Instrument

Just before I write there is this buzzing of elements in the environment. Then they begin to slow and settle. To take on significance in relation to one another. The angle at which they are set becomes exacting, crucially binding them in an array that little by little can no longer be taken apart.

I go around tweaking corners off-setting the minute flecks of expression that make up this new tuning fork. For it is the circulation of light and shadows as they absorb and rebound. The filaments of dust, the morsels as they come and go. The tread and shuffle of itinerant animals, birds, strangers and passer-bys. The hurrying steps, the lulled recurrence of a back treading footstep. The side glances and taxied journeying of synchronised feet, dogs and insects. The worms burrowing. The wind seeking passage taking with it dirt and fluff, seeds, smells, germs, a cool breeze on the skin, weaving in and out of the heat of the sun, creating patches of hot and coolness that pass over one’s seated body or propel one into momentary wanderings- out into the middle of the grass, the wasteland, and back again- that makes this place useable.

It is the place for the recording of events. Events that would not happen unless all these preset signatures bound up against one another.

There is this rising and falling. This growing up and this crashing down that maybe should be in different passages, different time-frames, altogether different events. In stories that never meet. But here they do cascading into one another. Interlacing like fingers seeking out the backs of one another’s hands. But it is the same body somewhere down the line. At some further point less diversified, more integral to the root of the thing. A person walking on the land sitting on a bench. Passers by nodding or avoiding. A dog pre-empting the moves that are made, insulting or enticing.

I am looking out over the thicket and the waning yellow flowers mostly turned to bristle these days. The slip of wire from a telegraph pole looped from building to building then across one of those metal braces that rise like a lost child’s bracelet next to stations and works and other industrial developments. Superimposed over this are other poles; industrial stalagmites that push up through the vacancy of a toothless smile filling in here and there a small section of emptiness- aligning with the top-most loop of this empty cage, the rigid bracelet thrust over a portion of land.

Figures are weaving their way in and out of the thicket, secluded here and there by bushes, trees, unruly growth only to reappear through the covering zigzagging but remaining before my eyes like corn flowers that are growing and dying so that the progress is the progress of a genotype not of a single flower. I am the same fazing in and out of credibility. Swimming and sinking in amidst this buzzing landscape.

Yet there is the moment when these elements- the metal against metal- the wire drooping and ascending again like a script in the sky; that single scant yellow flower, that straw cemented growth. The beetle coloured luminance of a discarded blue beer can. When they all take hold and root firmly into one another. That is when I too become like a tattoo burnt into the bench where I sit.

When I look out across the area there is no distance to cover. Just this resounding thrill of significance interlocking and exposing one another glistening in the shock of a torsion. A bustling traction that runs through everything as the workability of a vibration comes through in the midst of staying put resting and flowing on the wind.
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Someone walks past looking down. I am eating a banana. Nothing happens. There is a gradual coming into a smile somewhere in the mid-space between chewing and walking, where the rhythms merge.