online: 28 october 2006
modified: 27, 28 october 2006

27 october 2006 this sense of order


morning:
...after a second breakfast (at the outdoor cafe)... and now on seeing and walking on the broad terrace between Kenwood House and the sloping lawns with planted trees, and then along and beneath the avenue of limes, with birches silhouetted against sunlit grass beyond... both formal planting and wild growth in happy mixture, perhaps more felicitous than is the forest wild... it reminds me of a vase of cut and arranged flowers, for instance by my mother, her imposition of tasteful colour, and flowers, in an order she liked, and made, to the approval of everyone i think... (her favourite colour was fuchsia but i think she liked all of them)...

...i would like to find such order as that, and this, and thus, in what i write, perceive, compose, and coexist with everything... (but admitting chance, of course, in place of imposition)...

...but as i cannot write such thought on the handheld - it's too strong and immediate a technology and it imposes too much on the present, not allowing time for remembering and slow reworking of the few of the words of this that i wrote on paper while walking...

...because of that i am writing most of this hours later, extending those hand-written scraps into whatever form this takes as i rethink while re-writing at the keyboard... slowly... slowly

...and so i continued walking, on the lookout for any kinds of order, seen as i walked today as one connected whole, that of the universe, of life, of unstable total that is ever beyond us...



more examples found:

...cleared undergrowth, under trees, in which hundreds of brambles are sprouting even now at the end of autumn...

...and deep in the forest again, trees are growing at all elevations and angles among the pits and prominences of the sandy ground that was dug out in the war to fill sandbags to protect London against air raids... this order of trees in sunlight seems now to be a different perfection, one of improvised order, evolutionary change from the minute to the cosmic, appearing here year by year as the heath becomes forest and the sandpits become tracks for mountain bikers...

..a robin is perching on the arm of a bench that was put here in memory of Lionel and Valerie Gregory, 1917-1993 and 1928-2002 (this is the order of organic life and of species and of generations)...

...and i realise now that there have been many kinds of order, as many perhaps as there are people, or several times that number if one allows that each person may perceive or generate many orders in a lifetime...

...and now an order most temporary, three iron rods, stuck in the earth and connected by plastic tapes, to keep people off a worn patch of mown grass that has been re-sown:

'ground under repair, please keep off'
writes the Corporation of the City of London which owns and oversees these woodlands and playing fields...

...and lastly on my walk i copied some words put on a notice board by the London Natural History Society:

Some plants and flowers on Hampstead Heath in September 2006:

from Bittersweet to Creeping Yellow-cress and from Silanum duleamera to Rivippa sylvestus

in all they list 22 species (which i may have mis-spelt)



and i guess these too bare notes encompass, but do not impart, or fully reveal, some interesting thoughts about order in general (which cannot be named abstractly without diminishment of the idea)... the connective whole that i felt myself aware of from that start on the terrace outside Kenwood House and which continued as i walked on through landscaped park, spontaneously grown forest and planted playing fields... but i admit that the whole, the excitement that provoked this entry, remains more extensive but less definable than any written thoughts...



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