24 SEP   2008

you're sitting in side with a damaged arm it's pouring rain. you've sent the children out with aldo in a downpour - the sky is thick with rain with light barely coming through the mass of the cloud cover the leaves of the trees now turning - the elder and the red vine - reflect the light disproportionately, creating a luster a lustre in the drenched garden you're looking down. the three things you can do: cooking, writing, chopping you can't do now. now your arm is damaged you can't do anything; you're disabled and you're in trouble. now your disability resurfaces your compassion of course extends. the disability which was hidden now comes to the surface of the body where the ulnar nerve passes close the surface: at the elbow now that vulnerable point has been highlighted again in red a bird flashes in to the apple compassion of course extends in proportion disability of course is never far from the surface disability shadows, depending - person A causes you to feel severely disabled in the virtual presence of person A you are a severely disabled person you're a cripple the simple thought of person A renders you spastic, incompetent at every level person A the sodden landscape is in constant motion every movement of a branch or sodden clump of leaves, now turning, is a detail in the high definition picture you carry with you at all times, submerged of course submerged, of a body in difficulty in collapse the image, for your parents, of an infinitely resilient body against which the child could freely pit itself with impunity now we have taken in an image of a wholly different body it's a damaged depressed parent which has been reduced to barely functioning of course our parents and in particular the men have massacred it now you look out on it, you're in it - because you're going backwards you're going in - you're experiencing the ruthlessness of infancy now that it's even being left, now you're experiencing the sound of distant flowing / rushing the sound, simon says, of being in the womb - the distant factory well, it is with growing anxiety that the foetus experiences its drift in a scene all the more captivating because of the severe irrevocable damage it has suffered you receive in the mail a parcel containing something fragile which has been destroyed in the box - you have misgivings from the beginning because of the way the weight shifts from one side to the other and the sound of broken crockery in small fragments, this can't be right, you think, nothing is to be gained believe me by getting angry now you are embedded in this mass destruction system for which you are responsible which you are powerless to change everybody responds differently one person, Fiona, carries a phial of dilute honey and a small pipette for feeding diabetic bees which more and more, she says, can be found lying, apparently sleeping, in the grass even on the concrete - after a few sips of honey mixture these temporarily disabled bees, which would otherwise of course be dead, are able to fly off and resume their work this is called bee rescue it's big in canada - on the other hand, yesterday we learn of the confirmed discovery of methane chimneys bubbling up through the arctic sea the permafrost, in the words of the lead researcher on the , by email to the independent newspaper, the permafrost layer is now damaged it's perforated, he said, after months and years tracking the surface of the arctic sea looking for definitive signs of these perforations, which scientists have long suspected and theorised, it is with a mixture of delight and horror that members of the expedition on the vessel day before yesterday encountered such methane fountains literally pouring in columns of bubbles up through the arctic sea, obviously from the ocean floor, as says in his mail to the independent below the sediments of the sea floor in the arctic ocean lies a layer of permafrost through which, once perforated methane from the decay of ancient biomass now pours. twenty times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than co2 - a train hooted and now accelerates in the rhythm of a cowboy film it's a diesel locomotive thundering through loughborough junction - accelerating the warming which in turn accelerates the damage to the permafrost layer - not only under the arctic ocean but under the vast expanses od the arctic tundra - thereby setting up the vicious feed back loop long theorised by scientists, you were reading the independent standing up at london bridge station, watching sky news, as they say, out of the corner of one eye, after buying that paper because of that headline, which you can say you had been waiting for. after more than a year without buying a newspaper you finally gave in, partly thinking it would be useful for lighting fires, rediscovering just how partial, ill informed and reactionary this paper actually is, worse even than some others, there you stood reading it with one arm, feeling weak all that time standing there watching your so called fellow passengers out of one eye, while the giant screen flashed updates on the so called markets advertisements for a car in which large male hands handle frogs, lemons, cocks, not really - I was describing the problem with my arm to michael b, the eminent neurologist - in an animation designed to convey what, looking at the same time for your platform announcement for the 10.42 to victoria via denmark hill, if you can believe these actually real