online: 24 november 2010 modified: 7, 12 october 23, 24 november 2010, 2 december 7 october 2010 a pivotal moment?
point zero
...a cool and peaceful afternoon... at this eighteenth-century-like view of a distant landscape half-framed by overhanging oak leaves and branches... just after mailing copies of the internet and everyone to someone in the USA and someone in the UK...
...today, as i look up from writing this, i see before me a woman who is walking slowly while engrossed in reading and writing on a handheld device... as her dog takes advantage of her slowness to go sniffing the scents of others... not visible...
...yesterday i sat with my daughter Sarah to eat sandwiches a few metres from the gravestone of William and Catherine Blake in the cemetery in Bunhill Row (in London) where also lie remains of Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell and other dissenters of the 17th to 19th centuries... the ones who killed the king (or approved of that killing) and who refused or were excluded from graveyards for believers and conformists...
...and why do i call this moment a turning point, a pivotal moment?...
...i think it's because the video that Sarah gave me for my birthday led me to a piece by John Cage (called overpopulation and art)* that i have never encountered... it includes a clearer and more complete statement of John Cage's political vision than i have heard before... his extension of the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan...
...and this moment seems to me pivotal because of another gift (on this my birthday) of the rescued digitised text of After Giraldus... (rescued from out-dated softawre as a gift by a kind and capable friend) a vital step in the long journey to connect the 12th century life and works of Giraldus Cambrensis to the present time... in which (as John Cage notes in his piece) the number of people now alive is greater than the number who ever lived and died before us... a numerical reason for ceasing to be dominated by the past and instead to belong to, or to be, the future...
....and now the writer looks up and sees a rift in the grey cloud cover revealing pale blue sky and pinkish gold clouds... as if heralding a world beyond... (but above the clouds is continuous sunshine... except when we enter the shadow of the earth... 'the cone of night'...)
...he walks away from that place and pauses to look at the still surface of a pond... on which leaves are falling... then he changes direction and returns with these thoughts to where he came from...
*the piece by John Cage can be heard at http://www.archive.org/details/AM_1992_01_28
next day:
unable to write anything but this... this afternoon...
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