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I'm currently in the Grass Circle in Royal Park. Uh, and I was meaning to draw and photograph and write and do musical notation, and it's too cold. I've been disallowed from drawing and my hands are like ice picks. So recording seems possible. I'll condemn my right hand, which is holding the phone, to becoming more and more of an ice-blue claw, as the time goes on. I'll just talk for a while. Uh. Even if I sound pretty far away, and probably buzzing in weird ways. I can transcribe this to text later.
The city is very very big from here, and bright. The whole field is quite bright. Surprisingly so. Or maybe not surprisingly if you'd lived in the city. I'm used to places becoming black sheets when the sun's gone. And it really isn't that - it feels like full moon, though there's no visible moon at all. And there's lots of plane flyover as well. Uh, the city, which is looming over like [in] weird, distended blocks - so different from the natural landscape - a lot of the buildings have red flashing lights at the top. To deter planes. Well, not deter. To warn, maybe? If a plane wanted to, I, I don't know if you could stop it. Uh. But some of them flash in unison. And I don't know if they're on the same timespan or just flash in unison when I look because their respective parts of their polyrhythms are finally adding up. But anyway, it keeps flashing. [Sniff]. It's uh - it looks like a big organism flashing bioluminescence. I don't know, to attract krill, or something. In this situation I suppose the people would be the krill. Maybe it's a pretty thing like a whale shark, instead of something frightening, like an anglerfish. If a whale shark was bioluminescent. What I mean is understandable enough, I think.
[Sniff]. There are some bats flying over. There are very wispy clouds. They look like, to me, a very abstract sketch of a sandbank with water around it. [Sniff]. The membranous feeling around the circle that I felt during the day interestingly exists less during the night, which is not what I would've expected. Maybe it's just that the whole landscape now matches the feeling that was inside of the circle to begin with. Anyhow, it's not as present. Whatever was here feels stretched out over the landscape. Not that I think it was necessarily stored here and has been unleashed but, maybe more so this was a place where it stayed through the day.
It's really cold. Really really cold. [Exhale]. [Sniff]. I've just got a kind of a river of mucus and saliva under my mask right now. I'm baking in it. Oh well, reminder of my own humanity in a kind of a warm way. We all have saliva in us. And mucus and spit. And, you know, juice. [Sniff].
There's only a few stars. More than you might see in the rest of the city, but not as many as you might see outside of it. You can see the Southern Cross and the two pointers. And a plane under it - with its own blinking red light. Everything must have a blinking red light. All the cranes have blinking red lights, the Melbourne Eye has blinking red lights. Only I don't have a blinking red light, and therefore I am out of place.
[Sniff]. There's a piece of road, off to the side, away from the city, where there are cars moving back and forth. And it's interesting to watch them because it's a single road and there's no turns, so it's just a linear stream of cars all moving at about the same speed, either forwards or in the opposite direction. Sliding by basically parallel to the field. Their linear line-based movement contrasts the freer movement within the circle. You don't really have a destination here, you don't have a specific place that you're going. You are free to mill about. Maybe that's a unique property of a circle? Something like a square, based on its edges, you feel you can walk from one edge to the other, it makes sense. But on a circle, there's no line to follow. Unless you want to spiral inwards, but even that's a kind of free-flowing motion of its own.
[Sigh]. It's really ice floes out here. [Sniff].
As for what I would've done for the drawing and musical notation, because at least I can describe it, even if I can't draw it. I would describe - musical notation probably would have been smudged over entirely with the grey lead pencil and then I would have drawn little points rising in and out of that, of that smudge. Smudge being the white-noise background of the traffic, slight wind. And the dots being insect sounds or sirens or other unusual noises arising out of that. That probably would have been what I would've done. And for sketches [Sniff], it would have been a lot of noise texture still. It's hard to draw things at night. The lines between them get less distinct. There's slightly spikier things in the foreground, where I can see the grass, but beyond that it becomes indistinct. A smear. I might've tried to play with that: some spikes in the foreground and smears in the background. I might've drawn the clouds, more literalising the idea of sandbelts. I probably would have drawn the circle and then something spreading out from it, with a tent-like point in the centre moving out toward the sides. Showing that absence-of-membrane feeling. Or maybe would've drawn myself in it - in the centre of it - because I'm alone, there's no one here. Uh, that alone in the centre feel. That kind of pleasant outsider-feel. That feeling of being outside of warmth and a house and looking in from the outside. And knowing there's, there's something different about what you're doing. There feels like a sense of clarity in that. Not necessarily always comfort but that's not always something I want. Not something I can always have.
Wow, my hand actually looks sort of blue. [Sniff].
Yeah, the ground is all monochrome grey and black. More than a screen could probably display. Which miffs me, we should have more shades of black and grey, that's better. We should have more shades of every colour. There's a slight blue to it - extremely subtle - silver-blue, grey-blue. [Sigh]. It doesn't feel so deep. It feels, it feels, just sort of a soft depression. Not in the mood sense, in the physical characteristic sense. As if something has been pushed into slightly. It's a, semi-common feeling to parks, I think.
Trams and trains sometimes move by, to the right of the city. Moving along the train-track that travels toward the train station near the zoo. The inside of the trains is warm burnished orange. Not that the internals are, but the lights make it that way, and it's accentuated from out here. More of the outsider outside of the warm interior feel. There's also a massive boarding-house style thing that I can see. It's pretty gaudy in its construction but, it's got more windows too, in the same way. And it stands out in a fairly clear contrast to the interior of the circle. The circle is simple and flat and natural. The boarding-house is big and wrought and complex. And there are terraces and windows and things piling onto each other up and over and, it's a big greebled sort of tesselated cube. [Sniff]. It looks like a kind of slightly different human expression to the sleek tall spires of the skyscrapers over to the right.
Interestingly, the trees aren't pulling much attention. If anything is a black silhouette, it's them. Uh, the circle feels more present.
There's a slight undulation to the grass, a little little bit of wind. But not a huge amount.
There's some stream rising off the top of the children's hospital. Behind a silhouette of a helicopter, behind which or maybe in front of which there is another red light, and to the right of which there is another red light. To the far left of which there are two red lights. Further on, several more flashing red lights.
Can sometimes hear bike spokes as people ride around the circle.
Got some recordings of that.
I heard the church bells earlier.
Okay, and done. Cold hand.