THE ROUND MILE: WHERE I AM IS HERE OR THE WORLD TEN TIMES OVER by Gareth Evans
A Triptych Triangulation
“Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions; to imagine it as a physical space is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached.” - Rebecca Solnit
PROLOGUE: WAS
“Here I am sitting in front of my computer monitor looking at dates and times in luminous green letters on the screen. I’ve typed a memo of travel and engagements into the computer. From my tape recorder comes music with that bright okay sound that you hear from the curtained screen in the cinema before the lights are dimmed. It is, yes, it is also that music you hear in the echoing and vast spaces of airports. It makes me feel good, makes me feel neither here nor there but comfortably in between… Here at my desk I’ve put together that airport feeling, that wonderful airport state of mind, everything for the present suspended…” – Russell Hoban
ONE: BECAUSE
A rasping cough; a scythe through long slow meadow grasses dry…
To live at all is miracle enough.
The doom of nations is another thing.
Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.
- Mervyn Peake
We thought a stone
come from the windless
dark
a slingshot from the old
strung stars
to shake us
to the bone
but we were wrong
it is a low slung
smaller silence
close
through the streets
a scattering of spores
to shake us
in the lung
now the empty places
of the earth
are here
the desert of the squares
the crowdless wide piazzas
arcades of the air
and we elsewhere
in our
distant
lair
quite alone
as the stone
still roaring
open-mouthed
towards us
through the spaces
between worlds...
Forms of understanding make themselves familiar, briefly, to us in the certain lights. Doubt persists - blue kernel in the flame, there even, most, at the heart; the pelt of evening shadows; the glare where all the usual forms of sight bow down. A strange way to live, what we have now; what we endured for too long in the time we call ‘before’; what we might expect in times to come. Make matter speak, speak of things that matter, and we learn what we learn, or not.
To þe ymage of god he made hym*
When I stepped in from the balcony of sun I could see nothing for a moment or a longer moment. The universe lands differently, by hour and by surface, in particle and wave. Partly this is a quality of air. Heat on the shoulder is a bird of warmth alighting. It reddens the ear as it whispers there. Meanwhile, she undresses constantly into the morning and I try to follow. Impatient in primary glare, I am restless equally in its later scheming. The muezzin call is broadcast from the tower by the tracks and it sounds like the day's temperature would if it could speak. An Empty Quarter of the mind, indelible scenes: sand drifting against the tiled walls, the rails blown beneath dunes that never sleep.
If this at all, then this of course shall also be what we name ‘before’, before another so much larger coming, a joined up net of dangers to find us out (and all of it again all of our making), in the years before the waves: an era, an undeniable accounting, unavoidable as age. In the schema, though, butterfly durations all of them: remember, we are hurtling through space, while the longest creature swims in its own vast cosmos - fathoms of southern azure - string enacting its translucent pursuits at great depth far from us, and the skies, and from the virus. There are sponges 11 millennia old, sharks that have been gliding sleepless through the centuries since the plague itself felled oh so many here above. What you see, and how, depends again on angle; slant, direct…
TWO: Now
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
- Marcel Proust
I have been watching this a lot in recent weeks. It’s perspective is humbling and thoughtful in all the expected ways, but also properly uncanny, as the planet comes and goes like a neighbour you might glimpse passing before the front window several times a day. The long durées of absolute darkness, the intermediary scatter of glitter in the void, the marine curvature with its drift of cloudy icing: the whole place feels as unstable as it is, in the grand schema; fugitive, precarious.
Tom Cruise has surely also been looking. He has plans; he’s raising the bar, quite literally, all the way. Film production worldwide might have shut up shop for now, with catastrophic labour losses, and most of the workers involved on the shortest and most nebulous of contracts, but Tom is thinking of the bigger picture: to boldly go where no feature film has gone before…
As ever, this is provocative. Go where, exactly? There’s only here, for us, the only viable ‘here’, anyway, not that you’d know it from the treatment it’s been receiving. And then there’s the question of time. Cruise is working now on a ‘future’, to be realised more or less ‘now’, and yet in many ways he’s offering a speculative vision grounded more in a sense of the possible as conjured in the halcyon years of the 1960s than one believable currently. Any off-world enterprises to be entertained in the coming century are framed distinctly in survival mode, rather than as almost languorous exploratory enterprises.
