Y-Art

Friday morning was always art. A large curtain concealed the main classroom at the end of the corridor and I would sit outside by myself at a table drawing images on a large white sheet of paper.

The space shuttle Challenger had blown up shortly after take-off from Cape Canaveral killing all seven crew members on board and I would recreate the scene from memory each week with coloured pencils and paints. What I remembered seeing most vividly from the representations on the television screen was a large letter Y that appeared in white clouds of smoke against sky.

Months passed by and I would still be sketching the Y on a Friday morning. I would sketch in inky doodles in the back pages of my lined exercise books for a particular subject, Math or English, and on the front cover of my history book was a large letter Y. All of those lives lost, all those souls formulating a Y against sky.

It seemed traumatic to me, I was a sensitive child, traumatic-sensitivity seemed recurrent.

 

Jen knocked on the door of my flat outside of the hostel and she asked if I would help her move a sofa in her living room, and I kindly obliged. I walked the short distance to her flat passing a group of three lads, one of whom I knew by sight, he was called Wez and he’d been banned from the hostel the first week of my arrival for punching another young man on the nose.

I arrived back at my flat around five minutes later, stepping into the living room I noticed that my Hi-Fi was gone. I quickly deduced and determined, to my own satisfaction, that Wez must have taken it. He was a heroin addict and had a reputation for funding his fix with theft. I had seen the moment I had stepped into the kitchen that entry to the property had been made through the window above the sink which the thief had left fully open. He must have grabbed the Hi-Fi and made his way out through the front door which functioned with an inner turnkey lock.

I was angry. The CD Pre-emptive Strike had been in the disc player, and I walked into the hostel's reception area and said, “where’s Wez?” and Sheila, one of the key-workers with a rotund grey perm asked from behind the glass, “why?” and I said, “because he’s stolen my stereo,” and she said, “well, he’s not here.”

“He’s broken in through the kitchen window and out through the front door.”

“How do you know it was Wez?” asked Richard who was another key worker.

“I just know,” I responded.

“You can’t just know,” he said.

“I walked past him on the way to Jens, I was only five minutes, he knew I was out”.

“That doesn’t mean it was him,” said Richard.

I made as though to leave through the electronically activated main door and before I was "buzzed out" I said, “there will be sparks flying around here, you mark my words,” and then I repeated again, “There will be sparks!”

I went for a walk over Newton Hill playing fields so that I could calm down, and I walked around and on to the Newton Bar area, skipping across the roads at the traffic lights, and across the green, and I headed toward the city centre. I passed the college and took a right by County Hall, passing the library, and the Little Theatre, and onto Westgate. I walked upward towards the Yorkshire Bank, by this time I was calm and relaxed and my thinking was elsewhere, I had become distracted from the triggering influence of my indignance and after cutting through the old bus station, sneaking through the ginnel, I arrived onto Marshway’s car park. I saw that in front of the flat that I rented was a fire engine with flashing lights. I remember checking the building to see whether or not there may be smoke or fire emissions when Sheila approached and she looked angry and was pointing a finger at me quizzically, like a school mistress, “I might have known you wouldn’t have been here,” she said, and I asked, “what happened?” and she was looking at me as though I should know, and she said, “Wez was squatting in the flat next door to yours, and there was a chip pan fire, he’s badly burnt his arm”. I suppressed a smile, I’d almost entirely forgotten about him.

The following day mother brought me a twin cassette tape deck, without a CD player, and I told her that “part of the problem here is you pulling up in a BMW, they’ll think you’ll bring me another stereo if they steal one”. I thanked her for the stereo and later the following day I was able to score a purple-heart microdot of LSD. I sat collaging the new stereo with images from magazines, I had a copy of Focus, and there was a centre-piece pull out with images of tens of fish on each page and I cut out the trout and I pasted it down with glue between the twin decks. I applied the F in front of the head of the trout and the O-C-U above the body and the S at the tail-fin end.

