In a land of enchantment, a garden most gorgeous, a plain sprinkled with coloured meteors, a forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage; a region, not of trees and shadow, but of strangest architectural wealth - of altar and of temple, of pyramid, obelisk, and sphinx; incredible to say, the wonders and the symbols of Egypt teemed throughout the park of Villette.
No matter that in five minutes the secret was mine - the key of the mystery picked up, and its illusion unveiled - no matter that I quickly recognised the material of these solemn fragments - the timber, the paint, and the pasteboard - these inevitable discoveries failed to quite destroy the charm, or undermine the marvel of that night. No matter that I now seized the explanation of the whole great fete - a fete of which the conventual Rue Fossette had not tasted, though it had opened at dawn that morning, and was still in full vigour near midnight.
Against all odds
Beyond fear lies freedom
Believe in yourself
Be true to yourself
There's a brave new world that's raging inside of me
Chase you dreams
Courage strength mom dad
Don't dream it be it
My first act of treason was picking up a pen my first act of love was finding myself again
Freedom
Freedom is not free
Get busy living or get busy dying
People living deeply have no fear of death
Death before dishonour
I will not surrender
I am not afraid to walk this world alone
If you don't live for something you'll die for nothing
Individuality
I never give up
Integrity
I shall stand fast
It's better to be hated for what you are, than loved for what you're not
I will not conform to this world
I'll make it to the moon if I have to crawl
I found within me an invincible summer
Life is a lesson you learn when you're through
Live life
Monsters are real and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win
My cup truly overflows
My life is my art, my art is my life
Never give up
Never let your fear decide your fate
Never surrender
No net enslaves me
No retreat no surrender
Not with strength but with hope
Only the strong survive
Only you can define yourself
Out of the darkness cometh light
The pain you feel today, will be the strength you feel tomorrow
I'm richer then all y' all I've got a bank full of pride
Remember who you are
Stand alone
Stay true
Stay the coarse
To thine own self be true
Trust the voice within
The creation of reality is in the hands of the weaver
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong
23/57
The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down from heaven are whirled ;
Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.
23/58
Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir,
The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free ;
Much do I know, and more can see
Of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.
23/59
Now do I see the earth anew
Rise all green from the waves again;
The cataracts fall, and the eagle flies.
And fish he catches beneath the cliffs.
The poetic Edda, Translated from the Icelandic with an introduction and notes by Henry Adams Bellows
St Joseph sleeping and a prayer for work 2015-08-14
Pray to which patron saint for work?
Can any of you steer me in the right direction?
St. Joseph.
Yeah, St. Joseph the worker.
St. Joseph the Worker-----but there are patron saints for all kinds of work---what kind of work are you looking for? I was a lab tech & the patron of lab techs is st. albert
Hey,
We have exchanged posts before so I feel like I know you. Can I be honest with you?
This is what I have learned. I went from $60,000 a year, got laid off and now I am a bagboy at the grocery store. Happens to lots of people. After a year of struggle and prayer I discovered the Bible says "be as wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove". In other words, God expects you and me use our own wisdom and knowledge to make our way in the world. The Bible also says "work out your salvation in fear and trembling". To me it also means "work out your career in fear and trembling." St Paul says there is profit to be made in any career, so not to worry.
Prayer to St Joeseph is wonderful and worthwhile and Jesus may respond to you thru St Joeseph. But don't ever stop trying as hard as you can using you God given skills.
This too will pass. Good luck
St. Cajetan whose feast we just celebrated August 7th is considered a patron saint of job seekers. we use him at work as the patron saint of our Human Resources department.
St. Joseph is a great intercessor, and so many more...St Rita, St. Jude, St Anthony, St. Theresa, St Padre Pio, all have been known to help out in difficult situations. St. Anthony may be the Saint of missing things, but he is also well know for performing miracles through Jesus for near anything. And the very best thing you can do for yourself? Eucharistic Adoration and stay close to the sacraments. If you find you have some extra time, seek out daily mass.
God Bless you and give you relief soon.
