Fulham Palace Road

November the 11th, 2009, Remembrance Day.

It’s 3am
As Joelle and Alix sleep we leave quietly.
Remi drives.
A hug goodbye.
5.55am. The plane pushes off. 9½ hours later; in The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, writes about pasts and futures.
With tragedy the Greeks had given up the belief in immortality: not only a belief in an ideal past, but also the belief in an ideal future. In The Will To Power Nietzsche had written about moments; If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with  happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event – and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

The back of seat screen LCD jet crawls across;
The Indian Ocean.
The Arabian Sea.
Flying away from the sun the sky darkens only a few hours out from London. Dubai 1.17 pm. We’re late. The connecting flight leaves in less than an hour. The Dubai haze thicker than Beijing’s. This trip to London so unexpected. Whenever I’ve left London it has always been too soon.

6.30pm. The Piccadilly line moves in slow motion. Sounds muffled in the underground darkness recall Wim Wender’s movie Wings of Desire and the silent thoughts of commuters and apartment dwellers listened to by unseen angels’ ears. Baron’s Court; a family dressed in formal garb boards. Musicians on the way to a recital. They’ve been rushing. Polite English voices and flushed English faces chat. I’m invisible. South Kensington Underground Station’s Snax convenience store sells beer at £1.49 a can or 4 cans for 5 quid. Off Exhibition Road, into the Mews, knock on Alistair’s door once, twice. No answer. By my feet an envelope. The key hangs in the Olive tree on the left. Sky News; the same stories repeat every 15 minutes. The news readers over act concern. 3 of the beers are drunk watching the news 3 times then time for bed. I’ll see Alistair in the morning perhaps before leaving for Fulham to photograph The Elephants’ Graveyard. Tarzan The Ape Man was produced in 1932. I saw the movie in the 1950s at the suburban Gaiety Cinema. We called movies flicks or films then. The secret location of The Elephant’s Graveyard revealed to Tarzan as an aged elephant, trailed by cagey treasure hunters, plods into a waterfall, splashes through the wall of water and enters the hidden, cavernous and ivory rich graveyard. A 1950s Alan Ginsberg photo pictures Neil Cassidy in front of a New York cinema showing The Wild One, Stranger Wore A Gun and Tarzan The Ape Man. Still showing since 1932 Tarzan The Ape Man had a long half-life. Stumbling into an elephants’ graveyard, a post war, post atomic bomb, 1950s‘ yearning