Arc: Volume 1 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: John MacFarlane
Published: 2013-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

Dancing on the ruins

Simon Ings

Inner space

Some civilisations fade and crumble. Others dance themselves to death. Simon Ings catches glimpses of the party at the end of the world

A rmageddon. Inundation. Heatwave, ice age or plague. Pick your catastrophe: chances are that society would survive any or all of them. Or at least, some of society would. The men in the bunkers. Some soldiers, some sailors. Conscripts and miners, a handful of farm workers. Billions might be lost, but a handful would, more or less calmly, carry on.

But a party – a big, burn-it-all-up, bring-the-house-down party – would wipe out civilisation in a week. Universal agreement that there’s absolutely no more point going to work would bring the whole edifice crashing down more quickly than guns, atrocities or civic unrest. Wars create causes. Plagues foster control. But a strike or walk-out brings a nation to its knees. An impromptu festive season is the fastest way to a failed state.

The biggest, most anarchic party of recent years is being thrown by those funsters in plastic Guy Fawkes masks. For the lulz, for great justice: sightings of plastic Guy Fawkes masks, worn in notional solidarity everywhere from Cairo to Mexico City to the City of London, should strike more fear into the heart than they actually do. In the very sameness of the protest is an assumption – a declaration, even – that all fights are one fight, all dissatisfactions valid, all contracts void. Everything must go.

We assume that the more party-like the protest, the safer it is. The more like a free festival it is, the less threatening. The more socially diverse or (even better) middle-class, the more toothless.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bad thoughts attend a trawl through an old stomping ground. Yet all the signs point towards purported progress: an increase in affluence, a gentrification. Montpelier lies north of Bristol’s city centre, in a bowl where three streets meet. It has been bootstrapping itself year by year into a charmingly dated, New Age idea of gentility. The Farm Shop’s not the mouldy muddle I remember. The juggling store has moved; in its place, the Pacifica offers “little strips of Sesame Spiced Chicken and Green Capiscum served with Warm Mango Sauce”.

The rest changes hardly at all. In the Old England pub the jukebox still plays Pink Floyd. The faces are different, but the crowd hasn’t changed. White boys in dreadlocks, or shaven-headed with limp Jesus beards. Girls in cotton shifts and unlaced army boots.

I remember a party. An empty house in the middle of England’s south-western nowhere just after the UK’s second summer of love. Acid house had exploded, fizzled, fermented. A driveway. Exhausted gravel, all mud and hardcore and potholes. The drive was lined with trees. On the left were fields, to the right a bank of rhododendrons: our truck’s headlights rummaged through their glossy, un-living green.

The house came into view: a big, no-nonsense place, its white stucco luminous in the dusk. It had not been long left vacant.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.