The tenses are, well, tense… It’s not only, where are we, but when? Writing anything requires a temporal commitment. What was / is to be done?
Given the circumstances, I did something I have resisted with an almost Pavlovian vigour: I visited Grammarly. This site (or its advertising) haunts anyone who uses YouTube. No matter what route one plots through its audio-visual labyrinth, their sickening micro-fables confront you at almost every turn, uttering inane linguistic mantras like some high-school Pac-Man (Person) suddenly gifted a tongue. Nevertheless, it was important to clarify the options available:
Simple Present
Simple Past
Simple Future
Present Continuous
Past Continuous
Future Continuous
Present Perfect
Past Perfect
Future Perfect
Present Perfect Continuous
Past Perfect Continuous
Future Perfect Continuous
A kind of Shipping Forecast for the language, perhaps this was enough. As boats list in heavy weather, so I’d offer this and be gone, back to the impossible search for a full live version of Bob Dylan’s Brownsville Girl by the man himself (completists will know, of course, that he has only performed it in concert once and even then omitted most of the verses…).
The one tense Grammarly overlooked, however, was the Historical Present. This late addition to the table is extremely popular, servicing a significant portion of the fiction market, and endowing dusty tales with the ripped presence of the immediate. So many choices, too many, to be honest; each made their case convincingly, even urgently. I couldn’t (and still can’t) decide, can’t settle…
…because, it feels to me, any consideration of place, and writing, at this moment in the life of the species cannot omit chronology. By this I don’t mean the progress or retreat of the virus (the ‘how long’, in incubation, infection, transmission, quarantine, lockdown, treatment, recovery…) but rather, how the pandemic has affected our memory, our ongoing moment - which we can call ‘being’ (the present, tense) - and our ‘becoming’, aka the future (with hope, replete or spoilt).
We triangulate ourselves between these points as keenly as we do those in the process of placing: where we have been, where we are, where we’re headed. Similarly, we position our sense of this experience: at one corner there’s time, and place, and then we could call the third ‘intention’, or idea, or ‘why’ (which manifests in numerous ways and arenas). It is inside the pattern formed by these joining up that we currently exist. Journeys around and between these points are (way)-stations: they are milestones in the mind and body, and the factors that we keep in mind for reassurance or to indicate forms of threat.
Given the fact of so many imposed limitations on our behaviour, it is perhaps ironic that this dispatch has sought its own constraints, as revealed below. But maybe it’s inevitable: how else to frame the new ‘everywhere’, where restriction is the common currency, and roaming (on foot or phone) merely a day-dream we once entertained. The creative tension lies in exactly that: the spring-loading between where we find ourselves and where we would wish to be. Note here how frequently invocations of existential aspiration rely on a sense of location and movement, i.e. of place.
Watts’ Minotaur, seen on my homepage entry, embodies exactly this, with great and surprising poignancy. He’s (and we too perhaps) trapped in the labyrinth of the ‘long now’, waiting, for something, anything, to shake the stasis. We’re constantly told to live ‘in the present’, that it is the only ‘place’ we can dwell, which is both true and entirely bogus, as the human mind, spirit and surely also the body would attest. Anticipation and regret press on the soul, as ‘current’ as the demands of food and drink, squealing babes, stacks of unpaid bills.
Any call to ‘else-where’ and ‘else-when’ requires a form of address, a term that implicitly appreciates the umbilical relation between chart and clock: ‘I’ personalises it; ‘we’ feels comradely and inclusive; ‘you’ endows agency, but also hands on responsibility. Flush with the democratic, I shall deploy them all.
Our most used address as of writing, of course, is that of our email, website or social media, our newish home with many doors that simultaneously is and isn’t an actual thing (few of us can claim to visualise the extremely real server farms of the internet with any regularity). In terms of personalised, even intimate, communication, the walls within which we sleep receive barely any traffic. Gone are the childhood speculations of a cosmic geography that begins with the post-box.
