OUT OF HIS DISCOMFORT ZONE:
Fantasia On Sinclair’s The Gold Machine
By David Hackbridge Johnson
(click older posts below this article to read essays on Frances Cornford, Angus Wilson, Edward Cowie, Apocalypse poetry, and other interesting topics)
i. Escape from London
Sinclair in
Peru. Having seen the last of London[1],
our habitual walker Iain Sinclair – as if only his relentless steps will
trigger words – seeks new vistas. In
search not merely of altered scenic states but in search of a relative not
quite lost in the pages of a colonial-era travel book – a travel book with a
distinctly commercial purpose that hides much else. London’s Laureate of Detritus, the
great-grandson of the colonialist, heads out, and has to check himself – heading
out not for London Fields or to the swollen wellington boot of Victoria Park –
but to the airport. Total escape. Up and over the city’s cat’s cradle of weird
geometry – bursting the force fields of dowsers and ley line hypnotics.
But within a few pages of The Gold Machine, Sinclair’s new book from Oneworld, we are greeted
by a slew of discarded plastics and a severed head, one surely prone to
resurrection at the drop of an eldritch incantation. Awaking in a house on stilts near Chupaca,
central Peru, and walking outside to find ‘a display of bright blue plastic
bottles, silver cans, oranges, black bags, broken twigs and dead leaves’[2],
Sinclair might be greeting a grim dawn on Mare Street or Garratt Lane –
thoroughfares with gurgling throats greedy for rank offerings. The severed head has not been rolled out of
the pages of Lud Heat[3]
or from a bin liner underneath a beer-sticky table at The Blind Beggar – it is
that of Túpac Amaru the Inca rebel. It
is expected to grow a body and announce the next glorious Inca Empire. Find the head and administer the correct
libation.
Plastic filth and beheadings? – as if acquired
in the Duty Free shop en route to
Peru? We might wonder if Sinclair can
ever get out of his discomfort zone – can throw off the louring clouds over
Haggerston or banish the gently lapped body parts of murder victims as they
languish in canal depths. Will London's addled dithyrambists be thrown
off the scent by an alien climate? Will the virtuoso
alcoholics and deflowered Blakean angels miss the flight? Has Sinclair set up so potent an array of
tawdry gods and their eager servitors that he cannot escape their influence? A perma-looped Snake Plissken movie.
Must these dire inevitables follow our most intrepid unholy holy walker as the two
cloaked figures pursued M. R. James’ hapless Mr. Wraxall, author of
travelogues, all the way from the sarcophagus of Count Magnus to Belchamp St.
Paul in pre-gangster Essex? Won't the
whole project be strangled by a tightening scarf of fever hospitals, a sodden blanket
of medical notes from a landfill of mental patients? Won't a reignited pre-Bazelgette
honk drift westward over the Atlantic to fester the sinuses, obliterate the
heady scent of jungle flora? Quick! – let
go the gangway! - here they come! – a lemming-stampede of ecstasy zombies,
steroidal bouncers, wired poets – wannabe Hart Cranes twitching for ocean-going
suicide epics, leaking Portaloos on wheels, deliriously untethered from Thames
Gateway building sites.
The answers to these (far too many) questions
form a series of yeses and nos. Peru is the setting of the book but London
is the bulbous glinty-eyed head that sits at the centre of radiating tentacles
of Capital. The money flows in treacly substances – coffee, rubber, sugar
– even the planter comes up from the acquired earth, fingers sticky with sap. A colonial entity inhabiting late Victorian
masonry that from dressed stone cliffs sends out its agents to surmount all
geographical impediments to progress. If
we miss the rheumy hangover dawns in Vicky Park, or the burst bin bag slurry
outside Brick Lane curry houses, we get compensation – Sinclair is certainly
alive to equatorial odours that would incinerate in a flash the discarded fish
papers of an East End winter. And he is
quick to spot the remnants of the colonial project, or the project’s
continuation by other means. We see Peru
as a photographic inversion of London – the death-grey pallor of slum clearance
zones and effluent-filled quarries now rendered in impossible jungle richness -
a drenching of vegetal greens and the hot coals of scuffed rock. Broiling
skies and absurdly eager insects. Ashen
Lunar to blood-orange Martian.