Take a look at your biggest need in your life right now=--and pray to God he might lead you to the patron saint for you. HE will. Look at the Catholic Bookstore, and you'll undoubtedly find them! It sure worked for me----and totally coincidentally my patron saint that I found after prayer--turns out has my same birthday as her feast day--unbelievable! God surely works in miraculous ways friend~~
ST. Anthony has helped with many lost things, even lost jobs (lay off, union problems) and lost computer files. He got so fed up with me bugging him I think he appointed a special angel to keep track of my keys. But in all the years I have relied on him, I am not sure if I am praying to St. Anthony of Egypt or Padua. One was a hermit, one was a Franciscan. Seeker, St. Jude truly is the one to turn to when things seem totally hopeless.
I got laid off 3 years ago and haven't been able to find permanent work since. Salaried jobs, or "adult jobs" as I call them, I've had no luck finding, especially as I have a very peculiar set of skills and am useless and uninterested in anything else. And I really have no desire to change fields, especially since there's very little I'm good at.
But the "teenager jobs," the dead-end, low-wage, hourly jobs that I've wasted most of my life doing, won't hire me either. They say I'm overqualified and overeducated, that they know I'd be bored by the work and would leave the minute I found something better. All that IS true, but nevertheless....
I have no credit because I've always paid for things in cash. The only thing that's kept me off the streets is help from my mom, and even she is running out of money now. Plus I feel like less than a man having to get parental support at the age of 40. At least I don't have a wife or kids to support.
This spring my apartment complex burned in the second-worst fire in my city's history, and though my apartment was spared even smoke or water damage, I had to make an expensive move elsewhere in town.
The on-going problem has made me a ball of stress. Friends and relatives keep their distance because I'm so depressing to be around. This problem has taken a major toll on my physical and mental health. Medication hasn't really helped, and now my doctor tells me he wants me to get an MRI this week. Obviously, with no insurance, a procedure like this costing thousands is gonna be a killer.
And yes, I've tried every conceivable method of finding work, including many techniques you'd not have heard of. I've pretty much given up hope of finding anything, at least that will pay me adequately. And at the age of 40 I am painfully aware of how much time has been wasted and how little time I have left. It just seems a crime I can't exercise the talents God has so graciously granted me.
Sorry to be such a whiner.
I can appreciate the way you feel because I've been through something very similar myself. After I went back to school to qualify for the field where I always wanted to work, I was unable to find a full-time job in it and settled for something else. While I have a decent job now in a related area, it's still not my vocation and I would gladly give it up tomorrow if I won the Powerball. Therefore, one valuable thing I've learned is to look at my job as a means of survival & not what defines me as a person - we Americans have a really skewed attitude in this respect. I've learned from my friends & family in Italy, who look at work as something that needs to be done to eat & pay bills and not the sum & substance of one's existence. It helps...
As for a patron saint, I can only add St. Joseph. I know there's another specifically for people seeking employment but I can't name him or her offhand. I also prayed to St. Jude when I was feeling really frustrated with myself. Be patient and things will get better
Pray to your father in heaven and have faith that a certain job is yours. Read all of Hebrews 11.
thanks
Thanks to everyone for the encouragement. Maybe we can all pray for each other.
For thirty-five years now I've been compacting waste-paper, and if I had it all to do over I'd do just what I've done for the past thirty-five years. Even so, three or four times a year my job turns from plus to minus: the cellar suddenly goes bad, the nags and niggles and whines of my boss pound in my ears and head and make the room into an inferno; the wastepaper, piled to the ceiling, wet and moldy, ferments in a way that makes manure seem sweet, a swamp decomposing in the depths of my cellar, with bubbles rising to the surface like will-o'-the-wisps from a stump rotting in the mire. And I have to come up for air, get away from the press, but I never go out, I can't stand fresh air anymore, it makes me cough and choke and sputter like a Havana cigar. So while my boss is screaming and wringing his hands and raining threats down on me, I slip away and set off in search of other basements, other cellars.
Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. My best friends are two former member of our Academy of Sciences who have been set to work in the sewers, so they've decided to write a book about them, about their crissings and crossings under Prague, and they are the ones who taught me that the excrement entering the sewage plant at Podbaba on Sundays differs substantially from the excrement entering it on Mondays, and that each day is so clearly differentiated from the rest that the rate of flux may be plotted on a graph, and according to the ebb and flow of prophylactics one may determine the relative frequency with which varying sections of Prague indulge in sexual intercourse.
Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal, 1976, translation Michael Henry Heim
Most things still remain to be done.
A glorious future!
The feeling of having finished something is an effective sleeping pill. A person who retires feeling that he has done his bit will quickly wither away. A company which feels that it has reached its goal will quickly stagnate and lose its vitality. Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way. It is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning. In all areas. We will
move ahead only by constantly asking ourselves how what we are doing today can be done better tomorrow. The positive joy of discovery must be our inspiration in the future too. The word impossible has been deleted from our dictionary and must
remain so... Bear in mind that time is your most important resource. You can do so much in 10 minutes. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. You can never get them back. Ten minutes are not just a sixth of your hourly pay. Ten minutes are a piece of yourself. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.
Most of the job remains to be done. Let us continue to be a group of positive fanatics who stubbornly and persistently refuse to accept the impossible, the negative. What we want to do, we can do and will do together. A glorious future!
The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, A Little ΙΚΕΑ Dictionary, Ingvar Kamprad
Manufacture is word, which, in the vicissitude of language, has come to signify the reverse of its intrinsic meaning, for it now denotes every extensive product of art, which is made by machinery, with little or no aid of the human hand; so that the most perfect manufacture is that which dispenses entirely with manual labour. The philosophy of manufactures is therefore an exposition of the general principles, on which productive industry should be conducted by self-acting machines....The term Factory... I conceive that this title, in its strictest sense, involves the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual Organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force
The Philosophy of Manufactures: or an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, Andrew Ure, 1835
Gunter Grass, The Rat, Translated by Ralph Manheim
Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one only had to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.
[...]
Vast plains infested with garbage, beaches strewn with garbage, valleys clogged with garbage. Synthetic flakes on the move. Tubes that have forgotten their ketchup and never rot. Shoes of neither leather nore straw walk self-propelled with the sand and collect in pits full of garbage, where already yachtsman's gloves and droll inflatable animals are waiting. All these things speak of you, now and forever. You and your works wrapped in clear plastic, sealed in vacuum bags, moulded in synthetic resin, you in chips and clips: the human race that was.
Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind, translated by W. j. Strachan
As this personal love of nature began to grow in me and I listened to her voice as to a friend and travelling companion who speaks in a foreign language, my melancholy, though not cured, was ennobled and cleansed. My ear and eye became more acute, I learned to grasp subtleties and fine distinctions, and longed to hear the pulsation of life in all its manifestations more clearly and at close quarters - perhaps even to understand and enjoy the gift of expressing it in poetic form so that others also could get closer to it and seek out the springs of all refreshment, purification and childish innocence with deeper understanding. For the time being it remained a wish, a dream. I did not know whether it could ever be fulfilled, and I did what was nearest by loving everything visible and by no longer treating anything around me with scorn of indifference. p.84
[...]
I wanted to teach the people to be conscious of the pulse of the earth and take part in the life of the universe; not to forget in the bustle of their petty lives that we are not self-created gods but children belonging to the earth and the cosmic whole. I wanted to remind them that, like the songs of the poets and our dreams, the rivers, oceans, drifting clouds and raging storms are symbols and bearers of our hopes which spread their wings between heaven and earth; whose ultimate goal is the confident certainty of the right of citizenship and immortality of all living creatures.
[...]
But I was also eager to teach men to look for springs of joy and rivers of life in a brotherly love of nature. I wanted to preach the art of seeing, walking and enjoying life, of finding happiness in the present; to make it possible for mountains, seas and green islands to convey their message through their mighty and captivating tongues; to open up the view to the infinitely various manifestations of life as they blossomed day by day and overflowed beyond our towns and houses. I wanted to make people feel a sense of shame that we should know more about foreign wars, fashions, gossip, literature and art than about Spring unfolding its vital force outside our towns and the river that flows beneath out bridges and forests, and the lovely meadows traversed by our railways.
