I forget
I used not to ever forget.
Now, this does not mean i have any 'issues'. Age related slowing of the mind. In fact i know my mind the last few years has been at its sharpest possibly of a lifetime.
But I forgot, or maybe need to forget, where i arrived, riffing semi poetically in several different online spaces. What narrative is hinted at where And if they may be woven into one, one day.
As of even five years ago i would take pictures of bedding, and clothing, blowing in the wind. Fresh air way away from towns or cities. Because to me it more than represents or symbolises something existential, it almost is what happened.
I have in the decades prior to the turn of the century lived all over the world. And sometimes would have access to the luxury places. Not really sought, it just came about that way.
And i always knew that no money nor status can buy the only thing i ever find a true delight which is the smell of the freshly aired bedding, aired in the freshest of air. No fancy hotel pumped in chemical palliative. No artificial scent.
And above all no money can buy that unique energising glorious smell .
And i know there are two things linked. Even if it seems all of modern life is linked. Working away outdoors on the sort of jobs which cannot be mechanised, and are damn tough, and as you start you feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the physical tasks ahead, as you settle in to the routine and habits, things change. For the better.
But it is a slow process with ups and downs. The nett final effect being real contentment. Peace. No matter what.
But as for art. I think endlessly about how to somehow weave real life - real life...into some kind of art. Art that perhaps captures the reality of rural existence.
But almost gave up as ....
Well, the complete apocalypse of existing almost in a Wasteland... no one else wishes to exist like this any more.
That over the ears i find intellectually interesting in certain ways.
But the real imagery that somehow describes that is an imagery that almost hurts to sit and observe.
As yesterday in the square of a small market town.
In almost the middle of nowhere.
A decade ago perhaps was the last time i spent a day here. And i like nothing and knew there was nothing here. There. That was a good reason to go and just be there.
But I am amazed. The aesthetic. especially early evening.
A modest town square, the middle of nowhere, really nowhere, almost entirely overrun by the higher end, status, 'sports' utility vehicle otherwise known as master-of-the-universe shiny Discovery or some other such. All shiny. The kind of shine that a farmer would not bother with. The kind of shine that is only about one thing, which has nothing to do at all with the two reasons i know for inhabiting such places as this.
And it is so backwards.
Just so absurdly old hat - almost Victorian.
If one were in almost any city, certainly in the 'West', people watching, the landscape would throw up women who had rightly claimed an equal place in their ecosystem. Their body language and mannerisms and movement speaking of them owning their city patch quite rightly with fullest equality. even the older ones.
But here. Well, despite their obsessive modernity - all those Discoveries the latest gizmo rich model, it is as if the last fifty years never happened. Almost all these ugly shiny things are driven by the man. The woman sat next to him may as well be mannequin still.
And then there are the few who ....
Well there are two
Other types.
There is not much funnier than the sixty or older years old man - facelift, groomed to within a year of his desperate denial of his age, that sure as ferrets are ferrets will still be smellable upon his underpants. .. rolling in to the town in his hundred gran machine early evening and you know there is only one thing on his mind as he unwinds his cigar
Except the facelifted, expensive informal wear clad, manboy haircut groomed old thing, in fact quite genius in his act - playing to perfection the carefree young smiley bohemian... all jokes and easiness as (they all seem to do) climbing out of the Man O'War machine that almost bemused ritual begins with is remote locking .. it reassuring him with some headlight wink he never need worry - all technologically locked down... tight...
As of course her .... well we wont be rude.
There she is, bouncing along behind now... her act perfect. too. The look and gait in her shortskirt but festival going type easy skirt, of of course we'll be having an only wholesome fun night with our friends..... in the expensive hotel bar their colony. He probably wants to buy too.
That sounds sour. I am not ever. But i know when no one could conceivably even appreciate what i have to show. Which is now. When her and him are despite their modernity,
to me showing off something from another century.
I really thought we would never again see.
All i actually know that a range of jolly good 'art' projects - sort of performance, sort of sublime, sort of in the moment, long ago i began to work on, well, apart from being an environmentalist / conservation minded person where the same applies, you really do need a real sidecick on the same page .. ideally of course an equal! Equal in her real power... that power which only comes from true real security. Which also only comes from grappling with that outdoors and finding balance and compromise with mother nature..... but there seem none left!
Especially after their silly year of old people dying off with a bug which has been happening for centuries and centuries it was called pneumonia (three different ways of becoming buggered with that in fact) but.....
the whole point of the outdoors is ONLY to put human sensibilities into perspective... but as so few actually seem to wish to actually live in the outdoors at least a fair bit of the time....without machinery, well is not surmising they all lost it....and their perspective.
And then there is environmentalism.
NO MATTER how lonely isolated bereft you feel..... or what madness has been around and about. Always....always do the job such that it will last as long as possible because that is how we make the most of materials i guess we must use...
Forget them
[the silly manboys with their younger models attracted only to their new models ..at a hundred grand]
I did years ago
But they won.
Bought up even here.
The hills around and about.
But i know one thing - they have no idea what they are for...
