1.58pm, San Francisco

6.53pm, Sydney

A hypothetical minor graph...

Julie

4.48pm, Sydney

I said I would carry this for you but now i am not sure if it is for you or me...



Julie and Richard in Sydney

9:05pm London SE22

I'm searching for a new song. Some new energy to fill out our time. Our investment is 3:37. The best that I can do in this time is 3:34. I have lost us 3 seconds. It was a gamble that I was willing to take. I think it was worth it. I think we can stretch it out, push it over the edges. She had magic in her hands. She could make anything grow. Magic in her hands...

Just hold your breath a little longer inbetween. Let it out a little slower. Just once, and we'll make it back. This house always wins. She had magic in her hands. She could make anything grow. Magic in her hands...

Suck in that air, and blow on those die. Those lucky die. Shake them off with a kiss and let our fortune take its turn. Set sail for pastures new. She had magic in her hands. She could make anything grow. Magic in her hands...

Where to now...?

10:38 am, Sydney

Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of words un-edited:
Sitting, what the hell, these obstacles!
But I found this pony and he was so sad.
Discarded in the lane-way
But he never played with the big cats or intimidated the main man.
But what a sound he had made because he actually is very wise
Knows everything
In silence
Yellow mane, waterfall down
Reaching below to stretch up
No trusting but much belief
Shadows on the floor remind me of the speckles on the flank
Together with the dreams that keep re-occurring and telling me something that I have forgotten
Or need to remember from the past…

7.16pm Melbourne

There is an exhilaration, a sense of play and a freedom that comes from not being in the place that is usually “home”. Add a dash of Spring and a glass or two of alcohol and you have a buoyant cocktail. I am in Melbourne and it seems that all I have to think about is creating and generating work with a dash of critical questioning, no other commitments. I walk the freshly washed early evening streets, everything sparkles and there is a promise, a jewel hidden round every corner. That one song I keep on my mobile greets me and urges me on. Colourful hats and whimsical fabrics laugh at me from shop windows. I would never wear such a thing but the frivolity of my mood taunts me, saying “come on – it could be fun! You can do anything!” There is an energy, at the moment, that is very much about living fully, no half measures, no undue compromise! This has been fuelled, once again, by the ever-present spectre of immortality. Life lost and life taking its final curtain call. The players having strutted their stage brilliantly, brightly and with inspiration. May we all aspire to this! May I aspire to this and never self censor a moment based on judgement by another.

5:03pm The Castro, San Francisco

I have bought a book of knots.  An instruction manual.  A diagrammatic narrative on holding things together.  A short story on the ins and outs of taking two previously distinct entities, and binding them. 

Let's wrap this one up...

I am casting out a line (as I did once before), and I am closer than I can believe.  I am pondering the possibilities of  being in two places at once; touching two surfaces at the same time. 

A knot; 

a fold; 

a double helix.  

I have spent some time now researching the possibilities of sending myself over to you ahead of time; of drained blood, neatly packaged in a second skin, and mailed across the ocean.  This blood saves time.  It holds it tight in every molecule a singing bio-hazard.  Touching two surfaces at the same time.  The space between can no longer be measured by the feet of my long intestine, but instead, by the time it takes for oxygen to burn.  Three minutes: thirty-seven seconds.  How much oxygen can you burn in threeminutes:thirtysevenseconds (if you don't mind the gaps...)?

This is my gift to you, at a time when I know that you are waiting for gifts.  Wrapped up, packaged, and sealed with a carefully tied bow (a Japanese Parcel Knot).  I offer you threeminutes:thirstysevenseconds of my burnt-out, fucked-up oxygen.  I've heard it said that every breath of air on Earth has been breathed before and will be many thousand times again.  Recycle it, and use it how you will.

