Sinclair - London: city of disappearances

Ann BAER J. G. BALLARD Steve BEARDKi ki BENZON Paul BUCK Vahni CAPILDEO Keggie CAREW Peter CARPENTER Brian CATLING Marc Vaulbert de CHANTILLY Thomas DeQUINCEY Kathi DIAMANT Drif field BillD RUMMOND Gareth EVANS Tib or FISCHER Allen FISHER Anthony FREWIN Ranald GRAHAM Bill GRIFFITHS Lee HARWOOD Stewart HOME Richard HUMP HREYS Patrick KEILLER Marius KOCIEJOW SKI Andrew KTTING Tony LAMBRIANOU Malcolm LETTS Rachel LICHTENSTEIN Alexis LYKIARD Jonathan MEADES Michael MOORCOCK Alan MOORE Jeff NUTTALL Nick PAPADIMITRIOU Chris PETIT Tom RAWO RTH Derek RAYMOND George W. M. REYNOLDS Nichol as ROYLE Anthony RUDOLF James SALLIS Sukhdev SANDHU John SEED Will SELF Anna SINCLAIR Iain SINCLAIR William SINCLAIR Stephen SMITH Avram STENCLMartin STONE Ruth VALENTIN EAlan WALL Claire WALSH Marina WARNER Ben WATSON John WELCH Carol WIL LIAMS Sarah WISE Patrick WRIGHT

She told us there was a disappearance every eleven seconds
and taped everything we said.

DON DELILLO

At first it was cats and dogs. Snapshots blown up and pinned to trees, municipal noticeboards: Bodger. I am a tanned male Staff with white chest and little black nose, much loved by my family and friends. London is a kennel city populated by vanished animals, kidnapped domestic pets. Self-published, premature obituaries have been wrapped around surveillance poles, pasted to electrical junction boxes. Killer mutts killed in the course of duty: as if one dog had eaten another until there was only a single beast, the dog of dogs, left in town. Dog-shaped absences are felt as a warm wind playing around your ankles. Snatched pooches. Porn-star poodles. Privileged pussies converted into winter gloves or given over to laboratory technicians for evil experiments, scent extraction. Extraordinary rendition. Extinguished darlings can be cloned and replaced. They leave their traces everywhere. Under and around a bench, beside the Regents Canal in Hackney, I notice a thick mat of grey fur; the site of an epic grooming session. Animals, heard at night, yelp in empty buildings. Tooth marks can be found in the branches of trees where pit bulls once hung, strengthening their jaws for combat: the obscene fruit of twilight.

Now the temperature has changed, pit bulls are forgotten. Their patrons, bereaved, have retreated deeper into Essex. Photographs of disappeared humans, victims of the latest outrage, multiply across plywood fences that protect the latest grand project. Life drains from the image like hope from a dying eye. Memory-prints of the lost are arranged, in the hope that such a ritual will restore the missing person, the loved one: daughter, brother, husband, father. The disappeared of the First War were named and published on English memorials because they were not here; their bodies, what was left of them, could not be returned from the battlefield. In our present climate of shoulder-shrugging amnesia, we have memorials to memorials, information posters telling us where the original slab has been stored. Heritage replaces the memories which should be passed on, anecdotally, affectionately, from generation to generation, by word of mouth.

It is difficult to explain, this conceit: a city of disappearances. J. G. Ballard thinks of the centre of London as a redundant mausoleum; he cant understand why anyone would concern themselves with its erasure. He has never set foot in Spitalfields or visited Wapping. Why should he? Better to promote an accident of civil engineering like the Westway, a fairground ramp enlivened by tired fictions. What disappears, driving west, is not the road but the landscape that surrounds it: overbuilt, undermanaged. The ramp is the skeleton of a theme-park dinosaur. A fairground ride closed by safety inspectors: too predictable, too boring. A concrete folly in a skateboard jungle of cranes and diggers. A government-sanctioned sprawl of retail colonialism dumped between slip roads. Better this fancy, Ballard suggests, three minutes skimming above the houses, Hilton hotels, railway lines and stadia, than whatever happens down below in the dirty human streets. Three minutes of nervous reverie before the weight of things, the impossibility of escape, strikes us dumb once more.

By soliciting contributions to an anthology of absence, I hoped that the city would begin to write itself (punningly, in both senses): a Canetti fabrication, a documentary chronicle with a multitude of anonymous authors. A revival of the Mass Observation project, perhaps, without the greedy voyeurism of poverty snoops and Home Counties elitists infiltrating northern industrial towns. You have to belong to a place before youare qualified to speak. I am a tolerated provincial who has outstayed his welcome, the liberties of Hackney (where we are all passing through).