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Text written and presented as part of the artwork Fictions, Causewayed Enclosure, Windmill Hill, Avebury, 2024, A4
I have come back after many years. The forty-six wings I have seen moving skyward are those of kites and umbrellas. Between the dawn and the new city there are people who believe they are flying. It is already an achievement if they can get off the ground, flapping their bat-like overcoats.
‘Which way?’ He asked. ‘Touch’ I replied.
The silence was hostile and almost perfect. There was little sound in this deep stone network save that of the soft subterranean wind. I walked beneath the ground. Still I was lost and still I was stuck. I had crossed a threshold and an architecture, hexagonal in darkness, divergent in symmetries. An abundance of dead ends, inverted holes, rising steps, and invisible windows. Stairways clung to the ascending quarry wall, and I emerged into a kind of square, or rather a square space surrounded by a structure of irregular form and variable height. A monument held together by the extreme age of its fabrication. The daylight passed precious and freedom within the dwindling sun.
The road forked and forked back. I saw ahead of me an abandoned trailer, pink but mostly white, a depleted army amphibious landing craft, a dilapidated horse truck, and assorted other trash. I had heard it said that the swamp was a state of mind. The truth or otherwise of this had only just become apparent to me.
Beyond the quarry dust the scree was breathing, synthetic, an artefact and system filled with derelict tracts and carbon airways. As respiratory landfill it had been abandoned, and the wilderness of machinery towers and kilns submerged any movement towards, or return to, former more natural states. It was then that the ice arrived. I awoke the next morning into piercing blue sunlight. The rhythm of the new city outstretched before me through the vast titanic forms of the low slung horizontal basins. To the left quarry and beyond chimneys. Ahead a track that formed a loop. It was close to this place that I first called out.
I think these were my images. Images untethered from origins and elsewhere. As I returned through quarry swamp to swamp and to the new city I saw improbable and nameless shapes of architecture. I passed in shadows and heard fragments of song. My mind was fleshed. I recalled objects easily through names but when I opened my mouth it was dry, dysarthric. The autumn snow formed a circle in which for many days I sat resting. My back set on forgotten rough cast concrete. I gazed at the hatches of the many doors facing me. I scaled vertical surfaces, and like both the day before and the day after I left early and walked inwards from the ridge perimeter towards the new city.
Lakes stretched far along the curve of the quarry wall. I walked on either side, shaded by the few plants that gained purchase in the loose and cracked cement. The machine extractions had fused the quarry sand into new layers. The blast a distant and dispensed pathogenic strata of time. I came to understand how the new city was a telling from its future. Its pyramidal housing and vertical towers a repeating utterance of armour and exoskeleton.
All the while the ice crept over the long curve of the earth. To think of ice creeping was constant and disturbing, but as time stood the new city remained untouched and naively unconscious. Plants, species and increasingly my senses were overwhelmed, until eventually I noticed a strong odourless light. In the snowstorms that came I observed the dendrite structures of individual snowflakes clasped hard to the still falling dust of the first explosion. Scorched markers carried in glacial sheets like the stones and boulders of previous events. Through folding aquatic body and such altered mind’s eye I kept looking for familiar buildings and towers, but underground they were no longer there.
Before I wrote such symbols I heard a radio broadcast that caught my attention. In it I learnt that the new city had cloaked the ridge and outer quarry. Claw-headed I have come back again, this time with wingless arms of armour and amorosity.