online: 8 july 2009 modified: 6, 8 july 2009 6 july 2009 the food cycle and others
thoughts about grasses, etc
...after another day indoors... this time because of frequent rain, not excessive heat... reading a modern commonplace book*... and thereafter seeking to realise a new start**... long pondered... but meeting resistance...
...the weather, now westerly again thank goodness, is suddenly cool but sunny between heavy showers... and this seat beneath a lime tree is where i often sat and wrote perhaps a decade ago (it's 20 years since i began walking the heath, and 10 since this diary began)...
...but that's enough of my thoughts... now to look outward... for that's what i came for... to do my work (if you want to call it that)... the work of recording and onlining these moments... a purpose in itself...
...in a meadow of tall grass, mostly light brown, no longer green, grasses being a big fraction of the vegetation on earth (especially since so many of us have appeared on the planet-surface, sustained and formed by hunting-and-gathering the grasslands, and later by cultivating them, the savannahs (and some of the forests) which became the now threatened and threatening farmland, the industrialised earth....
...and now my thoughts return to those of Buckminster Fuller*** re how it is that the transformation of plants and animals into our bodies shows us to be not only thinking animals but also temporary forms composed through the flow of air and raindrops and soil to become first vegetables and animals and subsequently food products, and then integrated human beings becoming skin dust, and other excreted substances and gases and liquids (with ruder names than these)
...still no one in sight as the evening progresses, not towards any goal but as the nonprogressive change**** we now call evolution...
...suddenly i notice that the air is still... but no... there are occasional gusts of wind... and an aircraft filling the air with the movement we call sound or noise or unintended music...
...yes indeed the scene is peaceful, a peace including thousands or millions of unharvested grasses, each a complex stalk and flower and husk and grain which keeps most of us alive... when we are not eating other animals... what complex and connective actions are those that keep us going... killing and eating and excreting... breathing invisible gasses... perspiring... even talking, writing or singing or dancing etc... though many of our ancestors may have been unaware of thoughts and words like eat or shit or fart or talk or write or draw... they just did these things, the enacting of life (cruel or kindly, thoughtful or thoughtless, and in or as or because of our varying appetites and cultures and second thoughts)...
21:15
...but these thoughts are more from books than from the experience of this moment... i look towards a nearby cluster of fir trees trees among which is a seat in memory of members of the International Brigade... and i decide to walk across the meadow and to copy out the inscription:
Danny Tommy Gibbons international brigaders 1936 1938
Pat Dooley speaker at parliament hill editor 1901 1958
their family proudly remembers April 1980
...now sitting on that seat, thinking of the Spanish war that i can just remember... and feeling cold in the wind on this hilltop... i guess that's enough for this evening, Danny and Tommy, and Pat Dooley... and the rest of the International Brigade (the volunteers who fought against General Franco... and the ones who fought with him, we may remember them also, including Roy Campbell and his poems...)
...as i left the heath i saw that a plaque (stating that George Orwell lived in the nearest house to Parliament Hill) has been restored... didn't he also join the International Brigade?... yes he did... but what these circumstances tell me is that all this is our fiction, is it not... the welcome fiction of physical reality being seen in each mind as a differing story of everything and everyone...
...and then i walked towards the station... happier than before...
*ultra mera commonplace, compiled and edited by Eva Kellenberger and Sebastian White, Rollo Press, Zurich 2009 (and care of Studio 2, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, London)
**i like to think of myself as a lifelong beginner, always restarting... and presently attempting something new to me... in this diary or beyond it... perhaps an extension of designing as a kind of fiction
***Buckminster Fuller, quoted on pages 12 and 13 of ultra mera commonplace, (above) as part of a lecture by Cedric Price.
****Edwin Schlossberg, 'For my Father' in About Bateson, Essays on Gregory Bateson, edited by John Brockman, E P Dutton, New York 1977, nonprogressive change, page 145 and throughout, an integrated perception of environment.
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