ii. Different
Maps
In a change from previous non-travel travel
books, Sinclair has had to give way to hitherto unneeded direction – no auto-dérives of Brick Lane or Mile End Road. We are spared knee-jerk trauma-crawls along
Commercial Road or Whitechapel Road – those sclerotic twins to the benighted
east – spared the buddleia invasion of abolished boozers – the topers rattling
padlocked cellar access hatches. This
journey lacks a willed un-mapping. It is
Sinclair’s daughter Farne who with efficiency and determination deals with the
practicalities – timetables, negotiations, cash-handling – at the same time
pursuing a podcast project of her own. This
being The Andes, Sinclair gets to do less walking as the sandpaper air thwarts
breathing; journeying is rather by mountain railway or by means of white
knuckle rides on thrashed and seatbelt-less taxis. Shorn of familiar Hawksmoor or Watkins
alignments, a new set of connecting nodes are found on a map of Sinclair’s great-grandfather,
Arthur Sinclair – Aberdeenshire born, displaced from the Highlands due to crop
failure, colonial surveying and planting in Ceylon, further travels, one
last-ditch attempt to recoup vast losses in untouched Peru.
Not Túpac Amaru’s, but Arthur Sinclair’s head
is the one that must speak by genetic connection – colonial trailblazer to
Hackney's resident composer of street fugues – he is the one that sets the route
as laid out in his 1895 book In Tropical
Lands: Recent Travels to the Sources of the Amazon, the West Indian Islands,
and Ceylon. No territory is as
vacant as a map might show. The maps
come after the journeys and are biased by intent. Discovery is simply a form of replacement. The white spaces on maps are only assumed to
be empty for purposes already decided.
Thus Arthur’s directive from the Peruvian Corporation of London is to
survey land suitable for coffee cultivation.
The land can be assumed to be empty and ripe for exploitation. Prior claims by means of residence have no
appeal. Iain Sinclair’s maps have always
been cluttered, pocked – the virgin lines of force obscured – and yet for a
corporation-minded entity, the clotted areas – Docklands, the Lea Valley – are
‘empty’. Thrusting commercial purpose
eradicates the living and being of the target lands, reducing vast information
streams to a thin white noise easily filtered out. One map is brim-full, the other a vacuum to
be filled. In this sense The Gold Machine is a true part of the
Sinclairian project – the relentless charting and recording of displacement,
how places fill up, empty, and fill up again.
A cyclical sluicing of poverty’s gruel for the sake of those vast repasts
beloved of the glutton. The land grab
might be a million acres of forest or a row of terraced houses in Bow inviting demolition
– failing that, arson. Covert operations
both, and a mass suppression – a culverting of the means of mobility. Abolition of and egress and ingress. These outcomes are the result of, as Sinclair
puts it, ‘the never satisfied malignancy of capital’.[4]
iii. Stones in
Sepia
Some of the generous quotations from In Tropical Lands will be familiar to
readers of Sinclair’s Dining on Stones.[5] This remarkable and dizzying book from 2004, assumed
by many to be a novel, reveals splits in personality, landscape, and
narrative. A familiar cast of hacks,
gangsters, slum landlords, booksellers, photographers, perverts, and bent
coppers, pursue each other over the blast zone of the A13 and the south east
coast of England. Barren urban lands are
mirrored in quotations from In Tropical
Lands in what is perhaps a trial run for the work that might give Arthur
Sinclair, called Arthur Norton in the earlier book, an even more prominent
voice. It has taken Iain Sinclair 16
years to prepare for the journey that leaps from pages of a book to the living
landscape of Peru.
Sinclair's prose in Dining on Stones is largely wrought from those exquisite
modulations that underlie a riff of low-level perils; ones that threaten at any
moment to escalate to an east end Joe Pesci going for the jugular with his biro
– the prose so honed that it makes Sinclair a dark, Baroque twin to Ronald
Firbank – the two sparring for black-comic supremacy – where Firbank glimpses a
fleeing choirboy under dim clerestory light, Sinclair comes up against a
slavering dog on a chain by every lamp-post.
Gobbets of text that make Hemingway seem like Proust: ‘Muscle: on the
piss. Larging it. Hawaiian shirt, medallion, clenched fist,
bottle.’[6] Sinclair's is the more panoramic capture – garish
John Martin vistas as against Firbank's besmirched Vermeer – the depraved cardinal
may be an undignified anomaly on chequerboard floor tiles but the vom-starburst
on the pub toilet splash-backs is a more urgent millenarian warning. White cliffs of soiled porcelain. There is less of this modus operandi in The Gold
Machine, as if Sinclair can't find the audience in Peru for his one-liners.
Or one-worders.
Dining on Stones features many characters on the run. They know
too much. Mocatta (perhaps remembering
Mocata from Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil
Rides Out) the highly dubious head of a vast property empire, pulls the
strings of the residents of Cunard Court, the ocean liner-like edifice moored
on the south coast – an architectural memorial to colonial shipping. Escapees of the Rachmanite tendency have seemingly
been injected with tracking devices to ensure that the psychotic hood will
enter whichever greasy spoon caff they thought was safe. Acid-shitting gulls scatter. Everything dries up to a ball of salt on the tongue.
Don't be seen – but it’s no good, you’ve
been spotted. The bedsits, cafés and squats
may mimic safe-houses but are traps. The
plumbing is a conduit for slaughter.
Running, only means you run straight into what you were running from,
only faster.
In The
Gold Machine we might imagine Arthur Sinclair running from Iain Sinclair –
we can’t be sure if it is the other way round – ‘the future flows into the
past’.[7] On the
run from each other but fated to appear together – as Stephen Dedalus and
Leopold Bloom – in an unlikely setting.
Old photographs are clues to possible routes for flight or congress. They show backgrounds that give away
territory and purpose – the lush flora locates you. Do the figures of history run away from us or
towards us? – do they hide away with guilty secrets or rush out of albumin
pools to batter us with pleas for context – or clemency? The photographs – formal or otherwise – might
appear mute one moment and ranting the next.
Sepia is the tint for both a funereal shroud and a liquid of
resurrection. As in Walter Benjamin and
W. G. Sebald – both photographic conjurors – the images held up for our gaze
won’t stay still. All the ancient faces
– their sandy colours bleeding out of the frame – are telling us that we are doomed. Look into my eye, says the camera, and you
are dead.
Both these books feature film left in a camera;
undeveloped for over a 100 years by Arthur Norton in Dining on Stones and Arthur Sinclair in The Gold Machine. Each
Arthur leaves images that cannot die until exposed. Pre-ghosts on cellulose.
iv. Atrocity Exibits
The ultimate focus of all the narrative strands
in Dining on Stones is the
murder/suicide/truck crash on the M25 – that ring road whose narrative cannot
end – ‘a necklace of hammered metal’.[8] A fitting point at which to begin again with
the street furniture slightly rearranged.
The attention of hack authors and their doubles (or triples: ‘two Nortons
were never going to be enough’[9]),
TV crews, CCTV, the police, the gossipmongers, the hangers on for titbits of
flesh, form the composite vulture that views atrocity as a natural feeding
ground. The dismembered vicar (head
missing, probably talking) is subjected to a similar frenzy of voyeurism. Knowing that the murder of Rev. Freestone can
be traced in the real-life horror-demise of Rev. Ronald Glazebrook may confound
good taste but Sinclair runs up against uncomfortable truths in a way that
highlights a grim methodology: fact and fiction bleed into each other for sure
– but Sinclair shows us that this apparent metafictional game is actually a reality
– taking together events and their many versions, visionary lies if you will,
is the superstructure of human action.
It is a mistake to see Sinclair (and writers like J. G. Ballard and
William Gibson) as piggybacking onto diluted ideas from trendy post-structural
thought –in taking seriously a thinker like Baudrillard (perhaps the most
trendy) with his view of total exposure, the pornocracy, the simulacra,
Sinclair can posit a truth about the way life is lived and regurgitated in the
21st century. Fact is
captured in fiction and vice versa. Imagine it, and it’s already happened, and is
ready for immediate download – ekphrastic transcripts of the CCTV phalanx that
can never be turned off. Surveillance of
surveillance. Puffa-jacketed operatives
mounted on pigeon spikes.
