I Am, Your Image

I traced almost exactly the same steps as a week ago. So much has happened in those past seven days. So much should have happened and never did. A billion more car miles added to the death of planet earth, never ending smog, burning forests, dried up rivers, melting ice caps. Thousands more tonnes of poisons in the air, a trillion plastic particles in the sea. Just in the space of seven days.

Another 3,000 dead children in Gaza, at the latest ‘count’ there are at least 1,000 missing. Blown to pieces or buried in the rubble, perhaps still half alive, no-one can say for sure. A baby has been found, perhaps it was on Saturday. The baby is being soothed by a hand, a medical rescue worker. The baby is covered in oil and dust and blood. No one knows who this baby is.

The front lines, somewhere on the flat lands between Ukraine and Russia are static. No amount of technology, drones, satellites, fibre optic networks, missiles, database servers can break the deadlock. Conscripts attack each other with lumps of wood studded with nails, the sharp side of a spade, in desperation with hands around each others throats.

A plastic baby Jesus lying in a sanitised manger within a luxury shop in Bond Street. Only if one has wealth can this baby Jesus be visited. The poor must hang back but they hear a rumour that Christ will be born again this year in Bethlehem. What will he say?

Those who have spoken falsely will be judged, those who have offered kindness to the sinners will be saved, those who have stretched their hands across bloody war divides in friendship and peace will be redeemed, those who have given the orders for the slaughter of children will be damned.

The world will be turned upside down, those who are now high and mighty will fall, those who are crushed will rise, there will be questions about morals and morality; and when the power relations are changed, the answers will be different.

Tonight I walk on the other side of the street. My steps don’t fall neatly into the footprints of a week ago. These are different shoes, my feet feel different.

I had a dream last night, everything was ok, that’s about as much as we can wish, that things will be ok. Things were ok in that dream, it was like a film in slow motion, in black and white, images being slowly turned over in three and four and five dimensions and everything was ok. I know the person in that dream really well, and there’s been something not quite right between us, and in the dream everything was put right. It was going to work out. I woke refreshed.

A line of cars in the West End trapped by their own self-generated mass of steel. They blast loud horns at each other but remain static. Cursed in the aftermath of another carbon-heavy storm. At Gilbert Street there are Peabody trust flats. I make a note and take some photographs as reminders. These will be part of the research.

I like it here. The mix of housing, shops, cafes, restaurants, I like the red-brick London idiom, the bay windows, the bit of garden at the front, the iron railings. Gilbert Street is one of those streets where everything nicely comes together. Quality, a variation of architeture, the characteristic of ‘atmosphere’ that cannot be measured or added to an accounting spreadsheet.

But some of the buildings that were once housing have been turned into offices and some of those offices appear to be hedge fund management companies. Capital creates an unseen gas which seeps into the mortar between the bricks and poisons the balustrades and terracotta tiles. The offices are empty at night.

The computer monitors and keyboards could be discarded, who needs money when it’s cold outside? The rooms could be decorated, dark red and green colours, touches of gold, silver lace, a bed, just a bed, a warm bed, a safe bed, a bed to sleep and dream, so much to ask for, nothing much at all. The office will be empty all night. These spaces were once homes, before everything became financialised, monetised, capitalised.

In Brook Street I stand in a world of which I am a part of but do not belong. Streaming cars, a flow of people. I remember watching a light comedy film about a female jewel thief in Berlin in the early 1930s There are shots in the film when she is in a taxi and the city, all lit up in the night, can be seen over her shoulder, through the back window of the cab. There it is Berlin, a city in lights.

Within fourteen years that very same city was in ruins, bombed to pieces, all the night clubs gone, the Kroll opera blown into a hundred thousand pieces, the underworld was gone, the cabaret destroyed, the artists and singers executed by the secret police, the men conscripted into a war that could not be won, boys given hand grenades to throw at tanks, the women systematically raped by the so-called ‘Red Army’. Who could have imagined all that when watching… in 1931?

Within fourteen years Berlin was destroyed. Who can imagine what the future holds for London in the next fourteen years? There are precedents for the complete destruction of cities. Warsaw in 1944, Berlin in 1945, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. History is revealing itself again, the reality is becoming clearer, the destructive power of Capital in sharper relief. All the songs are now in discordant keys.

I can’t find the film on Youtube. When I search for comedy films set in Berlin in the early 1930s, all that is presented to me are images of Nazis. That’s how the algorithms work. The internet would be so much better with popular, open-source, democratic intervention. It’s not even control; it’s anti-control. The internet would be a great place without Google, FaceBook, Apple, Amazon and all the rest of it. Take money away and all social relations would instantly improve.

The words of Prada, Dior, Chanel, are merely brand luxury. They have no meaning. They are but carries of exchange-value, concentrated exploitation, the extraction of something from the workers (what is it?), part of the global production of capital. Marx explains this clearly in volume of Das Kapital. He would be a good companion in the luxury West End. Everything he described in the 1860s he would see here, only at a greater scale, more intense, more naked even. There goes the King; imagine that, a King in London in 2023.

The car exhausts are thickening the air while cars wait for the lights to change. It’s like hot sand paper in my mouth and throat. None of us can really breath anymore. The rich have exclusive islands, large houses in the countryside. Part of the force of the Revolution is to break the illusions, the so-called reality, bourgeoise reality if you will. Those illusions are the police-men in our heads. They batter us with truncheons of class ideologies.

People are stopping to have their photographs taken outside Louis Vuitton. A brief appropriation of a luxury brand. Transfixed by a million LEDs, digitised glamour, neon light reality. The shapes are blurred, where has real life gone?

I stop to look at them, I lean on the wall watching them, their images are reflected in the shop window glaze, my reflection is there in the plate glass of Prada, the images of the passers by are reflected in the chrome and steel of a thousand display stands. Our images are merging in the glass and steel, reflected, a momentary unity of images within the Spectacle, conflict, discordance, an impossibility, an oscillating tension of instability. It hangs in the air like a heavy hand upon the night.

I’m watching your images, you are watching my image, the luxury shops are absorbing all our images and reflecting them back to us. You are my image, I am, your image.