Chapter 14 - London: A Lifelong Pain

Sead Seferovic

Apr 17, 202022 min read

Updated: May 12, 2020

I stood alone in the London night, on Waterloo Bridge, looking down at the blackness of the river below, reflecting back the fragments of a broken dream. I looked out at the high-rise buildings and skyscrapers lighting up the horizon, fluorescent, shimmering, illuminating the darkness. I was ready to disappear forever into the night.

And all of a sudden, the lyrics of a song cut me to the bone:

“Dreams are like children, close your eyes and they're not there,

You hear them laughing, on empty streets and garden squares,

We walked so slowly, then suddenly you cried "I've given up! I've given up!"

"I've been undone by London, London and a lack of love."

Dreams are like fireflies, floating in a sapphire sky,

You try and catch them, but find when you do, their fire dies,

We walked so slowly, then said "I've finally realized enough's enough! Enough's enough!"

"I've been undone by London, London and a lack of love."

Dreams are like lullabies, a mother's voice when you were young,

A cherished photograph fading in the summer sun,

We're raising hawks when we could be raising doves,

“I've been undone by London, London and a lack of love."

Undone by London, by Rob Dougan, a sincere and heartfelt song from a bygone life. How did I get here?

All the beauty of my hopes and dreams, a lack of love, in the nothing of a London night. By the river, the memory came over like the flood, and December returned. These winter steps take me back down the frozen corridors of my heart, when I shivered in the London cold.

One fine morning, I stepped out of my Islington flat. I am taking a walk, walking to understand, walking through London to experience its deepest life, walking to understand my memories, and walking to understand myself.

It was a fine winter day, the sun was mild with a delicate breeze caressing the hairs on the skin, as I walked along the leafy avenue of large houses and handsome facades, and I stepped out onto Upper Street. I would walk through this long street every day, past its artisan bakeries, cafes and restaurants, past the little island of Islington Green, past the well-to-do young professional couples pushing prams of young children into a satisfied domestic life. It was an enjoyable walk, taking one through the area of Angel, and down into King’s Cross, into the centre of the city. I felt free and at peace, out in the open of a careless day.

I walked on, down into the heart of Bloomsbury. Here behind its pleasant facade, among the cluster of residential houses and gastro-pubs, I turned and walked into a very small park, an oasis of green, among the noisy confusion of the city of millions surrounding it. The park is Tavistock Square, and here I sat down on the grass on this fine winter morning, and closed my eyes.

When I was a student, I lived in London. I went to a top university that I did not like. Although I got very good grades, I felt that I did little work in the subject I was supposed to be studying, which was law. I used to go to this beautiful little park, here in the enclosure of greenery and peace. I used to come here and read every day. I was discovering the great literature, I was discovering books on all kinds of subjects. And this little park, Tavistock Square, has stayed with me ever since until this day. I often return to do the same thing I used to do, and sit and read here. In the background is a statue of Mahatma Gandhi.

It is not always a well-known fact, that Gandhi used to study law - at the same university as I did. He went on to change the world, and as someone I respect very much, demonstrated that it took enormous reserves of inner strength and power through serenity to meditate and to stand up against oppression, to help people live a more peaceful life, a life not characterised by conflict but a life of cooperation, balance and harmony.

As George Orwell once wrote, “in an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”, and Gandhi was a true revolutionary who told the truth, mostly to others. But above all, he was true to himself, walked away from what harmed him and stood up for what he believed in. In one of my photography works, Gandhi is pictured meditating in black and white, at one with reality. And in the background is a dazzling red tree, the red colour popping luminously out of the black and white scene. It is a beautiful illusion and a contrast between the real world and dreams, and the long hard road to become one with reality, the aspiration of ethics and science.

From here was a stroll to the local bookshop, to peruse for an hour and come away with a collection of souvenirs from another life, to take to a nearby cafe and continue to read for an hour or so, while the rain outside fell down hard on the world.