If Dining on Stones is written on a Mobius
strip of twisting narrative, The Gold
Machine exhibits fewer kinks in its travelling. Where targets are looped in the earlier book,
they are achieved in The Gold Machine
according to Farne Sinclair’s timetable: from Lima inland to Chicla, forked
journeys north and east, frustrated approaches, approaches only, to the remains
of the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa. Along
the way: asides on another Arthur – poet turned trader/gun-runner Rimbaud, on
Patrick Sellar – enthusiast of The Highland Clearances, on Allen Ginsberg –
hunting for a yagé-fuelled enlightenment.
Robert Mitchum – a starring role in Dining
on Stones – is not available for The
Gold Machine, but Klaus Kinski is – a lunacy-portage of the 320 ton steamer
over inconvenient jungle in search of the last rubber tree parcels.
By the
standards of the day Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather is relatively
enlightened – he is indignant at the treatment of Chinese labourers for example,
laying their bones down for shovels of guano in the sure knowledge that their weight
of numbers makes each one of them expendable.
These ordure-harvesters lead lives as wretched as the ‘moss lairds’ of
Perthshire, forced off the Highlands to desperate jobs that barely nudge above
sea-level – inevitable diseases of the land being worked – a dry run, that is,
a wet run for World War 1 trench foot and destroyed lungs. The massive trade in guano, primarily from
the Chincha Islands, may have brought potato blight to Ireland and Scotland,
thereby driving Arthur off his patch of land and forcing him to seek his fortunes
abroad – colonial ironies abound.
Despite his moments of sympathy for downtrodden workers, Arthur remains
an instrument of his employer The Peruvian Corporation of London; the essence
of his work being the surveying of land; the determination around its potential
commercial exploitation. His great-grandson
comes to see the self-same dynamics still in play at places like La Oroya where
corporate-governmental enclosure and despoliation of land is as eager in the 21st
century as it was at the end of the 19th – a continuity of rapine
despite the changing logos of mining companies.
Sinclair links the centuries: ‘La Oroya is hell. Old hell like the crusading denunciations of
Zola and Dickens.’ Joseph Conrad and
Roger Casement in the thick of these old hells, come alive before us, as they
do in Dining on Stones.
Iain Sinclair
has managed to avoid easy virtual signalling – he eschews bare-headed expiation
on a knee-shredding Chemin de Croix.
Rather he lays out the thoughts of someone confronting past and present
realities as well as those of a searcher for a long dead relative who played a
part in the colonial age. There is shame
at the appalled acceptance of history, coupled with an admiration for his
ageing great-grandfather on his perilous journeys. Having a copy of Arthur's photo with him is no
mere cosy reminder of ancestry for Sinclair, rather it forms part of an
unbidden but surely expected conjuration – this is a head that must speak from
its sepia tints. And like those snakes reported by ayahuasca partakers,
the head speaks disdainfully; there is a ‘Scottish countryman’s derision for
the shiftless cockney’.[10] Would he view his great-grandson’s ghosting
of past journeys as merely touristic? The Gold Machine presents alternative
Sinclairs treading on each other's heels.
Or not quite – Arthur always up ahead disappearing round a corner of the
trail. Or is Arthur following Iain? – a
familial ouroboros – the snake eating its genes. Different lives spiralling out from a core –
as Norton's second wife Hannah puts it, in Dining
on Stones: ‘describing biographies of my savagely repressed alternate
lives'.[11]
Hannah through the language madness of David Cooper, may hold the key to that
book; perhaps she holds it to The Gold
Machine. Unlocking the multiple
Nortons and Sinclairs.
