online: 6 june 2009 modified: 5 june 2009 5 june 2009 garden suburb
Hampstead Heath extension
21:09
...the garden suburb is already in rain or mist this chilly evening... no one to be seen, no living beings except for bushy trees surrounding the playing fields and almost hiding the utopian houses and the democratic intentions of its privileged initiators... Henrietta Barnett with her architects and other allies*...
...and now i am sitting here alone and happy to be writing this beneath a spreading oak and looking north towards several horizons... each mistier than the last...
...the sky is getting darker and as yet no sign of the many prosperous spirits inhabiting this earthly paradise who will return at sunrise... or as soon as there is any threat to the garden suburb... or to the heath...
...reading today some of Mrs Reynolds** again (as chance-selected antidote to inaction) i immediately re-inhabited it like an actual world... though, as in any book of worth, there is real illusion... not physical but literary... re-creating whatever thought or life that can inhabit words...
...a person in black is walking slowly across the grass and disappearing into the trees... and now a voice - is he talking to someone... or is he speaking a soliloquy... or words of madness?...
...and now the scene seems to be getting lighter (as my sight begins to adapt*** from day vision to night?) ...
...two men carrying bags or briefcases walk slowly past, as if in a play... they are speaking in low voices and do not look at me or ask what i am doing, lit up here as i am by the light of a touch screen...
...i was going to say that reading Mrs Reynolds gave me today a sense of happy freedom from travail... and entry to the world of ourselves, collective or singular... the mystery of thought, embodied in writing... the theme, the the, the intangible something... of everything...
...as i get up to go a large bat flies across the dark sky...
...and walking back through the suburb i pass into and out of a soundspace of song... a loud and confident female voice singing where normally there is no sound of the inhabitants...or was it a recording?...
...the mystery is everywhere... misery also... and the joy of inner strength...
* Henrietta Barnet worked with (or commanded) many: her husband Samuel Barnett, clergyman-philanthropist; Raymond Unwin and Edwin Lutyens, co-ordinating architects; Octavia Hill, social reformer; J Passmore Edwards, philanthropist of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Library, London... and others including John Ruskin who paid for one of their first attempts at social housing in the East End of London.
**Gertrude Stein, Mrs Reynolds and five earlier novels, Yale University Press, New Haven 1952, Books for Libraries Press, New York 1969.
*** There is an excellent description of night vision etc by Marc Green.
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