Beulah Road

Clouds correlate with a very different set of feelings seen from above. The accepted gesture for Faith is to cast the eyes upwards to the celestial. Only immense distance could glamourize this sale bin jumble of elbows and feet, however, of arm rests and foot rails, into the similitude of an angelic host. Looking down now only makes me feel like a meteorologist. The quiet is unusual, though only relative to the mesmeric vibration of the machine: the engines and the forced air vents, the stray crackle of sterile plastic wrap around the bags of man-made anything-but-nuts. The scratch of a pencil lead would hardly register even to the nearest sleeping neighbour. The sound then of a ballpoint is inaudible, and I write without looking at my hands, eyes still fixed on the clouds.

So looking down I try to observe all the transformations as though from above. In fact not now as a meteorologist but an historian. At least as a rank amateur, like in those plague histories where the apprentice picks up the pen as it falls from the chronicler’s dead hand. I pretend to reflect dispassionately on the debt pandemic and that sudden revolution, some say scheme, in global wealth creation. In that way that history has of looking backward, it seems like almost an inevitability. First with zero hours contracts, legions of workers waiting on demand like idling engines, all justified because of course we were paid. Maybe not well, but then that was just the value the work had. The value of the worker, to question that, that was monetary heresy, just as well call it socialism. From there though it was a short mental journey to functional human machines, bodies of work. If you lose the habit of moral disgust, if it has no fiscal value, then you lose the sight. It’s like the sense organs register, but the meaning has become blind.

The Greater Number of course is always realised as the sign of the moral force. It was just a measure of where the border was constructed and by whom. From the satellite’s view, while it was reflecting back the self-echoing chatter on the latest mobile phones, the clearest sight line must have shown a churning and a pullulating like a fury of ants in the east of the globe. Listening in on the traffic of self-promotion labouring to justify itself as knowledge you would never have heard, ‘One Belt One Road. Studiously rehearsing any lesson but the one most relevant, we consigned into the lee of our attention, from China to the fertile crescent, the silk road economic belt emerging from her chrysalis as the new superpower. The celebrity culture, self-involved, missed its starring role in the re-writing of history from this new centre. In the natural cradle of wealth before the peripheries of Europe and the West, that stellar fall was the natural exemplar of the aggressive and unclean empire of the other.

Why consider only two poles in a dispute, when the world in question is as complex as a Platonic solid, spinning moreover in a tangle of invisible forces? I have never had the luxury of feeling I had a handle on the arguments of the other side. I always knew both too well to feel I understood them, with the vertiginous character of the in-between, the ‘mixed race’. As narrative, any fixed position on ethnicity reduced eventually to a simulacrum of paranoia. But all the same we failed to make race meaningless before it once again became a globalised trade. They feared correctly, but the wrong monsters. ML or ME, those are the positions in the new fault line, the dining table squabble dividing the human family. Melanoid lacking, or endowed, the words distil the kind of confidence only yielded from a pseudo-science. From now on the global elite will understand the world through the first-person experience of being black, however blue eyed their unfortunate genetic inheritance. In the magazine racks, the future children of the oligarchs, those who are always with us, will appear aspiring to tanning and hair extensions… And such as I, too black and too white, for us only in that vortex between rising and falling, are we able to salvage the feeling of truth.

And why was the US the new gold coast? Ironically it was their reliance on the armed defence of freedom, that thing that in the end you cannot buy, only pay for. The international conglomerates did for weapons what they had done for cars. They turned the act of learning into the act of buying, with the self-aiming gun. And the essential software of course required a live online account. Customers, the important ones at least, were eager to volunteer ethnicity, to attest patriotic intent, or at least distance themselves from any radical one. And like a field of potatoes to potato blight, all the conditions required were in place, whether planned or serendipitous, to render insurgence neutral. They put their faith in guns, not in the science of ballistics. And the police? Well after all, where were they the first time around. The uniform didn’t change and hardly those wearing it. But now it was a uniform with the status of the old Amtrak workers, buttons polished in the service.

So I started this journey, not a flight but a controlled evacuation. The emancipated whites of Walthamstow village are an experiment in civic organisation. That is to say, a vouchsafe of plausible deniability for a city that has seen millennia of transfers of power. The choice of location is one of those enclaves in London that exist like an isolate without the need for walls. A brother of my father’s, on the white side, as a long resident, has a place there on Beulah Road. He sent cautiously for me to join him. Away from the epicentre of commodification, the industrial intensity dissipates into a global patchwork of the chilling trade. Like the sub prime complication a while back in the banking service, differing jurisdictions were more or less prone owing to certain kinds of regulation, or lack of it. And in any case, London has long been partial to a human zoo.

