...I waited obediently by each of several pedestrian crossing lights though there was no traffic in sight...
...the temperature is 3 degrees C, i see a solitary man standing still in a field of bare trees and many molehills: 3 worlds: that of moles, that of pedestrians, and that of high speed road travellers...
...a royal and ancient letter box faces me from across the road, the next collection is at 14.45... a number 17 bus goes past and i avert my eyes from a repulsive advertisement - a photograph of a goose dressed in sado-masochistic leather wear (to promote consumption of pate de foi gras?)... .i've always thought advertising to be the worst element of industrial living...
...i move on towards the forest, remembering Sigmund Freud's well-informed pessimism regarding civilization and what he called its discontents, the self-enmity and the unhappiness it imposes (perhaps inevitably?) in its prohibitions of love and its extensions of work...
...and now i am walking among tall beeches between which beams of sunlight slant downwards in the misty air...
...i cross a long vista, between beeches, ending at a mansion at one end and an open gateway at the other... no guards, no signs of private occupatiion, this estate has become a public place...
...Michelangelo's twice life-sized statue of David (with sling but without Goliath) stands on a plinth between beech trees - his nose, hand and foot being familiar to art students as models to copy...
...no snow remains from recent snowfalls except for scores of snowballs still existing in the sunshine in the middle of a lawn... and the partly drained pond is freezing over though the canal by the mansion is still unfrozen and is crowded with swans and geese and ducks and seagulls...
...outside the park beside the motorway i sit briefly on a crash barrier... a man wearing high visibility clothing disappears into the earth as he climbs down a ventilation shaft to enter a duct of some kind...
...pausing to sit at a bus stop (in this motorised part of the planetary surface) seeing my breath condensing into steam in the cold air, enjoying the sunshine inside the glass bus shelter, surrounded by parked cars outside an isolated tourist hotel of about 20 stories resembling an egg crate, i feel more in accord with a magpie (that is perched high on a street lamp) than with any of this architecture of transportation and storage of people - i feel that i am inhabiting a drawing board, an abstract world of preplanned experiences, not a place to feel free and at home in...
...Yet this, says Utopia, is the worldwide reality we have made or consented to, the first environment and culture to reach and to serve our whole specles. If it's wrong, then it's all of us who are to blame and who must come alive to put it right, whatever the cost and the discomfort...
...but Numeroso says no, this reality may be faulty but it's precious, it's the embodiment of ourselves, without it we can not exist in the numbers we do...
...while these imagined figures expose the difficulty facing earth people at present, Unesco seeks ways to resolve it - by the formation of new committees and supernational (and supernatural?) laws, difficult or impossible to enforce...
...but, while these mythical figures hesitate, the people of the earth become unafraid of what is happening and begin to see themselves in the roles of the gods whom they used to worship and whose responsibilities they must now assume... that is the challenge, beyond science, beyond nature.
later:
considering these thoughts, Numeroso remembers and tries to realise the state of 'afternature' - a new state of existence beyond the dualism of 'nature-and-artifice'... he also remembers the theories of Maya Deren in which the idea of this arose in her attempts at a non-realist cinema in the 1940s and 50s...
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