This location (for those who have one, and for those whom it is not a waking nightmare of abuse or violence) which once served as the ground zero of our aspirant public being, the still point of the turning world, is undoubtedly fetishised for being a rare space of possible control and affect, a gallery of our subtle interior self, carefully curated and commodified. Nowadays, however, it is most likely deployed by the state and other agencies of surveillance for purposes at once theoretically supportive while also increasingly intrusive. The fact of an actual GPS co-ordinate or property numeral reveals far more than simply where in the valley you lay your head. ‘They’ can come for you. And ‘they’ – the paramedics – can or can’t find you in time. It’s a two-way street, whether a cul-de-sac or not.
Within this virtuality it can feel as if the mind is sliding on ice, unable to stop or stand; bodies in motion and rest, but the latter elusive. When it – the SO SO MUCH – does not overwhelm, the sense of a pleasantly distracted meander is uppermost, riverine among the meadows of plenty (something I once searched for means that I now receive regular updates on preparing my soil for the coming season…).
And yet, and yet: this is no padded playground free of consequence. The power needed for the recent viewing of the Netflix smash Tiger Kingequalled electrical usage in Rwanda for a month (a surprising comparison but an accurate one).
We run through our days in space itself in such spaces. We ‘shelter in place’. Broadly, space becomes place when it is defined, named, detailed, occupied (benignly, we trust). We shelter, therefore, in the place allowed, but also in the time demanded. This is seen as safer than making for another shared, more communal position (all of this is relative – in Syria then, in Yemen now, atrocity will find you out wherever you duck and cover).
Space for now (place when threatened loses its distinction, becomes again an abstraction, a deforested and dehumanised target, a geopolitical strategic zone) is both condensed and infinitely (at least in psychological terms) extended. Elsewhere cannot ethically or in some cases legally be reached. There’s a twist in this, when the virus lodges close at hand. Safety is not here or anywhere else. Is there something of the refugee predicament in this (and for many tens of thousands the same fatal outcome) but without the risk of movement (we stay still and the virus comes to and for us)?
That said, these are not the only places and times under consideration. We must also consider the time and place of writing, and its reception in both arenas, which the pandemic has properly challenged and confused. Days and weeks stretch almost to tearing. They stutter, stall. Routine implodes. Dreaming is deranged, along with sleep patterns. Rooms become cages; tensions warp the walls.
What is the place of writing in all this anyway? Somehow the writing of place must take this into account. The world is acting directly on the body in ways that are truly rare. And all this is not exceptional or regional, but genuinely global, ‘unprecedented’. Nothing prior, with the exception of capitalism (in various gradations, as with the virus), has spread and impacted so widely and simultaneously. When Amazon tribes are at risk as much as Tokyo commuters, something boundary-shifting is afoot. The ecological emergency, (versions of) democracy, the Internet (or its lack), sanitation (or its absence), even conflicts (including the very large): all of these, in their fullness or scarcity, make landfall unevenly when compared.
Our consideration of the ‘place’ or places in which this unfolds is directly affected by it. Which version of place are we then writing to? There is no straightforward before and after in terms of the calendar (rather a more or less achievable co-existence yet to be determined) and so with place. All iterations of place and of time co-exist as mentioned earlier; so it has ever been, but is now entirely so. The place and time ‘before all of this’, the unfolding process of being inside it and the changes to come: each affects the other, and will continue to do so indefinitely. Just as with military operations, some weep over what was lost or altered, while others find revived opportunities in the transition. Will we look back in horror on the deaths from air pollution when traffic was rampant (far greater in number than C-19 mortality rates), something we pretty much took as a given or ‘acceptable’ prior? Will moral and policy revisions follow from this?
Meanwhile the seasons (where they still declare) continue: the various alchemies of humus, light and air. As do the human markers of our presence on that earth. This essay has been written before, during and following the 75th anniversary of VE Day (8.5.20) and even here, we see a form of place writing, and a particularly English obsession with Germany. Surely, at any relevant moment in the last decades, the promoted marking of this event could have shifted the emphasis from a defeated Deutschland towards an overcoming of Fascism, which can take root in any fertile ground. The ideology, not the territory, was our enemy.
