rain — notes to myself 15

urning to walk along a private road, the raindrops bouncing on the surface of the concrete road, bordered on both sides by mostly mature poplar trees. Beyond the poplar trees an elegant old metal fence, rusting around the galvanised bolts, a drainage ditch beyond the fence edging the vast field. The road seems to be a straight line at human walking pace but as the minutes pass you become aware its veering gently to the right. Further along in the silence caused by the rare absence of machines the sound of the heavy raindrops hitting the brown leaves on the grass, the feint splash as the drops hit the puddles on the concrete road. At the end of the road a large country house with a gravel drive, two or three cars standing in front of the house. People are unloading boxes from one of the cars, carrying them into the house. We stand at the end of the road and look at the B road watching a car drive through the temporary pond caused by the rain making the road impassable for us…

Friends and enemies acknowledging the distance between us even as we pay homage in the circular repetitive days and weeks. The curve in the landscape as we emerge from a tunnel through the mountains, suddenly in a thunderstorm is the entire universe for the duration of the violence; the farmhouse isolated in the valley is sheltering close to the wall, highlighted by a succession of lightening strikes into the plain, the house is unmoved utterly indifferent to the nature that surrounds it (it dreams of leaving…) In the daylight driving along the clifftop road, the road shimmers in the heat of the sun, the roof down so that we feel the hot air on our faces like a caress as we follow the white line up, up the rising cliff, it turns us like a [page] and we descend down through the landscape bordered by grassy downs on one side and the sharp fall into the sea on the other, down towards the bay and the salt marshes. Though this appears to be a destination, in truth we are only interested in circumnavigating the long curves, and in the process avoiding any immediate ending, the curve, all lucretian curves are like smiles, the smile it brings to your face, your lips. If our lives were like this curve you think, driftworking into the gentle curve, we could be here forever.

outside it is raining, the crack in the guttering sends a stream of water past the window onto the tiles below. A book vanishes and it cannot be found, nobody has any idea where its disappeared to, a slim volume of elegant revolutionary prose hidden somewhere in the stacks. One moment there, hours or days later when looked for again it has gone. They have this idea that the mass-media, social media and mass-consumption are some sense an ideal version that is necessary for their lives to be fulfilled. After an hour of looking through the stacks its become clear that the book is not in the shelving areas you thought it should be. It is scarcely imaginable that anyone can think like that. It is understandable how to live with, to share an environment, with them but to think they are necessary in these forms, not at all. They believe that the spectacle is a utopia (false, true of Castells etc) even as the ocean fills with plastic, becomes increasingly acidic, the sky fills with carbon and methane, local space with the chips of paint satellites and launches. What makes the specialist in waste despair ? Vast amounts of waste that cannot be cleared up because the costs are too great for the spectacle to bear if its to produce the glittering objects that constitute the ideal. The ideal pollutes their imaginaries as much as it does the air they breathe.