Stillness
A kind of tranquility is said to come to those afflicted with total paralysis; they who can only move their eyes are claimed to lack the input from their paralysed body that would disturb them. If they weep, this is not because of their mute isolation (they can only move their eyelids), but because of the sweetness of their solitude.
Is this true? Who was it who told me this, and how would they have known? Perhaps what I heard was the correlate of my own dream, once upon a time, to withdraw altogether from the realm of action. Then I imagined it, the world in which others moved and acted, like a bank of snow, pure and simple. Why would I want to make my mark on a world that was perfect as it was?
I imagined wishing it well, the world, from the perspective of total paralysis, as if only my stillness would allow the world to be pristine. And who were they, who acted? Ones who had a right to act, who were gifted with the capacity to act from the first. I was not to act, but to redouble what I saw as the non-action of the world - as its stillness beyond the movement and the actions of others.
Or was it that that movement was also part of non-action, and the swarming of others through the world was similar to the labours of the ants in their ant-hills in the woods? How quickly they moved, but how still were the trees. Action was only part of a great non-action; the world turned through light and darkness and everything was the same.
When was it that I changed, and wanted to act? When money came to the city; when I knew I'd have to force myself back into the world's hubbub. Soon, I would have to rejoin it, the world. But how could I? I was already lost in a kind of fog; the world was hazy to me. In the mornings, I wandered along the street to the cafe; instead of returning, I would make a small circuit of the town. There were the alcoholics, drinking in the morning sun. It was the morning, and they were ready to greet the sun with a drink.
Where was I? Where had I found myself? This was Manchester, and I was doing nothing in particular. How old was I? Young enough, I think, to know the pressure to deliver, to make good on my potential, had not yet arrived. I had a couple of years left, that was my alibi, and in those years I would have to discover a voice to speak and hands with which to act.
I was having an affair. She said: I would like to put to you in one of those houses. I looked: a paved street of small houses, no cars allowed. House turned to house across a few yards of pavement, ivy on old brick, gardens with potted plants and basketed flowers - how pretty! I would have liked that life. She drove me to the countryside in the summer haze. What was I supposed to be doing? I'd forgotten.
The Gentrifiers
In those days, the house prices hadn't risen; my town was still an obscure boondocks on the edges of the city. Who could come there? No one who did not had a deliberate purpose. So the days passed dreamily, as though I'd fallen outside history. The drug dealers in the house opposite were part of this world. When they left, and the curtains were open at last, I knew this was the beginning of the end.
Sometimes, car-radio thieves would come round the back of our house and knock on our kitchen door. 'I brought these' - and they'd open a sack of car stereos. 'You've got the wrong house, mate'. In the early hours, burglars would use our garden as a run-through. This, too, was just.
Then one day, they came, the family from London. They began to do up the house opposite. The curtains were opened, the rooms painted, the floors sanded. From my upstairs window I could see everything. Waking one Sunday morning, I heard the woman of the house speaking to another woman, another Southerner. What was happening to our street?
I knew this was no place for me. I, who'd moved North to escape the gentrifiers had been discovered by them. No longer was this town a dreaming arm of greater Manchester. They had come; I was discovered. I didn't belong here, I knew that. Were there any obscure places left? How far would I have to go? Or was it that I would have to act and make my way in the world?
I brooded in my room above the world. I could see across the rooftops, but what could I see? Prime real estate. What would happened when the tram line reached us? I shuddered. This was the end. Wasn't this the part of the city where all the bands had formed? Wasn't this where they came, the bands, living on the dole, passing years in rehersal studios and local pubs?
One morning, I blanked the woman from the house opposite when she greeted me. How rude! Everyone around me was talking, acting. It was time to do something. I knew the country was changing, that gentrification was spreading from the North to the South. (And when I moved further North? It followed me here; everything was happening. Where was a suburb in which to maroon myself? There were none.)
Action, non-action: what had happened to the old inefficiency? Where were the dossers and the skivers among whom I could hide myself? They liked me at the Job Centre because I was polite and others were impolite, but what would happen, now the world was changing and perfecting itself?
Refusal
Was it then I saw the protest by the quadriplegics? They allowed their paralysed bodies to be lifted from their wheelchairs. Dangling heavy and opaque, they symbolised non-action. This was their protest: anger at a world which defined ability as action. Refusal - but a refusal of the measure of ability. Their bodies inert and dangling. Marvellous reproach! For who remembers the density and heaviness of their bodies? Who remembers what they are unable to do and the darkness of a body that closes itself from light?
No doubt it is a lie, what is said about those who endure total paralysis. But what is known of the world on which action loses its grip and its measure? Back in Manchester, an old man called out to us as we passed. He had fallen on his doorstep, and we helped him up. Back he went inside, frail and vulnerable. He died a few weeks later, and the house was sold. Then they came, another family, sleek and ready. They arrived, the second family, to open the curtains and let sunlight into the house.
I watched them from my room. An era had finished; a new world was completing itself. It was irrevocable: bodies were no longer to be heavy and inert. Bodies were no longer allowed to be sick or unable. The fog was dispersed; sunlight reached everywhere. But the light was merciless. I knew it would spread across the world - what horror - and I dreamed of a protest of refusal and inability, of Bartleby's 'I would prefer not to'.
Letters arrived; we were summoned for retraining. Each of us was called and separated from the morass. We had a name, an identity, and we were assigned a Case Worker. The light was reaching us. One by one, it would reach us, and shine into the darkness of our bodies. We were to awaken, we sleepers. A new day had come. And what were we to do, we who'd banked on structural unemployment? There were no corners in which to hide; down into the cellars snaked the probe-heads of the new order.
We were sought, found and rounded up. The world was moving, and we were to move with the world. Manchester had been the galaxy slowly turning in the dream of its industrial past, turning in the blight of drug addiction and petty crime - and now? The city had awoken; regeneration had come; the city centre was changing and change was spreading from the city's heart.
Paperchase
One day, by chance, I found myself in Paperchase, a new shop in the city centre. What was this? Luxury pads, luxury pocketbooks, a whole shop, upstairs and downstairs, for luxury notepads. What was this? Upstairs, a coffee bar. Luxury pads and luxury wrapping paper. What was this? What kind of shop was this? What did people do here?
When I left, they were doing up the area around the river. The river - what river? I never knew there was a river in Manchester. But there was a river, and high walls kept us from the regeneration. What was happening inside? What was to happen? New Paperchases. New bars and new walkways, and perhaps a new tramway. The Corn Exchange, where you could buy herbal drugs and pocketknives, bongs and comic books had become the Triangle, a luxury boutique. What had happened?
European money, they said. But where was it, Europe? Where did the money come from? And was this to happen everywhere, in every corner of Europe? There's a new world coming, but not for us. There's new light shining, but not for us. But we will be remade, there's time. As the sun reaches you through your closed eyelids, so will the new light know the inside of your body and Paperchase open in our hearts.
Then I sensed it: Manchester was only drawing in breath. Manchester was only beginning to draw deep on the lungs of Europe. What would happen when it exhaled?