The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome , indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals to us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal
"fire, […] in the history of the medieval trail by ordeal, is a basic technology of truth. Burned, things of the world reveal their essential nature. The scriptural basis for this notion is iffy (Lot surviving the flames of Sodom? Moses' encounter with the burning bush?). The physics of the proposition, however, proves to be spot-on: everything that burns speaks with tongues of flame that cannot lie. This is called spectroscopy."
Fire and Truth, D. Graham Burnett, Issue 32, Winter 2008, Cabinet
Ivan Gutierrez, a 37-year-old artist who lives in the nearby village, stood before the pyramid and blew a low, sonorous blast on a conch horn. "It has already arrived, we are already in it" he said of the new era. "We are in a frequency of love, we are in a new vibration."
Electro-magnetic anomalies, as identified by Ivan Sanderson in the late 1960s, were the impetus for a worldwide reinvestigation of practical whole earth geometry. A source of confusion has been over the location of equally spaced points zig-zagging the globe 36° from the equator. This is not point latitude but rather the angle of incidence with the equator (as shown above).
'Fuckin' brilliant idea Gimpo. Can I do it with you?'
That was about three months ago. Today is 21 March. I've just arrived at the agreed rendezvous point, South Mims Service Station, parked up my truck and I'm looking for Gimpo's white transit van. I'm late. But Gimpo is later. A van pulls up beside me. On the side is daubed, 'Gimpo's Non Stop, 25 hour, M25 Spin'.
'You're late. Get in,' shouts Gimpo.
This is Gimpo's plan. For the next 25 hours, a certain Mr Green and I are going to drive around the M25. For those that don't know, the M25 is an orbital motorway that circumnavigates the nation's capital. You have to drive 124.5 miles to get all the way round. Gimpo has a notion that if we keep driving for the allotted time, he will find out where the M25 leads. It is best not to rationalise Gimpo's notions. Gimpo loves the M25. Gimpo loves to drive. He loves to view the rest of the world through the windscreen and, when he is too far gone to drive, to take the film back home and watch it again and again and again.
We make it to the Queen Elizabeth Suspension Bridge by twelve noon, the official starting point and time. When you experience things like the Queen Elizabeth Suspension Bridge, you fall in love with the modern world all over again. All that engineering. All that wonder. All that height and breadth, and 'aren't we just like ants'. There's a high blue sky. The Thames shines, snakes up to London in the west and slides down into its estuary on the east. Below us are the pylons and power stations, industrial estates and entertainment complexes of the Essex wastelands. And I love that too. On a sunny spring day, you can love almost anything. Gimpo is already raging and we have only just begun. We are heading clockwise. Gimpo tells me to drive the first two laps, then we will fill the tank, have a slash and change drivers. Gimpo is in the back, checking his boxes of films, cleaning his lenses, packing and repacking his kit bag. It's Gimpo's army training. He was a gunner in the Falklands War. They taught him how to concentrate his mind on the details of packing and cleaning, repacking and polishing, taking to bits and putting back together, again and again and again. Now, more of Gimpo's orders are being barked down his mobile. His mobile is held together with Gaffa tape. Gimpo loves Gaffa. But not white Gaffa. He hates white Gaffa. It has to be black or silver. His mobile is almost permanently shoved up against his right ear, the less deaf of the two. Gimpo is a pit bull of energy, unfocused rage and terminal paranoia. The only thing that Gimpo can do to sooth his seething is unpack and pack, check and re-check, spit and polish. Gimpo is both a man of our time and a man of any time. The history of England has been built on men like Gimpo. He is the bulldog spirit, the 'never say die', the original Tommy. The only reason why Harold lost the Battle of Hastings was 'cause Gimpo was not there (he was fighting the rearguard action against the Vikings). But Gimpo was at Agincourt. He was with Oliver in his New Model Army. He was Napoleon's Waterloo. He survived the Somme. Was the toughest desert rat Monty never knew. He is the true embodiment of the nation. I'm just glad I'm not English.
