Here is the present moment, and all of us contained within it.
You are but a body, she said.
Time toughened skin stretched taut.
A delicate but strong internal structure.
Our bodies and the sensations that pass through them,
are all that we are.
All that we have to make sense of the world,
outside of ourselves, outside of our control.
We must begin by grounding ourselves in the present moment,
by bringing attention to the sensations of the breath,
entering, and leaving the body.
Stay with the breath, she said.
Stay with the present moment.
Try not to be drawn into past failures or future plans.
The mind will wander, she said.
That is what the mind does.
Acknowledge where the mind travels to,
and then gently but firmly, time and time again,
return your attention to the sensations of the breath, to the present moment.
On the next breath, she said,
take a lung full of air and guide it down the furthest end of a limb.
Breathe into this point of the body, she said.
And out from it.
What physical sensations are there in those nerve endings?
Perhaps you feel the rush of cool air passing?
The touch of a material cloaking your skin, a tingling or persistent itch.
Perhaps you feel nothing at all,
and that is absolutely fine.
A man from the council came and stood in the library foyer.
He asked people how they would like the funding cuts to be delivered.
She said that's like being asked which limbs you want to cut off first.
If you feel a difficulty in any part of the body, she said.
Breathe into it, accept its presence,
but do not be drawn into your feelings about it.
We must accept that everything is temporary.
Feelings, thoughts and emotions are just fleeting moments,
coming and going, flooding past like cars on the road.
A steamboat chugs past, backwards towards things
remembered or read, felt, smell, sense or heard of.
Here comes all of our present moments past,
extending backward or forward embedded in this plot of land,
coming and going, coming and...
Here is Patrick's Island, the marshland and all its inhabitants.
Here comes Mr. and Mrs. Bundle, the asparagus farmers
and Tom Tug the waterman.
Here comes the night soil boat from the city
filled with rich urban manure.
Here comes the common land, the collective workers, the sick,
coming to Battersea to be cut for the symbols.
Here comes Sir Thomas More, who owns the land now.
Here comes More's tenant farmers calling out to him "More, More,"
but More can't hear.
He's on another island writing about another island where inhabitants behave,
as he writes in the chamber pots made of gold.
Here comes...
There goes the boat back to the city,
loaded with Battersea artichokes,
nine elm's melons and bundles of asparagus grown
huge in the night soil.
He comes the industrial revolution.
Morgan Crucible, the glassworks, the steel plants.
Here comes 160,000 new neighbors, workers wash.
Here comes the house, bricks, mortar, the house.
A home comes Jessie shouting to her father, the captain up on the bridgeboard.
Here comes the railway.
Nine Elms station.
There goes Jessie's boat, all the boats, the boatyard, the Waterman.
Here comes to Albert Palace, a steel skeleton on a carpet of broken glass.
Here comes the city's rubbish, the first electric street lighting.
The juncture of things yet to come.
Here comes the Battersea Tangle, the waterworks,
sending possible messages to our neighbors down elephant and castle.
There goes the waterworks.
Here comes Dream City, an illuminated tower of electric light.
There goes Dream City, left on a page in a box, in a dream.
Here come our Chelsea neighbours from over the river,
hungry for power.
Here comes the power station.
Right here, jobs for life.
Our Chelsea neighbours have that power.
A war, half their clean air.
More, have the valuable houses.
The women, we hold the source of their power.
The thick hair, the hastily built homes.
Here comes Jessie, looking on as Queen Mary visits, admiring her hat.
Here come the world-famous artichokes of Battersea,
something like a Jerusalem, but there goes the railway station.
Here comes the festival of Britain pleasure gardens,
leisure, the weekend, more.
Here comes the first council estate, a higher life, better, more sanity.
There goes the house, bricks, morta and roll.
The Riverside waste plant.
Shipping the waste from uptown, down the river, out the city, burry it.
There goes the farmland, the pigs, the cows, the sheep, the nine elms melons,
the asparagus, the Battersea artichokes.
There goes jobs for life.
More.
Here comes the families from uptown looking for a place by the park.
There goes the steel plant, the glass works, the workers.
Here comes old money.
There's certain types of cafe, the estate agents, the shops.
The shops we used to run a chain all over the country,
until we realized that we only needed one,
in a place where enough people had more than enough money
to buy a few extra bikes for poaching around on,
to take down to their cottage by the sea.
There goes the council estate,
the market, the post office step [inaudible 00:05:41].
There goes the weekend, leisure more.
Here comes a new market.
Here comes a future haunting the present.
Here comes the present moment,
future plans, or re-enactments of the past.
Here comes the railway again, resurrected, glass and steel structures,
towers of illuminated life, power, new life, more,
better, sooner, higher, but for who.
She said the mind may wander.
So that is what the mind does?
Acknowledge where the mind has been and turn your attention to the area
of the body in which we are currently focusing, she said.
Let yourself be with what you find there.
I feel nothing.
No sensations of breath or body.
I shut down years ago.
I can't even be sure I still have all my limbs.
We are not looking to make things better, she said.
Not looking to fix anything or make judgments.
We are practicing being with
our bodies response to exterior conditions.
We turn towards difficulty, by being with it, by breathing into it.
We turn our attention to our points of contact with the solid ground,
supporting us, holding us up.
But the ground feels soft beneath me.
I feel, hear, smell water creeping slowly in.
There is a dampness in the air around here.
A dampness that no amount of plastering and painting
and underfloor heating will ever get rid of.
