On several occasions, I spoke with a few ex-servicemen, all of whom had served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan and were now sleeping rough close to MoCa Trowbridge. Near Christmas, we were sitting around a small fire and their raw, cold talk of feeling alienated by both local people in the Middle East and people on returning home to UK, re-connected me to TS Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi,’ which I mentioned to them. They spoke of some of the horrors that they had witnessed. I asked one of them if I could make an image from what he had described. I used the charcoal leftover from the fire we were sitting around to make the charred dog’s head that haunted his thoughts. I invited them to come over to listen to TS Eliot reading out his poem through speakers concealed in the airbricks by the side of my window in Moca, Trowbridge, installed by Hugo Danino, who shares parallel Trowbridge realities. I put up an installation thinking of this journey, the birth/death, moments of consciousness, a MAGI constellation of stars looming behind. This lasted, with the sound, through the ‘festive’ period. We had a beer together when I switched it on.


A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
……..
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

……… were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I put MAGI posters around the town near MoCa Trowbridge