Suited and booted in tench-coat and timberlands, armed with the latest digital technology, old fashioned notebook and pen, I stepped out of the door and into the twilight, hot on the trail of dream I know is out there somewhere. Having ranted at my computer for days about the neon lightning and rush hour waterfall, about the sound of space and starlight in the towns electric breathing, I needed to track down an urban familiar to roam the streets while I slept and bring back vital information on the cities condition. I needed a spy, a spirit with no scruples, a peeping tom who'd stop at neither fence nor sign to peer in at the window of urban unconscious. A spirit with a strong stomach and a stronger heart.
Up Folly Rise from All Saints Road, trailing streets running riverwise into the sprawling suburbia, I felt sure the walk would awaken something. For days and nights on end I've been obsessing about the organics of electrics and the rude and untamed nature that lurks behind a formal pretense. Out there somewhere is the cities heart, beating in rhythm with power-lines, traffic, and its own unrelenting development, an ancient heart with a modern face and a story to tell. I pass window after window framing half lit rooms where figures lay prone and expressionless before screens, by signs that proclaim "neighbourhood watch" in threatening letters, but not a soul on the street.
Aha, me thinks, the first sign of ultra-terrestrial life. The city is being watched, and not by people.
They say that in becoming habitual and conditioned to routine, you become home-blind, and loose sense of the nuances and ideosyncracies of the world one lives in. The quickest, sharpest and most refreshing remedy for this is to get hopelessly lost, which I do, post haste. Its the only way to find my wayward egregore and strike a deal - you're probing for my pen, and nothing less.
My heart dreams of haunted alleyways where history is more than just a memory, where strange forms cohabit in the brickwork and steel, and bleed surreptitiously into passes by, affecting them with an insideous intoxication akin to a mild possession. My heart dreams of a forgotten, thousand year old story that lives in things unseen, that hides behind the perennial light of persistent signs proferring misdirection and disinformation, just to get a kick out of the mutation and spurious consequences. Hoping for some new idea to be born. Most of all I long to find some life in the modern world, beyond mere superstition and tired cliche's about other wordly beings. I want a glimpse of this worlds being, a sense of its intent.
But in the end I find nothing redeeming about the sleeping streets, and nothing watching, and nothing dreaming, and not sign of the egregore to salvage nuance from the mediocrity. I find beauty though.
In plants that have overgrown the walls, in doors rusted and warped. I never knew there was so much vegetation here, all out of place and unkempt, nor so many bricks crumbling and hinges rusting orange like metal dusted sunsets. I hope to find nature, wild and unrelenting, in the world electric, something glimmering in the plastic, something still wild in the corner stones, engines and steel fences. But i found nothing, except their gladness in decay. In being warped and rusted, reminded this way they too are part of life. For all our obsessive appetites for the incorruptible, immortal, stainless, and shatterproof, these things have not yet been denied their right to grow old.
My dreams of a modern mythos, of an urban unconscious rife with energetic forms, are for tonight put to bed in ill health. They are depressed, and deflated. Never have I felt nature so forcefully mediated. I hoped to find a symbiosis, an entwining of nature and...[insert dualist dichotomy here], and all I found was emptyness, a city sleeping, dreamless.
Back at my flat I let the candle burn, the one I lit to find my way home, I drink a little whisky and deposit the plant dreams of red ivy and creeping green in a secret box to ferment and fertilise my homonculous. We're not done yet.
