The Molecular Biology of Paradise - Rupert M. Loydell

The Molecular Biology of Paradise
for Duncan

Text © Rupert M Loydell 1999 - Images © Duncan Simcoe 2000

Beefheart: 'That was an earthquake. Did you feel it?'
Zappa: 'Yes, but it was so small that it made the people seem enormous!'
- quoted by Miles in The Frank Zappa Companion

But as to risings, I can tell you why. It is on contradiction that they grow. It seemed the best thing to be up and go. Up was the heartening and the strong reply. The heart of standing is we cannot fly. - William Empson, 'Aubade' My summer was disastrous. I became aware that gravity had shifted, and had to work at staying seated. Long and winding lines led up to a woman whose sole qualifications are her skills at oral and phone sex. Jesus The Hot Air Balloon is an extension of my own self-absorption; I will topple out if I am not careful. Well, you know I am a savage, frightened and dazed. The mind is a monkey and, honey, so am I.
He took us to another world, writing the same book several times to make sure we understood. Each book the same journey through an imaginary city he had created from reality. He did not plan to travel anywhere; was a thousand miles away from his room, looking further into impossibility. He told me of a perimeter fence with a set of instructions for simulating the distance between, a technology of disorganization conjured up whilst lying in hospital listening to a beeping monitor. He was not interested in relying on science, wasn't accustomed to his environment; truly felt his strangeness in the world. His untimely departure, this forced narrative, seems to have finalised the future. He was not the one who chose his words. *
He lived and worked hard, so they say, journeying around Britain reshaping the novel, painting in obsessive bursts until a picture was finished. Maintaining the always implausible distance between the creator and his creation, he appears only once in his own work. *
I paid him a visit once and his attitude was not one of distress but, rather, of recognition. 'You know' he said, 'there is no silence.' He was delighted at being able to project all those sounds into the hall at once. If you've ever seen a man singing songs while trapped under a chaise-longue you'll know exactly what I mean. By arousing indignation or sympathy, he reminds us how fragile music really is; how finely attuned to the zeitgeist. *

Lying face-down in the middle of a pavement and waiting for passers-by to walk over him he considered the possibility of praying to himself. *
Living and working in self-imposed exile anecdotes and coincidences can be given academic credibility. So much for transparent scholarship! Haven't we got anything better to do with our time than look for dead writers in long-demolished buildings? The sociology of architecture is remarkably unexplored. Possibilities are weighed up in the light of fragmentary evidence which suggests a combination of seaside bungalow and modern lecture theatre. *
Visual devices serve many different purposes. It is a question not of temporal displacement but rather the erasure of narrative time itself. The ripples spread out beyond the furthest horizon, a chronological violation surrounded by a group of mourners - the after-images of a shattering bright light. *
He did all his painting looking through a telescope, seeing only a small bit at a time. Again and again he was marooned in no-man's land, a utopian idea of refuge. The wonders of his art are now being recognised. He very much desired to give something back to the viewer who had a compassionate side, wanted them to be silent and overpowered. For forty years his followers have been wandering through blasted landscapes and living on a more abstract plane. People always think there is something to understand, worry over the ghostliness and shadowlike quality of existence. There can be, there must be, and are several events which unfold at once, suggesting not only a confidence trick but also a feeling of vertigo. Do you know the posthumous work? Slow, impressionistic mood pieces. A landscape can reflect our lives: we are at the mercy of nature and the mechanics of lightning. *