Gimpo starts to reveal his vision. He wants this thing, this Gimpo M25 spin, to become an annual event. The closest Saturday night/Sunday morning to 21 March each year, to mark the opening of the rave/festival/drug-taking/banging/techno/hippie thing that Gimpo and his weird mates know all about. He wants loads of other people to join in, come out in their cars, vans, trucks, loaded up. A non-stop 25 hour party, road to nowhere sort of thing; car stereos cranked up, people screaming, pumping horns, blowing whistles. Hundreds, thousands, pouring out of Clacky services. Not a race, but a celebration of this broken down modern world, where the M25 would get clogged up, grind to a standstill, the authorities could do nothing - and Gimpo would be king.
Mr Green is an artist from Warrington. He keeps his counsel. This is not the place to tell you about his twisted, ego-driven visions. I'm sure in time he will let you know all about them himself.
I'm driving as fast as I can, hogging the outside lane when the inner would do. Headlights flash me as I am forced to move over. One circumference is 125 miles. The second is only 124.5. Everything looks normal. I've seen it all before. The North Downs, the Surrey Woods, the Plains of Heathrow, up round the top M1 junctions, St Albans Cathedral in the distance, back down through Essex. All boringly familiar. But we know the further we go, the less familiar it will all become. We will begin to see things not seen before, discover new meaning in the signposts. The lie of the land. Lost tribes. The tank is almost empty. We pull in at Clacky Service Station, fill the tank, buy trash food, have a slash. Gimpo has a stop watch. The pit stop has taken us 9 minutes and thirty-seven seconds. He is not happy with this. Mr Green takes the wheel. We move back out into the flow. The eternal. The around and around. the headlights are coming on. The light is failing. The football results are coming through. End of the season is in sight and things are hotting up. And Mr Green is a dangerous driver. The weirdness is kicking in. It's a drug-free zone; even though Gimpo has invested heavily in all-night chemicals, Mr Green and I just say No. Mr Green cuts another artic. up, slams the brakes, ploughs through a dozen cones in the contraflow. Oncoming headlights blind, jumbo jets climb into the shepherd's delight sky. It's getting good. Gimpo is swimming in his hammock, mobile pressed to his ear, laughing and screaming at some London low-life friend.
'Yeah, it's me, Bill and Mr Green, 25-hour spin around the M25. Do you want to come and give us a wave? Bring us a cake? Toss us off?' It must be a woman. I hear, 'Look, wear that black leather miniskirt with no knickers. Stand on the bridge so we can look up as we go under'
Mr Green and I get talking about the Union Jack. How brilliant, the Labor Party move to use a Union Jack logo in their election campaign. Real carpet-pulling from under the Tories' feet. Such a loaded icon. It gives so many weird signals. Jimmy and I saw Damon Hill do his lap of honour at Silverstone, flying the flag and we thought, 'Far fuckin' out Damon. Let's liberate the flag for the common man.' You can't help but be jealous of the Yanks, who rally around the Stars and Stripes, from ghetto nigger to southern white trash from New York yid to mid-west WASP. To burn the Stars and Stripes is one powerful political statement, saved only for moments of national self-doubt. To burn the Union Jack is just a waste of a good tea towel. You don't agree with me? I don't know if I agree with myself.
Once, Jimmy and I had this idea we should reform The KLF. Massive campaign for the comeback single. Billboard posters, full-page ads, prime-time TV commercials, all with the words 'God Save the Queen' - The KLF'. Nobody would hear it until the moment of release. Everybody else would be thinking the track would be some postmodern update on the Pistol's classic, mashed with our national anthem, the Queen's Christmas speech, some monster beat and a pumping, sub-sonic bass riff. Wrong. It would be just a straight rendition of our national anthem, the one they used to play at the end of the main feature, and which when I was a kid you still stood up for. And the video would be the royal standard fluttering in the wind. For three and a half minutes, no edits. Thankfully, the idea remains unrealised. But as for Union Jacks, Jimmy and me, there is a job there yet to be done. And Marc Wellenger hasn't done it.