Errors of judgment, mis-readings, deliberate provocations, calculated margins of response: the nuances of politics find themselves activated, carried, realised in language. This Word document regularly underscores my typing with green and red lines. If I am charitable, they might be footpaths towards a clearer navigation. If not, they more closely resemble the trajectory of a border, an enclosure, a prohibition.
I wanted to challenge such barbed wire and watchtowers, creatively at least. As with the tenses of speaking and writing, as with the spectrum of times attached and independent, so with place: I drew up a chart of the kinds of - / experiences of - / possibilities of - / hopes of – place that we might agree are shared experientially by all of us at some phase of our life, yet which remain individually inflected:
Where I am
Where I would like to be
Where I was once
Where I might be
Where I will be
A private place
A public place
A place where I am not meant to be
A place where I am not wanted
A place I am obliged to visit
A place erased or lost
A virtual place
A non-place
Although my reasoning as to why a particular site might suit a category need not be explicit, it was evident I couldn’t satisfactorily find my way to the most expressive incarnation of each of these locations under the lockdown and during the quarantine. That noted, it would surely be possible to find versions of them closer to home, much closer. Thinking further, surely all of them might, indeed must, be present – whether active or latent – in every place, in this place, my place now. Calvino’s Invisible Cities reminds us of this, spurs us towards a poetics of open reception to the chartable variants within the surveyable terrain.
I would construct a round mile from here (Haggerston, Hackney, London) out; one more inclusive than the grids of cartography, suggestive of the freshly minted solidarity beginning to show itself within localities. From this, I would make three excursions, all achievable on foot from the door, confident that I would encounter and lay claim, however briefly, to an appreciation of each.
I would step out and stir within the weather – an Ur-place of common knowing – and I would seek stimulations of the flesh, intellect and spirit. I would loiter in a tent of shadow, open a doorway of the sun. I would very likely stay out longer than the allotted hour on each occasion. And, at least once, I would stand by the river that made this whole city possible, venturing just beyond my radius as, without that currency of water, I would not be here attending.
The notes I file would seek to retain the primacy of first looking and sensing. So it goes, and that as it will.
CENTRE: Morning
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page.” – Georges Perec
We take the back route with one exception – spent in the centre of Kingsland Road heading south - because we can. It is that quiet. We are granted the perspective the design intends, its symmetries clear. These are long-standing, regardless of the buildings currently occupant, as this is a Roman road. It is history, place committed to time. Cohorts would have marched up it through the depopulated fields and orchards, the populace hiding in their houses, trying to conceal themselves from mobile assault.
Is the empty city more unnerving than the abandoned countryside (the latter eerie already due to the lack of employment in industrial farming)? Why is no street food being served? The sound of an ice cream van some distance away, scoring the neighbourhood…
As we approach the outer edge of the financial district, the wealth of the visible world increases. There is a central tension between the older Portland stone and the accelerated chrome, glass and height of recent decades. This quarter is one of the very few effectively closed on Sundays, and now that quality has spilt across the week. The morning is very bright. A blue sky, barely audible, proposes itself over the rooftops: there is an atmospheric as of Sahara spreading, in time and place, things slowing into heat, at the ancient heart of the polis.
We pass the open gate of a small park, almost a courtyard now given the buildings that enclose it. Apparent from the entrance is a wall across the grass, and its tiled tributes to those who gave their lives saving others, their stories stopped in an instant of altruism. The display is designed by Watts; an artist, it seems, attuned to frameworks of containment, the mechanics of loss.
A closed side street angles out of sight at its end. A great slant of light stands at the turn, a fallen beam of the morning. A security guard, fixed at his desk in a vast tower foyer, mute beneath innumerable closed offices, stares out of the sealed glass onto the motionless pavement; watching over absent space from within another absence. There is no human or natural weathering, no grip to the surfaces of the real in such a landscape. There can only be deterioration. It is a place where souls can be mislaid.
