online: 12 september 2002

11 september 2002 in a landscape garden


18:30 A seat among trees growing sideways as well as upwards in grassland. They look so right when free to grow without mutual interference - it's hard to believe that their fullness of shape is the result of design, not spontaneous evolution. But despite the landscape gardening (or even because of it?) I feel a sense of peace and ordinariness here on a sloping meadow below pale grey cloud in a gentle north wind among well-shaped trees and mown grass and little or no undergrowth.

I sat here to listen to someone playing a pipe of some kind but the playing soon ceased. I saw the piper walking away between the trees and then I noticed a low brrr brrr sound to my right. It was a magpie walking about - I suppose looking for insects or perhaps hoping that I might feed it. This is a much-tamed bit of wilderness, is it not? But I like it.

Today I've been avoiding the radio - not wanting to be part of the worldwide replaying and resaying of the attacks on USA a year ago today. Instead I've been editing yesterday's digital diary entry and putting it on line.

Then I slept for an hour or so.

Since then I've been attempting to restart a design fiction in which I hope to re-tell the successes and failures (mostly the latter) of my life as if in an imaginary culture, post-industrial, post-agricultural, and free of what I conceive to be 'inhuman' and 'wrong'. Not utopian, nor dystopian, but something different from either. Something I've yet to experience.

But now the light is going.


I began to walk away when I found an unopened bottle of what could be vodka-and-lemon in the grass behind where I had been sitting. There was no label, only the word SMIRNOFF moulded into the glass. I'll leave it for someone who likes it. In the museum of the present.



digital diary dates

homepage

© 2002 john chris jones

You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you respect the copyright of quotations.

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