London Overground by Iain Sinclair Page B

Kitaj: School of London investigates a reserve collection of unoccupied beds, cupboards, chairs. A mad, uncurated heap of periods and submerged stories.
    ‘Ron, I’ll get the first book I find for thruppence and spend the rest of my life working on it.’
    That book was
A Human Document.
A suitable case for the William Burroughs treatment: the masking, slicing, excavating of covert truths. Rivers of phrases. Pools and puddles of words. Enochian signs. Hypnagogic undertow. On page 111: ‘a broken bridge and / photograph, betrayed … certain S-shaped iron ties’. Peckham as a site of divination, Mallock’s novel as a reconfigured
I Ching.
Mundane narrative redacted, by the wit of Phillips, into poetry.
    Like all of us who are responsive to place, determined to acquire a chorus of spiritual forebears, Phillips positions Austin’s ‘on Peckham Rye, where Blake saw his first angels and
along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham’. And where Muriel Spark located her own mischievous archivist burrowing into legends of freaks and mermaids. ‘It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-being, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.’
    Phillips ripped through numerous copies of
A Human Document.
The first one cost almost nothing. The one I sold him in 1981 was £8 (postage included). He sent me a postcard of ‘Dante in his study’. The Peckham artist, the man on the far side of Gormley’s courtyard, began by simply scoring out words to uncover the skeleton beneath the obfuscations of the dead author’s controlling mind. Phillips used the found book as I was using London: a Tarot, a Book of Changes. He tapped it for confirmation: ‘wanted. a little white opening out of thought’.
    Tom’s companion on that first trawl through the furniture repository, Ron Kitaj, shared this attitude towards a form of art recoverable by way of books as mediums. He favoured prints made of poets, philosophers. Walter Benjamin. Ed Dorn. The one-eyed Robert Creeley. The wall-eyed Robert Duncan. Kitaj’s painting
Cecil Court, London
WC
2 (The Refugees)
is an epitaph for a vanishing trade, bookdealing. A paved beach and a court of windows. A memory-culture escaped from Hitler’s Germany. A strip of London real estate soon to be priced out of existence. The painting has the noise and smell of Yiddish Theatre.
    ‘I began to collect scarce books and pictures about this shadow world, the trail of which has not quite grown cold in my past life,’ Kitaj said. He prowled book alleys. And the furniture repositories of Peckham. Street markets. Junk pits. But the submerged libraries of dealers who store everything and curate nothing have gone. Swept away in the slipstream of the
Ginger Line. Oxfam shelves, and all those other charity displays on dying high streets, will never supply the singular items with which Phillips and Kitaj worked, tracking wormholes through time. Some know-nothing dealer will be around to advise on what is to be kept: the bright, the current, the glossy pretenders. The rest is landfill. Austin’s of Peckham has become Austin’s Court, a nest of railway-connected flats. A desirable address. Old Alf Austin, the last of his line, had a catchphrase for first-time visitors to his warehouse. ‘Gentlemen, everything is for sale.’
    We sat in Gormley’s office above the Peckham yard where a regiment of sculpted avatars, forked and naked, endure the season’s showers, acquiring a weathered patina:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
aliens bursting from the pod. Antony Gormley is monkish, long-limbed, an abbot of intent at the heart of a multinational enterprise; a global brand whose product is the marketing of copies, reworkings, extensions of his own body, cast by his partner, Vicken Parsons, and her assistants, who are sterile-suited in white like a forensic team newly arrived at the scene of the crime. Photographs of these procedures have a fetishistic allure: yogic