THE DEEP POOL - OCTOBER 2003

All these days of air folding into itself over and over again as you walk down the street, until a hand of air moves shyly up your sleeve to say

- 'i think i'm dying, but i'll see you in spring, when grieving waters carry broken ice to the sea - our names will be in the ice and shall dissolve together as the salt leaves our wounds to join the great mother' (eh?).

Now, rereading that, i wondered whose cadence i was mimicking, or, with luck, emulating - i sat long and hard, staring at the back of the chinese takeaway, beansprouts turning brown with oak leaves and the first chestnuts: then it came to me - it's the great Anna Kavan, a French writer, and one of my all-time heroines, best known for her terrifying novel 'Ice', but also the author of great works such as 'Asylum Piece', 'My Soul In China' and 'Sleep Has His House'. Anna was a heroin addict for most of her adult life, a good friend of the English science fiction writer Brian Aldiss (author of the insanely good 'Hothouse'). However, her heroin addiction was of an orderly and controlled nature, with no investment in the 'lifestyle' associated with 'junkies' (two of my least favourite words). There is in particular, a chapter in 'Asylum Piece' which is the single greatest exposition of despair that one could possibly read - as the final scene ends, there is no sense at all that it is ever possible to enter the world again - something that has great personal resonance for me right now, as i watch my mother struggling to reconcile herself to life in an old folks' home living with people who are simply a lot more ill than herself, so that she is being, as she puts it correctly 'literally bored to death': however, she's having a laugh a minute compared to the girl in Kavan's story...i'll say no more here.

Oh, the phone just rang - it was Andy White - it just rang again - it was Martin Goldschmidt, my record company boss, to say that he's going to do a new and seriously limited run of my live classic 'For Peace Comes Dropping Slow'.

But back to Andy White - he's playing in Portsmouth tonight and Southampton on Saturday, so we're going to go and see him at one of those shows: i might ask him if he'd like me to play on a couple of songs. Andy is a real original - i love his songs, and he has a beautiful wife - so much so that i always say stupid things when i'm in her company, out of a kind of mooning abashment -

Andy's wife - 'so you played in Zurich on your last tour, eh Jackie?'

Jackie - 'yes, there was a football pitch to the right of the motorway when we drove into town, and later on i had a short sleep in the afternoon at the hotel, which was nice'.

Andy's wife - 'oh, well er, that must have been nice'.

Jackie - 'not really - i woke up with a funny taste in my mouth, because i drank some pernod at Stuttgart airport'.

....You see the problem...

Our holiday in Paxos was magnificent - for the first week i was a flailing mess, standing around in the supermarket staring at tins of corned beef that i had no intention of buying, or watchng the mainland coastline fading pinkly from view in my good friend Spiros's bar while a man on Chill Con Fusion Vol 4 sang 'babe babe babe - i don't wanna leave you', the best song i've heard in years, with fabulous production ideas i intend to adopt, like vocal delays put thru a fuzz box and spun into a distance that matched the yearning i felt as sombre mountains winked into blackness.

There's a picture in my desk of my father - it was taken in a little photo booth - he looks like Burt Lancaster in the film Valdez Is Coming - 'you tell them - Valdez in coming'. There can be no greater compliment.

We went to a great local bar in Magazia on Paxos, where i shocked everyone by eating whole young lemons that had been crystallised in a weird green syrup - they tasted great with ouzo on the side - old men were playing a kind of Glaswegian backgammon, in which you had to smash pieces down as loudly as possible, whilst spitting and catching wasps simultaneously - remember this image next time you are tempted to pretend you appreciate a particular piece of conceptual art...

My Greek friends are coming to see me play at the Small Music Theatre in Athens on November 8th, then we shall probably have a severe Greek-style yahoo the next day, playing in some bar, shouting, breaking things and hissing...

Sometimes these people will lock a bar, and in honour of, say, a woman who has endured the kind of hardship that would shame anyone who pays money to a psychotherapist: there will be an intensity of playing, singing and dancing that deliberately takes everyone to the brink of an abyss you never want to countenance - at the critical phase, every glass in the bar will be smashed violently to the floor, and a human greatness will be on display in which the particpants become one, and which, to an outsider, would look like genuine madness, or at the least, an incomprehensible craziness that would endure as your central and perpetual traumatizing image: except there are no outsiders to see these things - such a ritual takes place in the strongest of containers, and the strength comes from proper concealment - it is, after all, as important to conceal as to reveal. And nature loves to hide.

Our culture is addicted to revelation - it's pathetic.

jl