online: 9 april 2010 modified: 8, 9 april 2010 8 april 2010 the air is still
city forest
...setting sun in clear sky... seen through trees as yet only in bud... he north west wind has dropped and the air is still... sounds of distant aircraft and road traffic... i'm pleased to be outdoors again after days of keeping warm indoors with a cold (now nearly gone)... a large and isolated blue cloud over suburbia... the tree before me (is it an ash?) rises almost without branches until it reaches the height of the other trees... the trunk divides into two at ground level... and at about 15 metres these two trunks divide and divide into the finest branches and twigs with buds, not yet open... and each tree of the thousands here could be similarly described... but these few words and numbers are enough to evoke their presence... such is science and such is art... even in small quantity and simple words...
...as i write a man (running energetically up a steep hill) manages to say hello... though i was looking at this touch screen, not at him... one of thousands of the people with whom one shares a few seconds of life and then they and we are gone, perhaps forever... i suppose this seldom happened in more static societies long ago but now it's a part of the profoundly different nature of industrial living...
...at which i am reminded of a sculpture* by Alberto Giacometti... of several elongated figures walking (in isolation from each other?) on a city square
but now the light is fading and i need to return...
*...here is a link to a photograph of the sculpture... it's called 'City Square' (1948) and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
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