online: 28 june 2008 modified: 16 june 2008 15 june 2008 as thought becomes thing (and vice-versa)
Parliament Hill in the wind
...clear air, visibility 12 to 20 miles (15 to 30 km)... i can see cranes and tall buildings to the horizon... Islington and Camden are in sun while places further away are in shadow...
...on the way here a robin, and later a crow, hopped a few metres ahead of me as i followed them, the robin along a path in Sandy Heath and the crow through a field surrounding the tumulus...
...and in the forest i stooped to look at about 50 mosquitos circling and zig-zagging in sunlight against the dark background of tree trunks and the shadows of leaves
...the newest tall building (between the clusters of tall buildings in the City and those at Canary Wharf) is almost completed - only one of the three or four cranes that lifted its bulk now remains... and i guess it may be the last tower block for some years if the economic downturn continues (tower cranes and new buildings being among the first expenses to be deferred - because organisations may choose to stay longer in the existing buildings that they occupy at the moment)...
...this evening i'm wondering if these installments of newtime are going to include more fiction than did the digital diary?... and as i ask the question i notice the shadow of this bench and myself on the pathway before me... and as soon as i'd written that the shadow was swallowed in the larger shadow of a cloud that is suddenly darkening most of Camden... but what is fiction today and what was it or what has it become?...
...my own shadow returns as i recall what i read today of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's idea* of non-realism as exemplified in the strange experience of touching one hand with the other and how each hand can be the sensor while the other is felt as the thing touched... and also a handshake joining hands of two people which poses other questions of who's hand is doing the touching and whose is the touched one, or both... M-P explores these profound questions in long paragraphs extending over pages (and I've yet to read them carefully) but I already feel that his thought is going to help me in finding modes of faction or fiction that permit writing that is neither, or both, to proceed in the 'new time' of 'connective moments'(inclusive of oldtime yet not to be diminished by it)!...
...at which i look up and catch sight of a passer-by looking at what i'm doing and he smiles as i acknowledge his attention...
...and now nearly all the city is in the shadow not of clouds above but of this hill... but the upper half of the new tall building is still in sun...
next day:
...as i contemplate these shadowy and interpersonal experiences (at the edges of both the real and the imaginary) i feel closer than usual to 'the new' as i call it... closer to thought becoming thing?... each thing seen being a personal construct and each person being a thing that can see and can think...
...at which my own thoughts and these words reach a limit... (says that part of each one who is everyone?)...
*Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, edited by Thomas Baldwin, Routledge, London 2004, pages 257 to 258 (from M-P's unfinished book The Visible and the Invisible)
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