“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”
– T.S. Eliot

I stalk through Battersea Power Station
like a cat in all-too-human space
it is now a shopping mall
a screen onto which consumer craving is projected

An astro turf lawn lines the floor
a lady stands on it selling perfume
The University of Virginia is nicknamed The Lawn;
its lawn hid Thomas Jefferson’s slaves

With Abhayanandi and Ratnaprabha,
we make our way onto charter’d streets
besides the charter’d Thames

The character of Strider resonates
Unlike in Middle Earth,
kings and ideals are distrusted nowadays

Stalker a modern Soviet version of Strider?
prowling through a postindustrial Zone,
seeking grounds for faith

Stalker, the writer, and the professor:
none of them know what they truly want
At the very least their conscious desires are at odds with their unconscious desires
Does anyone know what they truly want or yearn for?
One response to the uncertainty and ambiguity regarding desire is faith
The other? Beckett’s resignation
Alan Watts: “why don’t you know what you want? Two reasons: 1) you’ve already got it. 2) you don’t know yourself.”

My mind is charter’d too of late
The dynamics of transaction
Stasis and distraction
estrangement from myself and others

Return the mind to its original nature

London lacks presence

It is too alive
A metastasizing cancer
Cells reproduce too quickly for no reason
The fractal dimensionality is too high

capitalist growth has a cancerous aliveness too

everyone is pushing too hard
the systems are under strain
You can feel it in the atmosphere
Ominous weight, the wear and tear
Something’s going to snap

Temptation is to return to one’s bunker

Within me is a stalled dialectic 
between the local and the global

I am rootlessly global and brittly cosmopolitan
yet I desire roots and firm ground:
a mountain hide-out
pull the drawbridge up from my surrounding moat

There is too much emphasis on becoming
I need more being

More continuity , less change
The radicals these days are conservatives

(the real ones, not the neoliberal ones)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

What am I seeking? A centre
Ajahn Sucitto: “don’t lose your centre”

Kerianna: stay embodied wherever you go

With a friend : a day’s walk
on the path above Bazalgette’s sewage system
It feels very psychogeography

Admiring of Bazalgette’s accomplishment
Admiring that a sewage system that large can be engineered

in awe of industrial civilization

in awe of the sheer population of people it sustains

Any admiration is tainted by an ominous ecological awareness
Which hangs in the background like an unwelcome guest

I’ve been off the rails since Covid
the ship veered off course in 2019

I’ve got CPTSD (and I’m a walking cliché)

Thanks to those who kept me going
thanks to the sustainers of life

Triratna: a port in the storm

sraddha– sukkha – jaya
but jaya (victory) of the subtle kind, not the Trumpian kind
victory of the subtle kind is what matters

Positive mental states
include those which face difficulty

Health may no longer be possible
but living with illness in dignity is

The Matthew Principle means 
decline builds up exponential momentum
and so does rising up
so take small steps towards rising up

Hold onto goodness
A parachute of hope takes air into its sail
String together days of progress into a vast wave

London swallowed me up and it’s about to spit me out
(again)