Ecce Homo

What Gordon Brown was doing in my dream I do not know – and much as I would like to, I can’t remember the conclusion of the dreaded thing: At some stage he was eating a commercially produced cup cake (it had something to do with proving his ‘Britishness’) and, after deftly separating out the sponge and the neatly parcelled chocolate filling (which he passed over to me), he ate it … then?

All very strange and disturbed: The ubiquitous thumping base from a parking car suddenly stopped only to be followed by the raised high pitch voice of one of the occupants as she struggles to find her pass key to the apartment block shattering the visions; and I surface on a fast rising swell of consciousness.

You don’t always notice the physicality of such an awakening – but my head was still swimming as I registered the slight chill – it must have been two or three in the morning to have cooled that much. Yesterday was hot. It wasn’t the hottest it has been this year but the heat has become tiresome and the season should have shifted down a gear by now.

There are too many disturbances in the night – you have to sleep with the window open or the bedding is soaked, the pillow needs a day of sunbathing to dry out and the sweat pouring from you dehydrates - you wake several times with a dry mouth and the nascent ache of a forming migraine.

Better to face the buzz of invading insects and the unnecessary sirens of police and ambulance speeding along essentially empty roads. And the obligatory drunks and dogs … last night there was a soul touching half hour of the sort of howling which can only accompany serious injury or the loss of something one loves … a howling and baying accompanied not by the barks of other canines but by their whimpering and silence.

Unusually I soon slipped back into unconsciousness leaving the prescience of a night full of its own untold stories and fantasies.

Labels: Know Thyself, Timisoara

# posted by Alan K.Farrar @ 12:39 AM 0 comments

It was to have been a great enterprise – a port, far from the sea, in the centre of a continent, on the edge of a landlocked empire. Barges carrying everything vital for the newly industrialising; materials to fabricate and all the exotic goods needed to support a booming middle class and expanding toiling subclass: the rich furs and wild silks of the East brought along the Danube from the Black Sea; the blacker solid gold called coal from the German Ruhr and the iron and copper, the wood and clay needed from central Europe. All were to change from barge to train from train to barge in what was envisioned. Strangely it was not vision enough – never was it big enough, never the shallow waters of the Bega wide enough to deal with the smallest fraction of the traffic, never the spider web of rail extensive enough for anything other than a circuit of the town and a moving on. Some journeys the Orient Express passed through – but never this side of the river and not stopping.

It is hard to imagine now – with children playing in the fountain; with push chair full of sleeping baby, mother, in tacky, short lived imitation of last year’s even shorter lived fashion, on her ‘mobile’, blowing the smoke of a cheap cigarette before lifting the stuck remains of chewed roasted sunflower from her lower lip; with a well disciplined, fuzzy-at-the-edges species of heavy guard dog, on short lead and excitable yapping white poodle, whose only discipline is in carefully managed curly hair, bouncing at the end of a red box with infinite length of fishing line.

Usually ‘the man’ walks the dog in this park.

Earlier in the morning, it is the younger, fitter, t-shirted and swimming pool bronzed specimens; young men off to work, men with wives who also are off to work, with dogs liberated for a brief moment of exercise and excrement before a day locked in tiny furniture cramped apartments; a dog whose life resolves itself into fatness and the lonely longing for pack, who can, for a fleeting moment, twice a day. run again.

By mid-morning it is the more fortunate animals released from the toil of pet-hood with retired workers, ex-officials who knew a better/a worse time before now and are willing to spend twenty minutes or so telling you; retired men-of-the-house, getting ‘under the feet’, sent to walk the dog and fetch the drinking water from the well sunk to tap the thermal groundwater hundreds of metres below: The sole purpose of the park for most who visit; afraid of the council delivered domestic tap water; devolving a mystery and benefit to the frequently street-child sucked taps and workman-washing location, exposed to all weathers and all the dust and grime or the busy city around.

An ill-fitting and even iller-constructed tattoo of paths marks the routes most people follow. Benches, newly en-whitened but most missing slats and uncomfortable to sit on, line the principle walkways. On these there is the constant workman – employed by whom none knows but in blue overall and drinking from a bottle some substance which renders sleeping through the day a benefit.

These docks are well used by the watchers – a mixture of the loneliness and frailty of age or infirmity, bored with the darkness of their officially appointed then purchased living space and seeking, even if only in the ability to censure, conjunction.

At weekend or after the morning school session teenagers glue themselves together for half an hour then move off to do homework and take the necessary private lessons that guarantee what is called success in this post-empire society.

Above and immune from all the anxious, lackadaisical human activity the magnificent trees. Cloister-like supporting trunks rise to a canopy enshading the ground with a flickering luminescence. Birds and insects fly above sometimes in a dance of extinction. Blackbirds sing matins and evensong and throughout the day the constant chatter of the assembled choirs counterpoints the crude politicking and inane positioning of the people.

It was to be a temporary park, a park before the port – but the storm passed quickly over and the space, forgotten and odd in shape, remained in a dream state. It is a place of unattempted intention where the only cargo is aspiration and the dross of failed industry washes into dock.

Labels: Know Thyself, Romania, Timisoara

# posted by Alan K.Farrar @ 7:37 AM 0 comments

The slightest layer of dust – more a regret than an accusation, more sensed in the throat, than seen

Two Chinese porcelains – small and portable, memories of wealth and a very minor bank-role against a desperate future.

A half consumed candle - antiqued and aromatic.

A stool – anachronistic in colour, shape and style – carried in for a forgotten use; never returned. Two irritating buttons and a re-stitched side split straining for its liberty.

A paper sundial – transported explanation and relic of madder days of enthusiasm. Soiled with the dirt of another place, faded through use and extreme in its accuracy.

Patterned shadows as the early spring sun pushes through the lace curtains ‘tattooing’ the wall with prison pin-pricks – an etiolated band of bondage to time, and the endless repartitions of the diurnal and seasonal.

Labels: akfarrar, Know Thyself, OU, Timisoara, writing exercise

# posted by Alan K.Farrar @ 10:48 PM 0 comments