Chronicles from the Left Field

CHRONICLES FROM THE LEFT FIELD

At the intersection I could go right and head home but turning left would take me to the field where I would spend the rest of my days. A beautiful day it was, the sun spattering its light and heat all around. I lay under a tree and closed my eyes, and the world turned red. I closed my eyes tighter and ancient men on a retinal carousel went round and round, not before my eyes but behind them. They looked wise and many were earnest; some had beards. Some seemed to accuse me of unknown or forgotten crimes but then some more amused fellows began to prevail and one or two winked at me. Perhaps one was Ovid; they never identified themselves.

I opened my eyes again and the sun attacked so I slowly narrowed them and let the cornucopia of bright filtered rays subside. Then I could perceive the primary colours of the treescape, the green pinnate acacia-like leaves and the blue sky behind. The sun returned silently exploding on me like an immense budding flower as it moved through the tree and I closed my eyes again. Whereupon I was home in a house twice the size of the one I had left. I walked upstairs and found new companions in upper flats and at the top of the house there was a passageway and I walked under the roof until I came to a mirror house as real as the one I inhabited and I descended mirror stairs till a bee buzzed in front of me.

In my sleep I pushed it away from me and the tree was in almost darkness but there was a light in the west and the sky was beset with the most beautiful of primary colours. It was if God’s spectroscope had perfectly refracted the last available light. Three equal remits- on top a midnight blue like rich velvet, below it an intense ochrey yellow, and then an equally rich scarlet red. Then all in a sudden the triptych collapsed. The blue and the yellow fell down the sky together and the red fled before them. Night was almost upon me and the blue darkness prevailed save for one last smudged red aureole of fire.

And I knew that the lands of the leftfield would henceforth be my home.

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I began to look in the wing mirrors of cars for their convex images. I created taxonomies of perception based on levels of imaginative input. I looked for a mate beyond the spare ribbed creature of the false myths. One like Emily Dickinson’s captive leopard still hearing the clatter and rustle of palm leaves, or Lilith herself returning to us men in our dreams, riding our sleep like Plutarch’s sovereign of the moist.

Everything is perception. My life began with parents, home and school. Theirs was the orthodoxy. I basked in the autumn sun of the British Empire, a benevolent outfit that brought succour and relief to less fortunate parts of the world. From them I learned history and geography and Latin, unwilling partners all to the conspiracies of that zeitgeist. I read stories, none of which were true. Even the British Empire- an English concoction that the Scots and Irish hated as much as any African or Asian did. And there was God, said to be an Englishman with everybody looking for him in the wrong place.

The world was black and white then, even in Hamburg where five Liverpool lads sang for their supper most every night. One at least of them was extraordinary enough to carry colour on his back and gradually release it for all to see as the cold impoverished Hovis-ad-on-the-end-terrace-world gave way to the Technicolor tie-dyed one of the 60s with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (variants of the colours I saw in my first left field).

A world that came into being a couple of billion years or so before for reasons no-one can even hazard a guess at. The timescales. Why did everything take so long? Look how quickly Steve Jobs got on with things. And why didn’t those Liverpool lads stop him (Jobs) from using their fruit for his raincoat Mackintosh?

Look how quickly the Comanche learned to ride horses and the things they could do on them. Horses changed the history of the world twice. Once around the modern-day Ukraine somebody jumped on one. Maybe a kid showing off. But it had wheels (the idea not the horse) and soon tribes started riding hither and thither, meeting other tribes- on their patch of ground. Bad idea. The opening chapters of the history of violence. But at least they had to get down off their high horse to fight.

Fast forward maybe four thousand years to one of the world’s most extraordinary inventions. Little pieces of jointed metal called stirrups. Now riders could stay aboard and wield lances at combined speeds of sixty miles an hour. They were called knights- half human half horse. When the man and the horse took leave of each other there was no knight.

When did people start making things up? How did humour begin? Were all those ancient myths once true? Well yes they were though not necessarily actual which is a different concept.

Is a choice a dilemma? Yes in its origins. Is a choice irrevocable. Well no, it doesn’t have to be. If I chose to be leftfield it didn’t negate all the stuff that went before. There’s still the empire on which the sun never set lurking in my psyche. Maybe it’s mostly in the Ornament rather than the Accident (sun doesn’t set there, geddit). Is someone’s deception a disappointment. It is if they’re French.

So what is it to be leftfield and not go home? It’s a way of looking at the world but also of looking to the world but let’s not spend too much time on the leftfield peacock. Just think of the size of a peacock’s head. And there’s more than the brain that’s got to be packed in there. So inward out let’s stick to that for the moment.

We grew up with very dubious heroes, and lots of them weren’t even British let alone English. Greeks, Italians, one at least pretending to be French. I’m talking Alexander the homophone fireplace, spiky-spicy Julius the Caesar Salad and the disaster in the kitchen that was Linoleum Blown-apart. I never took to any of them. Spent their lives invading other countries and killing huge numbers of their inhabitants. And I’ll tell you another thing about those wusses- they were all scared of cats. How pathetic is that?

Those aren’t my sort of fellas- no way. Greece also had Herodotus, the father of history who also went to many countries not to kill but to observe and record customs and diets and housebuilding. Rome had Ovid (already mentioned. We all need our heroes- Ovid, Jean Gabin, Brian Clough) who deconstructed Greek myths, saw their patterns and connections, and wrote the magnificent Metamorphoses. France had Denis Diderot, encyclopaedist, essayist, bantering novelist. These men added to the world; they didn’t subtract.

Leftfield is an observation post and needs time on its own. I too wrote. I could have painted or designed or composed music but I lacked the talent. Never mind. I did other things. I read and I travelled. I talked and I drank. Drinking beer in pubs is regarded by some as a waste of time. Not necessarily. As long as you talk to others, separate the good from the less good and you’ll get yourself some great friends. Beer brings out the talk- for a good while before maybe it all turns silly. Drink weak beer but good beer, beer still fermenting in the barrel, real beer. It’s called session beer for a reason. Don’t drink Danish rubbish. It’s not the best beer in the world, not even probably.

Travel. While you can. Within reason it doesn’t matter too much where. It’s how you look at a place. See the sights but not the sights you knew about before you set out. Not the obvious places lazy movie directors use for establishing shots (and why does Woody Allen so inspired by New York have a complete cloth eye for London?) Just walk, walk the streets, look upwards, sit at pavement cafes. Take your time.

Be a free spirit but know when your future partner has entered your life. That dream I had in the left field, of an enlarged home. Those were the rooms I had never entered. They must have been all the areas wherein my sweetheart lay for I never dreamed that dream again. She is leftfield too, left-handed and left leaning also. A magician with timelines and jigsaws. And she made my life as complete as any man could wish for.