COMMUTER

There are some giclee prints of mine for sale over at The Outsiders, most of which are works from In Rainbows, a Radiohead record I decorated in about 2007. But one of the pictures they have is of a different vintage. It's called 'Snow Accident Killing'.
There used to be some words painted in white on a soot-covered wall outside a railway station in London which said, 'FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE'. History does not record who painted the words or when, but I do know that as long ago as 18th June 1981 the wall on which they were painted was demolished, leaving only the word 'WHERE'.
Over a decade later, when I was at last able to afford the exorbitant pre-privatisation British Rail fares, I saw that someone had kept up this poetic trackside tradition, as the words had been repainted onto a new wall, and the evidently older word WHERE had been carefully repainted. I learned that the first six words form the first line of a poem called 'A Song of Contrariety' by Robert Graves, but the last four words do not appear anywhere in the poem.
Time passed, and I grew older, and the railway system was privatised and the fares grew almost preposterously exorbitant, but the words FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE remained constant, sometimes becoming shabby, other times showing a fresh coat of paint. Around the turn of the century I began collecting graffiti tags from around London, writing them down in a notebook. I noticed that the majority of these tags were monosyllabic or disyllabic - FUSE or COSA being examples. One of the tags was MYTH, which fitted in exactly with the Minotaur/labyrinth obsession I was suffering under (and the reason for my frequent exploratory trips to London). One morning I noticed a new MYTH piece, a beautiful multicoloured work. It was right on top of the white painted words of FAR AWAY...
There is nothing left now. Graffiti of any kind does not last long, and the tracksides are harder to get to now. Some time early in the 21st century I made the picture below, a peculiar sort of homage to MYTH. Perhaps also to Piranesi, and to Mac Operating System 8 or 9.
Perhaps one day I will do something about FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE.