online: 10 april 2017
modified: 8-10 april 2017
8 april 2017 imaginary world
...sitting today on a seat in memory of someone i perhaps knew and who was
born in the same year 1927 and who lived until 1987... my father used
to say that the worst thing about growing old is the disappearance of
one's friends (and generation)... but in various ways we all
survive...and physical death is not as complete as we fear...
...today random numbers have chosen for me a seat in the forest of Sandy
Heath where (having bought a book of British birds) i hoped to hear and
see many birds... (and to identify a few) but so far i've heard
only a wood pigeon... but perhaps thinking about the identity of birds
is to reduce them (and oneself) to less than reality?...
...at which someone tells me by internet that she can hear birds singing
in this wood but i hear none... and then a man in a white jacket asks the
way to the Spaniard's Inn and i tell him he is already on a path that
goes straight to it... and then i return physically and mentally to this forest and
these words that are appearing as i write on the touch screen...
...and i suppose that all these things together comprise a sufficient mode of existence...
...at which the mental image of an army camp (where my father and my uncle Glyn
came to visit me in Wales in about 1947) appears in my mind and then
disappears... and then i look inwardly for whatever else may appear...
and i hear an actual dog barking twice in physical reality... before my
brain conjours up an imaginary
pair of compasses... and then an image
of Bette Davis and dead trees in the Hollywood film The Petrified
Forest which resembles this Sandy Heath forest in which i am
seated this evening...
...and now i look up and see the actual dead-looking tree trunks and stagnant ponds
of former sand diggings... that remind me of the film... at which two
women walk by... one of whom gesticulates with her hands and lower arms
while she keeps her upper arms close to her sides as she talks... without instruction from a film director
...i feel it's time to continue walking... so i set off for today's next
random point (from where one can see the northern horizon) as i realise
that Bette Davis and The Petrified Forest may survive in many memories
on film and even forever... as may the rest of this writing and
everything else that is imaginable in this imaginary world... which
calls for some of us to make a film of it or at least a written version such as
this... which may comprise a more comprehensive future for everything...
next day:
returning to a similar walk i am saddened to see that a particularly
wild piece of undergrowth has been cut down and replaced by planted
gorse... and as i think about this my eye turns to an isolated birch
tree in the pathway from the lower trunk of which are several sprigs already
in leaf... despite the close proximity of passers-by... and all these sights and hopes and suppositions... viva!
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