online: 20 may 2013 modified: 16 to 20, 25 may 2013 16 may 2013 to a place that i like
walking to Kenwood
...after tiresome hassles i feel that i've sprung back into life simply by going to a place that i like... reached by ways just a little out of my habitual paths (selected by the position of the second hand of a clock whenever pathways diverge)...
...on the way to Kenwood i paused to note the four words on a war memorial: JUSTICE LOYALTY HONOUR COURAGE and rejoiced at the absence of sentimental imagery... and then i saw the newly invented words APOCALIPS WOW in an advertisement for lip lacquer... and i wondered what Joseph Conrad (the author of The Heart of Darkness the tragic 'book of the film' Apocalypse Now) would think of these words appearing on the side of a bus...
...but these cultural shocks did not depress me as i continued happily through forests and landscape garden towards Kenwood where suddenly i encountered the sculpture by Barbara Hepworth... (it has already appeared in this diary... on a webpage that includes links to other such webpages... some nested within others)
...today i enjoyed looking at this sculpture from an unaccustomed distance of about 25 metres... two resident crows are walking on the grass between the rhododendrons now in bloom.... and the flowering trees also... two people pass carrying opened umbrellas though the predicted and almost visible thunderstorm has not yet reached here... and though some big drops of rain have landed close to the handheld...
...and on the way here (through silent forest) i met no one until (emerging into grassland) i met a man with six dogs and a woman with a push chair who signalled me to re-close a gate that she'd politely left open...
...and the sculpture stands and stands... emitting human presence... and stillness... a reminder of the rocks on which we live... and the stellar dusts and barely credible constituents of the planets and the rest of the universe or cosmos... and the name of the sculpture is 'MONOLITH-EMPYREAN 1953'...
(i gather later from the Wikipedia that the empyrean is an ancient name for the sky or the firmament... for instance in Dante's Divine Comedy)...
...i could sit here for hours with the crows and the lawn and the ornamental trees and the sculpture... though other things are calling... so i decide to stay for a few minutes just looking at and listening to the things of this paradise...
...moving closer to the sculpture i see that someone has carefully removed the moss and graffiti that i noted in previous diary entries...
...in crowded bus in rain...and still elated by all this... i recall a resolve made at Kenwood to no longer let local problems narrow my actions or writings...
...so now... via this improved neway... to live life as self/other...
('we are self/other or we are nothing'... a philosophic poem by Edwin Schlossberg... reproduced with his 'self/other permission')
You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you
respect the copyright of quotations.
If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please
send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net
