online: 31 october 2010 modified: 30, 31 october, 1, 23 november 2010 29 october 2010 the pleasure of darkness
39 steps
...dusk at these semi-fictional steps... at a corner of the actual heath as well as in the imagined cinema of our collective day dreams... ('the 39 steps' of John Buchan's spy story appear elsewhere in the diary... as well as in physical reality on Hampsted Heath...)
... at which i heard a bang (was it a gun or firework... probably the latter as soon i heard another)...
and now it's getting dark... (but i can see to write as this screen is self-illuminated)... and now another bang...
...a tall floodlight in a nearby rail yard shines straight at me through a small gap in thick foliage of a tree that's still got most of it's many leaves...
(...and what now of realising/idea... as past/future/here in the present... at the edge of what is gone and is to come... as past reality turns into memory and future dream turns into fact...?)
...looking round me in the darkness i already feel slight presence of the people that we were... reappearing... or those we imagine we'll become turn into the people that we are...
(cough-cough speaks a self-critical throat)...
...another loud bang... and then another less loud... perhaps further away...
...now as it gets darker the wind speed increases and at this the scene changes to blackness beneath the black treetops and a dark grey sky above lit faintly by the sum of hundreds of yellow sodium streetlamps shining in the damp air...
...switching off the handheld i realise that it's not as dark as i imagined while slightly dazzled by the screen light... when the light is off i can still make out the forms of trees and other vegetation which i know to be ferns once green (now brown) in daylight... but dark grey in this near darkness...
... i look around but see no one in the shadows... nor do i detect any other creature but myself... sitting here like an eccentric person sitting in the dark... and not a man with rational purpose that insulates him of course from any form of madness... great or slight...
...but now after half-stumbling to, and down, the 39 steps of semi-fiction i reach a well-lit bus stop on a well-lit road between large expensive houses and blocks of flats which to me as yet contain no mystery... no life... for this is not a fiction... no not yet... it's only the outward architecture...
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