2024-10-03 12:30:08
Sasha Engelmann
Finsbury Square, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
It is a relatively warm and mild day in London, and people pour out into the streets at lunchtime as I set up for the satellite pass. Yet I am thinking about the wind and it's relationship, provocation (?) or resonance with memory. Writing from the depths of February in Dungeness, Derek Jarman is listening to the wind, observing: "Fragments of memory eddy past and are lost in the dark". The wind is blowing "high in the tower blocks and steeples, down along the river, invading houses and mansions..." He continues: "But the wind does not stop for my thoughts. It whips across the flooded gravel pits drumming up waves on their waters that glint hard and metallic in the night, over the shingle, rustling the dead gorse and skeletal bugloss, running in rivulets through the parched grass - while I sit here in the dark holding a candle that throws my divided shadow across the room and gathers my thoughts to the flame like moths. I have not moved for many hours. Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the early hours, the clock chimes. The wind is singing now".