I walked on again, past the Renoir cinema, past Southampton Row, past the offices of Holborn, and down to the river Thames, along Waterloo Bridge.

I walked along the river, heading west. I walked for hours, until sunset descended upon the city skies. I came across a girl sitting on the wall of the bridge by the river, the wind blowing through her hair. Looking out at the fiery sunset across the River Thames, this girl was my dream, a love that I had never had. Girl in Amber, trapped forever in a dream. The title of my photography work, trapped forever in a dream, signifies her life and beauty, being trapped forever as a memory, as an ideal, trapped as a photograph, to be viewed and never forgotten.

Yet she is also trapped within the dream of London, relentless ambition and individualistic money-making, lack of freedom, lack of opportunity, lack of education, lack of time and the constraints and limits on fulfilling one’s capacity and living a peaceful and happy life, while living in the strait-jacket of the world of business. It is not a positive photograph. It is an intense paean to the loneliness and detachment of London; for many people, the coldest, loneliest city of all.

I yearned to walk with a beautiful girl at my side, who would hear my story, who would not

simply look, but would see, and I would bury myself into her body, and into her dreams. I wanted to show her the secret places of London that I knew and loved. I saw many happy couples walking, yet though they walked together, they walked alone.

Where is empathy? Where is love? You may search for it all your life. For many, it will come once in a lifetime. If you ever find it, do not throw it away. It was the lack of these things that nourish one’s life that made me idealise the beauty of this world. And it is not something that I necessarily regret. It did not have to be this way. It did not have to mean so much, and the disappointment did not have to hit so hard.

So I retreated deep within myself, into my own mind, looking for the meaningful things that I could not find in the dullness of the city all around.

Unreal city of a thousand broken dreams. As I walked past London Bridge at rush hour, the ashen faces of the sunken ghosts in suits, exhausted by their daily pain of work passed me by, the tie around their collar a symbol of their subservience like a noose around their neck, modern slaves, the many toiling for the few for some digits in bank accounts, for no real reward, unaware of their inner lives. Walking in line down London bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many, T.S. Eliot wrote, when he set “The Wasteland” among this stony rubbish. April is the cruellest month, though the winter is cold.

I once truly believed the writer Samuel Johnson, when he wrote that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”. Yet London is a startlingly uniform place, and its diversity is an illusion. To live and work here, to have your most precious thing taken from you, your time, to emerge into the underground train among a sea of a thousand downcast, unsmiling faces, to leave for home when the damp grey air has already turned into a cold, lonely night, to streaming of continuous series of American crime dramas, rain pouring outside the closed curtains; this was surely not the life for me. The dullness around me was like being anaesthetised into a foggy, sluggish, clouded haze, with no way out. London in the rain, the music of Scorpions was on my mind. Where do you go, fantastic dreamer? Take me away somewhere. Take me away from here.

I did not want to travel while I lived here in London, of what has essentially been my home town for most of my life, for the seemingly endless exploration in large new areas every day with multi-ethnic cultures, restaurants and green spaces made me believe that I could be of this city and be of the world. It was only later, when forced by personal circumstances, once I had actually seen the eastern world, and looked deeper behind the dullness that I once knew, that I could truly understand the heart of the world. London is a city designed for money-making, and most will stop at nothing to make it; usually they will lie to themselves. If you do not make the money, you are done for. And to do that, you must adopt a public mask, like all those around you. Some will return home after their long hours of corporate work, and never take the mask off, and some may not even know that it is there at all.

But there are moments of beauty in even the coldest places. I’ve never felt this way before, I think as I walk along the river at sunset. There is a solemn, fiery beauty in the chilly London air, as the city lights reflect on the water, mixing with the amber colours of the setting sun. I look out to the south bank of the Thames and see three friends standing together, caught at sunset with the soft tint of the amber sun falling on them, framed by the bridge above.