Chris knocked on the door whilst I’d taken time-out and I let him in and told him, “I think I've been moving a pen from one side of the room to the other,” and he made a sound like “uh”. I played him some sounds that R had recorded for me on cassette tape and had hand written on the white tab, F**K DANCE, LET’S ART, I particularly liked the piece where a Scott’s man was speaking over music and he was saying, “we are the children of the underground religion, forever we will remain”. I played with the collage, and I said to Chris who was sitting on the sofa, “something will come from this, there will be an effect, some like representation of the imagery will come into being”, and Chris was sighing and rolling his eyes, he faked a yawn, and I glued a symbol of an antenna transmitting frequency waves outwards, and I saw that he saw this image captured and confirmed the idea I was attempting to convey. I hadn’t yet read Carl Jung. I applied several squares from magazines with the number four represented on them, and I cut out and applied the Tatvic symbols of the traditional elements from a bookmark that had come with a book on magick I had bought. Chris looked at the fishing box where I’d painted a Hopi Shield-Mandala with a blue-cross in a circle.

I received a letter through the door four days later, it was from Northern Counties Housing Association and I saw the address which was printed before the body of the letter had begun, and it said, Flat 4, College Grove Road.

 

In August, R helped me shift my possessions the short distance from one flat to the next in the boot of his mother’s jeep, and I told him about how David Bowie had lived at the four when he was younger. I showed him the inlay card to the album Entroducing and how there was a four in the collage design. I also pointed out that Massive Attack had a track on their album Mezzanine called Group 4. At a later date I said to a professor, "it wouldn't surprise me if Woody Allen lived at the four when he was younger", and a week later I read a biography about him by Marion Meade and it gave his address when he lived in California when he was younger, it was number four.  

I had placed the stereo in the middle of the blue window sill and below this I had painted a man with a big heart who was divided into two, he had asymmetrical eyes, and he was conducting energy into his body through his hands that was transmitted from the stereo above him. The speakers I had painted with a red band at the bottom, a green band in the middle, and a blue band above. This was before I was given the red carpet. I was speaking to R about “the Holy Other” and R’s eyes became wide, like a bugs, it almost seemed as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but I wasn’t certain what that meant at the time.

I saw Burnie in the Riding’s centre with his entourage and I recalled his fat chubby cousin saying, “you must be slob then?” and I said, “WHAT?!”

After brief conversational exchange I concluded with, “… but I’m just a scruff Burnie” and he responded by saying, “yeah, yeah, we all know Justin, we all know” and he was looking from one eye to the other, and I really had no idea what it was they all knew.

 

I was sitting on a bench on Wood Street in front of Wood’s Music store when R was walking past with a young man and he sat down on the bench next to me and he and R were speaking when all of a sudden R broke away mid conversation, turning and looking at me, and he said, “Mr Scruff!” I looked at him and he was looking back at me and his friend made as though to turn, but decided not to, and then they continued with their conversation as though nothing had been said at all. R was slightly blushing, which gave it away.

When they walked off I went to HMV and I discovered a CD called Keep it Unreal by Mr Scruff and I saw the track listed on the back called Jusjus and I thought that sounded interesting, it’s what Mohammad in Bately had called me, and the last track on the list was called Fish and that really did interest me. I had resolved to stop listening to the music that R listened to because I thought it created an arbitrary link between me and the people I had left behind and of whom I wanted to move on from and forget, but the following Thursday I gave in and bought the CD.

I played the album once over without emotion or attachment, I was laying on the floor, with my head resting on a transparent green inflatable head cushion that was propped against the wall. Behind me was an archaic and aboriginal totemic figure that I had painted and it leaned over to one side to denote my asymmetry. There was a blue-line that ran from one side of the room to the other, and the ceiling I had divided into quadrants, blue-green, blue-green, checks. Chris joked and called it, “God’s quad”. We had once mocked among ourselves the street preachers who we called the “God Squad”, and I found this hilarious, I said, “I think that may be the funniest thing I have ever heard”.

Chris came over on the Thursday half an hour after the CD had spun its last cycle, and he sat down on the living room sofa bed, this was before I was given the Chesterton chair, and I played the CD for him.

The week prior I had bought a compilation CD, the best of Bowie 1974-79, and Chris had mocked at the line, “I was running at the speed of light”, and he’d said, “no you weren’t David, stop exaggerating” and when Jusjus began, “Coasting in ten times the speed of light”, I looked at him with a quarter grin, that’s exaggeration and he sagged with resignation.

When the CD had finished he walked the short space across the room to the window sill and for a relatively long time, stood in front of the stereo contemplating the imagery. The last song had sung, “I wish, I could get my fish,” and they had used a spoken line, "in and out like a trout", and I had the trout in the centre of the stereo design with the word focus above, before, and after it. I hadn’t heard the CD at all, even though it had been out since June.

 

After some time Chris said, “Chaos magic”. I didn’t know what chaos magic was and I made a mental note to look that up. Years later I read on Wikipedia that Phil Hine had developed the ideas for chaos magic whilst visiting Wakefield. I’d valued his book Condensed Chaos sometime after when I went through a New Falcon phase.

Upon moving into the second number four I painted the kitchen door blue, and the door which led out onto the hallway green. I ordered a CD player from Argos and when I arrived home and unpacked I was surprised to learn that the Amstrad stereo came with two blue speaker covers, two green covers, and two black. I applied a blue on one side and a green on the other.

I collaged a section of the kitchen door. There was a timeline sequence that began with Alice from the front cover of Dodgson’s novel and she was sitting in a chair and reading. I placed an image of a bee above her head. Below the timeline collage I painted a rectangle of grey with a man in the centre, and the wings of a butterfly behind his head.

I was given a grey Parker coat that was thick, and bulky, and warm. The word SMITH was printed on the label and the hood zipped up through the middle which when unzipped allowed the hood to part and rest on the shoulders like the wings of a butterfly.

I was given the red leather chair the day after painting a red band around the archaic totem figure which had been blue and green and was crowned with a golden sun, in metallic paint, above an image of the man-eagle hybrid, Horus. I was sitting in the chair reading, and I didn’t move for eight hours. The kitchen door was closed, the windows were locked tight, it was a winter month, and in the early evening, I was startled to see a huge shadow swirling around all four of the electric blue walls. The shadow seemed the size of a birds, and when I looked toward the centre of the room I saw the largest bee I have ever seen. It was probably about an inch long, and I ducked underneath the flying insect and opened up the living room window on the left hand side, and the bee immediately sensed the opening and flew outside.

 

One morning I tore an image of two girls out of a book about the artist Egon Schiele that B had given me years earlier, and I Blu-tacked the image of his painting to my wall.

The following morning Chris called around to see me, there was an annual festival event down at Thornes Park and some of his friends were playing in a rock band later in the evening.

When we arrived, around about 11 O’clock there was a young man that Chris knew who had said that he was 26 years of age, he'd said he wanted to study psychology at university and he looked to Chris for approbation. I didn’t like the man, because he was drinking beers from cans and then crushing the cans and throwing them into the long grass and I disapproved of the behaviour.

The young man was with another young man and he was paralysed from the waist down and required the usage of a wheel chair for mobility. He had short peroxide blonde hair and he spoke about Kurt Cobain.

The two girlfriends of these men were thirteen years of age. They wore black clothing, the taller girl had long curly blonde hair and the shorter stocky girl had short dark brown hair. They talked about how they were Goths, and they seemed immature and silly to me. They were both drinking alcohol.

That afternoon, the taller girl who was called Selena went off up the hill with the 26 year old man and lost her virginity to him. Her friend sat kissing the Kurt Cobain fan.

In the evening before the band had begun I watched Selena move around seven or eight men, and she was tongue kissing with each of them in turn, and when she came and stood in front of me and asked for me to kiss her, I shook my head from side-to-side disinterestedly and said “no”. She begged me to kiss her and I still said, “no” and she took my hand, isolated a finger, and quickly placed it in her mouth, clamping her jaw down hard. Her teeth sunk into my flesh and I was saying, “let go, let go”, and I thought about hitting her, the pain was immense, but I stood and waited it out saying, “let go, let go”, and when she finally did let go, I saw that she had drawn blood.

 

The band performed alternative rock and before one song the lead singer-guitarist stared at me and said, “this one’s called Cut n' Paste", and he attempted to psyche me out, but he became insecure and unsure of himself, and shirked back, and they began the song. I was in a mood; my index finger was still throbbing.

I arrived home around 11 O’clock in the evening and when I sat down in the armchair I was astonished to discover an almost exact artistic representation of the two girls randomly applied to my wall.       

