NIGHT 12
After the excitement of yesterday it is a day of maintenance- of workload, house, cameras. We’re at £54,030. It’s slow but still building and we just need to sustain the pace.
Dan’s brother J and Sal have a team meeting of sorts with us over messenger. They have spotted me mentioning them in this journal. They were surprised I didn’t go straight into the global nature of this crisis. Sal is from Maldives – facing a physical and existential emergency with the imminent threat of disappearance. 80% of its 1,190 coral islands are less than 1m above current sea level. Looking at cartographic projections of future sea level rises is to see a map of destruction, death, mass migrations, survival and adaptation. Maps say a lot.
From terra aqua to terra firma or perched on top of it, we’ve decided there are only so many words for damp so we’ll stop describing the weather. Well, I won’t as it is an important preoccupation, but on top of that we’ve decided on other rooftop activities. Before we decided to sleep on the roof we knew we wanted to do some rooftop action both to pre-empt and then celebrate the arrival of rooftop solar. It was a question mark what that might actually be but now it is being and becoming. As this exercise in endurance and elevation continues we need some moments of light and beauty beyond the banal. There was always an idea of messages from the rooftop - postcards from the edge (of the roof). This has been amplified by others seeing the shout from the rooftops, circus friends talking of lofty rigs and Gina sending a lullaby. We will invite people to this rooftop to sing, to read, to shout out. We are here.
There is a sign propped on the window ledge downstairs saying HOME - one part of the currently dismantled card board sentence ‘every home a power station.’ I think of what home means. Of our home planet. Our habitat. The pandemic forced us all to get used to being at home - where work and domestic boundaries blurred and we began to think differently about where we live and what it means to be here. The T S Elliot quote resonates: ‘And the end of all our exploring will be arrive at where we started and to know that place for the first time.’ This knowing is always in process. People and places adapt and shift like islands in an archipelago - some things sedimented, others cast adrift. This project grew out of this home place. The need to transform it, not through cosmetic improvements or Marie Kondo clearance techniques but to make it an ever evolving living work. My friend laughs every time she enters saying it’s like a stage set shifting to accommodate each phase. She’s an anthropologist and explores the materiality of dwelling in sites of conflict or post conflict, ideas of citizenship in flux, of the political, social and psychic effects of invasion by violence and war. Happy that this is not the case here and aware of how fragile home really is, our home becomes planning, performance and meeting space and, now we’re on the roof - a framework for sheltering and holding up a vision of what home can be for us all.
A headline appears saying ‘Beast from the East’ with predictions of 4 inches of snow. That will be interesting up here. However further research shows the Met Office rebuking this speculation saying there is no expectation of this though colder drier weather is coming. That would be good. Clear skies and crisp sleeping bags. We receive constant comments about solar panels not working in the UK. That there is no sun here. Photons travel through clouds. We don’t live in artic darkness.
Someone has offered to film with their drone. I love this bird’s eye view of these streets. The children (and me) spend hours of google earth exploring this perspective. The pigeons that line the rooftops were once used in early forms of aerial reconnaissance – aluminium cameras strapped to the breasts of WWI spy birds. As we think of our dream rooftop guests and visions I think of a local falconer. I would love to meet a peregrine. I fell in love with a raven called Loki and any excuse to work with corvid or falcon is good enough for me. Sparrow hawks do hunt these suburban gardens – we witnessed the carnage of this in a pile of blackbird feathers and blood. This summer we thought our eyes were playing tricks on us when we saw the vast wingspan of a bird of prey riding the thermals above the parched football pitches. Eagle! We thought we must be mistaken but the twitching twitter feeds confirmed it. Eagle sightings from Waltham Abbey down the Lea Valley. Where does it build its eyrie? I ‘m glad it hasn’t decided on the nearby chimney stack and that we’ve chosen to camp outside of nesting season as it can get pretty feisty in these skies.
We also haven’t spotted Santa anywhere near the chimneys yet. Why is it said he comes down the chimney? He couldn’t fit down any of these. Perhaps it comes from ancient stories of Odin entered dwellings through their smoke holes at Winter Solstice. The Chimneys only really arrived with the burning of coal – physical monuments to the carbon era.
I look out across the rooftops. I don’t see smoke coming from chimneys but I do see the steam of heating systems rising. Flues and flu season. The avenues of lime trees in the nearby park tower above the houses. They’ve lost their leaves now. For a while they remained a dull brown, their colour seemingly stripped out of them fighting to survive the late summer heat. Sometimes they create havoc – pavements littered with dead bees intoxicated by potent lime pollen. The trees on the street all seem to have different seasons. The one outside our house thinks it is early summer. still green whilst all are bare or glowing amber. Does it tap into some secret elixir. Have its signals gone awry?
The red lights glisten on the cranes in Stratford. The crane drivers have gone home for the day - set to climb the long way up in the morning and sit in their solitary position above the city. Someone has pledged and sent messages of encouragement whilst awaiting trial and possible jail time for also taking a place at height – a member of Just Stop Oil on the M25 gantries. I read an article by the great granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst supporting these climate activists on the right side of history and living with that threat of incarceration. I imagine swapping this 360 degrees urban panorama for a cell. How to stay sane. To breath. To conjure a world you can no longer take part in.