I walk on, past the docks of Canary Wharf. I stop to rest and lean against the railing. Next to me, an old man, greying with his bygone years, leans onto the railing beside me, and I look across. Would I one day also end this way, having never taken the chance that comes only once in a lifetime?

I close my eyes, and I am walking again. I awake in Greenwich. Fifteen years have passed by in a heartbeat. I live alone, in a small studio flat with a dark blue carpet and a modern en suite bathroom with gleaming white marble tiles. I’ve been well provided for and Greenwich is a beautiful expanse of greenery, towering buildings and tightly coiled back streets with a disorganised and well concealed mess of a muffled escape. These are the hardest days of my life.

As I exit the studio at 3am on this winter night, I turn on to the deserted and vast road that follows the creek. My memory is that of walking through rubble, through smoke and mirrors, and I follow the creek that winds through darkness in the biting frost, as the orange light from the smothering lamps above me gently falls and drapes onto the embers of the concrete path. I have a concrete migraine and cannot sleep. My eyes are like two eggs flung against a brick wall; the piercing pain shatters their fragile shells. Baby blue yolk trickles down the wall now just like tears, still clinging to the wall that divides me from the other side, the love or truth I am still hoping blindly to reach. I remember my loves, the near misses and paper cuts, love that slipped through my fingers for years and I drift once again into their emerald eyes, the warmth of their embrace, and the footsteps I have failed to retract behind me. I wonder through, under the dark green canopy of trees, I walk on past an ice rink glowing a luminous blue in the distance and I walk and walk. And I am still walking, when I open my eyes again.

It was dark all day, there on mercy street. I remember the night, a young student in London, stumbling through the darkness into nowhere. I remember walking one side at a time to the other, alone one night in winter. Like an old fading photograph of some other man.

And now that these nightmares have gone, disappeared into the night like forgotten memories, I wonder once again through the Greenwich fields, through the parks, past a laughing child tugging at his mother’s sleeve, and emerge onto the riverside path alongside the undulating waves of the turbid flow of the Thames, the river flowing on, through the same city, for years. I am listening to Anyone, Anywhere, by Anathema, one of the saddest songs I know.

I decide to return along the river, on my walk through London, through the pathway of memory. I emerge into an underground tunnel and step out. The area is a newly-built residential complex of luxury flats. I once dreamed that I would retire from a career in law, purchase a flat here in Greenwich, and in the quiet solitude of this tranquil spot with the river around me, I would one day write my story.

I enter the underground station, and emerge onto the platform. As I stand here on the crowded underground platform, waiting to board the train, I remember a poem by Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” and I think to myself, I have my own poem and I will never apologise, not then, not now, not in the future, for these are my formative sufferings. And as I look at these faces in the crowd, this endless crowd, I tweak Pound’s words:

“The memory of these faces without sound, stains upon a white silk blouse”.

What if I should see beyond, what if, here on the underground, I should do something strange? Something that none of these people would ever do, something I have never done before? What if I should listen and tune into another, look at life from behind their eyes? What if I should feel someone else’s pain?

I decided to be someone else, and travel the world, wherever I was, for it was really not so hard. I could be anyone, anywhere, and it was easy to smile.

I emerged into the north of London, into the lush green woodland of Hampstead Heath. Here in Hampstead, there is always autumn. On one of my many walks through London over the years, I walked along the pathway into the woods, immersed in a heavy nostalgia.

During autumn, the giant oak trees shed their auburn-brown leaves, that lie scattered on the ground, damp and musty, strewn along the path into the woods, covering the wet autumn earth.

This was a scenic walk in autumn, among the chestnut brown, among Keats’ “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”, the autumn that seeks “to bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”.

Suddenly a dog bounded towards me joyfully and disturbed the scene, sending the leaves flying in every direction, a flurry of auburn-brown with streaks of yellow, swirling into a leaf-flurry of autumn hues, as the dog dug his paws into the earth and began frantically to dig.

