Tuesday, May 01, 2007


The Pipes behind The Sink

This is so obviously something to fill up the time. What a waste to just lie here in a fog of depression simply describing everything you can see like some literary, panoramic photograph. Try it sometime. Start at the door - a heavy door that suffered iin the sixties by having its panels pasted over with hardboard to give it a modern look - strip that off and underneath you will find a traditional construction - a bit of varnish and we'll be tipping back over Fukuyama's future into the smog and grime of Victorian England. You know you want to. A heavy frame surrounds the door and that is all you can say about it excpet that maybe the door is a centimetre thicker than it was when it was first painted - the rounded edges show where many layers have paint have been out like drawing a line a millimetre out from an object placed on paper and then another a millimetre further out; eventually this iteration will lead you to a pure sphere. Maybe that is the future of everything, all surfaces smoothed out created speres that eventually merge to fill the universe with matter. There must be some fractal maths in here. There is definitely some tiling theory in the wallpaper, a modern design of pale, pastel patterns repeating over and over, tiled to the edges of the room. And every comma in its correct place, like camouflage for my loudest shirts, the ones I stopped wearing all those years ago. No one would have believed that I could get away with those. They were fractionally better than the wallpaper but who cares nowadays? The light switch joins me up to the world - behind that little, plastic rocker is a network that connects me to giant lakes, high in remote mountains, to dancing atoms in the heart of nuclear plants and to the steaming, oily machinery of the smoke-belching power stations we all see around us - cool names like Trawsfynydd and Drax. The day has faded enough to let me turn on the light and so my finger makes a tiny change to the momentum of some massive turbine, many miles from here. The light somewhere else drops in intensity by some tiny amount, like the amount the earth falls away from you when you jump. Everything is connected. All this makes me think of evrything and nothing, switching between these two impossible states of mind, a flip-flop at a frequency high enough to make sound, a sort of brain hum like in those old computer rooms. A convetional description may be coming next because there is a picture on the wall, slightly leaning so I straighten it but should I describe it to you. To someone it might be brilliant star in the history of art and to others a boring and ancient cliche, lost and irrelevant in the modern world. A woman from probably 120 years ago walks across a brightly-lit field in what must be late summer with a golden grain crop of some sort stretching away into the far distance where a line of trees and a few sketchy buildings show what is likely to be a river. The sky is blue and white of the highest order and inside the woman's mind is an acceptance of the happiness of this moment - no sign of depleting levels of neuro-transmitters in the brain. I would love to be sucked into this paiting, dragged through the frame which must be able to accomodate even my spreading body and walk across that parched field to the cool, shaded river where surely there must be punts and fishermen.

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