The zone itself appears lost: a Marie Celeste in the doldrums, stuck, run aground. It has become fabular, a Rip Van Winkle, chin on chest, dormant. It will also wake to a world in which history has happened while it slept (meanwhile its capital still flows, albeit less rewardingly, contemptuous of both place and time, through the wires like effluent through the pipes).
Van Winkle falls into his decades-long slumber after drinking the strong liquor of nine strange men he later discovers to be the ghosts of explorer Henry Hudson’s crew (Van Winkle’s author, Washington Irving, willingly admitted he had never visited the Catskill Mountains in which he set his tale. He imagined the place). Hudson, a pivotal figure in North American colonial enterprise, was an employee on occasion of the East India Company, the activities of which have shaped the architecture, intentions and actions of the whole City. The numerous passageways, alleys and squares of the district are where early capitalism was born and nurtured. Trading in slaves would take place in the drinking dens and coffee houses, the same venues that several centuries later would host those seeking to abolish the trade, scattering their pamphlets across the gin-soaked tables. Quakers were involved on both sides of the argument. Their contemplative silence – in which a myriad of thoughts might be awaiting their voice – feels as edged as the quiet of the day, where a brutalising economy again bides its time.
Across this area exactly a decade earlier, in haunted accompaniment, ghosts were given voice as drifting renditions of Elizabethan laments filled the often lonely thoroughfares. “Time, in the shape of sound, narrativises space”. Centuries meet in the sacred air of grief. Now a single busker plays to nobody, for himself only, in a concrete underpass. Flow our tears indeed…
After people, where people are not, in the world to come, without us: in the crypt meetings rooms of St. Pauls I attended a symposium on the theological meanings of place which featured a remarkable presentation, ‘Forgetting the Land’, by John Rodwell, who was researching his father’s working life as a miner in South Yorkshire, and how forms of belonging and place-making might be considered in a post-industrial landscape and economy. After the closures of the 1980s, he approached the authorities to ask where the pit’s archive was kept. He was told that everything, including the offices, had been bulldozed into the shaft and then sealed over, with a banal restorative landscaping completing the erasure…
We reach the Thames, and find the river’s tide is low. The beach beneath Tate Modern is exposed. We walk down the wide stone steps. The shore is an edge but not an end. Rather it is a beginning, the start of the main event, which is the open ocean, the majority estate. We – and land – are the exception. Why do we not remember this?
The pleasures of proximity to water do not fade, whether for human or canine. Detritus mingles with pebbles, weed and bone. There is a muddy slime to some stepping. A friend made a small film by shooting the scene through a shard of faded sea glass she’d picked out of the flotsam. It scattered the image and smudged it, turned it towards its reverie: place conjuring a fantasia of place, of itself.
After a few minutes, we hear voices from the embankment. A police officer is calling out that we cannot ‘congregate’ here, assemblies of two, in communion with the fluency of things. We climb back up. The roads retain their clarity; a tenantless bus every few minutes and, on the side of one, promotional material for Call of the Wild, released just before cinemas pulled down their shutters. Are we listening? If not, as the Iron Woman, channelling the scream of wounded nature, declares, “something will happen”.
When we are home, a sudden slap of wind gusts the window shut.
NOW/HERE: Afternoon
“Space is a doubt... Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds.” - Georges Perec
There are varieties of cartographic vacancy. A place might exist on the map and not on the ground, as a form of entrapment. This might prompt an attempt to realise the settlement in the location suggested. Similarly, sites that undeniably exist are removed from documentation labelling, which can suggest an area is ‘clear’, ‘available’ for expansion.
Are the people who inhabit such spaces a little like the ‘tactile ghosts’ of place, to borrow a phrasing from Siri Hustvedt? Further, in distilling our time in place, are we all perhaps not already partly ghosts when the majority of our lives has passed, when the places that shaped us, in which we most felt ourselves at ease, informed in our being, have gone, whether destroyed or mutated? If the places we occupied are more expressively real to us than those in our daily being, how then to define the limbo, the no-persons land that results?
