has all the time in the world. (I didn’t even enter the British Museum across the road, as that would require a full day at least.) The vintage clothes shops are the same: racks and racks and racks— I give up before I even begin. The difference between this vastness and complexity and, say, a humble Wellington opshop makes me think of libraries. In a small branch library such as Island Bay it’s perfectly possible to scan every single book spine in an hour, whereas in a large library (RIP Wellington Central, we pine for you!) you really have to know where to go to find the good stuff. That is, a familiarity with the Dewey decimal system and a sense of purpose, at least vague purpose, are necessary components.⁴ Otherwise the library-goer will be overwhelmed with possibility. That’s me in the Library of London. I don’t know its systems— I can see they’re there, but I can’t interpret them yet.

After that I wandered the streets of Bloomsbury. It was raining— the morning’s snow had turned back to proper rain— but I had bought a cheap umbrella at Boots when I emerged from the underworld. As I walked, I kept thinking about Werewolves of London: I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain. At the rim of Bloomsbury Square were two crows in the road pecking ketchup packets, but when I tried to talk to them with the karanga manu, they sauntered away, stiff-legged, Whatever, human. (My crow is improving, but London crows are well hard.) I found a fossil shop, where I saw a mammoth’s leg-bone— I took off my glove to touch it with my naked hand, as I’ve been doing with any particularly ancient buildings or trees I meet, trying to absorb deep time through my palm— and this tiny dinosaur from China:

Keichosaurus Hui. I like how it looks like it’s swimming through the rock.

—Then Atlantis, the magic-bookshop,⁵ where I perused the Tarot decks (there were none I wanted); bought a moon calendar for Maddy (English times on it: no good for NZ); and joined a conversation between the Witch-proprietor and an art-Wizard who had wandered in for reassurance about his new book. He had a bashful air, a blue-and-white striped jumper, and brass buttons on his coat (snap!). He spread his fingers out on the counter like aerial roots as he said he’d been trained as a Spiritualist medium, but only gobbledegook ever came through— so he decided to turn it into art. The Witch-proprietor was classic, Pratchettesque, sitting behind the counter piled with trinkets and book-stacks, resplendently winged by a harvest altar (pumpkins, russet leaves, dried hops) in her sensible clothes and glasses, a fruit-shaped Grandmother. (Grumpy rather than benevolent, though, the sign of a true Wizard / Witch. Like, don’t waste my time. Not quite Bernard Black, but definitely in those curmudgeonly realms.) I asked them if they’d seen the morning’s snow, but neither of them even knew about it. When the Artist-Wizard brought up the Flood, I mentioned Irving Finkel, a Wizard of the British Museum, who reconstructed the Ark from a cuneiform tablet: “Oh, we know Irving, he comes in from time to time,” said the Witch. “Bit of a crowd-pleaser.”
The door kept getting jammed on the Turkish rug, so when I left I was careful to close it.

—Then I found Bookmarks, the Socialist Bookshop, Liberating minds since 1973. Kev told me later it’s associated with the Socialist Worker.⁶ He said it used to be in Seven Sisters Road (where I went on the train the other day to meet Elise: it was very down-at-heel); now it’s at 1 Bloomsbury Street, an extremely toney address.

Anyway, the postcard I’m writing on, reconstructed from memory, shows a large wristwatch floating in the sky. The caption says ‘The perfect timepiece for the zero hour economy’, and every number on the watch-face is a zero. I’m writing using the oak-gall ink I bought from L. Cornelissen & Son, or as it says on the bottle, Eisen-Gallus-Tinte. I bought two shades, Salix and Scabiosa, and I’m writing in the Salix, which is a kind of dark dusty blue. (Cornelissen’s was another of my quests. The ink was very reasonably priced at £6.50 a bottle. Maddy bought some small sheets of vellum— she’s a botanical artist. I was interested in these: London Pigments by Lucy Mayes. They are colours made from London itself. Of course,

Caroline Ross

is the mistress of the handmade pigment arcana: her book Found and Ground tells you how to do it yourself, which is far more magical than buying paints from a shop.)

My first few days in London, the sky was a thick grey blanket. It made me feel panicky to think of not being able to see the sun, the moon. Where even was I? People reassured me that the sun does sometimes come out, but I didn’t believe them until I saw it with my own eyes.