names, these actual real imprints on the surface of the ground you watched, with amazement after flying for many hours over the libyan desert the gradual concentration of population and the gradual increase in pressure of the so called human footprint, after spending those hours looking down from the rondo plateau, where you looked out over the hills of east africa: biondo forest as far as the eye can see - a flock of goldfinches flew over, sarah was saying how many goldfinches there are this year - with their electrifying subsong! now the greenfinches have been so reduced - whether it is a cycle similar to the sparrow viral cycle you didn't know - after that long flight, which also brought us in over sardinia, sicily where you could see the smoke of etna - still, yes, since what? the roman period or probably the phoenician period - those slopes covered by the hoopoe and the scop's owl - their calls, which when you hear them speak of eternity at the very same time now sound the death knell - over the vast industrial fields of france, over the channel in over the increasing intensity of exploitation that distinguishes the british countryside with gathering horror over the vast grey swathes of the london suburbs you turned left, passing the london eye the serpentine lake out of the right window before roaring down in to this impoverished landscape where you now sit so fast and so forcefully you couldn't hold the camera you read about the whale - michael b, the eminent neurologist, who in fact wrote the definitive texbooks on neurological genetics, as well as the current definitive online database of genetic abnormalities, said to get a referral to a neurologist - it was an entrapped nerve - a flock of goldfinches is feeding in the top of the apple tree feeding, preening and gathering in the rain soon they will leave making their way down across the silent fields of england over the vast agro industrial spaces of france interspersed by woodlands scoured by mushroom hunters little ditches and copses where the so called passionate hunters are already out in the early morning with their breaths visible in the early morning scouring the ditches and copses for the so called free gifts of the earth - believe it or not - down over the feet of the pyrenees heading for the aiguamolls of emporda - in camping nautic almata the campsite is closed deer have taken over the pitches now lush with grass the finches undisturbed enter the high poplar trees they sway and feed and deliver their staggering songs for which they have been systematically trapped and caged since the beginnings of the so called classical civilisations - not to speak of their for you even more captivating and in fact totally captivating subsong - there in the swaying poplars the the purple junipers which grow there to be large trees, showering the surroundings with tons of pollen which strangely has less effect on S than the small amounts of contaminated pollen released here in london, along with the spores released in the house, in these cold damp climates - S is in the carnegie library with aldo, which exists like a limb semi severed from the carnegie foundation, this mythical creation of carnegie himself the magnate who later became a vast philanthropist, giving away the vast bulk of the wealth amassed starting as they say from nothing both his parents were active in protests around workers rights carnegie brutally suppressed union activities in his organisation before finally selling it to j p morgan, or somebody, for 60 million dollars, or something, before retiring from his business enterprises and devoting himslef, as they say, full time to his philanthropic enterprises he opposed religion founding a great chain of libraries, starting with one dedicated to his mother in his home town of carnegie or dumbarton or somewhere in scotland, of course, before moving on to other areas dotting the surface of the planet with a web of excellent library buildings, all in their distinctive arts and crafts style, which successive local authorities have since run into the ground, neglecting and effectively destroying the fabric of the buildings themsleves, running down the collections, leaving the buildings as cold dirty semi derelict spaces where homeless people sleep when they are open - the carnegie foundation has no further responsibility for these buildings, the thatcher government did everything it could to destroy them, now the local authorities are by and large unable to manage maintain or for the most part even open these buildings, which send out a clear message to the people young and old who use them, not to say work in them - a message about deprivation and extermination which it is barely possible to go beyond, intellectually, with a set of outdated, irrelevant, physically decaying books and internet access tightly controlled to prevent access to images of human sexuality, so that research is so stunted as to be impossible. there is a picture taken in 2007 in the independent magazine left over at smiths in london bridge station from the weekend of some japanese schoolchildren with clipboards watching some men with special long handled tools butcher a whale. it seems to be a school trip, some of the children are in high spirits, laughing, making notes, watching the men described in the caption as fishermen butcher the whale seemingly with great skill, sawing throught the bloody flesh and blubber and exposing the skeleton - they're back