www.pasdelabas.org – Page 20 – writing from another someone not from where they are

i asked which bit he was doing (iv)

Driving back with the kids they asked “Can we go and see Phlegm?” So we did and two of them came out to see what was going on. A man was there wearing a mask, or with it round his neck, a protection mask for spray paint. I asked which bit he was doing. The pipes he said. Are you Phlegm I asked. Yes he replied. I thanked him for the wonderful artwork he leaves around the city. It is so generous I said. We chatted a while, the children asking what is this and what is that and who did this and who did that. Phlegm started back to work looking for all the world like a renaissance muralist up there on his ladder. The work remains unfinished. I’ll go back tomorrow. It is a hard one he said, it is collaborative, and he doesn’t like to be more that four days or so at a painting.

uneven writing

More uneven writing

Painting thrown against the wind

Unsettle the scene

it continues to complexify (iii)

Almost got there before it got dark but not quite. The machine looks so very primitive. Really like a wooden structure supporting steel and glass or like some house on stilts standing in the sea.

then this

This appears during Tuesday. Phlegm is building a machine that is holding the other pieces together, suspending them in mid air.

so this goes up (ii)

This is there on Monday evening. Doesn’t look like Phlegm I think. Could he have been taking the piss out of my middle class sensibilities?

colombine

dense moorish monkish

bothering around the path

month of may believe

under water trees

hot day under water trees

lichens mat the rocks and

wood sorrel springs

something is happening here (i)

I stopped and asked what they were doing.

“It’s Phlegm, we’re getting it ready for him, we’re just mates”

casualty of love

We’ve been listening, again and again and again to songs by Jessie J. Following us from place to place, various children singing along at full volume or less or more depending on whether that track was the one they wanted or no.

This evening CR asked what a casualty of love was (title of a song from the album)?

Do you know what a casualty is? I asked. EM did and explained that it was when someone was hurt, a special place in a hospital. Well I said ponderously… a casualty of love is when someone is in love but that love is not reciprocated perhaps and they are hurt thus becoming a casualty, feeling injured, experiencing the pain of rejection perhaps.

EM replied:

I think it is when a man and woman are in love and the woman is maybe going to be hit by a car and the man jumps in front of it to save her. I think that fits.

I hadn’t thought of that.

begging

At the local swimming pool as I arrive in the car and pull up to let the girls out two boys knock on the door. They follow the car and when I get out expressionless they ask for fifty pence to go swimming.

The Roma have been moving to this area for a few years now. They are highly visible, they move in large groups and there are various somethings that distinguish them from other groups here.

One thing is that the children will, at times, directly ask for money. There is no ‘side’ to this, the request can be at times insistent but no more. Like today it is almost expressionless.

Some children have come down our road either going through the bins with an adult or at other times tasking things left in the front gardens, kids bikes were taken from our house. We got then back though because people on the street had noticed them, they are visible and a sense of predictability comes with then too. They are, it is assumed, going to take things.

It is as if there were a group of people living amongst us who are coming out from the forest. Today it felt like we were the pastoralists and they hunter gatherers.

However to the hunter gatherers aren’t they ‘other’ too? Are they every ones other? A shared category, one that aides integration by being so much the ‘other’?