And Newcastle’s ours – too ours. Newcastle opening to us. Newcastle by bike. By Metro. Newcastle by bus, opening out.
And Newcastle’s welcoming – too welcoming. We’re part of it. It’s not actively hostile to us. It’s not throwing us off.
The city opens to us too easily: shouldn’t we be concerned? It yields itself up too easily. It’s lulling us. We’re settling down.
Where’s our world-hatred gone? Where’s our city hostility? Where’s our regeneration suspicion? Where’s our gentrification horror?
Keep low: what happened to that? Fail: what happened to that? Our watchwords. Our mantras. What do they mean now?
Our walking city. Our cycling city. Our summer city – opening to us in summer. The paths around the Ouseburn. The view from the Cumberland. These places. Heaton Park.
Where we’re allowed. Where we’re not under threat. Where we’re not panicked. Where we’re not in fear of our lives.
Where the skies open. The trees, in full leaf. The benches offer themselves to be sat upon. We can be here. We’re not out of place.
Joining everyone outside, at the pub. Sitting around a pub table, in the long evenings. In the can’t-believe-it’s-light-this-long evenings. In the still-a-bit-light-at-night evenings. In the as-though-the-northeast-sun-never-set evenings.
Social lives … did we have those? Friends … did we even have them? People to meet at the pub. Were we normal after all? How did that happen?
The risk of losing our guard. Of losing vigilance. The risk of disarmament. Of laying our weapons down.
The dangers of losing our hatred. Of feeling at home in the world. Of losing our Gnosticism. Our strangers-in-a-strange-world-ism.
Summer desertion. Leaving our posts. Leaving our work. The danger of not working every single day. Of not writing every single day. Not boring into the night, ever single night. Of not streamlining ourselves – our lives – for total work. A dereliction, surely. A desertion, of course.
Not turned away from the world. Not casting off from the day. Not leaving familiar diurnal shores. The danger of not turning to the essential night. Of losing our constant wakefulness! Constant vigilance!
The danger of not hating the world. And not hating ourselves as people of the world. We needed to hold onto despair. To keep our despair.
The dangers of complacency. Smiling. Of laughter that wasn’t sardonic laughter. That wasn’t hateful laughter. The danger that our humour wasn’t the blackest of all.
There’s no time for happiness – unless it’s ecstatic. Unless it was utterly wild. Unless it rose blindly into the night. Unless it was some passion of joy. Some cry of transport.
Were we to become weekend idlers? Sunday moochers? Pop-ups customers? Buyers of stuff for our flats?
Owning things. Owning stuff. The accumulation of stuff. Going out in search of stuff. Buying stuff from market stalls. From bric a brac shops. From flea markets.
Hunting down stuff. Looking out for stuff. Collecting stuff. Weighing ourselves down.
Stuff’s gravity. Stuff’s weighing us to the Earth. When this isn’t our Earth. When we don’t belong to the Earth.
Stuff to hold us hostage. Stuff to weight us down. To prevent a quick escape. To stop us fleeing. When the police knock at our door. When they come to take us away. When we’re locked up for hate speech, or whatever. For bad attitude. For dark thoughts. When we’re force medicated. When we’re rounded up.
Live as if we’re always about to be rounded up. As though we were about to be taken out to be shot. Cultivate paranoia. About when we’re sacked for wrongspeech. For wrongthink. When we’re shot for sins against kindness, or whatever.
Need to feel the urgency. The corruption in high places. The powers and the fucking principalities. The spiritual battle. The war in heaven.
If we can’t raise ourselves to that level. It we can’t fall to suicidal despair. If we’re not either manic or depressive – if we’re anything in between.
We don’t want normal life. We don’t want the lives of normies. We know what’s going on. We’ve seen backstage. We know the secrets.
Summer dangers.
We need an autumnal phase. A winter of the soul. We need to shut ourselves in. To work through the nights, the weekends, bent over our laptops.
We need to go up a philosophical gear. Move into a new phase. Stay lean. Stay in training.
Watch the right films, listen to the right music. Don’t let ourselves become spiritually flabby. No compromise! No defeat! No surrender!
We’re not going to find our notch in the sofa. We’re not going to get puppies or kittens. We’re not going to settle down. We’re not going to get comfortable in life.
Was that why we moved to the coast? Was that why we moved out, away from the city? That was where Cicero lived, of course. And didn't she encourage us: to move out to the coast? Didn't she fear the signs of our summer complacency? Didn't she look with suspicion at our summer tans?
Work in Progress 