The forecast hurricane did little except whisk a few leaves around in slow motion at the centre of a large, revolving city where dancehalls and vaudeville were booming. The performers all seemed to be in agreement, didn't stay because nobody would take care of them. Ah, the difficult beginnings of urban gentrification: places that seem both familiar and unknown. *
One of the luxuries of being older is that you know instinct is a good friend. Most bookshops contain a shelf or two of antiquarian graffiti and other crazy stuff. Congratulations upon your homecoming! I read about it in the transparent book where air is the centre of attention and we can learn of our living history. *
The whole of his journey was a pursuit of gossip, conversation and life. He hurtled around in search of a past, tampering with his own archives. All of his memories, his travels and trips, became an embarrassing piece of journalism he constructed on the return voyage, having made up his mind to become a writer. Only interested in timelines and maps he was always several movements ahead. He had an incredibly strong character and learnt to make a proper apple pie. Fond of the byways of historical accident he finally invented his own strange country. Around midnight he returned home, hardly disturbing the beauty and calm.
He persuaded his mother that she should learn to ride a bicycle. The result was both ugly and silly, a faked industrial accident. Faceless women dressed in black assumed funereal poses and gestures that implied tenderness and violence. It seemed sophisticated, cosmopolitan even. As a metaphor for limbo, a dead-end place, it gave glimpses into the exotic unknown: we knock on the door of a hotel room hoping technology will carry us to paradise. *
Walking backwards through life after years of observing failure he gave up and agreed to do it. He blessed a pile of envelopes, licked stamps, but refused to join the community of pronunciation or make donations to the Pygmy Fund. He was far too bogged down to take in anything with perspective. Internal divisions made the creation of strategy extraordinarily complex. Disagreement eventually led to estrangement and decline, habitual and ritualistic poodledom. *
Now he lived his life around his family, grabbing time after the baby was in bed, or napping in the afternoon. Suddenly he felt like an old man, detached from the music and books that he loved. Each afternoon he walked through town with the buggy, and a head full of all the things he would rather be doing. He felt beaten into submission, puzzled; everything around him had changed. His business was running without him, or maybe wasn't running at all; he wasn't quite sure what was happening. His world was slowly turning into one long playtime, squatting on the rug. *
Should prevailing winds prove favourable, pilot Bob Hawkins may release the tethers from his gentle giant of the air and sail towards intellectual tension. He knows from all the time he's spent with human beings that, although they're precious, there isn't really a system. Not having the imagination to set out his own vision he sought out a few good men to become part of the crew. Most were captured voluntarily through manipulation of drinks and well-judged insults. That, and a lot of special pleading. *
Walking backwards meant he could always keep an eye on where he'd been. Here is understated melancholy; there is much more comfortable. Up ahead, paradise eluded him, but he'd wandered so long that even eternal homelessness seemed little threat to anything. He longed for his younger self, the cars and trucks and fire engines he'd imagined himself driving one day, criss-crossing a fabulous country. He scanned the skies for the puff of wind that might take him up in final ascent. 'All clear for takeoff!' he shouted, keen to arrange the passage of light. People laughed and pointed as he fell into the zone where nightmares are earthed and dreams are impossible to eliminate. *
He sat in the border patrol's hut thinking how interesting it would be to exhibit interior conversation, make some sort of collective reading. He wrote out his life as an alphabet, a fictional wander through memory. Ideas and impressions formed patterns which have a sense of inevitability. There were tales of bilocation, inexplicable cures, instant conversions and prophetic visions; his parents brushed aside bullets and bombs to walk through the orchards of silence. He wanted to make it clear, this molecular biology of paradise; it's interesting how we furiously name things: Devon, Cornwall, Bosnia and the unknown. His descriptions are captivating: part narrative, part death-bed memoir; heavy black gestures and brushed asides which will later turn out to be fiction.
He felt a yearning for those summers he'd spent performing as a mermaid in the backwaters of his hometown, and with his contributions to gaiety earned a footnote in the Rough Guide. Now his world had to be reconstructed. Slipping and sliding in a lake of echo he became one of the cornerstones of transcendental homelessness; as a pioneer in surrealist ethhnography found shelter in the bosom of paranoia and in elaborate percussive exploration. He transmitted cries that could not be ignored and found himself in a suburban parking lot. Tranquility hung in the air like petrol. *
A squiggle of lines that resembles nothing much at all travels with ease and economy from the margins to the centre. The noise of faint, murmuring voices seems to resonate nicely with a sense of danger. Military dictators, comic book heroes and cartoon figures hysterically squish urgent faces up against windshields. A troubled narrative of fear, laughter and perversity, the work questions where real life ends and art begins. *
His terminology changed according to tactical advantage. Just look at his dialogue: no-one ever spoke like this. Informal, often gossipy, his answers unambiguous, he lifted his bicycle from the hedge and cycled furiously alongside. His need to monopolize conversation, his selfishness and recklessness, his lifelong willingness to risk disgrace have to be viewed in close-up. He was trying to save their sons from war and large pockets of industrial decline. Woodwind and cello solos were eloquent and sensitive, sometimes extremely lucid. The significant movement in his novels is internal, a fascinating window on to a romantic world, yet there is no way round the fact he was a bore, or that he used mundane imagery and objects. *
He finished all the night shooting then waited by the lighthouse. His eyes grew wider and wider as the balloon rose overhead. *
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. - John Cage, For the Birds
SOURCES: TLS, April 9 1999 TLS, April 30 1999 Bruce Chatwin, Nicholas Shakespeare flyer, The Merrit Ministry, California letter from Duncan Simcoe The Night of Our Days, Luna The 20th Century Art Book Art Review, April 1999 Caravaggio, Leo Bersani & Ulysse Dutoit 'Richard Wentworth talks to David Barrett', artclub, Spring 1999 London Review of Books, volume 21 number 10, 13 May 1999 For the Birds, John Cage Art Monthly, April 1999 Sight and Sound, May 1999 Exotica, David Toop Art New England, April/May 1999 Rodinsky's Room, Rachel Lichtenstein & Iain Sinclair London: the lives of the city (Granta 65) Gratitude is extended to the editors of Acumen, Iota, Hummingbird, 10th Muse and Slope, in which parts of this sequence were first published.

A Raunchland Publication 2000
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