online:15 january 2009 modified: 14, 15 january 2009 14 january 2009 stillness profound
in cold weather
...pausing at a pond in a park to look at a group of five mallard ducks who are standing still on melting ice... i can detect only slight movements of heads or feet, their bodies are inactive... and when they walk they do so slowly, with a little skidding or sliding...
...after a few minutes twenty to thirty seagulls arrive... they also stand still on the ice, heads hunched into necks... two moorhens arrive and are more active... they move quickly and reach forward to peck at things on the ice surface...
...now all the ducks and seagulls settle into an irregular formation... as if waiting for something (they know not what... melting or frozen?)...
...passing the playground... no children today (is it too cold and damp?)... i sit on a bench to write something about two empty swings (hanging side by side
from a single arch)... they are absolutely stationary in the cold wet breeze... somehow they seem to me as significant of something i cannot name... perhaps the potentiality of movement, or of zero motion, or gravity, or even sculpture (at its silent or uncommunicative best!)... to [me?] many things...
...do all physical things have this mysterious quality, beyond words, if and when one catches them without (or disconnected from) their purposful element? (in this case playthings without children)...
...yes... looking now at a fir tree... i see in its stillness a similar profundity, or calm...
at the 39 steps:
..chopped and fallen bracken, reddish brown, beneath the still atmosphere of cloud at earth level (or what we call mist)... both mist and bracken seem 'profound' in this unnameable sense... in this mid-winter scene...
...i hear a few voices in the middle distance... and someone whistling... i could continue this forever...
...on the way back i bought a slice of home-made apple cake which i ate with yogurt, cinnamon, and a glass of tea, before typing this out (for today, as it was too cold to write text on the touch screen, i noted only disconnected words and phrases with pen and paper... so this is perhaps more fictional memory than factual record... but perhaps that is always the case?)...
...is stillness artificial, or imaginary, or sublime... or... or...
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