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The meditation from last night as a couple of people asked it get put here

I have a bit of a thing about party debris. I love empty bottles and cans lining mantelpieces, burnt out tea lights, wet fag ends, redundant corks. The crashed out bodies of last night’s revellers in duvets around a house, resisting the morning light. The dregs of drinks in hungover cups along bookshelves, the glass distorting the titles on the spines of my books.

I love cleaning it all up – it’s not particularly unselfish, it’s just the most evocative kind of cleaning. I like it. I probably feel cool doing it.

This morning in someone else’s kitchen, picking over bottle tops and soggy cupcake papers, I thought, – I’ve had a thing about the debris for a while but I’d not thought about what I liked about it much – and this morning I thought, it’s coz we were alive last night, – I look at the shrapnel and I know we had fun. – I’m not dead. I’m not going quietly. It’s a relief. My limbs work. My blood isn’t thin.

The Thames in the Fire Sermon carries no party debris. “The river bears no empty bottles, –/ Silk handkerchiefs, cigarette ends /Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. /And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; /Departed, have left no addresses”. No party debris, and the people we knew or didn’t know, who populated our line of vision, have left; and it feels hollow.

I usually go excited to parties; usually like London. Like Tower Bridge, scaffolding on one tower last time I saw it; like the lanterns along More London, the tiny beach at the South Bank, the ferry boats, the spines of Charing Cross Bridge, Westminster all gold and dusty, Battersea Power Station.

Sometimes my God rattles through my city air and my sinews and cartilage and the tube tunnels I’m shunted through daily.

Sometimes I want mundane, I want dead, I want mediocre quiet. Sometimes I’m hardly alive, and I hardly care; I’m in absence and everyone’s not here, and there’s no sign they have been, and God is in the everybody.

POSTED 21.09.09 BY: admin | Comments (1)

One Response to “The meditation from last night as a couple of people asked it get put here”

  1. On September 24th, 2009 at 7:36 pm Sam said:

    Gracie, I love your randomness. My life pretty full of party debris, but ive just left it in other people's flats. Anyway I love how the meditation moves through excitement and party to 'why the hell did I do that Last night' and 'were the last 5 pints entirely necessary…and now ive got to clean up'. Hope life is good in london, it certainly seems to be full of cleaning :)