A cold curtain of rain drew down its own grey light. The city lay, pitifully small, under its monochrome. This photograph, this graven image, this still-born thing: what place is this? And the wind barely picks up at all. And the clouds scowl lower and lower until the monument stands topless behind me. And the sky-reflecting streets throw back the last fogbound hints of daylight.
Time. I have one point upon which I stand. Hard standing. A point of vantage. This is one location where I might, as a god, look down. What I see is a world stripped of its essence. I mean, this place has no heart, for all its engineering. All this shape is just design. So here I stand above a cosmetic cosmos, a unilateral universe, on a promontory that is haunted by lovers, wet with the passing clouds, obscured by the way the world rotates with me outside it. Here I stand and wait, for whatever it is: whatever my bones and soul and streaming blood are crying out for.
Nothing. Two people walk from there to there, a man and a woman. Hand-held and eyes-for-you-only, they walk away in the mist. For them this is romance: it tells their story, sings their tune in each drip of the rain-wet stones, in the far away snake’s-hiss of traffic.
Aloneness is not the same as loneliness. And, God knows, there is enough of that in a city like this. You can feel it in the closes and in the dark pends. This place is full of people struggling with their lack of connection: broken, dislocated people bending under the yoke of being just themselves. Over there, behind the rain cloud, half hidden in the folds of it are high-rises filled with pockets of human bleakness. These were meant to be a great solution for urban living. But no matter how close to heaven these peoples’ souls are lifted the great grey boxes shut them off from God and each other.
I slip myself out from behind this pillar of the Law tower, into the proper rain, and the feeble wind that slopes the wet in a single direction: from the North. I am walking with a military bearing. I have my hands clasped behind me, like a soldier, like some veteran or the lovers who are now gone. Between earth and sky, there is only the monument and me, the fallen and the waking dead. I am myself both loved and lover but, whereas the mass of beings in the street- and tenement-scapes below me are crippled by their loneliness, I am merely alone. Solitary, I have no sense of anything else.
Don't recall where that came from. It had been 20 years since I'd stood on Dundee Law. Then the jets scudded over the city on their way to Leuchars or, was it, Libya? Dundee Law is a place where sky and rain meet and the ground is an irrelevance. People become sociopathic by just standing there.
© BH 2011
Don't recall where that came from. It had been 20 years since I'd stood on Dundee Law. Then the jets scudded over the city on their way to Leuchars or, was it, Libya? Dundee Law is a place where sky and rain meet and the ground is an irrelevance. People become sociopathic by just standing there.
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