On the very first day I went out walking. I went by feel, because I didn’t have a SIM yet, and I’m usually pretty good at navigating and wayfinding. I passed through the Orthodox Jewish quarter: black coats, wigs, and big fur hats; flocks of children, miniatures of their parents. I walked and walked in my new boots, wondering when I would reach the river. Soon, surely? Evening was drawing in (4.30ish) when I got to a big bus station,⁷ gave up, and jumped on a bus home. Afterwards I worked out that I had been walking North the whole time, convinced I was walking South. My magnetics are all reversed here! I should have noticed sooner— I would’ve, if I’d been paying proper, non-stupefied attention. For instance, when I was topping up my Oyster, I told the hole-in-the-wall shop guy that it was my first day in London and I was out walking, and he told me, somewhat baffled, that I should go to the centre. I am! I said. But I wasn’t.

Kev has tried to explain to me in the past that the sun goes backwards across the sky when you change hemispheres, and I could never understand what the fuck he meant, but now I kind of get it. When I wrote a note about the inverted magnetics, my Stack-bestie

Lidija P Nagulov

said ‘wait back home you just know where north is? You ARE a wizard.’ The feeling of the cardinal directions is much like the feeling of knowing left from right: you just feel them.⁸ But I guess it’s by sun, moon, and stars that you set and reset this knowing, which I couldn’t do at first, due to the overcast skies.

Another thing, though, that I just noticed this morning: at home, I always sleep on my right side. Turning over onto my right side is the signal to my body that it’s time to sleep now. I always thought that this was something to do with organs— bowel gravity or some such internal alignment. But the right-side trick doesn’t work here. I tried switching to the left, and that works a whole lot better. When in Upside-Down-Land, do as the Upside-Downians do!

My outing to Soho / Bloomsbury felt very city-watchy. As when I stumbled upon Highgate, I was riding along with Maddy for the fun of it, while she did something else.⁹ This randomness is an invitation to chance: I can’t yet interpret, so I let the city show me what it wants to show. All of which is to say that I’m feeling more and more like myself by the day. It is interesting to feel my deep bodily affiliation with the Southern Hemisphere by means of being whisked away out of it, like Dorothy. Maybe, too, there’s something to the belief that we leave our souls behind when we travel so unnaturally fast, and they have to catch up. I can almost see them, my poor weary shreds of spirit, fluttering ragged across the atmosphere, then coalescing like water drops, homing in on my pulse, a tiny glow down in the middle of vast grey London, then down-dropping, slipping in through a window-crack, then into my sleeping ear (the right-hand one, uppermost for once)… I wake up and immediately write this postcard to you.

Love,
Rose

1. Doesn’t that degree symbol look like a tiny planet?

2. Writing this, I suddenly remembered a time-travel dream I had a year or so back, wherein I found myself in snowy Christmastime London. I think it was after watching Bodies on Netflix. A few moments into the opening scene (of the TV show, not the dream) I was like ‘This is based on an Alan Moore book,’ though I’d never read the one in question: it just had his artistic fingerprints. I DID have an Alan Moore book with me on the plane— his new novel, The Great When— but I saved opening it until I arrived. Instead I home-ishly watched movies about historical Aotearoa, ones I’d been meaning to see: Ka Whawhai Tonu, which I only got to watch half of before I had to change flights, and The Convert. Both good, both fairly accurate— and The Convert had the personal home-touch of having been filmed somewhere on the West Coast.

3. Indeed, shades of The Dispossessed: the opening sequence describes Shevek, who has never left the ground in his life, enduring space-flight. (On the Capitalist planet Urras, the womenfolk shave their heads and dust them with glittering powder, leave their breasts bare over voluminous skirts, and wear jewels in their bellybuttons.)

4. However, more chance discoveries happen in the small library: some good-weird books reside in unexpected places, and also, sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it.

5. On the shelves, my eyes immediately fell on a book titled Werewolf Magic. Ahoo! Werewolves of London!

6. I always hear this phrase in my mind’s ear, in the tones of the street-cry Kev demonstrated to me— “Socialist WORK-ah!”

7. Where I found this card in the gutter:

8. Tyson Yunkaporta has some interesting things to say about wayfinding in Right Story, Wrong Story. I remember, for instance, a bit about finding water in the desert: you read all the signs, then ultimately you follow a feeling, a knowing beyond knowing. I was struck, too, reading that book, by the traditional method of conceptualising land from a birds-eye view, which makes sense in a flat landscape. (See also: G**gl* M*ps)

9. Also, we went there on the Tube, which I hadn’t yet done: swallowed into the side of the sparking metal snake and spat out at another cave entirely. Much like riding the Waiheke ferry, regular commuters hate / tolerate it, but I love it, the crazy underground rattling swerve and dash of it all. Guys! Guys! We’re on a BOAT / TUBE TRAIN!