These might be non-places, but the more familiar are those often constructed, intended; in the interstices of built priorities; the in-between, seen as little more than conduits, segments of the necessary transit, or examples of the open ground required, if little tolerated, to grant structures their permission (While most encountered in the open air, the interior is not exempt: atria, foyers, corridors can all attest. Architect David Adjaye is one of the very few to understand the centrality of the latter as an activating space to the entirety of the construction).
Unloved from conception onwards, they are vulnerable to greater damage as time settles into the space. In these scenarios, however, the passage of the days does not bring texture to such forms, does not soften them into becoming place. Rather it magnifies the lack of affection that spawned them. They become the target of displaced anger, unspoken injustice, widespread but inarticulate bitterness. They are the dumping grounds for emotions as much as refuse.
You feel this before you think it. A red helicopter skitters urgently overhead; disappears from view and ear, only to return; ambulant saviours of the flight path. You are on the Greenway, which is that, but not much else. Established on the embankment that conveys the Northern Outfall Sewer, and regularly renovated, it proceeds for four miles from Hackney to Beckton. 90 years ago, Gandhi, staying at nearby Kingsley Hall, would take his long early morning walks on its precursor (previously named Sewerbank…).
Now designated also as a ‘Quietway’, it is a barren strip of paved path and lacklustre grass, fringed on stretches with trees but otherwise open to the surrounding lower streets, ragged terraces and suburban semis, all mashed and mixed. It’s a site of regular muggings, and one murder in 2015, but has no postcode, so crime records cannot be attached to it, and are instead allocated to roads nearby, where the incidents didn’t take place.
It’s necessary that it exists (it can’t by definition be built over), and gives a vista to an enduringly poor area, but it is a plein air passage with little reward; it speaks to the landscape as a non-place because it cannot be easily attended to, nurtured, loved. The infrastructure, locale and lie of the land itself all mediate against much tenderness here (friends blow kisses from one side of the path to the other; their little invisible butterflies carried on the greyscale afternoon).
After quite some time you realise you have missed your turning down and off it. You backtrack, which adds to the trudge. Once beneath, all sense of direction is challenged, and remains so. The skies offer no assistance (light is diffuse through cloud, and compass-free). The established sense of conurbations and the orientation they offer is entirely lacking. There’s a great weight to things, but no gravity. Blitz bombing, cycle of demolition, post-industrial dereliction and random apartment construction on any cleared ground, and all this intercut with major through-roads and bypasses, make it an inherently hostile environment for human-scale engagement. There is no adequate map for these territories.
You eventually pick up the often obscured trail of a local walking circuit and find yourself nudging between houses, down dog-paths, skirting the edge of unkempt playgrounds and groves of sorry trees. In one more concealed hollow a woman is getting dressed. Graffiti covers all surfaces possible. This is not the ‘street art’ beloved of hipster enclaves but a silent scream in lurid hues, place shouting to itself without a sound. A phone box on a grim drag is no longer taking calls; but you can thread the needle anytime.
You step across a junction and then pull back as an empty hearse turns left. Earlier you’d logged gravestones in the ragged undergrowth near the bridge over the motorway. From here it’s across the car park of the closed retail centre and then somehow a stop-start towards the docklands. You ask a Polish man where the river is, but he doesn’t know. He didn’t know there was any waterway close. You are standing next to Savage Gardens, which seems the only way to proceed. There are always secret corners only those who need them will know and value, but they are few indeed to count.
Here at last is a semblance of the loved local: playing fields on either flank of an avenue of trees leading towards a gladed pond (‘wet paint on balls’ the only railing signage), where a few residents are watching the turtles installed there, circling in their ‘bedsitter of ocean’. You think of how these creatures instil a certain passion in those who are isolated, who maybe find themselves caught in their own shell, as protection yes but also barrier to further interaction. The yearning for a liberty from confinement – material and emotional – transcends the species rift. Children strain at the extra impositions, wishing to flare out across the open green, while parents and carers call more frequently than needed to stay close, within ‘rescue distance’. So many languages settle on your hearing. Speaking is a place, at least one you can carry. Edge-land living and the migrant are frequent fellow travellers (you will read later that the borough has the highest rate of Covid-19 deaths in the UK; structural inequality fuels this).
