The near and the far

I am on the end of a peer looking out to sea. The sea has receded far form the original coast line so that it is shiny mud-flats that absorb more light and take up a picture of some sort of the inverse sky. That is not like the moving sea that bounces straight out again the fractural light, magnifying that beam where it immediately bends back on itself. There are a group of kids to one side. Hindered by their own intelligence and lack of a place to go, they start picking on one another, backtracking on plans for the moment and expectations to come. It's only when one of them gets up to go, that they grip on to one another, hugging, with fists clenched around pulled down sleeves. A man and a woman are lying out to my right trying to judge the distance of boats that are tilting over because the bottom is toucing the mud through water that still only just swirls around them. "Four Metres" says the man. "No, much further than that" says the woman.
I`m leant up against a pole and it's uncomfortable because it's a square metal colummn and my back meets it where one side converts into the next. I need to sit like that to get the right view. Right out across and to the land far away on the other side. Music is coming from the empty bar down at the other end of the peer where a boy served me my drink. There are some Spanish people half way down the peer with sunglasses on, not looking out to sea but facing inwards along the walk-way. They look back at me as I look down that way.
A rumbling can be heard from a crane which is dredging up large quantities of sand and shingle just past the pub in a cordoned off area. Every once in a while, some kind of coversion takes place in the inwards of the pillar I am leant up against. Something between the wind, the crane working and the music in the bar creates a tone that resonates and ciruculates in that limited internal hollow space and all the sequential items laid out here seem to ring together not as given distances on a certain plane but as harmonics that must also be in place for that sound to exist. I hear it now and it summons back up the music, the rumble of the crane and the smell and taste of the salt air. A deep thud that however chimes for an instance even as it cuts out. It is like striking something into existance all over again. I cannot predict when that sound will re-emerge. As I sit there on the cold concrete of the peer, my body still hot from the sun of the day, my ear pressed against the cold metal of the pole to catch the thud when it comes, my back straining to position on the edge of that square pole, still uncomfortale, I hear a hurriedly rattling sound speeding towards me. I stop breathing and my lower abdomen contracts. Then the plastic bag scuttles off the edge of that peer with incredible speed, at odds with everything else so far, and for one instant I nearly follow it. It would be simply for the sake of completing a pattern; resolving a sound with it's evidential movement. And it is so compelling a thing to do. Such an incredible lightlness and ease in doing it. There is no current of wind once it begins to drop past the level of the peer so gradually it descends and I lose sight of it as it goes towards the mud-flats.
I realise then that imperceptively I have adjusted my posture; I am pressing in to the corner of that square bar until it hurts and now when I remember the feeling of that pressure I also see the floating plastic bag which seems to go up momentarily before it goes down. This is not a visual memory. It is a sense I have of my body re-organising. That organsiation is on-going- not a before or after- but a re-application every time the chime comes through. A re-accomodation of the near and the far.

A r t I c u l a t I O N

Alien Support

What is articulation? This strange word that means the utterance of vocal sounds but also means the composite integrated movement of limbs. In architecture it is used to mean the different twists and turns of a building. The demarcations that are not caught up into a single gestalt but must in a sense be enacted or worked through each time the building is considered like the decoding of a movement pattern by the minutiae of bends and deformations that put off centre continuously any single bench-mark of up/down, left/right.

Maybe we only know such orientations according to a waywardness that tips the centre pole out of its literal rooting. Buildings like humans are systems of gravitational leanings. Otherwise they become so upright as to lose the quality of what it means to be a habitat or to inhabit.
A person, a building is an influx of tendencies that push and pull it out of shape. It is the risk of rain; the risk of falling that makes us understand a shelter and understand uprightness.
In a sense we are always working between a structure and our use of a structure. They do not tally although one informs and situates the other.

It is the piecemeal breaking down of structures into surfaces of use that is their articulation; their breathing configuration. Their on-going metamorphosis.