My view over the hills of Sydenham and Dulwich keeps me grounded. Nearly twenty years in this flat. Everything’s falling apart. The neighbour extended the back of his place and blocked off half the panorama and with it one of the Crystal Palace transmitters. Not out of spite, never is.
I always had some kind of garden available at my other London residencies. I miss them, but the view makes up for it. It’s all my kids have known and I can’t imagine how it will feel come the inevitable day when we move out.
Vastness is always available. Beyond the window, above our heads and inside our selves too. We hallucinate so many extra walls beyond the ones that provide shelter. I know this reads like a load of hippy bollocks but I really think it’s true. I don’t think I’ll be sliding through a real wall any time soon, but the other walls are surprisingly easy to tear down once you see them for what they are.
You’d think after all these years of gazing out I’d know every brick, branch and chimney pot but that’s not how memory works. Memory is more of a murmuration than an accumulation. All those little images popping in and out of your mental inventory – always shifting in their position and relation to each other. I’ve never made a memory palace but if I did it would be like those Escher stairwells at the end of Labyrinth.
It’s all a testament to how we still can’t move on from Heraclitus. The view is always shifting and so is the viewer. On realising this, there isn’t so much a sense of satisfaction as there is a sense of release. The worries will come to pass. The worrier will come to pass too.