and life goes on...

Another morning opening the cityscape into my eyes, clouds upon the hilltops and drizzle upon the air, thoughts of the mountain postponed once again and, instead, another bike found, a slow cycle off towards the river.


Along the cycle path a scarcity of people, occasional joggers and other cyclists, the odd figure across the river, fishing in isolation. A bird clutching a stick flies across my sight, nature continuing, seasons turning, others taking what they need and find to build and shelter nests. A sense of scale, of insignificance, descended from mountain peaks into the concrete environment which surrounds. I think of a poem by W.H. Auden.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


But eventually it's time to get off the cycle path, find an unplanned route and head back into the streets and then, well sometimes it's good to have no sense of direction I think as I find myself lost passing through areas which I don't recognise, convinced that I'm cycling back towards the flat. I see a sign for the zoo, follow it and find myself upon the edge of a bicycle free road, no way back and no pavements, I'm not meant to be here, no idea where here is but it's certainly not the way I'm facing, lifting the bike across the verge while the lights remain red, heading in the opposite direction until, grey and ethereal in the distance the shape of 101 rising, beckoning or giving me the finger, this time I'm not really sure, but if I head towards it then I can work out the way back to the flat, or at least figure out where I am. A few streets and turns further I see the curve of the MRT above me, pass what looks like a station but don't notice the name, don't know which line, haven't seen 101 for a while and don't trust myself to be going in the right direction but it's no big deal, there's no hurry and then I find that I do recognise something, know where I am, the line's the one that lead back towards home, only three stops away or down through the ghost tunnel, not so far, not so lost...