Taken by God and Was No More

The smaller galleries and museums were taken with their contents barely saved. Entire movements and historical finds never to be seen or known again. An architectural flourish that never left a certain façade of a certain building of a certain street in that gone city.

The peri-urban bleed, suburbia and greenbelt suddenly met with all those who leave, their myriad accent, a pace and lifestyle born of those stack bricks and panes of glass, those canal pathways and cobble stone old town.

Some never come to know and are taken too. A full teacup on the side table as they wonder why the estate is so quiet now. Pigeons and robins and foxes and squirrels and rats wonder at the emptiness, where the usual torrent of street-feed has gone, before sensing that impending oneness and making haste.

A vague Pompeii, a quiet Hiroshima, a cold Dresden, a dark Pripyat, it is just gone. A new blank spot on a map. Tags and graffitoes with street in-joke remain in scant few memories.

For a few days the roads busy heading out, and then it was just those vehicles that couldn’t start or had been anonymous a while that remained. An entire neighbourhood of terraces with just one turquoise Robin Reliant to count. A dilapidated van on an industrial road ending in a dockyard. A people carrier raised off the workshop floor with no wheels in a garage with the shutter down.

It all had to be left there.

And then.

Ed Tom Bell Gets to Grow Old.

Image from IMDB

Under that hat a late solemn mind cooking.

Taking them in. It seems from a glance,

an expression, shifting hands,

that they wish to eat the world whole.

no reason to it

just as certain as a turn in orbit

and the sun sets its heat off Texas 'til another day.

The things he sees in a lifetime

in no way helping with answers

and his fear finding only

the saint that he married

to protect him with love and light.

His daddy has passed on by on horseback.

He looks at the relics of his

Uncles house amidst the mess;

he will inherit such a seat

an old man, an old country man,

to sit in a chair and hear out 

a worn-down sheriff yet to step up

and give answers 

that draw in a dark

and edge the boys dreams

afterwards.

Along the Avon & the Chew: Bristol- Keynsham- Woollard

-Walk past the traffic that's always on Blackswarth road to get down onto the Avon river path. Someone's dumped a 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks' boardgame near the path entrance and the quiz cards are scattered everywhere.

-In front of me are two guys maybe on a walking date, or a walk the morning after a succesful date. One describes to the other growing up in Burnham-on-Sea; "Everything's grey, the estuary's disgusting, and it kills people every year... there's three lifeboats named after drowned little girls... It's all very melancholic."

The Little one yaps at every passing dog on the river path.

-As soon as I started down Blackswarth Road I have 'No Diggity' by Eminem in my head.

-Trees in form of towering majesty against the blue sky. Blossoms in bursts. sounds of tiny wings and river babble. willows cracked, fallen, surviving regardless where they may. barely half an hour in I buy a coffee, a compulsion more than a need. something to hold and sip and pretend for a minute I'm strolling lightly.

View South-East across the Avon coming up to Hanham lock from Crewes Hole

-Squabbling and chattering from the heronries perched atop the absolute height of some willows on the south side of the river, one of the birds nestled against the bone-white of a standing dead ash vulture-like.

-The sudden alienness of a poplar plantation, tall and straight and ordered among the lively tumble of green all around. I'd always thought there something abandoned feeling about this small plantation. There's a ruined building close by as well.

The Small Plantation of Poplars, Incongruous with its wild woodland surroundings.

-After listening to a podcast series about the Norman conquest of England, I look around at the fecundity & fertility of these hills and rivers and see what the Norse, Normans, Danes, German tribes, Romans, all came for; there own lands lacking or suffering. Across the river a new build estate on a flood plain; this is what we've done with it.

Along the Avon after Hanham lock.

-Walking under a bridge in Keynsham I see a puddle of dog piss and 'Dog Dribble' by Getdown Services gets stuck in my head.

-I take the unfamiliar path alongside the river Chew out of Keynsham, passing through a mausoleum-like converted mill where my footsteps echo and there are myriad signs forbidding entry.

-Burble of the river consumed by the quiet of the fields between Keynsham & Compton Dando. Just birdsong, flies, pheasant calls, all birds, trees creaking, the very distant and occasional sound of rushing cars.

The path lined in the golden flowers of buttercups.

-I'd previously done this walk in maybe June or July, and am now struck by all the May flowers. Pinkish haze of a patch of flowering grass in a meadow.

-For a brief moment the path takes a dive up out of the sun-baked fields into a woodland. I'd been here before, and a lot of trees have come down since then. Heavy smell of garlic, as the woodland floor is covered in wild garlic, giving out scent to the air as it goes to seed and wilts in the dry sun. I hear mice rustle & squeak away in the undergrowth at the sound of my footsteps.

