To Books
To books.
Not yet written.
Already occupying shelf space.
Or at least self space.
I know this because I keep finding them.
In old photographs.
In cybernetic diagrams.
In bookshops.
In tarot cards.
In places where they have no business appearing.
The evidence arrives shuffled.
1966
1966 keeps turning up.
England won the World Cup.
At Wembley.
In London.
The Cybermen arrived.
Regeneration arrived.
All filmed in 1966.
All filmed in London.
Books on cybernetics appeared with titles that sounded as though they belonged to the future.
Control.
Communication.
Feedback.
Machines that learn.
Boxes connected to boxes.
Arrows looping back on themselves.
The future drawn in black ink.
Not my future.
Not quite.
Someone else’s future.
One that still occasionally leaks through.
Systems
Foyles of London.
The old one.
The one that felt less like a shop and more like a system.
Find a book.
Receive a receipt.
Take the receipt elsewhere.
Pay.
Receive a stamp.
Take the stamped receipt back.
Collect the book.
An obscure administrative ritual.
A strange order of operations.
The sort of thing that might have made perfect sense to a cybernetician.
Or an Edwardian Londoner.
Or nobody at all.
Old London
Old clothes shops.
School uniforms.
Itchy trousers.
Where parts of Edwardian London had somehow remained behind.
More counters.
More drawers.
More compartments.
Dark wood.
Brass fittings.
Signs.
Rules.
A city carrying its past forward.
Not enough to notice consciously.
Enough to feel.
Tarot
The decks are already there.
The fronts are familiar.
The backs tell a different story.
For one, old London.
Postcards.
Maps.
Street scenes.
Photographs.
For the other, diagrams.
Feedback loops.
Communication systems.
Control mechanisms.
Strange visual artefacts from a future that never quite arrived.
The card drawn is the same.
The conversation surrounding it is not.
Seventy-Eight
Seventy-eight cards.
Seventy-eight chapters.
Or perhaps seventy-eight doorways.
Not necessarily discovered in order.
Why should they be?
Cities are not discovered in order.
Systems are not discovered in order.
Neither is memory.
The cards are shuffled.
The city is shuffled.
Memory is shuffled.
Time is shuffled.
The order changes.
The connections remain.
The Same Story
Old London.
Cybernetics.
Tarot cards.
Golden Dawns.
Secret orders.
Feedback loops.
Maps.
Lost streets.
Forgotten diagrams.
Receipts.
Counters.
Drawers.
Compartmentalised systems.
Perhaps all books begin this way.
Not as arguments.
Not as chapters.
But as curious objects that refuse to stop talking to one another.
A postcard.
A tarot card.
A map.
A forgotten diagram.
A receipt from Foyles.
A feedback loop.
A strange order.
A city.
A system.
The suspicion that they might all be part of the same story.
Or perhaps two stories.
Connected.
Where one ends, the other starts.
Around and around.
A wheel.
A feedback loop.
A Magic Roundabout.
Things springing to life when nobody is paying attention.