Half Moon Lane bathing in the most gloopy of fogs. Distorted figures - or elements of things that could have been figures - appearing as watered-down colours from within the foggy tarpaulin, seeming to increase in frightfulness due to the missing clarity. I had not seen anything remotely as strange before, but I’d certainly felt it. This fractured image, no, it was more accurate to say series of images, made me recoil, it disrupted my serenity and clouded my state of mind. But I liked it, too. The omnipresence was exciting – it broke the inertia in a good way. Without that looming ‘other’ lurking, this little village wouldn’t be much, fading away in its own whitewashed torpor and unceasing MOR efficiency. The unease offered a thrill. The vision, for one thing alone, made it difficult to gauge the time – it felt like a strange continuous night-morning in which there seemed the eternal prospect of it getting lighter, but one which was never fulfilled, so that the inaction of this half-dawn remained, boring into the soul. The past seemed to be eating away at the present and the future, rather than the other way round – the eerie forgotten bits were destined to try and not be left behind, and to emerge into the current landscape as opposed to sinking without a trace. Time was moving forwards, yet progressing under the weight of trapped screams that were resting relentlessly somewhere. They were emerging into this weird landscape, but in drabs and often attached to or immediately following other echoes, so that they became annoyingly inseparable from them, and ambiguity ensued. A barely audible screech over-layered by the brief kerfuffle of post-train chatter travelling through the underpass. Low-level voices squashed by violent ambulance sirens. Lovely voices heading into the bakery drowned out by motorbikes in chainsaw-brutal bombardments. And numerous other submerged delights. The lane bathing in the fogs, giving off a sense of timelessness, generating the unreal magic.
© Copyright 2017 John Maher