Marcel Proust
Living as I do in Cessnock, within five minutes walk from the Imax and the Science Centre (and more importantly, the river), I pass the 'science quarter' almost every afternoon as I walk or cycle up to the university or into the Campsie Fells beyond. I have been doing this for three years and never get bored of it, perhaps because each time I do so I find something new, something that surprises me, that I had never seen before. Like this afternoon, the five swans in single file, gracefully gliding east underneath Bell's Bridge. Sure, I know these swans intimately but I had never seen them in single file like this. It was almost as if it was a test-drive, you know, when your parents take you out for your first driving lesson (and you have them in tears by the end of it). The water in the Imax pond seems to irradiate a different view each time I pass it too. Often, it is waterless, but no matter. What's more, the titanium shell of the Imax cinema and Science Centre reflect the light like nothing else. Not far away, there is the wilderness (spare ground) of Plantation (awaiting development, but not yet quite primed for construction). Hovering above it this afternoon, in the quiet fading light, was a young kestrel. Sadly, I had left the binoculars at home but it didn't prevent me from stopping and gawking as it flickered its being for a moment before swooping in on some poor creature in the shrubbery. On the grass fringe beside me, I noticed a blackbird, as dead as a doornail, but strangely peaceful looking and all in one piece. Maybe it had been caught by a truck or bus as it low-flew (as they normally do) across Govan Road. The other day I had seen a struggling magpie as if it too had been hit (but of course it wouldn't let me get anywhere near it). 'Magpie Park' (or Festival Park as it's more commonly known) is opposite, and sees, all year round, more magpies and wood-pigeons than people, hence my name for it. It's a wonderful little space with its birch trees and poplars, and its little wetland pond wilding out with couch grass and all manner of organisms that I dare not name. I keep realizing that within a mere five minutes of my flat, in an area that most people would not give a second glance, there is a whole world of acitivity that one cannot simply see in a single visit.
A great poem remains to be written of the spare grounds (awaiting 'development') around Govan and Cessnock, of their overgrown spaces (itself a mysterious oxymoron), their weeds and wildness, that add a sense of bio-profundity to our humble localities. I fear that some day these spaces will sprout lifeless machines of glass and steel, and the weeds and wildflowers will all be gone (like the eye and the soul) to be replaced by a sterile, ageless, sheen. As a humble poet, who frequented the hills around Loch Lomond once said:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
['Inversnaid', Gerald Manley Hopkins.]
A great poem remains to be written of the spare grounds (awaiting 'development') around Govan and Cessnock, of their overgrown spaces (itself a mysterious oxymoron), their weeds and wildness, that add a sense of bio-profundity to our humble localities. I fear that some day these spaces will sprout lifeless machines of glass and steel, and the weeds and wildflowers will all be gone (like the eye and the soul) to be replaced by a sterile, ageless, sheen. As a humble poet, who frequented the hills around Loch Lomond once said:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
['Inversnaid', Gerald Manley Hopkins.]
The Imax Cinema and its placid moat, and the silhouetted Govan Town Hall, March 2010.
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