Can two books become one? Mirrors facing
each other? Soon there will be a theory that if you read The Gold Machine backwards, or reconfigure it as an onion of
interlocking Raymond Roussel parentheses, you will come up with Dining on Stones. A dialogue
between the real Peru and fictional Rainham Marshes then – except that the
blurry line between fact and fiction swells like a flooding river to wipe the
entire picture. The whole venture threatened
by prose therianthropes – narrative body parts parading willy-nilly through the
unquiet dreams of hapless protagonists. And
things can get worse. As the viral
nature of ‘civilised' incursion into virgin forest gathers a criminal momentum
– despoliation, child abduction and abuse, priestly incitement to murder – The Gold Machine threatens to becomes
Sinclair's Heart of Darkness.
The penetration up barely navigable rivers, the gouging of pathways through
jungle thickets, the final recourse to the gun barrel as the ultimate tool of
negotiation – these are the 19th century modes of persuasion – tools
that aid a journey of souls sickened by green gold. Arthur Sinclair and
his expedition partner Ross ensure by their meticulous surveying that half a
million hectares of land with be made over by colonial dispensation to the
Peruvian Corporation of London. An act
of enclosure that would have sent John Clare on an eternal fit of rhyming. And the cash-strapped Peruvian government
sells out. The Peruvian tribes driven
from their land and redeployed as cheap labour.
An effective slavery, where the bounty of their former lands lies beyond
the compound. And who is the
Peruvian Kurtz? The finger points at Father Gabriel Sala, religious
instrument on the ground – the mover and motivator of the colonial project – the
saver of souls by means of their capture – a wielder of priestcraft with sundry
blessings: child-abduction, exoneration for spent bullets and jungle
flesh. Who even bothered to count the bodies? Not Arthur Sinclair
who must have fled the scene before operatic levels of pillage commenced in
banal melismata.
v. Family Ghosts
In emphasising
the colonial violence that lies at the heart of so much of The Gold Machine, it is easy to miss more tender moments: the
attention devoted to meals, the friendships formed, a most warming celebration
of Farne Sinclair’s birthday. There is a
real beauty to these episodes, and the nagging avatars of nightmare are silent If disquiet is the main thread of the book,
there remain hopeful connections almost entirely absent from Dining on Stones which ends in a tangle
of betrayals, threats, book deals about to go sour. Unreliable views from sea-facing Hastings
hotel rooms – Edward Hopper exhaustion in pastel washes. The most telling passage in The Gold Machine is near the end – the entire
archive of the Pampa Whaley coffee plantation is piled up in a room with barred
windows – you can go in but will you ever get out? Here are the paper ghosts of a vast
venture. An eerie shell of commerce – ‘a
mausoleum of fiscal fingerprints and triple-entry bookkeeping.’[12] Missing from this heap of records are the
countless human beings that fed it.
Lives rendered as numbers written immaculately in dusty ledgers. And yet Peru in Sinclair’s eyes is full of
life, full of sensation, and guaranteed at least a hold on its future.
There is a
ghost in Africa that I would struggle to follow – the trail is cold. He will be a Beetz – a German engineer
working on the railways. My own forbear
with an ill-researched colonial past. Somewhere
there is a photograph, last seen on my parents’ sitting room shelf – a large
imposing-looking man standing on a locomotive boiler – around him African
workers brandishing the tools of track laying.
Some goal has been achieved, an ‘X’ on a map – the poses are imbued with
strength, even pride. A flag. A vast machine smothered in bodies. A sepia print with a 140-year stare. At some point in time the photograph was
removed and replaced with one of great-grandma playing a violin – the very one
that was passed to me when I was large enough to manage a full-sized
instrument. A more fitting bequest, it
might be thought.
[1] See, Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an
Unreal City, Oneworld, London, 2017.
[2] Iain Sinclair, The Gold Machine, (hereafter TGM) Oneworld, London, 2021, p. 4.
[3] Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat, Albion Village Press, London,
1975 (and Skylight Press, Cheltenham, 2012).
[4] TGM, p. 81.
[5] Iain Sinclair, Dining on Stones (hereafter DOS), Hamish Hamilton, London, 2004.
[6] DOS, p. 47.
[7] Ed Dorn – part of the
epigraph on page 25 of TGM.
[8] DOS, p. 253.
[9] DOS, p. 370.
[10] TGM, p. 136.
[11] DOS, p. 84.
[12] TGM, p. 387.