online: 27 january 2010 modified: 26, 27 january 2010 26 january 2010 winter sunshine
Sandy Heath
...sitting among bare trees and looking up at clear sky... air near to freezing point... woman and dog climbing hill... man following with short rapid steps until he catches up with her... squirrel running along highest branches... another man walks by while speaking via mobile... and now he pauses to sit on the backrest of a bench with his feet on the seat while swinging his arms gymnastically a few times before descending the hill...
...i imagine him reading this and realising that his brief action could become known to hundreds of people who may eventually read these words...
...today i only just managed to come walking in this cold air but am now glad to be out ... and now to continue to the next randomly chosen point before it gets dark...
....stopping to look at the garden suburb in wintry mist... the distant horizon merges into the sky.. the church and spire (built in an enlarged cottage style of the early years of the 20th century) rises from the mists and reflects the fading sunlight... i'm feeling warmer now having walked a few kilometres... house lights and distant street lights are switching on in the garden suburb... pale pink cloud is forming above the church and houses ... so now to walk onward again before my fingers freeze... and to walk past the former house of my friends Michael and Daphne Farr... and to buy vital supplies from a health food shop and a supermarket...
later:
reading this little story of events in the forest and its surroundings i wonder when or if these diary entries are going to turn into fictions or plays or are they that already?
... my response is to say yes this is already fiction if i can accept that each moment consists not only of facts but of acts of which reality's composed... the primary imagination* as maker, or even as The Maker, not that He exists apart from ourselves and all such tangible-intangibles... as we drift into philosophy (no less)... even religion... no longer taboo to intelligence...
...this is still not a play but soon i may perform it on the radio...
*this is my interpretation of S T Coleridge's distinction between primary imagination (which 'is the living power and prime agent of all human perception') and secondary imagination, or fancy, (which 'must receive all its materials ready made')...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited and with an introduction by George Watson, J M Dent and Sons, London and New York 1975, chapter xiii, page 167.
...there are several references in this diary to Coleridge's theory of imagination, for instance:
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