A willow completely falling apart, exposing the heartwood.

-Coming downhill into Woollard I pass through a sheep paddock. It is the closest cropped field of this entire journey, nothing left to even hint at a meadow. All been cows until now. Then I pass the alpacas sleeping or grazzing at Bell Farm. Radio 4 playing in an empty wood shed with a red massey ferguson tractor. Geese eating grass under an orchard. A couple of geese eating vegetation on the bank of the Chew as I pass over the bridge, like a Ladybird book snapshot, except when I start crossing the bridge they immediately hiss until I'm well away.

Bell Farm alpacas.

Geese in the Chew at Woollard.

-Swim in a pool of the Chew by an old bridge.. It's a lovely, deep cold, felt in the bones and joints. My first river swim of the year. I find a decades old crushed can, with a triangular opening, and the rubber heel of an old boot, still with jack nails, an imprint reading "Fussells of Somerset." 

-Serious blisters starting to set in now. Because I'd set in my head that I was doing this walk in a day rather than making camp anywhere, I had kept to a high pace. If I'd thought I was walking all the next day as well, I would have probably stopped more, taken my shoes off to let my feet breathe and rest, applied plasters as soon as I felt the slightest rub. But no; I just powered through. That being said, I walked the short stretch from the swimming hole in Woollard to the field gate barefoot, and the grassy, earthen path compacted flat by walkers felt extremely pleasant underfoot. 

-A tiny stretch of road is swallowed up in someones private property in Compton Dando, blocking off one foot path from another, meaning that you have to completely circumvent the entire village. It's only small and quite pretty, but still, it doesn't feel right.

Circled in red is the small stretch that is gated off, forcing a complete circumnavigation of the village to continue onward.

-Less notes on the backwards leg. The cold dip in the Chew and the new pain from my blisters quieten my thoughts. I walk up the hill in Keynsham, devour a snickers, and get the train to Temple Meads accompanied by two screaming babies. When I get off the train, my blisters have kicked up the pain a notch, and so the longest feeling stretch become the 10-15 minute walk from Temple Meads to my front door. 

Who sets the tables when there is no one? A note on objects and environs in the 'Silent Hill' franchise

Your character, whether Harry, Heather, James, Henry, or many others, steps over the threshold between worlds; sometimes more than one. In many instances, this horrifying world is now a familiar world in utter ruins. Ruins unwitnessed before; shades of rust and blood spattered and growing where they wouldn't if the hospitals, malls, prisons and apartment blocks you visit now were simply abandoned. In these instances, you understand that this rot and decay is the very nature of these worlds. A mirror that shows too much, perhaps. 

We come to understand that these worlds with their access point in the unassuming town of Silent Hill are directly influenced, even manifested, by a characters psyche. This can create symbolic creatures, inhabit representative locales, and even 'set pieces' in the form of environmental puzzles, art, setting. Puzzles can also have a plot source, often relating to the works and scriptures of the occultist 'Order' who operate in Silent Hill and have a presence in most of the series. 

In this understanding, this ruined world is a set; everything in it, every object, being and colour, is seeking to say something. And yet I find myself distracted with thoughts of ecology; we encounter demonic, abhorrent creatures eating. They have specific dwelling places (easily seen as 'props' of that particular 'set',) that suggest they have habitats. Sometimes these creatures are eating what are recognisably human corpses, (SH2 has some ambiguity as to whether these could also be thought of as 'props'... this isn't about that,) suggesting that unwitting others, residents or visitors to the town have ended up as prey.

Additionally, I am distracted by furniture: The world is just 'The Ruined World', not a world after it has been ruined; by its very nature as a manifestation or reflection it cannot have been anything else. It is historyless. It is wrong to think or believe that the buildings and objects are left over from any prior, different instance of that world; yet there are objects that appear to have been actioned, rather than swept around or dilapidated into place. Doors are blocked off with heavy objects such as wardrobes and other furniture, as if someone blocked them off before you, as if they were there for an event. 'Reflected' rooms may have the furniture laid out understandably, albeit now gross with rot, whereas some will be void of the expected furniture or it may be haphazardly cast about. Who moved it? 

I hope you do not think that I trying to imply any of this is bad design. To me at least, it's jarring and unnerving for these oddities to occur. Why would a supernatural creature with such set dressing as cloth, metal and bandages also exhibit behaviours recognisable to 'normal' biology? Why would environs appear lived in, interacted with, when there is no one else to do so, and actually no existing history to explain it either? Going back to the understanding of this Ruined World as a set, and everything in it a prop or an actor, this is malicious intent to generate further feelings of uncanniness and discomfort. Even the comfort of rules suggested by this world are bent and broken.