Going Underground?
During
the riots in August 2011 we were handed this text. It had been passed through
various people, hand to hand, which may explain its reference to events
several months before... We do not know the authors, but reproduce it here
because we liked it.
past tense
Down in the Sewer
On
May 16th, there was a ‘terror alert’ in central London. The press reported
a manhole into the sewers under The Mall being ‘disturbed';
according to police, ‘dissident Irish republicans’ had been exploring ways
to blow up Buckingham Palace; as we rarely read the papers or pay attention
to the guttersucking media, we’re only responding now, late.
As usual.
There’s lots of rats down here
Disturbed
manholes? It was republicans, yes, but no splinter psycho-rump IRA; it was
us, sewer rats, but not trapped in any nationalist mazes. We’re republicans,
yes, of an undetermined kind, with no attachment to any borders; ours is
a floating republic, bright dreams of a life free from darkness and wage
slavery - dreams tossing on the tide of shite we wade through day by day.
We weren’t breaking IN to bomb the sad Windsor windowdressings – we were
looking to break OUT.
Picking up empty coca cola cans...
The
mid-19th Century journalist and ‘urban explorer’ John Hollingshead toured
the London sewers with some of its workers. After they led him through a
maze of tunnels, till he had no idea where he was, they halted, and told
him he was standing directly under Buckingham Palace. Being a good patriotic
soul he made them take off their caps and sing God Save the Queen.
In the sewers under the Queen’s toilets.
Knee deep in shit.
Like the poor fuckers sweeping the drains of St James need to learn the
royal family are crapping on their heads.
It’s
not
something we need to learn either.
We know.
People
say you shouldn’t
stay down here too long...
We weren’t delving into the drains to find a way to blow up the royals (you’ll find armed cops hanging out there anyway, polishing their glocks in their piss-soaked boots, still gutted they didn’t get to shoot down rioters on Regent Street). We spend our lives in the sewers; we’ve swum the black depths of the Fleet, navigated the southern outfall, boated the echoing chambers, sidled past crumbling brickwork – all our lives. Lately you can barely move for the sub-urban explorers, the depoliticised psychogeographers of the sewers... tunnels and lost rivers are so TRENDY again.
...lose your sense of light and dark...
in
fact we’ve kept our sense of light and dark. both light and dark are alive
in us - the Light, the burning light of a new world, of the love we have
for each other, the laughing, singing, dancing joy of being, for ourselves
as humans, not
commodities or wage slaves, the head thrown back ecstasy, our cheeky kids
learning letters and who to trust, the fucking sucking and wanking (porn
free), the trespassing, the stealing and the occasional all out rioting
- all of it, at its best, utterly cut loose from control, property and suppression.
The dark - the Dark - love is magical, but to
survive in this sea of floating shite, we also need hate and defiance to
keep our heads above water, hate for the early morning alarm clock, the
bullying gaffer, the shithead bureaucrat, the racist small mind wankers
proud on their white toilets, all the balding fuckwit violent men, the priestophiles
and imumblers, gaybashers,
godbotherers, gangbangers...the list goes on.
... lose your sense of smell...?
are
we coming up into the daylight? we still don’t know... we carry the light
with us, even in the gloomiest side tunnels. sometimes we sit
disheartened, by torchlight.
Sometimes we dance, Wilko Johnson on good speed.
We
drink alot.
Alot.
Sometimes
the circular walls close in on us,
pressure beyond bearing...
... I tell you what I’m gonna do...
some
nights just the spirit we create between us vaporises the walls, the sewers,
the royal shitheads on their golden thrones; it’s just a whisper though,
a shadow, Harry Lime caught in the fork of two tunnels; an echo of a future
that could be...
Sometimes the desires that burst inside us emerge sounding like pretentious
poetry.
Yuk. Like we’re fucking Tiqqun.
... gonna make love to a water rat or two...
...
Athens, London, Tehran; we’re emerging,
surfacing, with a clang of manhole covers, the rats, feverish and plague-rich,
blinking and stretching, night of the living dead... If we’re coming then
it won’t just be the underground Victorian brickwork that’ll crumble. Palaces
will fall. We’ll turn banks into bonfires and streets into canals. We’ll
flood the City, and return golf courses and gated communities to wilderness.
We’ll squat all churches, mosques, temples and dance and drink all night,
every night; we’ll hack into the phones of all journalists and spook them
and stalk them till they crack. We’ll mix our races till we’re all funky
colours. We aren’t yet decided if we’ll turn the houses of parlyment into
a massive storehouse for manure (as William Morris predicted), though as
we know all too well, all that shit has to go somewhere. Politicos, from
biggest presidents to self-righteous activist moralists, will be taking
our places sweeping up sewage.
We won’t be living in ruins or holes in the wall, thanks Durruti, we’ll
be hotwiring space shuttles and heading for the stars.
past
tense gongfermers cell,
June 2011
lines
from Down In the Sewer, by the Stranglers, quoted absolutely without
permission, but with thanks and apologies