online: 26 july 2014
modified: 26 july 2014
22 july 2014
new forms of life
changed presence
...walking to point 10 wondering how much one can change one's
presence... and that of everything... simply by avoiding presumptions...
and thus enabling others to do likewise...
...sitting here in
a sunset of clear light without clouds... as someone on a nearby seat
speaks loudly via a handheld to someone else who is present
electronically... even to me... though i cannot decipher muchof what
either of them are saying...
...setting aside terrible news of
an aircraft carrying nearly 300 people being blown to pieces in the sky
... i hear distant hand clapping as someone scores in a
game of cricket... and long shadows darken half of the lawn before me...
and another aircraft flies overhead seemingly unaffected by this new
form of warfare... to which no one seems to have found the right way to
react...
...i hear a thud of a foot on an inflated football...
and sounds of grown people playing in an enclosure for small children... and
now comes a man pushing a baby in a buggy while he talks to another
presence who is physically somewhere else...
...i have only to
name these everyday activities to enable the whole reality to become
present in written words as well the thoughts of myself and others...
thought differently for each one of us...
...this classic
scene (of an eighteenth century landscape recreated as a garden suburb
in the early twentieth century)... is suddenly brought up to date by the
roar (already gone) of 'a four-engined jumbo jet' that was flying low
and still climbing... together with the several million people who are
now always aloft despite this global warfare... and upon which we all
now depend... and which some of us try to control by inventing new words
like baby buggy and jumbojet... plus the accompanying hardware and
software and new slang and new technical language... new ways of being
ourselves... collectively...
...but looking up now from this
touchscreen to the organised tranquility before me (much of it existing
through the vision of Henrietta Barnett and her benefactor
philanthropist husband Samuel Barnett... and allies) i stay longer to
look and enjoy this summer of mown lawns in a city forest with tall
nettles and long grass and blue misty horizons beneath faint clouds of
pink creaminess beneath the palest evening sky that i can imagine... but
here it is peaceful until all becomes dark... and there is no aircraft sound and
only faint traffic sound in this still lovely evening... in which the
marvels of existence predominate... artificial or otherwise...
...(imagined applause in the distance)...
next day:
again on the film makers' seat... on which
someone has left a large cardboard box unfolded and flattened to make
smooth surfaces over the existing planks... and turning an uncomfortable
experience into a pleasure... at which i recall the many kinds of seats
i've tried to improve as part of the redesign of industrial equipment
much of which is operated while seated... but some of which i found to
be better and more healthily operated from moveable seats... with which
one can alternate from sitting to standing... and vice versa...
...aware of this as a rare inclusion of earlier life into this
diary i wonder if or how these words are to become 'the film we never
made'...
...as the sunlight fades and the scene becomes darker
i look about and think of the complexity of everything as simply
indescribable... though somehow it becomes the texts through which the
world as we experience it can be remade and reimagined...
...walking a new path through a field of chest-high hay
(planted perhaps consciously with wild flowers) towards the highest
seat... i see the distant tall buildings lit up with red lights beneath
blue misty sky... above the bushy trees and nearby rooftops of the Vale
of Health... a village where romantic life took form... as do these
words... and thoughts... of life as it becomes...
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