A flight across the Canadian border took me to the town of Pickering. There with a sister of my mother’s (also, like my father, late) I reckoned on passing at least long enough, in the confusion of the newly revised colour theory. It was difficult to picture anyone doing any more than passing through this commuter town in the Rouge River valley: a collage of arable fields and suburban houses set back on narrow lawns, cement brick walls in a style developers adopted so as not to do violence to modernist aesthetics and which filtered down mostly in their capitulating to a horror of decoration. Still the pitched roofs conceded to the strictures of a Canadian winter. That is the in-between space where I found myself. Between the strengthened storage floor on ceiling beams and the roof rafters, I was an urban child pretending to camp in a tree house, a loft ladder up, a small window for ventilation like a porthole, a mattress as though it might be for summer storage.

My aunt was out of the house that afternoon I came home, between some days and a few weeks after arriving. A strange feeling propagated from my uncle, but all along I had sensed he didn’t feel obligated to run the risk of someone else’s blood relations, even his wife’s. I retreated and having drawn up the ladder sat vacant in the space kept bare as in a sign, should anyone look, that no one was staying. Then in that hollow left when you suddenly abandon your life, I needed a ration of memory, as much as the comfort of a dummy allowed at least until the first teeth break the gums. I went to find a little token of my unrecoverable life, the one that every refugee finds room for, however small the bag or hurried the preparation. Mine was a queer souvenir, and so much the more personal. A little silver votive heart, it must have come from the earliest of family trips, which opened like a locket with a gilded interior that never tarnished even as the decades receded. My one bag, though large, was kept out of sight behind a jib door in the partition that was angled into the crook of the roof. At first there was dark, dust and the usual small confusion, then nothing. In the emptiness, as the absence rendered unmistakable, a realisation merged into the growing din of knocking at the street door and rising voices … Whether the uniforms attested the new private property guardians or just the regular old police I cannot recall. Physical resistance is a luxury of those with hope and creatures throughout evolution have actually always been more likely to play dead.

And so emerges the flight here that I had hoped to be taking in a different direction, to another destination. For the present purpose, no longer my own to decide, a note of lading suffices, rather than a ticket and passport. Glancing at the details, now no longer my own to determine either, I am designated as Ching Fat, an auspicious name; no surname is required on export products. I gather I was knocked down to an online auction site as a prestige purchase, marketed as an aspirational acquisition to the house proud, maybe newly rich. The auction must have been running as I planned my emancipation over the water. I wonder if my aunt even knew. This time could be worse, the seats retain as yet the vestiges of passenger travel, rather than cargo. The cabin staff all the same are the marshals of the panopticon, the snack bag and plastic water bottle (for both hydration and its inevitable consequence) in place of in-flight service. This is the civilized version of livestock transport, keeping cargo watered and roughly clean, unlike the labour ships… Within the background of piped music the suddenly ignoble light classics have been replaced with elevatored hip hop and electronic jazz.

With the last of the Venetian notebooks I stocked against misremembered birthdays, I am surprised to find myself writing a slave narrative. But then why the surprise. Enslavement didn’t come with the Triangular Trade and didn’t end with the civil war. The interludes either side were no respite for the concept, only its mass industrialization, and that mass industrialization will be limited in life expectancy. Not so much due, I would venture, to the moral apotheosis of the abolitionist mission, but to the fiscal imprudence of this new sub-prime Ponzi. An age of literacy and information is a genie yet to be relegated back into the bottle, and so the evolutionary nature of history regurgitates what it swallows, even if it is with glacial slowness.

I will continue page by page, or depending on the vigilance of the crew, line by line, since attesting my presence offers a lifeline to manumission. I think I read once, ‘the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make’ (someday I will check the source). Perhaps it is only in the suspension between rising and falling, in the dark still water that pools in the vortices between ebb and flow that we can fish out the words of our honest autobiography. I will keep mine going as long as no one notices, or cares. The laden ascent from the long intercontinental runway at Pearson International was as by design. The journey is long. I can only anticipate the descent.