Shadow
Today I ride over to Kingswood to pick up a book on English folklore I bought on eBay. Cycling up the edge of Eastville Park the thick car fumes get me wheezing. I recover while waited in line at a claustrophobic post office on Lodge Causeway to send a painting off to Norfolk.
Later, I meet F and A on the downs and look out over the gorge envying the gulls and pigeons freely wheeling in the unrestricted space of the sky. We drop into goat gully watching a carabinered man dangling from a rope strung between two trees across the cut. The gorge is a flora anomaly, uniquely home to a handful of species such as two types of whitebeam and dozens of other rare species like the Bristol onion, a red ball of a perennial that, in the UK, chooses only the gorge in which to grow. Today, other than the redwings, goats and dangling man there is not much on show, except for half of the human population of Bristol taking their outdoor perambulations. It is cold, we don’t stay long. The carabinered ropeman regularly breathes warmth into his hands, and for some reason isn’t wearing anything on his feet.
In the evening I take the dog out into the night. Everything is shadow. I follow my own with its floppy-eared dog dæmon plodding alongside. I notice great amounts of ironwork – fencing, gates, lamps – because of its traceried shadow filigreeing the pavement. Rows of cars have shadows that look like regularly clumped trees on a backlit evening horizon. In both instances the shadow is a more beautiful sight to see than the thing casting it. Organic, soft-edged, full of textured depth and rich, quiet movement. Tree branches cast woven shadows like the leadwork in a stained glass window. A temporary fence makes hardly visible graph paper shadows, geometric featherings on the asphalt. In the shallow-angled glare of car headlights road ironworks throw long shadows at our feet. Flat surfaces bulge and bellow: Pothole and drain grate, catseyes and metal crossing markers. A usually featureless micro geology now all mountain and gorge. There are no moon shadows tonight so each shadow is angled differently per its electric light source. In this sense the world makes no sense. It is a world of a thousand competing suns that encircle us, play tricks on us, control our restricted senses. I am grateful for the outside tonight, for the shadows that give me something to watch and write about. For the cold air in my lungs, for the dog who matches his pace to mine.