Richard.x

7:41pm, The Mission, San Francisco

10.46am Newtown Sydney

The familiar intro kicks in, I feel strangely at home. This song has become a marker, a stable, the one sure thing that will be there every month. I take a big deep breath in and out. The stop point. Oddly, the lyrics have become a bit like a mantra and whenever I listen I feel like everything will all work out no matter how chaotic. I do think about you, Richard, your journey in this time, the song that is silent. So I send this out as a bit of a reminder, that to readjust you've got to trust.
x
Julie

3:56pm Downtown, San Francisco

Walking the streets of a strange city, I understand that I am alien.   I am homeless in my own country, and between addresses in this new state.  I spent last night with a famous border crosser.  My borders have all been breached.  I've kept telling you about this new place that I've been looking for, this space for something new to grow.  I think I've found it.  It's ground zero.  I am handed the simplest of forms, with the most basic of questions, and I don't have the answer.  I'm in the middle of a fog, with sunlight beating down.  Distinctions that used to be safe are melting on a blurred skyline and a hot tarmac.  I talk to strangers.  Most of them are homeless too.  If I close my eyes for just 3 minutes 37 seconds I think I might melt too.  There is no point in keeping your eyes open in a fog, you just have to feel your way through...

r.x

5.20pm Newtown Sydney

The evening sky presents a beautiful magenta slash, could it be a fishbone or a strange beetle? The new moon slither delicately places itself. I am in St Stephens cemetery in Newtown. It is an old cemetery, by Sydney standards and is completely walled in. It is an oasis in the inner city, a quiet place to read, picnic, sleep, contemplate, caress, listen to music. On the way here I overheard a woman say to another in passing - " It was 5 degrees this morning! Disgusting!". I think about that, now, as I listen. "Disgusting", such an odd word to describe a temperature measurement, or maybe the oddness is about where it was placed in the statement, at the end, a definite, a solid opinion, there is no negotiation!
I listen and think about the many years I have come to this cemetery, the visits marking my life, tide markers. This place holds many secrets and not just the ones that lie with the dead and buried. My 1st visit here was when I was 24, it was the middle of the night, I was high on life, inlove and on acid. My boyfriend, at the time was high on too much scotch. Always one for an adventure, on a whim he had bundled me into a taxi, from the party we had been at, and sped me off into the night leaving the revellers behind. We left the cab in some backstreet, and with suitable melodrama he proclaimed we must approach from here, the view is beautiful! As we walked along, I was floating, suitably distracted by the glow-worm sparks in every dark corner. Then I looked up to see the grand gothic spire from the cemetery church, looming in the night sky. It was quite breath-taking. As we came closer, a suitable hush descended upon us, the streets seemed quiet and deserted, there was a tension as if the air was holding its breath. At the gates, my boy suddenly let out a mischievous chuckle and with a flurry and a turn of his dark cape,raced head on into the darkness ahead. I smiled, I was still on a high, playing the game, unquestioningly following. However, after 30 metres or so the darkness enveloped me, I had no idea the lay of the land, so to speak, I did not know how extensive or large this place was and it was quiet and pitch black. Up till that point, appropriately enough, I had been pouring a length of heavy chain from one hand into the other. I had picked it up at the party and become obsessed with its feel and sound. However, in the stillness of the cemetery, it had started to sound booming and loud. A marker, a beacon for the denizens, that inhabit such nocturnal places. I waited for my boy to jump out from behind a grave, and laugh, hoping to make me scream. It didn't happen. i wandered a bit more, but the unfamiliarity and the aural and visual distortions of the drugs only served to halt my progress. At some point I found solace in a large morton bay figtree. Nestled in its fleshy limb, I waited and waited. A night bird sounded its forlorn chime. I must have stayed put for nearly 2 hours, listening to the occasional screeching cars and shouts from beyond the cemetery walls. I couldn't decide what was scarier, to stay inside here or venture out there. When the cold finally threatened to drag me down into the ground with its icy fingertips, I knew I had to leave. Plucking up more courage I prepared myself for the walk home, alone.
I survived that night, and my boy did come home not long after, when large droplets of rain had fallen on his face and woke him from his drunken slumber upon his favourite gravestone.
As the song comes to a close, I think, I never did find out which stone was the favourite gravestone of that fateful evening. Now, I have a selection of my own favourite gravestones, places to sit or lie or picnic or seduce. Not to mention the special grave, host to a thriving beehive, whose delicious pungent heady scent hangs in the air on those warm summer evenings as I lean over to kiss my lovers lips.

x Julie

9.32pm Nottingham

I'm thinking about anchors. Y'know, big, rusty, wrapped in seaweed and busty mermaids, held in burly seaman's arms. Tagged with worn out ropes, there's nowhere to go but out. Or down. When are they useful, and when do we just cut them loose and sail on out? Or down.

