LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN takes a psychogeographic trip through south London
Nobody wanted proper light they want to be in the dark, they liked it, they liked
the little cupboards. To live a story written in invisible ink, painted in
abstract arcs, but atmospheric, poignant, calm, devastating . . . Perhaps this
could never happen except in some strange half-apprehension inside?
Hurtling the elevated course[i]
viaducts arching forwards
headlong,
cable-ducting streaming a frantic pulse
while gantries blink at signals vanishing
gaps before speech
no time to question
twelve tracks in unison, dividing, merging,
aimed reckless
– a geometric exaltation –
at the sharp radius, weed-ragged triangle
of Borough Market Junction
(slow thunder amongst the attics),
braking will have its moment, but now is not it,
now is acceleration,
exploding through the jumbled visual inundation
of miraculous panoramas vaunting the compass
to praise and shun
from slum to gentrification’s skyward balconies
skewed bridges over stalled clutter
horns accusing each other
St. James’ Bermondsey[ii] – foregrounded – is granted time,
Tower Bridge Road is not.
Scaling steel and dazzle of glass, mirror and kaleidoscope
the solid eras from which they took insolent flight,
splintering visions into the grey-green river’s tidal swell.
Cannon Street or Charing cross . . . default to London Bridge:
this sublime chaos has been overripe for a century,
between the essence of specific words
changing with the hour
the light, the region of Europa, the confident stairways.
Did the bombing try to neaten things or only add another density?
Followed by two or three decades of hopefulness[iii]
(in retrospect overstated, deluded),
soon came the point where things went subtly
yet more incurably wrong.
More than anything, landscape had always given him freedom. Uninsistent.
It had no care for the human world.
All that dialogue, phrasing, signature, soundwave, all that need and frustration:
it made no impression. It missed almost everything.
Censor the didactic rant to puzzle on the outpourings of runic graffiti
ipton’s Tea, the finest the world produces
disrupting or expanding Deptford Broadway
bloated Arabian Nights or a portal to secret cults
conspiracy conflations overrunning all others
horror sunflowers with erotic intent
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik[iv] is not the genre
nor boombox cars racing their decibels
no wardrobes or courtyards conceal the past
for the hangars of wire are all a-rattle with nothing
nothing visible
and the indulgence expanding from self-control,
intensifying experience to give a purpose,
rings artificial,
yet undoubtably the ancient and the medieval
exhale through every area of wood or raven black
and transitory 21st century towers alike suggest demise and the diagonal
upon which the air itself will carry their dust
their stone tapes[v] into the clouds and colours
as though history is more than dead structures and the fabrications of books
is rather the ether itself (as some claim love is truth and truth is love)
behind and above all terminal, worn out, buzzing industry
this daily to and fro of mindlessness
the impatient global death-wish.
Take Courage at the Amersham Arms by the double red lines:
I did and I didn’t – no alcohol passed my lips
chalk on the wet wood around the shadow of alphabets
all of these corrections
and all of these failings[vi]
echo from the mesh fence over New Cross station
expectant platforms freed from rush hour below
looking south to Hastings (theoretically),
taste the wash of the tide and the rush of shingle
briefly fade the queue of danger lights shining on bin bags
the pierce of brakes . . .
what first impressions from a precarious pushchair!
boys will be . . . what we teach them to be[vii],
as this mental brass rubbing, struggles corridors into distances
angles waking from the dormant
tries staves to support a cloven harmony.
Obviously, it wasn’t good to have all this contempt. It wasn’t kind.
Even to wish for a magic wand to wave up another life . . .
the lodge house on a disused drive . . .
Only he would ever open the gates between the trees. High ornate gates that would
symbolically exclude or welcome –
if occasionally he felt expansive towards the outside world.
Roadworks now upon the winding hill
funnel the yellow box junction overlooked
by that endless fight of George and Dragon
good versus evil or more complex alchemy?[viii]
From a smile to the left, other soundscapes flow
reducing plastic vehicles to a whispering haze
mind-manacled time zones intersect and cancel
hint forms, images, prospects
even narrative
from tilted rooms fumed with exhaust
from fenced corridors under bamboo screen and radar dish,
stunted palms and arrowslit windows
from country villas stranded in their rowdy future
dilapidated, behind railing and creeper
preceding 40s flats . . . perhaps? (they have a rectilinear austerity).
The projection may be drab
but climbing Blackheath Hill toward the grass, drought-widening common
its balconies are not stale,
filled with town and country,
their musics drift above the heavy traffic
the stop and start of hybrid buses
the slant of dreams and aspirations in many languages . . .
“If you can’t satisfy yourself, how can you satisfy anyone else?” runs the wise phrase,
the target of self-knowledge, bow and arrow, individualist parade.
The only trouble being: who but the ignorant, the arrogant or the lucky, can ever
satisfy themselves?
Higher, as the plateau begins to break,
wooded commons buffer zones of peace
where red shuttered bays remember green wartime garages,
until a siren sounds from 80 years past
loud enough to wake Wat Tyler[ix] from his abysmal mooring
reduced to a road sign,
loud enough to date other more recent subjectivities
garnered from artists, writers and characters who preferred art to living,
half-dead or lost, fascinated perhaps
and wishing to stay that way –
forgetting that at its most vivid, art is life multiplied
or aware that such a level or spiritual leap[x], is too great a risk or challenge
and prudence often worse than a toxin.
Gestures and beauty gone –
You had your chance
and mine is nearly done
there is never finally any way to turn
but take port duty free on the link span[xi].
Is history the attempt of spirit to conquer matter[xii]
or no more than an accretion of grime?
something we should try to learn from but forget,
the circles through which we overlap or not . . .
our one-way flow with no option but to follow
– or a topological map with infinite directions and choice?
