online: 22 July 2008 modified: 16, 17, 22 July 2008 16 July 2008 honeysuckle, fuchsia
the beginning of the end of summer
...grey sky, cool wind, late evening at what i call 'point 10' from where you can see the roofs and windows of Hampstead Garden Suburb between and beyond the trees and the playing fields...
...on the way here i was attracted to the colour fuchsia visible through dense vegetation at the thirty-nine steps... and when i emerged from the forest i saw a long piece of fuchsia textile (about 30 metres by 5) being held aloft and allowed to rise and billow in the wind by about a dozen people led by a tall stilt-man in white from head to ground - the textile was his train in a procession across the grass... they did not seem approachable so i never discovered why...
...and now, to get here, i was again attracted to fuchsia (my mother's favourite colour) being the colour of some vetch growing amongst other wild flowers white, yellow and blue next to the rushes in one of the Seven Sisters ponds... and where i found my first blackberry of the season growing amongst honeysuckle... (it was completly black but not yet ripe enough to eat)
...yes it is the beginning of the end of summer, i thought, as i walked through long grass that was already bent and yellowed though we are still only halfway through July...
...i've been reading from books - selected partly by chance and partly by interesting accidents of memory, of radio, and of literary criticism on the web.. Henry James's Portrait of a Lady... William Shakespeare's Cymbeline (through the mind and editing of J M Nosworthy) and memories of William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Ruskin and William Morris... and their putting the protection of human life before that of nature (conceived as a separate thing)*...
*James Woudhuysen this morning on BBC Radio 4 referring to The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate, Harvard University Press, 2002 (which led me to his book The Genius of Shakespeare)
...what i find in these writings is the notion of connectiveness... or even unity... the unity of thought and experience being a quality of mind and of nature... and not at all a separated or divisive entity such as is supposed in any idealism, or realism, thought to be good or evil in itself...
...but now it's getting dark and cold so i may continue this less hurriedly at home...
midnight:
as i follow whatever attracts me in these writings i realise it's time to put my ideas with those of others into a connected whole... as i once did in Design Methods!
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