smoke, a curve…
Standing outside in a moonlit night, smoking a cigarette in the dark on the boundary of a property, the edge of the road. From the distance we are an incandescent rhythmic dot on the landscape; we stand talking about the day, the political, the death of community, the sound of cicadas, I cannot remember now, the cigarette arcs away a glowing curve bouncing as it hits the concrete road surface. The still burning singularity is also in the cross-hairs, lingering too long here is to invite the fates to intervene, struck down by a high velocity round—though as in Big Time it will look like an unlikely accident, a small asteroid, a hit and run driver, a lightning strike or a passing hornet and to fall to the ground like an innocent bystander shotdown at random by a sniper. Though it’s never really random. The glowing curve it produces is not simply a singularity but the erasure of it… drawing the line onto the landscape, tracing a fading line onto the dark. In that fading curve it evades the bullet from the rifle and vanishes away leaving no trace, only the curve remains. Its only desire is to produce the curve across the face of the dark, the antithesis of the full stop (under erasure). Becoming something between a fading red dwarf star and an incandescent light bulb being switched off and fading, fading. A desire, a want rather than a target, the touch of desire of an angel’s wing, to seek it out is to watch it fade like an avant-garde version of Green Dolphin Street, which six months later is as dated as Mel Torme, just after he throws his cigarette in an arc onto the ground and stepping forward… Then when an old friend ducks out through the back of cafe, through the alley past the rubbish bins, over the low wall and running, down the street without paying, transformed into a glowing arc of escape, round the block to the Paris Pullman Cinema to watch a forgotten film, whilst the waiter on noticing his vanishing is famously green…
crossing a junction…
Very little is more impressive than crossing a road successfully and without being run into by a person or some other machine, and not simply to someone from another country who doesn’t know the formal and informal rules of crossing in the locality… The walk across the road is impressive and gives the pedestrian a certain privilege which if it’s morning they will carry with them all day—especially if they smile graciously at someone they narrowly miss colliding with halfway across the road. In our world the simplest act is made all the more difficult because of the social and technological objects we surround ourselves with. (A man following his satellite navigation package on his mobile phone not noticing the change in road layout almost walks in front of a van turning left where last week it could not.) For those who do not simply rush across the road with an inelegant run… the difficulty stems not from the other pedestrians crossing simultaneously, before whom we are eager not to lose face, and who urge us to get out of their way, to leave the way clear for them to walk through or to cross with false casualness, not worried by the paused cars, snarling motorbikes, light-jumping cyclists. …. We dance between the figures and the light-jumping cyclists. … We are split, as subjects we must be, however between looking at the man who waves from the corner or from the terrace of the cafe where smokers sit and talk as they drink some types of coffee, we carefully look from left to right, incapable of choosing, the place becoming a blur as we look back and forth, around. To the south the road is awash with bright sunlight, the dust in the dry air shimmering. To the north the dark clouds are already producing the dark grey mournful light that covers the world in a veil. So that as we look back toward the man, finally reaching the curb, using him to locate the place where we will once again step onto the pavement, this place is always somewhere different than where we desired to be, even as we walk south past the man we know that it is a place where we should not have arrived. Before us the familiar pavement of the entrance to the always alienating office, the other awaits….
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Stephen is a philosopher and engineer and lives on a remote island in the middle of England. His current blog is driftwork.tumblr.com.