She's Lost Control

She gave away the secrets of her past

1. "I"
Up there with "How are you" and "What do you do" in the pantheon of bollock-crushingly boring icebreakers is "Where are you from". If my father had had his way, that would have been quite a simple question to answer - I'm from Germany. However, memories of the fatherland are fourfold: sitting on my grandfather's knee in front of his liquor cabinet, which had a spiked helmet in it (although I doubt it was his); crying at the dinner table after putting my finger into a candle flame and discovering that, yes, fire is hot; racing down a motorway crammed into the back of a Porche going at a ridiculous pace; ice-skating on a frozen pond in Beckum. Also, assorted hazy memories of breakfast, inevitably involving small white rolls with cheese and/or ham.

When pushed, I will say Londoner, or even Crouch Ender. I have a certain amount of pride from growing up in Crouch End. It is certainly not an unpleasant part of town, picturesque, filled with advertising execs onto their second child and artists whose husbands work abroad a lot. It is definitively well-to-do, a place where apparently by law pushchairs can only have three wheels. I have a certain pride because those are the reasons people have heard of Crouch End - its mid-30's Volvo bohemianism, clock tower, and lack of tube station the only memorable things about it. I grew up on the bad side of town, in a large house with eight families in it, sharing a room with my brother, avoiding the burglaries (seven in five years) by being away or sleeping through them.

My mother always wanted to be a well-to-do artist.

There's nothing wrong with aspirations like that really; to want to be a certain sort of person is the reason most people make judgements about most things in life. We judge others on - are they like us? - are they acting like they want to be how we want to be? Perhaps it's just me.

I could say, I grew up in England and Turkey, spent some time in Bali, became a man in Holland.. but oh what is the point, selfish autobiographic muse of mine?

The point is a simple one: I have moved around a lot, while staying still. Fundamentally, I'm an adapter, a chameleon. If you could mate a chameleon with a cat, the offspring would be me. I seem to remember a horror story Asimov wrote featuring a similar creature, which ate parrots by firing its nose into them.

The point is a simple one: I've booked my ticket out of here, and halfway through January will find myself stranded to some extent in New York.

A grand feeling.

I've been in a sentimental mood lately. Part of the hopeless panic I feel when people go out of my life is to do with my changeability. I often develop certain personas around people I care about. Being very aware of that, I've managed to limit how much I care about what people think of me 99% of the time.

As there is only one person in my life now who has known all sides of my life, as it has been for the past four years at least, all the iterations and mistakes, loves and lustings, and perhaps even moreso that that person is someone who I will hardly ever see although conversation takes place nearly daily, I have shed my skin.

Who am I? I have never known. I have known who I have wanted to be, often very badly, badly enough that nothing else seemed worth it if I could not be that person. Even recently, wanting the love of a good woman (but not being a good enough man to cope with it when she said no), wanting a partner in the wildness and exploration that has taken over my life (but not one who'd take that quest for exploration - internal and external - and turn it on its head and say anything goes), all these things are things that I have enjoyed wanting more than I have enjoying having. I have been as a mirror and a mannequin, words dressed to please - through genuine care for those I love, but also genuine lack of self-awareness. I have no doubt that there could have been happier endings all round if things involving other people had gone my way.

Truthfully, I believe I have the best life of anyone I know, and I want to share it. Adaptable and chameleonic, I fit into underground fetish clubs, fashion shoots, high society, luxury restaurants, squats.. I am not judgemental of the people I meet. I simply don't care. My life is good. It could be better if a few other people were still in it, and there are hundreds of things I do that I'd love to be able to share, but on the evidence at hand.. the ones who fall by the wayside only get left behind. Will Lilian whore herself to a few thousand and get down to South America? No chance. Did Jenni go back to college, get the self-respect she always thought it'd bring? Last I heard she'd moved to Kent. Did Willow find a place for herself amongst the rubber men and vintage girls she so aspired to? The only times I've seen her in such places, she's only been accompanied by the quiet boy she'd known since she lived in Ireland. I don't begrudge them their inevitable failures, although obviously it still stings to see people I'd wished to share great things with disappear under the morass of average. I wish things had worked out different, but ultimately, it is far more their loss than mine.

2. The only time I know who I really am is when I take pictures.

Do you know the feeling, that greatness is happening now? I have very little use for people telling me they like a particular picture I have taken, unless I have taken it with them in mind, in which case their affirmation or rejection of it is simply a measure for me to judge myself against - how well have I done?

As a younger man who thought to become a writer I was able to put myself into a state of mind of near total concentration simultaneous with heavier and heavier use of narcotic substances. Typically, I would lock myself in a room for three or four days, with a bag of dope, four packets of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey and a little speed and/or acid. After four days I'd have something like this on my screen:

Headlights searchlight through the winter night -
police flashlights cast jagged shadows of street fights.
Underground, the Underground rumbles under concrete mounds,
the last train, making wind in the drains, aching like growing pains
through the unsleeping city, awakening with no pity
the light sleepers, disturbing the midnight daydreamers,
spreading beneath the ground like jungle creepers
reaching out to throttle cheetahs and all the wildlife,
hunting with good looks, smart suits or a knife,
pounding beneath the pavement like bad breath
the night before the morning after, rails squealing
like mouse laughter, or a knife sharpened,
the closed stations darkened, rats martyred
under the steel wheels, dodgy deals done
in the first carriage, sex before marriage in the last,
in the blackness impossible to say how fast or slow
they go, how high or low, if it rains or snows
above. A standing couple declare love
under fluorescent bulbs flickering
like St. Elmo's fire, loose wires
crawling from a broken hole,
the groaning metal mole
burrowing between buildings,
glimpsing stars through the skylight,
glass towers reflecting moonlight.
People on the platforms look
like ghosts
in the tubelight.

which I wrote when I was 20, I think. I don't know how I'd evaluate a poem like that now, but certainly the state of mind I was in when I would write - and I wrote a lot - was very similar to how I feel when I'm in the midst of taking pictures.