Of course, we try to keep to toll gate twenty-three on each lap. Some habits you can't break, like wanking and picking your nose. Gimpo hits me with a concept that he tries to convince me my mate and fellow literary arsehole Z has already agreed to. A 25-day non-stop M25 journey. Just me, Gimpo and Z, the idea being that Z and I could finish our journey-up-the-Congo book while we spin round the 25. I'm filled with dread at the idea and hope it doesn't become a reality.
Darkness. Gimpo lights candles in the back of the van. Lap five, and a buzz is tingling my body like some strange and untried chemical. Talking of which, Mr Green has put on a Chemical Brothers cassette. A live performance, where they bang into 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', The Beatles' version with some added beats and noise. I'm out there. I'm hanging in the hammock. The candles flicker, the night shimmers ahead, my mind slips its moorings. For some reason, the three of us and this van are an old-fashioned tin-opener going around the equator, opening the world up, and the worms are getting out. the fact that Tony Blair is younger than me is somehow connected. No drink, no drugs, just the hypnotic effect of the sodium lights. I love it.
My shift. Midnight to 4 a.m. Me and Gimpo up front. 'Sailing By' brings the closedown of Radio Four. Somewhere up near the St Albans turn-off, we can see a huge bonfire and a daisychain of people silhouetted against the flames, dancing around and around. The rain is falling but they keep going. I explain to Gimpo that like us they are celebrating the equinox, but with a Beltane fire. A bunch of hippies in a dark, wet field and us on a miserable motorway, each going round and round. The rites of spring. Pagan roots. Nailed to the cross and risen on the third day. My biblical leanings grasp at a walls-of-Jericho analogy. Round and round we go, and the walls will crumble. On Monday morning, 2,300 points will have been wiped by the Footsie 11, and nobody will know why except for us. The mother of Parliament's bastard son will have burned down the palace, raped Harry in the tower and taken a shit in your girlfriend's handbag.
Stop stop stop.
Calm down Bill.
Hale Bopp streaks the northern sky. The World Service informs us that Buddhist monks are rampaging on the road to Mandalay. Kinshasa is falling and Mobutu is on the run. Channels are changed. Melody FM. Abba's 'Fernando' - mariachi trumpets, a tale of war, death, love and loss. Sodium lights like a ten-mile serpent, heading for the estuary. Downriver like Iain Sinclair. What would Sinclair make of the psychogeographical possibilities of this, our mindless journey? I am hoping to uncover some psychogeographical facts about both the ancient and modern roads and routes that radiate out of the unseen metropolis, around which we are winding and tightening our strange spell. I may be sliding in and out of reality, but Gimpo's intensity is scaling to new heights. He is still raging into his mobile. It seems the support team have not once been at the right place at the right time to capture on video this transit van hurtling by. I'm thinking, how long is this new girlfriend going to take Gimpo on full throttle? The novelty value of the man soon wears thin. Added to this is the fact that two cameras in the van keep jamming. As far as Gimpo is concerned, the whole thing is a disaster. He was planning on having a complete 25 hour film, every cat's eye of the way. Not a moment missed. Real time to the max. But it is not to be. He bangs out some more numbers on his mobile and takes it out on whoever answers. The film of this journey (I think) is to be a follow up to his first major movie, Watch The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid. I can't stress strongly enough how important this 25 hours is for the man. He has talked of nothing else since first revealing his plan to me back in Cardiff three months ago. Mr Green is saying very little as the hours skid by. He observes. I try to ask him, why Mr Green and not just Dave? People will think it's some sort of corny reference to Reservoir Dogs. Then he tells me if I write up anything about this journey, he just wants to be known as Dave. But the contrary side of my nature gets the best of me, and Mr Green it is, Tarantino or not.