Leaving the easy ambience, you pace an approach to the basins. Still there is no hint that such a large body of water is imminent, but the paucity of the immediate street furniture is notable. There’s a quite blatant shift as the corporate footprint begins to manifest: the interwoven aprons, parking areas, privatised entrances, manicured ‘public’ spaces all preface the watefront opposite City Airport, with its fleet grounded, an aircraft boneyard before the event. Here is the space where things could end, and the birth of a desired future might ironically be situated. Let’s bring the cars down (here) too, so it can all go out together. Let fossil fuel vehicles become their own fossils, and build a spectacle into it while it happens. In a terrain made for their self-realisation, let them have their last functioning moment here…
You try to walk further along the edge of the marina but are stopped by a police barrier. There’s a different fleet stationary here: numerous ambulances, seemingly at odds with the usual procedural of such a place. Then you realise you’re on the fringe of Nightingale Hospital, repurposing the big shed of the Excel Centre, more used to arms fairs than a fair use like this. Here’s another space, then, where the old world could usefully foreclose. You look out across the still unbroken water. Not a single vessel ruptures the glassy calm.
THREE: ONWARDS
Your art is the place you always return to. It's the place without borders, time, or expectation. It is a geography of longing that maps its own meaning. - Pat Benincasa
CLOSE: Evening
“I would like there to exist spaces that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories . . .” - Georges Perec
The gently lit windows of the evening upper stories lead me out: beacon fires, way-torches, flags of the close, high mystery; almost summer, almost marine, a warm breeze through the pines, and so I stroll, among the musky air, inside the round call of the wood pigeon. Weather is the place from which all else… I can't remember what was here before apartments came: close your eyes or turn your gaze for a moment and they’re up. The cranes, so many, are taking down the sky to fit them in.
Here’s an older tower. Notice how it stops and then there’s nothing, just like that. Halfway up the air, a man in middle age is out, smoking, gazing, leaning on the dusk. He’s levitating really; the world persists around him. Why is there not more love for the lawns between the blocks? Can you smell the cooking? So many menus being prepared; it’s time, the true place of the plate. The earth entire is here and all of it is under pressure, shared. How is it at this moment for the Mongolian nomads, out across the Steppe; for those barefoot kids in long grass somewhere deep in old Missouri, as their house, a shooting gallery, tips into the long-lost afternoon, adults strung out on the porch and gone; for the elder woman with just a single window looking onto shanty walls in the alleys of Kinshasa…
I walk the slow streets up and down, past the adventure playground, its half-acre once a traveller camp. The rides and climbs are taped and strapped but that slide alone is somehow free. It’s a solitary pleasure; distance stays intact. The clown museum hidden in the spare room of the church is closed much more than usual, but still the masks and painted eggs are grinning in the gloom.
Belief too is a place, not just the dreamt of after-world for those who hold the faith, but how the land is understood and lived in. Is this a worldwide Shabbat, a Sabbath to reflect on, a broad, enforced retreat to redirect the days? Ramadan unfolds without great fuss around me. The mosque is planning dinners for all of those in need, their skin and soul regardless. This is how the personal makes the common good. We are so used to ‘individual’ worth, a face attached to deeds. Yes, there are heroic, selfless acts, but these occurring now sit in the public realm, in wards and care and unpaid mutual aid. Where are the artefacts of culture confirming this as how it always, really, is, behind the name-tag call? Remember La Commune? Idea, Site, a Reason, Act, History, Aspiration, Artwork, on…
And on those same French streets, just look at THIS. Doesn’t it catch the essence of what we've lost and wish and wish to have again...? The gifted life of cities, of people here or anywhere together; how the dance is ‘handed’ on, how it’s only whole when everyone has danced, and note the older dancer's final, sparkling wink. She knows, they know, we know. The world is young again if we find this afresh.