Here, the country church[xiii]
invisible tock upon the bookshelves . . .
red bus through the trees and fences that reach backwards and block
all diagonal pursuit
no sleep ever seems just
only a pause between enigmas
unless you switch off to it all and dream of Wales, or a remote coast
or a vineyard in Chile
as if the dream were all.
That dream could be the dream of the lodge, off the map, disused, forgotten,
but self-sufficient – as in the end we must all become, unless (or even if) we can
rekindle love. Our own fracture is enough, only the landscape or the lover can heal,
not the peer group or the distant friend.
Once it becomes impossible to tolerate life as it is, there is only the light inside.
The gates opened into woodland sun and shade.
All human drivel died between the avenues
all ambition drowned on the unspoilt riverbanks which followed.
And through the lines, words, shapes, the movement arose,
becoming tastes and notes and colours.
At New Cross station, Sutherland[xiv] asked “Do you think I’ll ever be an artist?”
This was the late 1920s – before the primeval incursion of Pembrokeshire
shattered his mould,
“Or shall I get my father to find me some other kind of work?”
Do such assumptions, signifying class structure, still remain?
Should I have been a meter reader[xv], musing on life’s paradox as I walked my round . . .
never troubling to scrawl any of it down,
never disturb the peace
for anything beyond style or template originality may be too cruel.
Was post-war optimism also when culture began to slither more generally trivial,
relaxed too far?
or can such impressions be blamed on the inevitable drought,
the scrap to maintain one’s personality in the face of the world? . . .
However –
since the developed temperament and will
can banish or dialectically justify all negative reality,
or dissolve material into metaphysical
today’s dull light is more than enough to make us content
avoiding the fairground and the ever-flashing blue lights
of ambulance and fuzz
as we walk, expecting rain, flippant but uplifted,
crossing the parched August space of
Blackheath.
NOTES
[i] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_%E2%80%93_Greenwich_Railway_Viaduct
[ii] Neo-classical. This image seems to exaggerate both the height of the viaducts and the closeness of St. James’ Church to the railway: blackcablondon.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/near-bermondsey-church.jpg
[iii] From 1945 – 1975: arguably the maximum period of post-war hope – during which (for one example) ecological concerns were fully realised but insufficiently acted upon. During which, global corporations became too powerful and greed became a virtue.
[iv] Both the music and specifically (in the line above this one), Dorothea Tanning’s painting of 1943: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/64/
[v] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069316/ 1972 British television horror drama film written by Nigel Kneale.
[vi] https://genius.com/Songs-ohia-travels-in-constants-lyrics (paraphrased) lyrics written and performed by Jason Molina: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcNpD1YyoI&list=RDbTcNpD1YyoI&start_radio=1 at 12.46 – 13.39
[vii] Slogan on a screen or billboard? [visible but small in the top right of the roadworks photo –21st August 2025]
[viii] From https://brill.com/view/journals/rt/13/2/article-p195_4.xml :
“It is the purpose of this paper to interpret the legend of St. George and the Dragon in terms of alchemical symbolism. While the victory of the Christian hero over the Dragon is traditionally interpreted as symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, it is argued that both combatants represent the four alchemical elements: air, water, earth and fire. Instead of a duel of opposites their combat transmutes the coiled-up energy of the dragon into solar light, which manifests as the beautiful princess of the myth. The conclusion is drawn that there is a dialectical movement of force in the battle between St. George and the dragon. The hero releases the antithetical power of the dense, dark matter symbolised by the dragon so that the elements of a polarity do not remain contrasted but are resolved creatively.”
[ix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Tyler
[x] Søren Kierkegaard et al
[xi] Link Span, BTF film of 1956, directed by Michael Clarke. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt1754135/ “This documentary from British Transport Films, follows 24 hours in the life of three British Railways Channel ferry services.”
[xii] Colin Wilson paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee in Religion and the Rebel (1957) reprinted by Aristeia Press in 2017, page 130.
[xiii] Charlton village is the one here of many.
[xiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland While Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire landscapes may not be “realistic”, personally, I wouldn’t think of them generally as “surreal” – which word to me indicates an element of attitude, even a degree of literary willing, more evident in (for example), Paul Nash’s gently surrealist, Landscape from a Dream, or in Dorothea Tanning’s, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-eine-kleine-nachtmusik-t07346
Sutherland’s best Pembrokeshire work celebrates the mystery and reveals the hidden power and primeval qualities of the landscape. However, I can see how, given that his landscapes are often ‘more real than reality’, this can easily be associated with surrealism, and at times he does utilize a more surreal approach. In fact, it could be argued that the most relevant aspect of surrealism, is not the exaggerated drama of melting watches and so on, but simply an ability or a moment in which one sees and notices things more vividly. Walking through a suburb of Heysham yesterday, gradually moving into a heightened sense of seeing, I was reminded how ‘surreal’ so many houses and gardens can look in bright daylight, the layout of shrubs and pots, the window surrounds and porches etc – all those aspects of daily life it is so easy to take for granted or disregard. Down on the prom, I was reminded of Paul Nash’s short essay Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism published in The Architectural Review (Volume LXXIX, April 1936, pp. 161-4). Nash himself distinguished between the work of artists belonging to a Surrealist group, distinguishing their work by a capital ‘S’, and “artworks, situations, objects or locations that have a dreamlike character or incongruous settings that evoke disquiet or the uncanny. These, he describes, as surreal with a small ‘s’.” See: www.paulnashdorset.co.uk/timeline/1936#
[xv] https://internationaltimes.it/?s=meter-reader Obituary for my father, 2024.
Lawrence Freiesleben is an artist, musician and the author of the novels The Bow, Maze End, Certainty Under the Rose and A Bruise in the Snow