Gimpo is at the wheel. Light is streaking the eastern sky ... and all that descriptive stuff about breaking dawns. Lap eight. Through toll-gate twenty-three and back up into ancient Kent. The waking Weald. The garden of England. Cockney hop-pickers, the turning for Canterbury. Gimpo's Tale - now that would be good. The Carpenters' 'For All We Know' is cranking through the three-inch speakers, compressed to fuck and sounding like one of the best records ever made. A green hill covered by a sprawling car boot sale. Above, the clouds break and massive sun beams shaft down, illuminating the hill, already crawling with Sunday morning seekers one bargain away from happiness. It's like a neo-classical canvas depicting the smallness of man in all his little ways, and the power and glory of the Almighty as he looks down on his wayward creation.
The turning for Brand's Hatch, and my mind turns from the biblical to Damon's bad career move in signing to Arrows. For me and Gimpo, Johnny Herbert is our man. No glamour, no chance, born loser, but at times, for some unknown reason, gets to the chequered flag before the others. A small clump of primroses brings morning gold. Will they spread like they do down the Devon stretch of the M5? Or like the wild lupins on the M6 as it cuts through Birmingham? Gimpo's rage at the universe has found a new avenue as he hurls his beloved mobile phone out the window. I momentarily hear a female voice plead 'but Gimpo' before it smashes into the side of a passing artic. Gimpo then turns the video camera on himself. It's set up on the dashboard. I'm in the hammock. Mr Green's asleep on the passenger seat. Gimpo's voice is shot through, but he starts to bark, scream, glare at the unblinking lens. His madness, his psychosis, his vanity, his vulgarity pour from his scarred soul as he tries to explain this journey of his. His inarticulate genius. His excuse for living. His sordid reality. (For those interested in such facts, I've heard from various reliable sources that Gimpo can fuck harder, faster and for longer than any other man in London.) He starts to get maudlin, he starts to apologise to the camera for being a cunt to his girlfriend. It's like I'm eavesdropping on some last confession before Mme Guillotine drops. He must assume I'm asleep. Some of the stuff he is coming out with is pretty embarrassing, and I won't embarrass my mate by documenting it here. He falls silent, and my paranoia tells me that this whole M25 thing is some sort of elaborate suicide plot.
I drift into sleep for a while. I dream a dream where Gimpo tells me that in the future the crusties, the ravers without hope, the ferel underclasses, will live on the M25 in broken down buses, discarded containers, packing cases and anything else that can be procured for nowt and provide shelter against the rains. The M25 will be taken over, clogged up, no longer used as a thoroughfare to nowhere. It will be like one of those forgotten canals behind backstreets in Brum, stagnant and dank, fit only for dead cats and stolen shopping trolleys, until it is ripe for future heritage culturalists to proclaim its worth as a site of historic interest. It will be a place where Gimpo will be king. The dream shifts, and I see Gimpo robed in purple trimmed with ermine held shoulder-high by a pack of Swampy's wayward grandchildren. They are carrying him to a throne built from a distant forklift truck and broken pallets, decorated with hub caps and liberated crown jewels.
'Last lap,' Gimpo shouts, and I awake from my dreams of his coronation. I clamber into the front. The three of us peer out the truck screen at our fellow Sunday travelers. Mr Green seems disappointed; he was hoping for something to happen, something to be revealed, for some sort of breakthrough. Gimpo says, 'It might yet happen.' I say, 'Maybe it already has. we just don't know it yet. These things take some time.' We are passing by Heathrow pylons, J.G. Ballard Crashlands. M40 westbound. Blackthorn blossom, catkins and gorse gold. Wild cherry, hovering kestrel. Not one dead fox, dead badger, dead rabbit, even dead hedgehog, but lots of dead pheasants. I notice these things. So does Gimpo, and he notices so much more, but I'll wait till the Congo book is written before revealing the true essence of Gimpo and the awfulness of his vision of our land.
Back into Herts, St Albans cathedral on the horizon. Two minutes to one. The pips. Gimpo goes berserk. The job has been done. We pull up on the hard shoulder. Trucks plough by. Gimpo is out. Down the embankment. Hammering in a wooden stake with a huge wooden mallet that I gave him as a wedding present. Mr Green has prepared a Wedgewood-blue plaque. These are the words printed on it:
On March 22nd/23rd 1997 Dave Green, Bill Drummond and Gimpo drove around the M25 for 25 hours non-stop. This plaque marks the point where the journey was finished.
