As I was cycling down mill road yesterday, I saw some familiar figures.

After a moment’s reflection, I realized that I was recognizing them from a time a few years back, when, as I'd been wandering along the same road, the whole street had been suddenly lit up by the appearance of a curious translucent orb which descended somewhere between the Al-Amin store and a particular lamppost.

As it hovered there for a bit a fascinated group – including many of those I was seeing now - soon congregated round to speculate on what on earth it was doing there. When I passed by later, they were still there, having followed it a bit further down the road to a point just over the bridge – it was strange to see how they’d changed even since that morning; some of them had lit up and were glowing with a kind of faint orange colour, one woman was crying even as she was smiling. I asked them what they were going to do next. ‘We’ll probably stay with it for a while, follow it and see where it goes,’ an elderly gentleman told me. I thought this sounded like a very good idea.

I went back some weeks later, and they were still there, with some new faces among them. I thought I could see the orb in the middle of the group, but as I got closer I saw with curiosity that it wasn’t in fact the original orb at all, but an almost exact copy, made of tin foil, chicken wire and silver-painted papier maché, suspended from the lamppost by fishing wire. I didn’t want to interrupt them, since they were so intent on watching it; but I nearly fell off my bike when ‘There – it moved!’ yelled a man I recognized, who worked at the post office. And indeed the object was swinging in the breeze. I left, somewhat perplexed as many of the group immediately threw themselves onto the pavement.

I forgot about them for some time, until I passed that way again several years later, when there was not one but three separate groups each huddled around a model orb. All of the models looked almost exactly like the original, but each was slightly different. I wondered if any of them had managed to trap it and cover it up in their coloured papers and paints, or whether they were simply artist’s impressions.

And then yesterday, when it happened that I came across the groups again, I was amazed to discover that the groups had split and grown again since before, and now there were seven separate factions. Some of the groups all dressed alike now; in one they all wore sashes of tin foil, in another most of them had lanterns balanced on their heads (this seemed to me quite impressive, although I could not work out the reason for it). In another they all hummed softly, and I thought that maybe I recognized the tune from the time I’d seen the orb so long ago. Every now and then one of the groups would build up chants insulting the other groups; I saw a lantern thrown and smashed and a crate of slightly soggy cabbages was distributed with some energy.

And then I saw it. There was the glowing orb again in the street, spectacular and iridescent, slow moving and graceful. I knew they would all be delighted.

‘Look – there it is!’ I shouted, at the top of my voice, pointing into the sky.

And at that moment pandemonium broke loose. All of the groups snapped at once from their positions and hurled vegetables and chicken wire balls and shoes at me and shouted that I was mad or lying or both.

Somewhat terrified and quite astonished I fled at once, and somehow or another made it to the centre of town unscathed.

They were still there when I came back, back in their normal positions, although I myself took the precaution of cunningly disguising myself in a sheet.

i have been looking at architecture, and thinking
about
these layers collecting year on year on year;
broken down, built up, downtrodden, erased... extended, remodeled, downsized, replaced; renewed, upgraded, stripped, renovated
blueprints on footprints on newsprint,
in fashion, outdated...
and how they
reveal
our walls we build
the spaces their ideas shaped
the scaffolding of yesterday’s desires
reaching sky-high in towers, dreamscapes and spires;
mounted bricks of belief bridging, eclipsing, competing, eclipsed
each shouting different words -
all this noise
the practical solutions, swept out of sight
dead by day, alive by night;
all these monuments -
the men you meant
to save
it’s hard to hear
And now
how to inhabit…?
see the habitat
kick the habit out
harder still to listen.
Our spaces...
nostalgic looking back, we shift it all about
see old objects in a new light
once a function now a toy, here is a novel joke,
a pretty collage, pastiche
spanning old fault lines – whose fault?
And above all
Graffiti.
Here is
my place, our place, in place, out of place, no place
Like Home
The cityscape.
The urban playground.
A canvas...
To rebuild?
To regenerate - each generation;
and re-collect, with new veneration...
but
Beauty?
In creation beneath.
Maybe possible
in creation above -
In expressive spaces, in normal places, with many faces?