I started following the path into the oak trees, obscured by the shade under their branches. I looked out at the path beyond. Two paths diverged, and I had a choice of which way to walk. I chose the path less travelled. It was a path I had never walked on before. Like other readers of its symbolic power, I considered the poem by Robert Frost. I saw the woods as a metaphor for my life, the decisions made and the life to come:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the road less traveled by.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have miles to go before I sleep”.

I could not stop, for I would continue to travel for the rest of my life, on deep, dark roads into the unknown world.

I walked out into a large opening of green, and suddenly found myself at the top of the city, looking down at the line of high-rise buildings on the foggy horizon beyond. Depending on one’s perspective, London really did not look so large after all.

On Parliament Hill, a woman looks up to the skies and sees a bird directly above her. It signifies the contrast between flying and freedom and the constraints of reality and humanity, for I strove to see the city through the eyes of a child, as I sought to represent the beauty of Hampstead forever through my photography works. Souvenirs d'un autre monde, from another world, the memory remains of these precious things.

I imagined that I was once here, along these country lanes of childhood. As I walked past Hampstead Heath, I saw a light on in a distant house, and in the ember glow of a warm fire, a mother sat with her child, playing the piano. I imagined it was me there, the child cradled in the warmth of the house, as I heard the music from a further room; the piano of D.H. Lawrence:

“Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings

And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong

To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside

And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.”

The music of London, it was with me always, the awe-inspiring post-rock concerts that overwhelmed my mind with nostalgia, bands like Mono, Caspian, contemporary classical artists like Max Richter, they all took me back to a longing for the beautiful innocence of a disappeared childhood among these green, leafy Hampstead streets.

But this was a childhood that I never had.

I continued to head south, and some hours later found myself in Clissold Park, near to my Islington flat. This is surely one of the most scenic, quiet parks in north London. During a year of drifting, I came to this park every day, where I would walk for hours and feed the ducks in the pond.

I remembered a lost December, in the snow. In a blizzard of white, the flurry of snowflakes settled thickly, covering the large park in a white winter wonderland. Treading steps in the crunching white left imprints in the snow, like imprints on my memory. I walked past youngsters wrapped up tight in black hooded coats, throwing snowballs at each other. So long, lonesome days, for groups were huddled in warmth, their hot breath on each other’s faces, thawing the freezing numbness of their nose, rubbing each other’s aching hands with the warmth of another’s touch.

I walked home in the white snow, and I saw a boy making his way back to the safety and warmth of his home, to the comfort of a heated blanket in his flat at home. I had one wish, to be that boy, to have somewhere to come home to. I no longer live in London, and nothing lasts forever, not even the dream of a permanent home, lost forever in childhood days.

I sat down on a bench and I closed my eyes.

What had this city done to me? I was a student in my faculty, where I did not belong. I remember the sadness, the anger, the panic, the lump in my throat. An intensity that did not abate, ideas repeating tightly. Flashes of fear, dancing once again before my eyes.

I was the student once again, and I began to return to my university through the winding streets of London, the smell of sweat, the screeching halt of red buses, the peeling plaster of billboards imprinting themselves on my heavy mind, bitten hard by the cold, as I entered the library, sat at a desk and switched on my battered laptop.

Why am I so hard on London? Others here hurry about their lives with seemingly little thought. “Love deep, chastise deep”. I was so entwined with the hopes and dreams here in these London streets, had invested so much time in my life here, that I wanted it to have something, I wanted it to mean something. It was born of love, a beautiful city in which one would have the freedom and time to think and find the answers to the questions that he asked. Instead I found pain; and I am not the only one.

One must fight fire with fire. To live with ideals of beauty and truth, one must fight all their life. You may have been raised in a culture where it is seen as important to let everyone speak, even when what they are saying is harmful. Certainly I do not prevent you from doing so. But I am raised by a culture of honesty with myself, and writing the truth, about my inner pain, about the cruelty of the world. My anger is an anger born from tenderness and broken love. As the poet Rumi once wrote, in Mathnawi III, 1284-1288:

I said, ‘Thou art harsh, like such a one.’

