Charing Cross Encounters

A couple of years ago, I met a friend at CharingCross. From there, we decided to explore the area during an idle walk. We crossed the street and from Tottenham Court Road slid to Soho. We strolled through its streets without an intention to stop at any of the places we passed by. And yet, some things seem to be irresistible. One such topos occurred to be the record store, where I heard a track that now in my memory exists only as a signpost in the story that was exchanged as we walked. The actual sound of what I think was the saxophone (but it can as well be a fantasy fabricated to supersede the lost experience) remains a lingering veil over that afternoon safely lulled in the embrace of the past.

My friend told me about his ant with whom he grew up, having been abandoned by his mother after her decision to dedicate her life to a serious investigation of the shady side of life. Her decision was reinforced by a newly established relationship with a guy who happened to be a key figure in the 1960s London underground scenes. Not only was he nocturnally charming, but his charismatic personality was a centripetal force in the circles generally inclined to dispersion. The mother fell into the category of the particles of that universe undeniably attracted to and held by the gravity of that demimonde colossus.

Sooner rather than later, she discovered her secret passions. One of them was unsatiable  hunger for digging layers of consciousness with occasional excursions into the unconscious. She joined a dance collective whose philosophy predictably drew from the ancient Vedas. With a strong predilection for eclecticism, the group combined the Sanskrit wisdom with extremist shamanistic, trance-inducing practices. Later, this was to be recognized as kernel in the descendant subcultures founded in the philosophy of immediacy, apolitical social agenda, and corporeal metaphysics. Before the time of these contemporary gregarious enthusiasts came, my friend’s mother and her mates were grooving and steaming in a feverish anticipation of being combusted out of livelihood and from life.

They were against the division between inner and external world. Instead, they preferred to understand the world as an extension of a human being. That enabled them to freely link their bodies to whatever surrounding and to sustain communication between what is typically perceived as two realms of existence. Their denial of such boundaries found fruitful justification in allowing an intake of a radically versatile character to freely nourish intercellular spaces of their bodies. That, coupled with the abovementioned artistic bodily practices, ensured that phenomena such as levitation be but a warm up exercise in the series of mind-expanding experiences. To live such life meant not to want to stop even for a second to be exposed to those meditative ecstasies. Players’n’mounteneers at heart, they projected passions onto either exalted speech or elevated states of mind. To persevere in exercising that bottomless body of spiritual research was to be ready to leave behind everything and anything that could preclude advancement  on the trajectory to the ever-exciting unknown. She died like the rest of the like-minded from the circles—in the flame of the hearts irrevocably committed to the transcendental expansion of the body.

What was striking to me about that testimonial is, like in most of them, the tangential content of the message. In this particular one, delivered by my friend, it is the marginal remark about incessant correspondence between him and his mother until she died. The letters, according to him, were emotionally charged and not easy to handle for a young soul struggling with demons of abandonment, guilt, and self-abhorring. This, in fact, turns out to be slightly paradoxical, since the content of her letters was most decisively targeted to proving her positive feelings for her son. And yet, the most powerful effect had her insistence on coping with the agony of living with the knowledge that she couldn’t bring happiness into the life that she herself gave to someone. “As your child, I am not supposed to be your agony!” That struck me as the moral of that Charing Cross encounter.