refugi gallina pelada 15 JUL 2011

A person recently returned is still inhabited by sounds from away – phonomnesis – which can be played back in memory without physical reproduction. They lie listening to animal bells in the col on the way to the peak of the Gallina Pelada (Skinned Hen), below Pedraforça (Stone Fork).

Finding the refugi in the col, going towards it, signs of a closed house as you approach: no wisp of smoke; livestock guardian dog getting to its feet; no stick by the wall. A note on the heavy bolted door with a number to call, but not today. You are out of synch with the working week. Turning away, there is a place to sit by a series of troughs, fed by a trickle from the slope. In the stillness, rough cattle, sheep or horses or wild goats (isards) would come down from the higher ground close to the small turf ledge, hollowed by the backs of animals sheltering from the wind.

By the time you reached the peak it was in thick cloud. You found a book in an iron box brazed to a post, and used the biro to write *we can't see anything*

The rain brought the mushrooms out early. *Crecen mucho* said the baker at Pobla de Lillet, putting loaves and biscuits into bags: her brothers were in the mountains now, she said, as we were speaking, surrounded by jars of mushrooms on the shelves.

You picked what you thought were puffballs - white and rounded like meringues. But they were wolf farts – pets de llops. Smelling good to eat, they turned bitter on cooking and ruined the dish.

[Insert: image: pets de llops]

cp: cantallops - wolf songs - for chanterelles

Planes go over constantly and woodpigeons call

[Insert: approach of planes to Heathrow International over Ruskin Park area]

[Insert audio: cambria road]

Just there the rain began : a few drops, then steadily - drenching, you think, the berries and the many moths and butterflies down in the grasses ..

[Insert: link: rain - Tinguely]

All the time you were in the mountains around Berga, S was waiting to come back and get chickens. That was S's abiding concern and sustaining obsession, at that time.

[Insert: image: chicken with S]

You painted the chicken house red.

.. you rode your bikes to the Greendale field.

.. blackberry bushes are piled up the hill with thistles and vetches. a spectral landscape falling down to where the the river Effra runs underground. You picked 5 kilos or so from the tall bushes : in masses there in the sun : the four of you, this (that) summer..

[proposal by Dulwich Hamlets FC to level for all-weather pitches]

You stood there in the hot sun with the racemes of berries around and above, thinking of Ponge

There was nobody else there

By the time you got to making jelly it was the middle of the night

P was talking about Adam Bede : how they know how to make everything: jams and jellies and butters. How George Eliot wrote a novel a year and translated Feuerbach and Spinoza. You were cooking spaghetti.

The rain came over now it's running in the gutters and channels you can hear it dripping on the leaves. The mountains were full of wild flowers after the early rains. You went in to Bergá. The film in the orientation point in Bergá left out the twentieth century: it jumped straight from the Carlist revolt to now.

Half way down the Passeig de l'Industría you went into an agricultural supplier. You bought a belt a basket a hand hoe and a hatchet.

[Insert hatchet scan]

On a high balcony you suddenly saw a kind of wind garden – with all kinds of pinwheels, streamers and spinners – the terrace of a person who loves winds and breezes. Rather than just enjoy the winds and breezes that blow over that balcony above the covered market and the pet food store, this person has set up wind catchers to show and animate the passage of wind over the balcony – even down among the streets – where before you were not really aware of it

[Many years later] you still wake up at night and in the day your thoughts are still interrupted by the memory of seeing Sasha's cuckoo Maran, after she was destroyed by a fox, alive but destroyed

Each such point as an opening. Each closure as opening – fung(u)a.

A person's tears fall down from their eyes and nose. Du Fu says. running together

The liveliness of that chicken, of those times, is inseparable in your mind from the risk of bring them together, about, to life – those ephemeral things