17:10: Bus to central London after visiting a flat for sale in an industrial wilderness (I like the roughness of it) and after a busy afternoon on the web... I'm on the way to buy shoes - if I can find some at this late hour on a Saturday...
...Despite the ordinary nature of these activities I'm enjoying the day...! for at least they move me in directions I like - as so much of modern life does not....
...but I'm afraid this space is ceasing to be a good place for me - the Arts Council's exhibitions have ceased, perhaps too many tourists have discovered it, and soon there is to be redevelopment - no doubt commercial and likely to make it no longer a free public space indoors but more of a shopping mall. Oh dear.
But what can I make of it today, now I'm here, not intentionally but propelled by a mis-timed visit to a shoe shop (it was closed) - as a way to make something of a trip to central London that might otherwise be fruitless?What of the 'experimental city film story' (not a bad place in which to write it?)
As I look about I'm struck by the agreeble and fascinating variety and individuality of the many people surrounding me, despite or in contrast to their outer fixedness, agedness, predictable clothing, roles etc. as tourists or as arriving concert goers... I notice one or two women looking curiously and yet patiently at their (more focussed or more narrowly-minded?) men... and someone wearing a spangled metallic-looking scarf of gold and silvery discs (sequins) it reminds me of a glittering snake... and much else, too much to describe, this moment is quite wonderful, completely beyond me and marvellous...
So thisis 'afternature'! - hundreds of totally unique people conforming without resistance to their expected roles of sitter, payer, eater, listener to, reader of, whatever is socially or commercially offered, as goods or services profitable to others (where are those others?... not here)...
But as I look more critically I think that none of this is worth thinking of, this whole scene is out of date, and ineffectual, and dead... ! Yet we live it, nearly all of us, the living death of presumed prosperity and apparent comfort, and obedience...
...all except a few of us, like the man with a dog, both he and it beneath blankets in the rain, sitting outside on the ground and asking 'have you got any change?'... Street dwellers live only to an average age of 42 I read today in an appeal that reached me from a housing charity - though I detected little charity (in the religious sense) in the wording or the form of their printed message - I inferred only exploitation of distress by new professionals... No one is putting control and responsibility for donated money into the hands and minds of the ones who're said to need it - they're not trusted... But I'm getting bitter - and I'm criticising the occupations of devoted people...
Yes we are all responsible for what comes of human endeavour, right or wrong, but as yet no one is in a position to alter the social or political or moral direction... but I think it will change (here it comes).
... now his supposed grandmother joins in his game - in mock attacks, and tickling, despite her smart costume, dressed up for the occasion... the boy lies on the floor with knees up and legs bent - he is laughing at her pretended aggression...
...the children love this expanse of clear floor space with no specified activities and no obstacles or limits to movement...
...and now the little boy is sitting on the lowest step of a wide stairway and propells himself by sliding sideways in sitting position - a strange movement which no adult might attempt...
...and now he stands and turns round and round until dizzy and falls without any hurt whatever... and we were all once like that (with a different physique and dynamic) we old ones sitting here in such immobility and stiffness and conformity... To what?
...and now a little girl joins him in his spontaneous dance... She seems acquainted with formal dancing as she lifts her feet and swings her arms and legs more in the self-conscious manner of a children's ballet class.
Where and when and how do we learn and adopt our so various ways of moving? I guess they are mostly inherited... or our basic tendencies are - with specific formal movements learnt by imitation, others by instruction. But the main teacher is the self, the bodily self, I feel, recalling experiments at the mirror that I still indulge in before or during yoga and other exercises...
...and now another infant runs up and down the long ramp beside me as his mother or grandmother or whoever she is watches semi-anxiously to see where he goes... now a man is accompanying him and saying 'steady!' - and he picks up the miniature car the boy dropped.
There are so many people here, as concert time approaches, there's too much to take in, no one will ever notice most of it - even if all our movements are recorded, eventually, by video cameras. The available perception is so much less than is the immense variety of all we do, and are...
Which is perhaps the lead I've been seeking into the story of the filming of experimental city (but with the experiment being life, not any sub-part, or abstraction)...?
Something funny's happened type the fingers this is no longer in or below the Festival Hall we are partaking of new parts as we wake up from the (frozen?) dream of the eighteenth century, the new enlightenment of afternature, the creative democracy of direct rule of the imaginary selves inhabiting the experimental cities and networks of our bodyminds and memories and in the extended sciences of our conscious thoughts and actions... does that make sense asks the voice from nowhere else but the present...?
...I guess few or none of them understand why we the fingers are writing this and thus, adapting words written before the concert to become what is happening four days later... but continue it we will, knowing that this is our life such as it's becoming as we digitise and transform and and a nd an d go to pieces and/or become new ones...
The place is filling up with expectant people who will soon cease talking to each other and sit in perfect silence listening to other people performing sounds written centuries ago by people who dreamt this world we're now inhabiting and who may not have expected it to become frozen.
But the people around us are not yet attuned to what is happening they are still walking through the sounds and motions that they came here to become parts of. Full stop.
The mouth and brain ask the nearest person what is the programme and he tells them it is Dvorjac and Tschaicofsky (they guess the spelling's wrong) and the man goes on to recite the names of the conductor and the soloist. He is truly programmed and rehearsed, as are the musicians, by those famous names and sounds of long ago... and so are these fingers of this bodymind.
The eyes recall seeing a thick copy of War and Peace in the bookshop this evening and remember having read only half of it - and how enormous and yet so fortuitous it is, that vast and formative fiction, and the war it describes, so terrible, and the mind wonders at the capacity of the few who wrote such novels, and such symphonies, to encompass so much and to conceal so much else that might otherwise have entered educated minds and then frozen them otherwise?
...and now, coming to the end of the last sheet of paper (having forgotten the handheld) the fingers cease writing and the mind tries to think without words...
...a signal sounds and nearly everyone obeys it and moves slowly up the stairs to the concert hall... soon this space will be almost empty, write the fingers, and those who remain will be feeling more at home and in touch with their minds and previous lives. And at last this piece of writing has stopped. Is this the movie?If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net.