Afterthought

 9.4.10

My afterthought is three encounters that pervaded the atmosphere of yesterday’s stroll in the city of London.

They were not mentioned in the run of things, because that run needed to get on- to build up speed in a particular momentum in order to become generative from one moment to the next on that day and in order to engage with the running process that led from word to word in the composition under the heading, “Disparity”. Yet embedded or occluded within that header were three associations; cohesive involvements; strange affinities that galvanized and spurred on the release in the journey into the overall theme of “disparity”. They are now there clearly, in relief on the following day. They have not gone. Rather the processual meshing which they gave rise to is shimmering into transparency, bringing these occasions up to the fore, whereas before they were too dense, too slow, too lingering even in their brevity, to remain consciously relevant. Yet they come up again and again, whatever the turns and twists and wobbles and perceptual infidelities. They keep being arrived at, reinvigorating the flickering scene with their permanence- a permanence that has arisen out of this very flickering and so it endures.

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Three events- three human encounters- occluded before. Told backwards.

1. An elderly Sikh couple on the curb, holding hands. I’m already stuttering from the fragmented light- They are there- a certain absorption- a density in their body matter- the affinity that reverberates between them, idling there on the curb. Momentarily I settle into this presencing, absorbing into their body matter between going one way and another. A pause that extends beyond that time. I backtrack. Evade moving bodies by speeding and then slowing through the sweeping criss-crossing. I am between one direction and another, hesitating. Again, there they are, now just ahead on the crossing. Suspended as if the only thing unmoving. The centre of a kaleidoscope. From that base I glance out down a side street and that’s when I catch sight of the Gherkin building. In the last written account it is that gherkin building that I record though it is the presence of the Sikh couple that grounds and set up that perception. In that moment they become the gherkin building. They are subsumed in it. They are both invisible and axiomatic to perception at that instant. Now as I think of them on the curb, the gherkin building is shimmering through them, the glass panels reflecting light as they absorb it. I cannot take the two apart anymore. (Is that what Whitehead means by “Prehension” rather than “apprehension”?

2. In the courtyard where I eat my sandwich in front of the building with the external lifts going up and down. I get up and cross the courtyard to the fountain sculpture and place my hand in the running stream of water over the surface of the metallic silver. There is a man standing just behind the sculpture speaking into his mobile phone. I orchestrate my approach and he his conversation so that we are fractionally adjusting our angles in relation to one another so that we never meet. Yet there is this high level of on-going bodily accommodation that allows the smooth running of my necessary action and his necessary phone call in parallel yet separate spheres of operation. Yet in order for that to unfold flawlessly there needs to be this high level of perceptual-bodily configuring so that these operations are actually one event. That choreography is blanked out in the recounting of my sandwich stop in that courtyard but is the main event in my mind and of the most significance on the following day when I look back at the day’s events. There is a presencing so that my actions in the way they played out and his as he spoke in that way would be unthinkable without the twinned shadow of one another that created in both of us, propulsion and demarcation in the way the actions took place. We never met. The encounter was one of absolute avoidance or negation. Yet somewhere in there, there is the use of “we”; the use of “Us”.

3. Coming out of the green just beyond Tower Bridge where I have managed to crush my glasses whilst slumbering along with countless office-workers over the lunch time period who are also creasing their clothes. The light hits me starkly and I can not avoid the charge of elation that this brings. Then it is snapped out as the shadows of the tight streets take hold. Some workmen in fluorescent yellow jackets lie out on a portion of pavement where the light is still captured. I am drawn into a church courtyard in an adjacent street where there is a gap in the wall. The courtyard is entirely in shadow. There are grave stones and well tended flower beds just coming into leaf along the short curved pathway towards the church. The church doors are closed. I can see this before I get to them so I don’t bother. There is a tree in the middle of the grass in the centre of the square with purple buds still wrapped in leaves that have not yet opened but are just on the verge of doing so. In one or two the purple of the top-most petal has just begun to unfurl. I touch one, then feel slightly foolish for doing so. Back at the entrance to the courtyard that leads back out onto the street again a woman walking very fast stares at me for a sustained amount of time without changing her pace. I cannot read her face at all. It appears to me entirely blank. Even when she passes she looks back at me and continues staring. There is a sort of taking hold and it is not only resting on that final stare although the stare seems to me to become axiomatic. Something about these three consecutive occurrences collapses them into one another- the men slouching in yellow jackets in the spot of light, the feeling of touching the purple bud and the slightly resistant abrasion of the outer leaf, the woman staring and holding me there, puts in relief all three in relation to one another. The next morning I only think of the woman and that pause in the stare that becomes a lull before my turning back outwards into the road. Again I can not think of that event without it somehow subsuming the feel-color-scent of the bud in the darkened courtyard. That courtyard was somehow brought into relief by the light attack of the fluorescent jackets that still shimmers and holds the bud in place, the still attention of the woman that lingers.