At London Bridge the Changes by Windowless Consultant

At London Bridge the changes are the most explicit yet.

I often go for Borough Market, as of course I have to. Less exclusive than Broadway, it lacks the pure Petri interest, but it's still a phenomenon, with many other qualities to replace it of interest to those in the retail trade. I'd do an entry on it but for the urgency.

Something I've often remarked with disquieted, I have to admit to my shame now amusement is how when they knock a building down - or sometimes even a whole block - even if it might be in some area you felt you knew well, you can't for the life of you remember what it was that had been there. For me it's if the shops there were dud it happens, or if there weren't any. I've noticed that even my sense of orientation works like that: they serve as my landmarks, so when the shops lack interest I get lost.

 

But so here I was passing through this bit of Borough and then suddenly that happened in a kind of way. It wasn't that the things were unrecognisable in themselves, but that they were unrecognisable to me, because I'd never looked. They were duds, I'd always felt, and I was, in my line, right, so it was strange to be feeling what I was feeling, but it was something like that some relative I'd always taken for granted had passed away and suddenly I couldn't, not so much tell them I loved them as find out if I could have loved them had I made the chance. The feeling was wrong. There was no need to feel attached to something gone I hadn't even noticed there, and that was the first sign of something untoward.

My immediate response was just to wander, record, absorb the feeling and see where it led.

In places the sense of disaster was so great that I had trouble believing that what I saw was already real, that I hadn't somehow, my orientation compromised by the lack of shops, wandered lost into what was going to happen, or a model of what might.

I was so relieved to see what was clearly an explanation that it took me some time to see it.

Since I'd originally thought of the Renaissance as a vaguely defined phenomenon rippling across Europe at some fairly distant point in the past, that it should be occurring now promised to elucidate much of what had appeared strange to me.

It is a bubble of some sort of chemical accumulations from the inks being dissolved out and then brought down by water coming beneath the plastic covering and gathering greater and greater weight as it comes in a sort of bag effect.

That would be an explanation of the phenomenon as it appears. And yet it is unsatisfactory. To leave it at that would be to ignore, for instance, what I'd already understood but hadn't yet been able to explain. The poster was just making manifest what I'd already grasped, was the point, although I didn't yet know what that was. I could have stayed there standing, watching it descend and enjoyed it somehow, enjoyed simply watching, as though the city deserved it, stood there for however long it should take to land. 

On the other hand, the world in which it was happening would be irretrievably lost if I did, and that, I somehow knew, was the world to which I belonged, a world that I should be joining in order to save it.

I don't yet know what is under threat of that obliteration, but the signals that is is are getting so much clearer, falling so much thicker that I realise that if I don't find out, the loss not only to myself but to the city as a whole will be massive. It is something like the feeling at the gas station. it is again as a feeling associated with things turning into props, but this time I feel I'm getting closer to the source of it, sicne the thing at the heart of it is so directly identifiable with the disaster. There is going to be a disaster. The disaster has already happened, is happening, must be averted.