© 20.7.2003

© 1957

There was a city when I was three and it existed beyond the edge of the world.

The world ended at the trees with the stars over them opposite 3 Pen-y-Bryn.

No one had a car except the man with the Austin A-40 who I later learned had the job of hovering over a button to stop the rolling mill in case the steel flew off, and died of stomach cancer.

I also found out that the city, called Swansea after Sweyne Forkbeard of Denmark, or Abertawe [mouth of the river Tawe] in the Celtic tongue, was burned and bombed by the haute bourgeois Luftwaffe in 1940 and its city centre flattened in the ‘Three Nights’ Blitz’ of February 1941.

I never knew what crying was then. I thought it was about hands burned in snow and the toggle that came off my duffle coat. And the tin globe that fell apart in my hands before we went to Australia.

the tin globe that came in half
in Wales in 1957
and told me
this is the world

In the city were red buses, as red as postboxes. No Yankee doodlebugs loomed from out of the uttermost West.
And in the village, my dog Prince who saved me from falling into a sinkhole of coalwater … and the time I got stuck in the muck of the farm at the back when I ran off to visit Auntie Nan … and the horror of holly that scratches your leg.

Counterfactual utopian blueprints, condemned rightly by Karl Marx (when not hunting in the morning and fishing in the afternoon ), are to me no more than precious flickerings in the campfire, shadows on the cave wall, dreams of the dead. Utopian yearnings, like cemeteries with only a magpie, noiseless, alighting on chipped concrete to take off alive … , or analogue clocks running backward in a mirror, animate my soul nonetheless. I demand the impossible, like space to store my moth and rust-vulnerable books, and a decent income (as most of the planet cries out for clean water), yet I find that blueprints can no more represent the ‘ideal future’ than the compass needle can find true north or tell us what the Arctic Ocean smells like. At best they are literary exercises, sometimes beautiful in their own way like William Morris’s News from Nowhere; at worst they may in practice come to resemble Orwell’s 1984 or even Nabokov’s Lolita.

My orphaned Manx father,

(Douglas Verdon
son of Florence Beatrice Verdon,
no relation to Dante)

street-kid of the Great Depression,
airman
— once with a pocket full of dog-ends
until he got double pneumonia —
made me a toy garage
in which the lift moved sideways;
we rode the roundabout together —
he told me why the air moved
when it wasn’t windy
and why ‘if’ was a very big word.

Now I am old I know what crying is. And cars. And cities. And horror, watched over by my father’s ghost. And we would eat laverbread and bacon at a sunny table.

‘Death is the harshest anti-utopia’, said the crusty old Stalinist Ernst Bloch. Utopia is a death-defying vision of the child within. Beware if this child is autistic. A better world, that fantasy of ancient Jews, Anabaptists, Anarchists and Socialists, is something to be created with scientific artistry by adults who know that life is limited and that discovery is eternal. But fantasy is not valueless, as Francis Bacon shows in the New Atlantis. If we can build a better mousetrap, why not a better world?

Let us rebuild our childhood while we still breathe and dance and study and sing.

The ideal city may become a Guernica, a Brasilia, an Islamabad or a Stalingrad — or a Kronstadt with poor soldiers falling like stones through the shell-shattered ice, followed by a Paris Commune-like slaughter of innocents. It may be an arcology under one roof or a skyborne Metabolist metropolis. But let it be run democratically, not from behind the scenes like a ‘protected village’ or the World Trade Organisation.
It is a world where all is prolegomena and new beginnings, and old women with so many children do not have to live in shoes , nor their children without them. It is science fiction in action, not for ‘mind forg’d manacles’. The building of the new in the arms of the old is our heritage as a human species, the clothed apes, the greatest of all adventures. No architectural blueprints exist for it, any more than rules for writing the novel or for motivating Henry Vaughn’s ‘darksome statesman’, or orchestrating the wheezing aeolian pipes of my bronchiae.

The impossible I demand is justice, even for Timbuctoo, not necessarily embodied in a global gypsy camp or a Letchworth or an arcology or an Auschwitz.
I want ‘neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.’

(Or as the apparently homeless, drunken woman down from Vinnies said to me like a police officer when I asked if she was o.k.: “Move on. None of your business.” Later, before watching an American children’s program about how to make ‘juggling sticks’ with multicoloured duct tape, a model for the capitalist system to emulate, I realised in the shower that Pears soap might make an ideal lens which if properly calibrated might allow us to concentrate solar energy and see the future. But I am mad, though not as bad and dangerous to know as capitalism.)

The city, even drowned of God, is like a flower, must grow, bloom, and die ceaselessly. And no one will be forced to live in the streets like a wild animal. My own utopian country, born of a cossetted adolescence and a soft infancy, is called Iliantyn, a land with a terrible past which is striving to become part of a better world. Which is the most we can ever do, short of the Second Coming.

The clocks are not striking thirteen in my time-zone.

Armed with love and grief and humiliation and a bow of burning gold, I return to it time and again.