I'm thinking about our track. Y'know, 'our song'. A kind of anchor that we drop every month, wherever we are we stop and chart our position by the clank of its rusty metal against the seabed. I don't hear it anymore, but I still wait for the waves, the ripples. And I wonder now about the distance still to travel, the gaps between the ripples.

I'm trying not to think about anything. I'm going with the flow. I'm skipping those ripples and surfing in those gaps. I'm treading water that's yet to be mapped. Those places that we talked about, those spaces for something new to grow...

Richard.x

Sydney Central 8:01am

The music plays...
I have my headphones this time.
It is wet and cold and winter. The rains have brought floods less than two hours north.
I watch the rain come down, I watch the cars go by and I look up at the clock atop Central Station, this is one of the older buildings in Sydney. As I peruse the scene, I do that thing that I often do, I pretend I am observing it for the first time and that this is new and I could be somewhere else in the world. It could be London, Prague, Brussels, Amsterdam, Madrid. Or it is Sydney and I have arrived here for the first time, taking in this view with the anticipation of a traveller, an explorer, a navigator.
I listen to the words of the song, it is funny they are starting to really speak to me now, take on a new importance, this is what I have been given to take care of and explore and navigate through, these bars these beats these lyrics.
Many people have asked me what was the song that Richard decided to play for the last time, What is this song that I have committed to listening to every month for a year. A friend asked, what was it about this song, the lyrics that so moved me when Richard played it for the last time. To all of these queries I have declined to reveal the song, for in truth, I would not have been able to tell what the song was at the time or its lyrics, for it was not the song that moved me, but the profound action of choosing to let go. The action of choosing an ending. The releasing of something that brings joy to oneself. Symbolic of the many endings, last times and little deaths we witness along our way.
So now as I board the bus, a traveller, and it departs Central, the last strains of the song play and I find it fascinating that I am moving closer to it.

love Julie
x

10:01pm Nottingham

I set the timer on my mobile phone and watch the seconds count down. I can still match the seconds to the memory of the song, but I wonder how long this will last. How much is left, and how much is left to change? 0:04 - beat. 1:27 - a syllable in a word I used to know. 3:13 - time is running out. Time is r u nn i n g ooo u t. .. What will come to fill that space, when time has run out? Will it be you? I propose the only certainty is that it won't be me. That it can't be Me.

I am at home. I'm leaving soon. This project somehow helps me to understand what I'm leaving behind, and the possibility of what I'm coming to.

I'll let you know when I get there.
Richard

6.29pm Prague

At 6.29pm, sitting by the banks of the Vltava, I played that piece of music. I don't have my headphones for my mobile with me, so I had to play it through the speaker. Just a few seats up a small stall holder was playing some disco on his tinnie ghetto blaster. It made for an interesting merge. In front of me, across the river the setting sun balanced above the Prague Castle and the shifting clouds kept creating that evening burst effect that you see in so many classical paintings, just waiting for some iconic symbol or valkerie to appear to the sounds of Wagner, or some such, but that is a little way off what I am listening to, possibly a minor thing.
I must admit I am a little emotional at this point having just stepped out of the Pinkus Synagogue, a memorial listing on its stark white walls, the 77 297 names of the Bohemian and Moravian jewish victims of the Nazis. Upstairs is an exhibition of drawings by the children that were held in Terezin a town/concentration camp, a "model" holding pen of sorts, north west of Prague. These drawings were encouraged as a way of self expression in response to the oppression around them. Most of these children did not survive, being transported east to Auschwitz. I know this history, I know the facts, and I know there are atrocities and genocides that continue to plague this world, however it never ceases to amaze me that when faced with the memorials and documents of this time, again and again it still leaves me gutted.
So then it is sun and a gentle river and an epic sunset and a crazy song and lyrics reminding me that yes, it is all transient. Transient, yes, but during that transience marks are made and excavations follow.
nazdravi
Julie