online: 26 july 2010 modified: 11, 13, 26 july 2010 11 july 2010 sudden light
highest seat
...as i look towards the distant horizon... beneath light grey clouds and patches of blue sky... the whole city (or business district)... is lit up... by sunlight:
...tower blocks, cranes, a mass of new buildings that did not exist when i first came to London in 1950... a consequence of economic growth that is both history and ecological madness... or something quite other and hidden from those of us who live in... and fear for... the system... so called...
...and now the light dims as clouds move in westerly wind... and a nearby bird ceases singing... and gorse spikes and branches reach each into it's self-appointed piece of space and time bearing decaying remnants of flowers that were bright yellow during spring and even winter... (for the seasons may be changing)...
...what is this moment... wild, serene... and lit up intermittently... while subject to disasters none of which maybe fatal in the longest view? ... and inwardly whatever we make of it, our always present unknown fate or changeability...
...hold hold to all in hand that grows from shrinking origins... the new, so called, the reality beyond realism yet dependent always on things physical and named in ignorance of what's to come or could change unexpectedly...
...but enough, too much, of abstract speculation while still needing the vision of a Mr Stahr (last tycoon of a Hollywood that was*) in the business of conservative change that fears less realistic dreams of power shared equally as in the end evolves at it's own pace and rhythm...
*F Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1968... Scott Fitzgerald died in 1941 the day after he had written the beginning of chapter 6... his notes, and a synopsis of the unfinished part, are included... the hero, Mr Stahr,
had flown up very high... and stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, had settld gradually to earth...
...a cool evening in the weak summer of the north... a moment good in which to choose our way (as if we owned it... history)... but listening to the barking of a dog and observing the flight of a buzzard or kestrel... or any such sounds or sights or smells of collected awareness...
...remembering that this is all we can do in perhaps necessary blindness to what, if we saw it, might put us off and quench our energies...
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