There are a lot of questions to be asked.

being human
is
terrifying

and yet the veil slips easily, how easy to forget in the constant noiseimageblur of our televisions, caught in the web of cybernetic diffraction broadcasting HERENOW distraction and a thousand images of frozen-dream safe havens from another time. here is stuffed up longing and holographic belonging, welcome home. how ICONIC. and meanwhile how to maintain the
careful control
of our
daily
turning
circles....

Familiarity

cloaks the peculiarity of my space
your face
our EARTH,

But it is still there.

THE WORLD IS STRANGE.
We are extraordinary. You are odd.
Nothing makes sense until you make sense out of it with your head.
And this is really good.

Wonder.

Are we children of our history?

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
Passage from Night, Elie Wiesel

I came back to that place three days later and he, the man Jethro, was still there – or had come back again, I don’t know which.

As I sat down, he passed me some shortbread to share with him, and we sat there and watched the waves a while.

After a bit, he pointed out a big house to me far to our right, on the cliff top, which was full of light and colour and music.
‘You know, I used to always want to be in there,’ he said quietly. ‘I used to sneak in the back door, pretend to be a Somebody. I’d convince them for a while - I can do a pretty good act,' he smiled, 'and they’d welcome me in, we'd drink champagne, swing in the hammocks.’
I watched the movements in and out of the house; it looked warm, inviting; I thought i'd like to wander up there.
‘But somehow,' he sighed, 'somehow they’d always discover, find out my real name, and turn me out again – I’d have to come back here.'

There was a long pause, a deep and heavy silence. 

‘This is my desert place, you know,’ he told me, ‘ – this bench. Here I’m always on the outside, I don’t belong - not anywhere.’

I nodded. I felt it; you could hear the noise, know you weren’t wanted there.

‘But one day,’ he continued, his voice distant, ‘one day I’d had enough. I couldn’t get back in no matter how hard I tried, I had nowhere else to go. It was night, I was tired, and I stayed; I just sat here. And the ocean,' he indicated the navy expanse spread out in front of us, lined with wild white surf, an alive thing, 'there it was like a great black pool, swallowing up everything inside itself. I wanted to run, to hammer on the door of the safe house to make them let me in, to conjure up images to hide it, to plug up the hole with some kind of chocolate-sweet relief… but for the first time I didn't run, i looked into it. And I waited.’

He paused again, and I tried to imagine the sea at night. It looked so calm now, but in the dead of night I could imagine that it could be frightening, isolating, horrific.

‘I felt abandoned,' he whispered, 'lost, nothing made sense. In the black pool I saw my aloneness, the meaninglessness of it all, my own fragility. I wanted to hide, to scream... but somehow I stayed. The people were gone; the lights in the house went out: there was just me and my mortality here, me and the night.
It was the longest night I have ever known; I thought it would never end. But there, in the morning, in the grey dawn with the sun rising white on the waters, there was the deepest stillness, the stillest silence… There was peace.’

‘Isn’t it lonely, out here?’ I asked at last, slightly afraid of the answer.
He laughed again, as he always did, and waved up at the house again. ‘Do you really think they’re not lonely in there? We’re each of us alone, that’s the truth of it; and yet we’re all of us connected, more than ourselves, part of a bigger story being told… And look, here come my friends,’ he nodded towards a group, a rabble of oddballs, strolling towards his bench, chatting; they waved at him.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘Losers, weirdos, freaks…’
I blushed.
‘Like me,’ he said firmly. I couldn’t realize until I made this place my home, until I gave up knocking on that door up there. Oh, I can walk in there now; I have done. The walls don’t hold me out any more. But here is the place I want to be… you can learn to love the desert place, I think; to choose it. There’s terror in the beginning and darkness in the night but in the morning there is peace…’

I think prayer can be noisy, it can almost certainly involve words, it can be eloquent and it can feel like fighting.

But by moments I wonder whether that thing that we're fighting, and pushing away; that frightening fear-and-shadow feeling that can make us fill spaces frantically with words and battle valiantly to push back the defence-line, could be the very thing to embrace in prayer. The simple act of climbing into the paradox, and sitting there in silence can wreck you, but I think that those moments could perhaps be more transformative than a torrent of a thousand words...