In the city today
> In the city today – Left: Seeds from the tree of heaven, a gift to the Borough of Southwark by socialist mayor Ada Salter in the early 20th century, part of her mission to beautify lives of poor people in the docklands. Right: The concourse of Canary Wharf rail interchange This used to be a dock, clipper ships and all. These days, an absurdly towering glass financial district, could be anywhere within the globalised reach of capital. More or less anywhere, then?
> The blog: https://write.as/papers/2025-08-29-four-horsemen-of-activist-habitation This formatting of this version here foregrounds the four-ness. The blog version is 'more literary'. The words are the same.
Life is of course taking its course, and the scheme for expanding my ‘melancholy territory’ exploration ([May 17th](https://write.as/papers/melancholy-territory-activism-in-deep-time-and-life-in-the-collective), [June 1st](https://write.as/papers/the-scope-and-reach-in-here-and-out-there), [June 11th](https://write.as/papers/exploring-in-four-phases), [June 18th](https://write.as/papers/patterning-this-paper-and-a-conceptual-weave)) is on the back burner. An interregnum. ‘Four horsemen’ are riding: familiars. Let them occupy this blog space today then.
- **A new-old organising commitment** (in the digital-institutional landscape) has swum into the pool, and it seems practically wise to step into its emergent flow. It will call for a lot of time and attention, and will pull on the heart and mind with powerful force, to the detriment of other commitments. - The tension between relationships with the planet and relationships between people is heightened. The pivot seems to be the investments of energy(ies) that they call for, and the relentless cycling of energies: a building, magnificent curling-solid eminently-surfable wave, a churning dragging aftermath of chaos and dissolution. - A fresh, deepened dimension of meditation practice is tentatively offering itself, in a way that is fugitive but seems strategically to matter – especially in relation to a capacity to inhabit the ‘energy’ and commitment stuff with some kind of equanimity and sufficiency. - And the everyday demands of everyday living – eating, shopping, maintenance, companionship, family duty, blood ties, tenderness – always are pulling and pushing on space for reflection and choice and ‘big-picturing’ The journey into the day remains unmappable.
And – I have to say, I would be ashamed to leave them out – there is a flotsam of traces and scraps of joy. The scarp slope of the North Downs in the embrace of sun and a picked bunch of wildflowers. The Simon Bolivar orchestra and a thousand delighted voices: ‘Otro! Otro!’. Kisses, a tender embrace. A document well figured and well placed.
For a couple of years the four have recurrently been asking for resolution, or resolve, or reduction: as fields of commitment and engagement. And here they are again this day, this week, mobilised and vocal and – as interior movements – inescapably forceful. - The political life, of movements and *formations* and organising (the field of **we**: formación work). - The deep-historical life of legacy and the grandchildren’s grandchildren, ‘everything in the commons’ and the planet, beyond the scale of knowable community (the field of **region**: stewarding work). - The powerful interior-ambient life of affective *forces* and affiliations and structures of feeling, the heart-mind and the dhamma, greed aversion and delusion (the field of **in-here**: care work). - And inescapable domestic life, **here**: the field of subsistence work – shelter, sustenance, rest, touch, taste, provision, sufficiency, cohabitation . . immediately present material *forms* of habitation and dependence, rippling inexorably outward and outward, pouring inexorably in and in: with the rising of the sun, with the rising of the moon.
Better write about them, then, these four!
On the other hand: maybe not. It’s early afternoon, not yet 2 o’clock. It would take a long time to open the space into which these feelings, sensations, vistas might walk, and to then walk them gently and expansively on to the page and to weave them as threads into a fabric of sufficient – perhaps beautiful – text.
The impulse to speak their presence is met. The mapping of present landscape is sufficiently done; a sufficient response to the day’s waking disorientation has been made. A snapshot of an urgent-sustained enquiry can be shared now: with my lover-companion, my therapist-companion also; and Dear Reader, just a waymarker and a holler, in case you’re here in this landscape somewhere.
Vale! Buona giornata. Is the sun up yet, where you are?
And this afternoon I can step – which? – into mapping and provisioning the territory of the emergent digital-domain project; the manifest activist moment, modernist clock ticking. - The work of formación. - Later: touch and cooking. - Later, meditation. Another day: son, granddaughter, lover’s grandson. - Through the window: trees - ‘Trees of Heaven’- strikingly offering festoons of seed still on the branch, leaves not yet yellowing but soon to fall to earth, revealing sky, clouds, rain, moon.
Grandmother moon takes another turn, the waves wash up on all the beaches, recede, render themselves froth.
Ted Hughes wrote: The page is printed. Indeed.