 

Before leaving Wakefield in 2003, I told the artist B about two of the verbal predictions that had become mainstream news media headlines. One of them I believe had become a major international and historical event, the other which had followed was a minor fire in a Palace where I had said, "nothing of value would be damaged, and nobody would be hurt", and this appeared on the front pages of the Daily Mail on the Tuesday morning which was exactly what I had predicted the designated day would be. 

I had been stimulated into making the predictions largely because of the imagery that had seemingly popped events into existence. I believed I may be pre-cognitive for a time, but I also couldn’t be certain that I wasn’t causing the events to happen myself. I called this the Shaman’s quandary.

As though to prove the validity of my claims to him, I gave the artist B a prediction, “On 123, the space shuttle Columbia will go boom, there will be seven people on board”. I knew we were in late January, but I wasn’t certain what the exact date was. I told him about the Y-Art in my youth, and how having initially forgotten about this, I had found as an adult that the letter was resurfacing in some of my designs.

I told him how I would like to demonstrate these synchronicities that I'd been personally experiencing, but that there seemed to be few other people around to experience them with me. I needed to demonstrate the art to a community. B had once taught me the art of creating stickers years earlier, I knew what I wanted to do in the future.

I was talking to B on the Monday, it was the first time we had talked in over four years, he had stopped me as I was walking out of the Ridings centre. At one time whilst I was talking I pointed up to the logo above my head from Gregg’s the bakers, they had recently taken over Thurston’s bakery and the new logo had become a symbolical four. I found that I could bless people  walking through town eating a pasty. 

On the Wednesday I bought a National Express coach ticket for London, when I looked at the ticket the date read 123, which was for the coming Friday and I thought, well that’s an incredible coincidence, and a great date for moving.

Friday evening I was walking along the left hand side of the road on Oxford Street from the Marble Arch end, when I saw a vendor selling the Evening Standard. I could see the headline written in black marker pen on his newsstand. The space shuttle Columbia had blown up, it seemed, and before going back to my every day thoughts, I thought to myself, I said that to B on Monday.

“Looks me in the eye says he’s got his mind on the countdown, 321”.

As I walked toward Borders I was thinking, maybe scientists from the future were sending signals back across time to warn individuals of disaster events that are yet to come in our time, and I walked up the stairway of Borders and inquired at the desk as to whether or not they had any books in by Dr Leary? They had a copy of the CD Beyond Life on the third floor, I was told. As she was talking I had become aware of a book facing outwards on the science fiction shelf and after she had passed on the information I walked over to the book and saw it was called Timescape by Gregory Benford. Reading the blurb on the back, I discovered that it was a novel about scientists in the future sending warning signals back through time. I bought the book and the CD.

The first week in London I had spent mulling over books in the British library. I discovered a book published in the 1970s by the British Psychic Research Society and in one paragraph, in memory, they mentioned something that seemed incredibly pertinent to me. That some people, according to their assessment, seemed to be able to accurately predict the future, but the predictions always seemed to be the front pages of newspapers in the tabloid press.

 

Before leaving Wakefield I had said to the artist B, “the number 72 is a very powerful magic number,” and B did a double-take and looked at me and I was immediately reminded of having said this once before, “the number four is a very powerful magic number”, I had said to R, and I said, somewhat hesitantly and slowly to B, “… and that will be the next house number that I move to”.

For the first two nights in London I stayed in a cheap hotel at Earl’s Court, then I stayed in a hostel for two nights sharing a room with four Singaporean girls from Australia. For the following two nights I stayed at a Pakistani Muslim woman’s house in Plaistow who was kind enough not to require payment. As money was tight, and as I was finding it difficult to secure permanent residency, I joined an agency called Flatland. I gave them seventy-five pounds and they gave me slips of paper with addresses and phone numbers on them.

I couldn’t rent from the first two flats that I visited because they required me to have proof of employment and if not proof of employment then eight month’s rent upfront. I could do neither. I walked across the road to a phone-box and called Flatland, and I said, “can you provide me with addresses of landlords that don’t require proof of employment or eight month’s rent upfront?” and she said, “I don’t know if that will be possible” and she left the line for a few minutes and when she came back she gave me an address which I wrote down on a slip of paper with a black pen, “72, Kingscourt Road”, and my heart began to beat more rapidly, and my brow became damp, and my knees bent.