How to understand the networks now emerging? Data tell us one thing. Facts proclaim another. Myth frames our deeper feeling in a manner sly to reason. Each helps us in its fashion to understand that everything is joined. You cannot quantify an act of social kindness and expect to tell its full and lasting story in that way. This is the great learning to be done, of and for the ‘now’, following “the threads that spin from a thought to a fact, and from one fact to another fact.”
All disciplines confirm it. The internet, ecology, the climate crisis, trees and how their roots and branches work as one assembly, new thinking on the mind and on its memory, the holographic universe, the virus and its shifts: we are all one thing. We are all and singular, this single body breathing, I that is a ‘we’, many selves inside us, many more without, but these borders help no more. There is the one place only, it is here and here and here. All of it is ‘here’. Our atoms pass from stars to those before us, to us to children, soil and flame and on… and on again…
Life co-exists with life. The form comes second to the fuse; the general fire endures.
Towards the end, the moon was almost ripe, its silent crater seas filling with our sight. The last train, high and empty, unspooled its frames across the night’s estate, no audience to view it except the solitary, shelterless and the young fox, first time out. She threaded shadows down by the canal, slipped between the railings like a thought. Streetlights cooled a single gleaming leg in the barely stirring water, like a heron on alert for what might feed. A tattered, broke-spoke, blue umbrella swayed on down the street, a little drunken stumble in the still warm midnight breeze. “Bats flashed through the space between branches, mapping depth into the flat sky”. Wind is what the distance feels like. Come a little closer: count the contours of the air, climb them into sleep.
The cranes are resting also. Their red light constellations speak to larger stories than the ‘balance sheet’ of place. Imagine it all sunk beneath the waters; imagine their lamp warnings fading in the depths.
All of this: what place is, and what it might become. It’s not over; it can still be different. Let’s write that with real rigour through our acts and through the years; and by writing it, with living, in the new ways that we must, work to common purpose, work to change what we have done to place, work to ease the rising of our fears.
After the final no there comes a yesAnd on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
Always about the taking it all in, it is. Too tight a hold will choke the all, and us, come far too soon. Still, now, again and once or twice, I find a tender gesture on the public green, weigh it in the scales; it is not found wanting. Unsure what to call it, even if it fits inside a name, or by any measure clearly can be read, I nest it gently, in a dappled corner; watch it cautious, hope that it will take.
POST / SCRIPT
As this writing edged towards its close, two packages arrived; one a welcome surprise, the other also desired, but ordered. The first contained the latest newsletter from the entirely real-world publishing house Analogue Sea, quartered in Austin and Freiburg and utterly committed to writing and reading on the page. Their books can be found in numerous independent booksellers globally (they are distinctive in form and content), but one needs to look. The emphasis is on texts, recovered and new, challenging the dominant narratives of the contemporary order. This mailing included a short essay, as ever on suggestively tactile paper stock, called ‘Life Beyond the Machine: Leisure as Dissent’. In it, founding editor Jonathan Simons recalls a 1996 online manifesto by cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow who wrote, “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind… Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” The envelope also contained another pamphlet, entitled ‘Notes on Solitude’. I opened it to find the pages blank…
The second carried a lime-green publication of less than 20 pages, all of which remained uncut: Tim Robinson’s Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara. Printed and published in 1984 by Ireland’s Lilliput Press, it was the debut in their series, and the author’s first on the subject. From this modest seed grew one of the great literary mapping projects of the modern age, a gesamtkunstwerk re-imagination of the entire human and ecological topography of the Aran Islands and Connemara. In this short essay Robinson, who died aged 85 here in London in April after contracting Covid-19, does what he proposes in the title and, after an observant walk, closes with an imagining of the voice of the causeway as it watches him leave, “By hurrying you risked something more than being stuck on an islet for a few hours. You might have… even mislaid one of the co-ordinates of your dream.”
Robinson listened. He would commit the rest of his life to that place, and never again lose track.
Note: this article is woven throughout with links to stories, places, people and works that have informed the writing.
*from Genesis 1.27, Wycliffite Bible, early version, 1382
THE ROUND MILE: WHERE I AM IS HERE OR THE WORLD TEN TIMES OVER