It works like this. My mind is full of concepts; I spend at least an hour every day reading the news, sport, wikipedia, whatever. Information for the sake of information. The more I read the more it is like wrapping strands around candyfloss; ideas in my head swell up, often totally unrelated to anything I've put in there. For writing it might be - for the example of the poem above - a rhythm that stuck in my head for about a week, like being on a never-ending train journey. I could not stop thinking with it, and it was not a metered thing, more organic than that, but clattering along either way.

When I take pictures the elements are a bit more vague than with writing, especially poetry (which in my opinion is probably the most condensed, signifier-heavy form of art) but the same ideas of structure and time fill me and are translated by the click of a shutter.

The perfect moment of intersection between the elements (framing, speed of subjects vs shutter speed, movement of light within the frame, planar & perspective shift from moving the camera etc.) is always going to be a subjective thing. It is true that anyone can take a great photograph; what must be learned is that we must be objective with our subjectivity, which is a stupid and roundabout way of saying we must know what we like. When you know what elements would go into the perfect photograph you want to take, you chase it every time you pick up a camera. And then, if you are good, and have the technical skills to capture what you want to, then your mind is filled with the changing of the elements in the frame, and your whole world becomes focused, but through a lens.

I don't know that I could ever stop taking pictures now; it is only when I look through the lens that I truly know if I like what I see. All I know for sure is - the feeling, that the creative thread has been gripped tightly, has been with me for over a year now, and grows stronger every day. I can lose myself in a photoshoot while directing two models and three assistants - the words come out on autopilot, and all I am aware of is how it looks through the lens.

There is no future or past to this. My perfect moment is now, measured in fractions of a second.

3. Moomin

I first remember the litter; my personal opinion is that, while many different sorts of cat are beautiful, black kittens are inherently ugly. Their darkness and kitten fur gives them no definition, but their faces look too small surrounded by all that blackness. So it was with this one. For a while our house was full of cats. We were breeding them; I think at one point my brother and I counted 23, mostly kittens, but still - watch your step!

We kept one, and it was my turn to name. Black cat, like a troll - Moomin! Also a girl I had a crush on used to draw them on her school books. Half Burmese, which but for the FAIDS would have meant she was worth a lot of money. As it was, she was big, strong, vocal.. and then nearly dead.

My mother found her in the alley next to the house, howling like she was on heat and really needing something up her. We took her to the RSPCA hospital, where the prognosis was that she'd broken her hip and spine, and would probably not last the next day. Two weeks later we picked her up, and she was noisier than ever.

Something had changed though, her smell perhaps, or perhaps the fear and pain had changed her personality; the other cats rejected her, and so my room became our room. She ate in there and she slept in there; the roof terrace outside my window was where she went when she wanted to go outside. She'd let me know by pawing at the window and howling, any time of night.

As she got stronger, she grew more willful. She would howl at me to bring her food, to give her attention, to brush her hair.. I suspect a certain transferred oedipal situation took place, but I didn't mind. She was mine, I was hers - if I had been a more sociable person, perhaps I would not have reacted so strongly, but we bonded somehow. After I'd brought her food, she'd go out; a few hours later there'd be a muffled roar outside my window and she'd climb through the top left open. Half asleep at whatever time of night it was, I'd open my eyes to find her purring noisily on my chest, a pigeon or rat in her mouth, as if she wanted to provide for me.

One night she climbed through the window howling louder than usual; I stroked her, and then saw blood all over my hand. I examined her; the tip of her tail was not fur but a jut of bone. She hissed at anyone else who picked her up, so I carried her to the vet in my arms, covered in blood by the time I got there.

It is an odd sort of madness, how we treat animals. I suspect that it is a two-way thing, that the more we treat animals as human, the more we become a part of their pack. Is it madness to talk to a cat? She always told me what I wanted to hear.

When my mother moved to Dorset, she took my cat with her. Earlier this year I got a phone call telling me my cat had diabetes, and needed an injection every day. Two weeks ago I got a phone call from my mother telling me my cat had died, suddenly, of a brain hemorrhage. My mother said they were going to cremate her; I argued and said she must be buried.

I don't know if my mother told the truth about how she died; it's perfectly possible that she gave me one reason when the truth involved the money it cost to give her insulin every day. I don't know; I cried a lot, like I haven't for a long time.

She had perfect eyes, the softest fur, and knew my footsteps when I was coming into the house even if I hadn't seen her for six months. I've had many pets but she was the first who was really mine; I will miss her at Christmas. I brought her back from the dead, twice, but this time I wasn't there. I am sorry.