I know the water rising, the ground growing soft beneath me.
I keep my eyes firmly shut.
She said we cannot control the conditions in which we live and work,
and only focus on ourselves,
the internal responses of our bodies to exterior forces.
All around me, I see people at war with their own bodies,
acting out the change they wish to see within the world
on their muscles, faces, skin, hair,
each body and island containing all that it can and cannot be and do.
She said I should ground myself in the present moment.
Concentrate on the sensations of my body.
I am now nothing but body.
A dormant physique once honed by activity, now vacant behind the eyes,
a vessel to be filled with the projected fantasies of others.
I am no longer the source of power, but its frozen deity.
I'm not sure if I'm inside the plan, a tolerated inconvenience,
or outside of it, looking in or out or up or away, to the side, the past.
I'm too large perhaps, or too useless,
encumbered by my excessively bodily body.
I clumsily manoeuvre my way through their visions.
Never as polished or as smooth as them.
Their passage through life is seamless, smiling, confident.
My vision is too blurred. My hand too shaky.
I am all too visible or too real.
Aware of all the eyes upon me, I avert my gaze,
try to shrink back inside my excessive body,
withdrawing from the windows, the doors, willing myself to disappear.
I know there are others like me out there,
empty shells whose names no longer signify the workings within,
but have become a collection of letters pointing to nothing but themselves.
From North to South, to East to Westfield, to East Westfield,
here East, sometimes we are right inside the drawings,
and sometimes we are outside, on the other side of the fence.
She said I just want to find some time this week,
just a couple of hours to go to Costa and sit down, sort my life out.
She said, all these feelings, emotions, thoughts,
are just like trains on a track, passing,
with no need to jump on board.
I look at the words encircling me,
and I can't tell if they are a promise or a threat.
Some speak in a forceful future tense,
others definitively write the future into the present, willing it to arrive sooner.
But if the future is already here, its presence as the present,
announces its own death, future aside at its own hand.
An opening for a new future appears not in the horizon,
but in the present moment,
beneath us, here, on the ground beneath our feet.
I keep my eyes firmly shut,
and return focus to my limbs, the ground beneath.
It is the present moment,
we might be casting our eyes up, traveling the length of each building.
We might be standing perfectly still,
watching towers melt into the marshy ground, not crumbling or crashing,
but silently softly submerging themselves back into the silt.
We let go of the present moment, and sink back into the marsh of the past.
We could have been looking at memories, projections, flights of fancy, or design.
We could have been looking at the symptoms of a mental illness,
disturbed activity, untethered voices, disjointed thought processes,
suicidal ideation.
We could have been heartbroken or relieved or feeling empty, but free.
We could have been rejoicing or longing to return to crawl back into familiar holes.
We could have been all these things and more.
We could have been sitting here in the present moment,
with a sensation of the soft carpet under the toes of our left foot.
We could have been aware of each breath rising and falling in our chests.
We could have been the present moment.
Battersea, the house, the home is gone.
We could have been the water once more
flowing through the underground pipes back out to our neighbors.
They've killed the elephant, captured the castle,
and so we look back again
to find something better than this, more than this,
the ground of the present moment.
Sooner, we could have been building roller coasters,
cementing leisure time.
Weekends, a dream city with stores and aunt Sally's,
an illuminated tower of electric lights.
If this was our new dream, we could have been.
We could have been building Battersea towers,
leisure time, and more.
Skating on ice before ascending in a hot air balloon,
or even an escalate to such great heights.
The top floor of themed craft retail,
with Margaret Thatcher in a personalized hard hat.
If this was our 80's dream,
we could have been building an art gallery,
a temple of culture, or we could have been building
a great stadium, singing in unison, united by our common goals.
If this was our blue shirted dream,
we could have been building office residential.
We should have been office residential.
Workwork, live work.
We could have been office residential again,
and again in all our failed plans
from these endless end times, we could have been.
If this was our present dream, yes, we could have been.
The failures of our past could-have-beens
point only to the possibility of future could-yet-be's
of the softness of solid ground, the shifting value of waste,
the overconfidence of speculative fear.
They say there's not enough power in the area,
to feed the new developments.
They want to erase the riverside waste plant,
burry it underground, but the waste workers refused to go.
On the high street of shops, estate agents, certain types of cafe,
the street cleaners, one Sunday morning,
refused to clean up the night before.
The people out for a sourdough brunch were upset
by the visibility of their own messes,
the work which should have been completed silently
during the hours of their sleep.
They stuck to the other side of the street.
We reveled in the Technicolor vomit piles
in the fast food containers flowing down the high street.
The notes swell, growing larger in volume and in stature,
they climb ascending to infinite heights,
save crotches, and quavering quaver
stacked without restraint, without order.
Building order only from disorder is disorder, our disorder.
We wait for our new power.
Down the road, a new block plummeted in value
as the WiFi reception was horrific, the residents said.
The phone company refused to lay more cable,
the developers were powerless.
We could yet be allowed to crumble and decay,
learn to be with our failures, our ruins, our bodies aging gracefully,
softly sinking southward, surrounded by human activity,
houses of homes.
She said all we had was our bodies,
and at that moment, we did, we are, we have bodies,
time toughened skin stretched taut.
A delicate but strong internal structure,
but the water is rising,
the ground is growing soft beneath our feet.
I let go of the present moment, and fly into all of our futures,
both past and present.
I am, we were, she said.
I know and we could have been.
Yes, we could have been.
The ground is growing soft beneath our feet.