This is nailed to the stake. Mr Green has also got a camera. He takes our pictures. We smile. A job well done.
Postscript: The Truth Will Out
If you are the type to remember such things as when Halley's Comet last visited our corner of the Solar System, you may have reckoned that my 'Gimpo's 25' story to be mis-dated by at least 365 days. Well if you did, your reckoning would have been right. The story was written a month or so before I made it to my forty-fifth year, but because I wanted it included I lied about the date and added a year on to it.
The world's oldest map, which Richard J. "Dick" Benson dates to 6018 B.C.,
depicts the elegant theory of mathematics embodied in the planning of the city of Cairo.
The megaliths shown are (C) Cheops, (K) Kephren, (M) Mikerinus, and (S) Sphinx.
Benson's work may well provide a helpful, radically new framework for historical linguistics
as well as uncover a lost simplicity in the art and numbers of geometry.
Olaus Magnus, on Finnmark and its Inhabitants 2013-06-23
Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, book 1, On Finnmark and its Inhabitants, Published 1555
Illustrating that the year in the far North consist of one day and one night only.
Let's record the dying century and the birth of another man... Nothing should be left unshown or unseen, dirty or clean: Let us see and go further, out of the swamps and into the sun.
Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, Macmillan, New York, 1972, p. 236 (April 21, 1966)
ATALANTA FUGIENS, THE FLEEING ATALANTA - NEW CHYMICAL EMBLEMS OF THE SECRETS OF NATURE
MICHAEL MAIER, Count of the Imperial Consistory M.D., Eq. ex. &c
1618
Et sic in infinitum (and like this to infinity)
Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser)
The primordial darkness of the universe at the moment before creation.
R. Murray Schafer … the earth forms the body of an instrument across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand. We must try once again to find the secret of that tuning.”
potlatch
noun /'pät?laCH/
potlatches, plural
(among North American Indian peoples of the northwest coast) An opulent ceremonial feast at which possessions are given away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance prestige
'Let us grow to be a group of constructive fanatics, who with unwavering obstinacy refuse to accept the impossible, the negative. What we want, we can still do. Together. A glorious future!'
A Little IKEA Dictionary, Ingvar Kamprad, 2007
'It could be said that self design is a practice that unites artists and audiences alike in the most radical way; though not everyone produces artworks, everyone is an artwork. At the same time, everyone is expected to be his or her own author.'
Nikolai Astrup, St. Hansbal.
Astrup sitt eige notat, udatert brev til borgermester Aslaksen , Arendal, etter 1905 / Kunst og kultur 1928, s. 227-230.
"Hun matte slik som jeg selv og mange andre barn her pa Vestlandet lide under den fanatiske religiositet som en tid herjet blant de eldre her. Alt var synd - like til det a renne pa kjelke. Og St. Hansnatten, nar balene brente rundt i fjellene og menneskene myldret som sorte punkter oppover fjellsidene og de rodkledde jenter med de hvite skjorteermerne ringet seg som lyse prikker og gnister om blussene, da var det synd for kristne folk a vaere med, da matte den lille jentungen og jeg sta pa avstand bak gjerdet og se og hore, hvordan de andre danset om balet og hujede av glede. Den siste rest av urreligion som ubevisst blusset opp.
Jeg fikk en forestilling om at dette med balet var noe syndig, noe stygt, som ble bedrevet i det gronne halvmorket – noe hedensk. Og dette ble enda mer forsterket ved sjalusien som grov i brystet nar de andre barna fikk vaere med, og jeg matte sta utenfor. Og slik sa jeg min lille lidelsesfell e – og den stygge, gule ilden, som ikke lyste i sommernatten, men som lokket og drog meg nettopp fordi den var omgitt med mystikk, ugudelighet, og ra hedenskap. Og til sist turte jeg meg inn blant de ugudelige. Men den lille piken stod igjen og sa pa med det bleke ansiktet og de store, sorte oynene som suget ilden i seg.
Slik er det jeg opprinnelig har bildet inne i meg."
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