For the lovers of the 1971 American road movie Two Lane Blacktop - me - tarmac and cities are the stuff of existentialist dreams. From a montage of films, photographs, writing and music ideas of motion and place swirl in your mind long before you - if you ever do - arrive at your destination. These places, real and imagined, shape an understanding of not just the world around us but also the world within us.
This last year the streets and spaces of London have never been more empty and yet I’ve never felt more a part of them. The closed drab doors and unwashed widows, the padlocked shutters and dusty cars, the half-open gate, the drawn curtains with the dim glow of a life being lived elsewhere. All the clouded layers of noise and bustle and distraction have faded like the early haze of a hot summer morning.
There is a lazy narrative served up weekly in Sunday magazine back pages. It is one of escape from the teeming and claustrophobic city to the open and spacious countryside. To be away from everyone and everything is our natural state, a return to the serenity of the Garden. There, absence will allow us to be who we really were meant to be. Though the stillness of the countryside is not one of the future but of a past; one where space is not inviting but constraining. Heavy with the weight of received opinion and deference all choices have already been made, especially for an outsider.
Two cyclists @ Coal Drops Yard, Kings Cross
First lockdown
I went on the Overground to Hoxton last week to get some spray paint. In this now empty city crossing a deserted street or looking out through a train or bus window - the sitting, the detachment in being transported - creates a reverie where we are free to look, to explore, and to dream. As Susan Sontag wrote, we become a tourist in other people’s reality and so, eventually, in our own. And now it is the very absence of those people which allows cities to reveal themselves to us and then us to ourselves. Drawing a space where everything seems possible, the quiet and exhilarating stillness becomes our inner landscape. Like the dry autumnal leaves on an empty tennis court, for those who have ever spent their day staring out a window at nothing in particular or felt the warmth of the sun in an Eggleston photograph, then this is what dreams, and we, are made of.