online: 8 february 2005
modified: 10 february 2005

8 february 2005 continuity and difference


16:13 Tumulus. Beneath the tree that became an eclipse camera. Tuesday afternoon, what in the world is happening?...

...a tall woman walks by in a ground length dress. The trees about me look exceptionally skeletal and still. The cool misty air reaches everywhere - beneath pale blue sky with a few misty clouds, pink and grey. A person in bright red runs slowly through this landscape of greeny grey trees and green and yellow grass ... Breathing in and looking upwards i feel the continuity of everything, wishing these things i mention had not names but were perceived as parts of a unity, a continuous enactment of an all-pervading process of growth and change and evolution, always new and surprising - but, now that i think and write this thought, i perceive that it is true - all the things i can see, hear, feel, or imagine are indeed such a continuity, despite this medium of distinct words in which we describe and differentiate what is, fundamentally, integral... how does the mathematical calculus, of differentials and integrals, relate to this perception of unity as more fundamental than difference? I don't know enough to say but I remember Richard Huws* explaining how each phenomenon is of integrative character, though each embodies also a specific element or 'particular integral', as in the calculus... he may have said something different but that's what i remember

Two women go by, talking, talking, not looking about as they walk. A man stands alone beneath a tree, legs apart... and now, as he is walking away, about six birds fly above me in formation, squawking continuously, my writing hand becomes cold, a man walks by with a stick that he carries and waves about without using it for support... nearly everyone might carry a walking stick when i was young. The noisy twin engined traffic-spotting aeroplane flies directly overhead - i can see it through the tree from which i also hear (but don't see) the flapping of some strong wings among the branches ...

All this, endless things (or more correctly events), comprising the blessed and fearful elements of life and death, our existence, our absence, the limitless whole of the unnameable, the unattained end of descriptions, the never-ending of 'it'...

It's nearly five o'clock.

*Richard Huws, perhaps the best-informed and most extensive thinker-doer i have known.... engineer, marine architect, landscape architect, teacher of architecture, ecologist, industrial designer, water sculptor, thinker, modernist, disillusioned Welsh nationalist, cartoonist, non-fitter into slots... but these words do not describe the continuity, versatility, sharp insight and practical zest of his thoughts and actions, he was a unified man... Richard was born in 1902 in Anglesey, Wales and he died there in 1980. He is the father of Ursula Huws.





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