(Thoughts) On the Washing Line

My Beloved Washing Line at Home.

Looking back after hanging up laundry on one of the first sunny days in March. The wind catches the sheets and they lift. The gentle movement is transfixing, meditative. The greenery of garden foliage around, the depths of the soft blue sky above. There is a distinct pleasure in hanging up, and seeing, laundry drying on a line.  

I am glad to find that the subject has become a repeated feature in paintings (see here for a wonderful collection.) Perhaps it is the clothing and material itself; the hanging to dry bearing to the sky the worn-in, the laboured-in, each wash a bleaching, hard assault on the cotton. The week's workclothes rid of their imprints and miring. A degree of completeness; a task done, or at least a task in a restful, passive stage. 

It has presumably existed since the invention of human clothing. There are very few acts in the first century of the second millennium in daily life that link ourselves with such early ancestors, enacted by each generation in each place clothes were worn with bare changes made to the act itself. 

The everyman harnesses the power of the weather. Each time the laundry is hung to dry, appreciation and respect is renewed for a shift in the clouds, a gap in the rain, the open and close of the seasons. Like saving rainwater for watering plants, it is of few acts that puts you in relation with the heavens, with the atmosphere.

In modern day society it is also a rare act free of charge, owing no-one. 

Despite all this, gushing about laundry on the line has people thinking me boring, inane, or simple. I can't hear them over the flap of the duvet cover in a late afternoon breeze.

Drying clothes on a tree in Dartmoor. It rained on it all overnight.

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.