13 June 2001

winds, grasses, and the fictional nature of everything


20:25: Paul and Elizabeth Elek seat...

Strange wind tonight - at ground level from the south east - while high clouds move in the opposite direction. And there's an unearthly-looking pinkish grey mistiness approaching over east London.

I'm surrounded by tall summer grass that's been allowed to grow to seed (or is it blossom?) as part of the heath keepers' efforts to protect butterflies etc. The wind is quite cold though it's only two weeks off midsummer. I feel sure that summers were warmer when I was a child but I know very well how selective and even fictional is memory.

Ah, that's a nice topic - the fictional 'nature' of not only memory but everything!

But these leaves and branches, blown by the wind, this seat, this pale blue sky, the dog barking somewhere to my right - and yes me too, this clothed animal who is writing these thoughts - are all of these just fictions?

Yes they are, yes I am, and most certainly so is this writing. It doesn't correspond exactly to anything - it's a story, a constructed reality is it not? And I delight in it being so!

Sniff, sniff, small signs of a slight summer cold - and yet that is perhaps more real than the rest of this.

This is my daily journal - that is the name automatically appearing at the top of the screen and so I accept it for the moment. But I prefer the grasses and the wind - though all of it, from this digital pen to the sky and the jet plane and the siren I can hear as I write, every part of this scene or this moment is in some way the result of a unity. Not a god or a devil or any separate being but the obvious fact of connected existence.

Philosophy indeed, or in deed, or in thought, or in some kind of reality - but conjoured by me and by my history to be this fiction of sorts that I love. Yes it is, yes it is, yes it is!

And I wrote that more for the sound and the rhythm than the meaning... for 'meaning' is a thing I don't like. It's the enemy, the wrecker of life lived as beauty. Tut, tut!

...And what is the nature of fiction?