Without a love of my own

"Without a love of your own"

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W H Auden

I remain drawn to things that hurt me. That's why I took off my
baseball cap that I always wear after twilight and threw it into the
sea, that's why I'm here at the beach with cool sand between my toes;
looking out into the still, glassy sea that turns my stomach. I keep
telephoning Gordon Sumner and he still works in a school. I hum to him
and he hangs the phone up. Eight o'clock every night. I sing to him, "I
send an SOS to the world, I hope that someone gets my?" and he hangs
up.

This is absolutely true. I don't want to be in this world anymore. The
sea doesn't lap at the beach the way it should, the sand isn't damp a
few inches from where the sea lies. The sea, the bloody North Sea just
sits there as still and dull as a garden pond with fattened golden koi
carp. Not a single wave. If you could freeze the sea, you could walk
over it to Ireland and all the way there it would be completely
flat.

Nothing washes up on these beaches, no driftwood. The sea doesn't move.
It has become passive, all of the life of concrete. The Beach Boys
never made a single record, nobody has ever surfed. My favourite
section of Apocalypse now doesn't exist any more.

Don't ask me how, but by mishap I have pushed through into a parallel
world, the same as my own in every regard except for one. In this
world, there is no moon, and everything that flows from that.

The streets are dark, or lit up by lemon lights. There is no natural
light, no gorgeous disc of silver hanging up there like some strange,
rare fruit. There's no moon to pull the tides, so the sea is still and
unpleasant, like watching film played at a tenth of the speed, slow and
queasy.

I can't get back, I can't get back.

There have been days when I have pulled and clawed at the air itself,
trying to rip a hole into it, puncture through and get back to where I
belong. I was wearing the cap at night so that I wouldn't have to see
the empty sky. There's not even a scar to show that the moon was ripped
out, it simply never was. The sky at night, to me and me alone in this
world, is like looking into the eyes of Roman statues, blank and
inexpressive.

For a day or two, I hadn't even realised that I was living in a
parallel world. I just didn't look up at the sky, and I live nowhere
near the sea. I can't even recall now what chance remark I made to a
work colleague. But I remember a blank face when I said the word moon,
as though I had said 'sesquipedealean'. There is no moon in this world
anymore; and though I know there was no life on it, just some dusty
footprints, a golf ball and a plaque with Richard Nixon's name on it,
the loss of it makes me feel utterly alone.

I went to the British library, got out the books, did the research.
Astronomy, science, exploration. Never a mention of the moon. Neil
Armstrong shows up on google as a former pilot who went into
drag-racing. Buzz Aldrin doesn't show up at all.

Women don't have 28 day cycles here. My attempts at dating have not
been too successful, as this question always comes up too soon, in my
eagerness to calibrate what a moon-free companionless earth might be
like, what circadian rhythms we may cling to. I can't be sure, it may
be a trick of the mind similar to the tendency of the skin to itch when
someone talks of lice, but I don't think a second is quite the same
here as it was in my world. I count, but the minutes seem fractionally
off.

There are no myths about werewolves. In this world, no men of a certain
age get a special feeling in their belly when they think about Jenny
Agutter; well, not unless they are sick and fancied her in The Railway
Children.

It is the music that slays me. It always does. I can't resist spending
my lunch-hours flicking through the racks at HMV. As I've said, the
Beach Boys have disappeared completely - their early career was based
entirely on surfing, and there's no concept of surfing now. You can't
surf without waves. Charlie don't surf, but neither does anyone else.
Nobody ever saw a bad moon rising, that curly-haired chimp from
Toploader never was dancing in the moonlight (that's one tiny
consolation), Showwaddywaddy never invited a girl to go for a little
walk, under the moon of love.

I went to the City of Manchester stadium once, and even though I've
never been a Man City fan, the absence of a song from the terraces
still made me shudder and weep into my sausage and chips after the
game.

Funny, the things that snag in your memory. A Beano annual, from the
late Seventies, featuring Dennis the Menace's dog Gnasher, wearing a
top-hat and with a cane, singing "Give me the moonlight, give me the
bone" - a joke about a music-hall song already years out of date by the
time the Beano tried to deliver it to children reading it, but
indelibly fixed in my memory.

Sometimes, I do wonder if I am just wrong; if there has never been a
moon and I am the only one imagining it. But if that's true, then I am
a great artist, who can envision, and try badly to execute, pictures of
stormy wild seas : Delacroix's 'Raft of Medusa' that was no longer
hanging in the Louvre when I visited. And I can write poetry and
compose songs. None of them make any sense to anyone when I try to
communicate it. These days, I paint skyline after skyline, all with the
curve of the moon dominating.

I can't help stalking Sting. In my mind, he is the key to it. He's
fixed as a school-teacher here. He never got out and formed a band. He
never had a hit with "Message in a Bottle", because without tides and
waves, nobody would ever throw a bottle into the sea with a message in
it, hoping for rescue. He never had a hit with "Walking on the Moon"
either, and that was that. He remains a school-teacher.

But I believe that somewhere within him, these songs remain. I can make
them wash up to the surface, I can exert my own gravity and make these
songs come out, like flotsam and jetsam.

So I found him and I telephone him to sing to him. I whisper to him,
"You don't have to put on the red light", I plead with him, "Oh can't
you see, you belong to me" and most importantly, I pretend he's an
actor that I'm wishing ill-fortune on, "I hope your legs don't
break".

This is my slender hope, to draw down the moon and make it mine again.
If enough of us dream and believe and pay homage to her, she will come
out of the shadows and paint the sky again.