‘Know,’ he replied,

‘That I am harsh for good, not from rancor and spite.

Whoever enters saying, “This I,” I smite him on the brow;

For this is the shrine of Love, o fool! it is not a sheep cote!

Rub thine eyes, and behold the image of the heart.’

I often tried to understand myself, when I was young, rather than creating myself, when I was an older man. I remembered my days as a student. I stared hard in the mirror, trying to understand my presence outside of my own mind. But why this, why this body, this very situation? For what reason had I been cast inside this particular skin? What invited the creation of my self within this particular face and not one of the billions of others that would exist throughout time? Pushing the boundaries of narcissism, I still felt that my existence was imbued with a significance beyond explanation, simply because it was me, I existed for myself and I perceived all life by my own senses. I was on hyper-alert, so driven by my actions, so driven by the value of my own consciousness, that being in my mind had to have some meaning.

But I knew that this feeling was not true. There was objective truth, the world all around, there was existence with no significance, and the question would never be why. The world just is. I understood the significance and experience of other minds and other lives. It certainly became easier while travelling in the eastern world in cultures outside of my own. In London, it was hard, the environment was cold, and I naturally felt weighed down by the struggle of my own fight for survival. It did not have to be this way.

So I sat at my desk and returned to my work once again, reading slowly and carefully all night, until my eyelids drooped peacefully and I floated into a deep, dreamless sleep.

That night, I dreamt of love, I dreamt that I walked alone among a desolate and barren path, my over-stimulated mind was whirling down, when I heard a train approaching from the horizon. I looked in for a few seconds at most, inside there was warmth and light, and there she sat behind the glass, those delicate and knowing eyes had looked back into mine, transfixed, I stared, those seconds seemed like an eternity, and then the train hurtled away along its set direction, she was gone, and I wondered onward on my own again. Our lives met for no longer than a second as her world departed far away from me.

On the journey back, she answered her mobile phone, talking endlessly about things or people that I would never know. That was all it was, something beautiful in barren times. I thought it might have been love, but no, it was confusion. I had been bitten and infected like that before, and the imprint revealed a thousand layers, or maybe nothing at all. I believed it to be an oblivion, a vast expanse of thought and memory that I could never touch. And while I walked on in the bitter cold, love eluded me. I vaguely recalled having read something like this by Proust, but in this dream I was no longer walking, but almost skipping as if there was no gravity, and after several skips, I could usually fly. But I flew no longer, and woke with a start, gasping.

I loved deeply, but was not understood. But then I understood that I could not dream my way out of my inner pain, that I would have to understand life on its own terms. I read a work of classic Danish literature then, Niels Lyhne, by Jens Peter Jacobsen, and I was struck by a passage where the narrator fights to accept his rejection by the woman he loves:

“You have done what so many people do: they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life cries 'No' to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want their dream to be fulfilled. But life takes no account of dreams. There isn't a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world, and in the end we lie there crying at the edge of the chasm, which hasn't changed and is just where it always was. But we have changed, for we have let our dreams goad all our thoughts and spur all our longings to the very highest tension. The chasm is no narrower, and everything in us cries out with longing to reach the other side, but no, always no, never anything else. If we had only kept a watch on ourselves in time! But now it is too late, now we are unhappy."

There is nothing special about us all, and we all live within our own mind; yet we cannot hope to find peace without fighting ourselves and engaging fully with the terms of the world. As the poet Robert Frost once wrote, “The only way out, is through”.

