someone asks me the way and then i ask a woman on a bicycle when the ornamental garden will be closed and she says 'now... i am going to close it'.

the seats are too wet so i can't sit in order to write on the handheld - instead i am writing brief notes on paper while walking...

now i turn off the gravel path and head for a large plinth among the trees that is without a sculpture or monument... Coming close to it i see that a large branch of a beech tree has for decades been growing over and into the empty sculpture-space above the plinth (which is circular and about 6 metres diameter and 1/2 to 2 metres high)...

(everything is equally important, he thinks)

passing several fresh molehills (surely constructed since new year) i pass a vast fallen tree, felled by saw cut, perhaps 20 years ago..... the trunk is about 1.5 metres thick and is it gradually rotting - changing into other things - insects, fungi, gasses, soil...what else?

...the short grass on which i am walking is mossy and very damp, as is everything today ... i can feel the cold air next to my face and neck but the rest of my skin is in contact with warm air held in place by layers of clothing.

now i've found a dry seat and can write on the handheld ...

i'm sitting close to an inclined beech tree where, one summer's day, i was suddenly surrounded by cyclists ...

as i write this note, naming objects not ideas, i recall section 4 of Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud which i read this afternoon and in which he writes in more abstract language than i do... but nevertheless with much credibility... he writes about our erotic impulses towards unimpeded love and their perhaps inevitable thwarting by what we call work, or civilization (a cultural or evolutionary tragedy, as he presents it)...

...and now i pass the partly tamed deer, standing in an enclosure, almost as still as statues, before i revisit 'Ode To The Moon', the female figure holding two wreaths above her head as she stands perpetually at the top of a war memorial with statues of soldiers...

on the way out of the park i speak with a man who was attempting to lead an infant boy who kept stopping and crying - so as to force the man to stop also. 'The young controlling the old' i said. He told me that he liked his son to be obstinate - 'it shows character' he said...

(these pages are designed to be read with the window set to two-thirds of the screen width)

atlas

homepage

daffodil email newsletter

If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net