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I sit beneath the shadiest tree in Peckham Rye Park

Oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter

Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets

I'm dressed all in black despite the sun

Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion, barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes

Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke

I watch as X____ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk, enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can

Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.

Heat ripples from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds

Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron

///

I sit in the recovery lounge and, if you've seen one, you've seen them all

The same clinical sterility with an underfunded NHS grubbiness collecting in the cracks and crevices

The click slurp of antibacterial gel dispensers

The paper half-cup of cooling vending machine coffee

X____ sitting next to me with the woozy indifference of general anaesthetic wearing off

Waiting for a taxi because nobody in the city owns a car and certainly not us

To pass the time X____ tells me everything her doctor told her about idiopathic disease

Which is, “any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin”

click

I peer down into that still black coffee pool

slurp

///

In the park everything blurs in diaspora

Everyone converging on the Summer

I watch X____ with her arms still wrapped around the oak

A young William Blake who, in the year 1766, was rapt by a Peckham Rye Common vision of, “a tree filled with angels with bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars” †

I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds, daydreaming about leaving the city

Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains

///

“So I remained with him, sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep.

By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city. Beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining.” ‡

///

In the Clock House overlooking the Common I order an overpriced house white

To distract myself from the maximalist, etsy grotesque interior, I read about how oak trees have evolved to hollow themselves out as they grow, to conserve energy and stabilise their massive weight

How populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat

“Even in cases where oak woodlands remain they are often broken up into smaller, isolated fragments. This fragmentation makes it hard for beetle populations to connect and breed, reducing genetic diversity and species resilience”.

I run my wetted fingertip around the rim of the bulbous wine glass until the sharp whistling gives way to a hairline fracture that splits the glass from stem to rim

I get up and leave the pub

///

The rumble of the overground above the arches blurs into sub-bass

I try to get drunk quickly on vodka mixers in plastic cups from a plywood bar

A damp patch spreads on the unsanded bar top beneath the drip drip drip of the semi-circular brickwork, my right boot in a sloshing puddle over by the cloakroom, a generally subterranean atmosphere

I push to the front of the stage where a billowing opium fog obscures synthesizer, pedals, reel-to-reel tape machine

For the next hour I watch X____ debuting her solo album in a swirl of below-Earth ambience

On the rainy bus ride home I try to avoid trite hauntological insights even as the right side of my black hoodied head slumps against the dirty glass of the upper deck window

///

Jerusalem, plate 76 ‡, “a few white lines indicate the tree’s roots; some jagged lines form triangles (trees? mountains?) center right” ⁜

The inscription etched in the lower center confirms the identity of the figure crucified on a fruit-bearing tree, though there is debate over which of several trees named in Jerusalem are to be associated with the one pictured ⁜

Possibly the tree merges all (Life, Good & Evil, deadly Moral Virtue) with, among others, the trees of The Oak Groves of Albion, the most terrible form of the oak assumed by Blake's prophetic visions — covering the whole Earth with ”'dark roots' and the 'stems of Mystery' upon which the Druids sacrificed their victims” ⁜

///

Down to underwear me and X____ give the bedroom a chance, suffering the viscous humidity of an attic conversion in a Victorian housing stock

Draughty rooms somehow mouldering year around

After half an hour we're voiding an over-cautious contract and making our escape through a hallway window, climbing onto the flat extension of X____'s partitioned townhouse

We take turns flicking lit matches off the roof and counting the seconds before they blink out, picturing a rural night sky dark enough to watch trailing rock and dust ignite in the atmosphere

Kids shoot a grime video in the stairwell of a newbuild up the street, our neighbour sits in the gutter playing guitar

He croaks folk songs in familiar Brazilian Portuguese and we decide he misses some part of something he used to call home

While writing this I have the not-entirely-unpleasant sense memory of melted tarmac fumes

Me and X____ talk until late but I can't remember a single thing we talk about, and looking back I can only imagine the things we might have talked about, because the whole point of memory is the forgetting

In a photograph I find on a usb stick our faces are obscured by digital artefacts conjured by a phone camera struggling in low-light

I remember that, “technology has made us all ghosts”

The night curls up around us like a ribbon, the roof floating on updrafts, on steam

///

Gilchrist, his first biographer, relates how, “Blake was diagnosed as a sufferer of extreme and persistent visual hallucinations, a man who 'painted from spectres', and had lost his grasp on reality. 'His may be deemed the most extraordinary case of spectral illusion that has hitherto occurred.'” †

I follow the synchronicity present on the final page of his 1793 work, America A Prophecy ‡, in which Blake depicts a colossal white-robed figure bowing to the earth besides, “three lightning-scathed oaks, each of which, 'as if threatening heaven with vengeance, holds out a withered hand.'” †

I begin to notice frequent holey imagery appearing in my notebooks, journals, drafts

Holey as in foraminous, perforated, full of gaps or breaches

Nothing pertaining to the Divine

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References.

† Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake. Richard Holmes, Alexander Gilchrist (Harper Perennial, 2011).

‡ William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books. William Blake (Thames & Hudson, 2008).

⁜ The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

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