We Will Weather Journals, indeed. Penny Newell. The weather is rainy, every day it rains a little, which is not annoying and very refreshing. However, strong autumn rains will soon arrive. In Italy, September is not the best season. Sigmund Freud. Palermo (11 September 1910) The work I have now the privilege of presenting, under your patronage, to my Fellow Citizens, is calculated to inform them, on the ground of observation and fair induction, (apart from Mathematical dreams and fine spun theories,) of what they may desire to know of the Climate and of the district in which they dwell. Luke Howard. ‘The Climate of London, Deduced from Meteorological Observations, Made in the Metropolis, And At Various Places Around It’. Second Edition These two quotes, extracted from the books that lie crammed to the sides of my laptop on the blue Formica table, just struck me as the starting point to this posting about our ‘new aims’ and our latest discussions through clipped emails, to our ‘new ideas.’ Yesterday, I must first say, I witnessed blade-black pits in leaves singing out in tree-speak as Tar Spots - it was perhaps the image of inked raindrops, water that had hammered the night before, with the telling of this idea. We are working with a weather journal - ‘with it’, as an object and as a collaborative field, or so the rain suggests - a diary of the psychological spaces that Aidan passes through daily, and that I pass through daily, and that at the same time under the ‘same British skies’ we each pass through and will record daily, suggesting differences in the approaches that each of us carries to/through the weather to/through our shared but different days. The words of these two writers strike me as working across two intersecting registers - Freud is a descriptive weather diarist; his judgment is restrained and withdraws into observation - he thinks through the observations of 11 September 1910 to the future, predicating the coming weather on his previous understanding of what has followed days like this refreshing, light late-summer rain. Where Freud is restrained by the linearity of time - brought back upon himself through a loop of time, running back from the present moment, to the past conditional of the coming Autumn - Howard is restrained by the metropolitan restrictions he has placed upon his observations - the urban brought back upon itself through a loop of ‘places around it’ (the M25, strange loops, strange wonders), to a metropolis in expansion; an image leaning back to itself, in bas-relief.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 22:26:54 +0000
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