I have been here so many times before, among a thousand false beginnings. But I am not the only one. Others have felt the pain of living London. The novel “Youth” by J.M. Coetzee tells the story of the young man, making his way through the coldness of London, as he finds work as a programmer at a corporate company, facing his hopes, dreams and disillusionment by this city:

“In the time he has been here he has changed a great deal; he is not sure if it is for the better. During the winter just past there were times when he thought he would die of cold and misery and loneliness. But he has pulled through, after a fashion. By the time the next winter arrives, cold and misery will have less purchase on him. Then he will be on his way to becoming a proper Londoner, hard as stone. Turning to stone was not one of his aims, but it may well be what he will settle for. All in all, London is proving to be a great chastener. Already his ambitions are more modest than they used to be, much more modest. Londoners disappointed him, at first, with the poverty of their ambitions. Now he is on his way to joining them. Each day the city chastens him; like a beaten dog, he is learning.”

Others have painted a more poetic metaphor of the heady flight of dreams colliding with the reality of the world. In Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov imagines the poet’s flight:

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff- and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky”. The metaphor represents the poet as a bird flying into a window, to quote the notes in the novel, “a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, against the outer surface of a glass pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly lower cloud, presents the illusion of continued space”.

I had known the darkness of being young, in a dull world that did not understand high aspirations. I knew the agony of breakdown. I took myself back through the years when my mind shut down completely, a silence enveloped everything and I felt as if all around me were whispering. A hissing emotion coursed through my veins, my mouth in my throat for all that had gone before. Agony wound me in knots and I felt sick. My eyes stung and wearily drooped down as I felt all life flow from my over-stimulated mind. I felt as if I had been struck in the gut. All air and thought knocked out of me, gone. Shutdown. Light. I could not have this, it was not mine, the intensity of this moment was crushing me.

It hurt that for the people around me, for the law students, people I met in nightclubs, in bars and restaurants, appearances came first. It made me sad to know that only the memories of my external reflection, words that always fell short of the vastness of my thoughts and the peculiar amalgamation of intense and incomprehensible emotions would be all that would remain in the minds of my fellow travellers on this strange journey within the confines of the earth and the constraints on their time.

If you did not give anything to others, they would give nothing to you, and empathy and warmth were a rare commodity. Everyone always expected the other to make the first move. Yet if you made the first move, you gave the appearance of over-keenness and they lost interest. It was a stalemate, this zero-sum game, and I grew tired of playing. What do you give me but the absurd and ignominious squirt of lime into my eye? What do you care for the sacrificed youth, awake tonight in the bed of his grave?

I wanted to express myself, but I could not, nor could I write, though the words flowed in abundance in my thoughts. Again, through the lack of meaningful engagement beyond the practical study of law, I developed idealised thoughts that I would only express myself only if it was perfect, or gave the best, or most poetic expression of my thoughts through writing. But I slowly learned that I did not have to say anything, nor could anyone understand another fully and clearly in this place, so I drifted along, among these practical folk.

Borges once quoted G.K. Chesterton when he wrote: "Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest. . . . Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire."

But I have made my peace with this shallow world.

I wound my way back on my walk, returning to my Islington flat. I knew that I could not express my being in full, and I knew that I could not understand myself. No-one can. Yet on this journey of self-knowledge, I had expressed truths about my life, and in a cathartic way, I was free.

As the Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran once wrote:

“Seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line. For self is a sea boundless and measureless. Say not, 'I have found the truth', but rather, 'I have found a truth.”

I did not have to understand. One could simply strive to exist at peace. Einstein once wrote that he had no special talents, only that he was “passionately curious”. Yet there is a limit to curiosity, for we are all flawed, human, unable to reach within ourselves and unable share our lives with others.

By now, on my walk, night had fallen. I returned to my Islington flat. I had started my walk here, and had returned. The world of sleep was calling me. Memories were like dust, in The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, immensely dark, immensely deep.

Yet I could not sleep. Like Pessoa, I never slept. I gazed at the street illuminated by the lamplights in the darkness of night. I have never truly slept in my life, though I have often pretended to be awake. And I felt once again the Preludes by T.S. Eliot, as I felt the familiar burn of insomnia, lost in my darkened city street at 4 and 5 and 6 am, everwake:

“The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.