before, and a bourgeois love story…
Before… all of us have waited at crossings and as the trains pass in front of us, almost envied the railway workers as they look down on the trains from the signal box. The red lights flash and sirens sound, warning us of the danger passing in front of us. A part of us recognizes that the envy we feel is an illusion, that the railway workers do not see what crosses in front of them in the same way as we do they watch the pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses and trains pass in front of them, watching and working throughout their shift. Where we see the singularity of the crossing as an event. Happily observing the chaos and the charm of scene as a squirrel runs across the tracks as the train fails to run it over, the entropic signal box, the signals, the tracks, the tarmac between the rails, and the buddleia bushes with their blossoms cover in common butterflies. They see none of this merely seeing their shifts passing. Nor can they know how we feel as we wait in our vehicles, on the wrong side of the crossing, our journey to the sea interrupted by the Southern Railways electric trains as they pass towards some unromantic destination. We are in the spider, the roof has been down since we left the motorway, watching the train pass, a world passing by, peculiar images in the framed carriage windows, children waving, men in funereal suits, an attendant pushing a refreshment trolley, a school party in red blazers with teachers watching them intently, ticket inspectors chatting before… only later as we stand on the ferry watching the island approach do we land again in the world beyond the singularity listening in the sunshine to a man explaining how to make braised lamb and couscous. Sometimes a ferry, or a crossing is so memorable that it suggests another world — as when the ferry pauses in mid channel waiting for the destination berth to clear or when a train pauses at the level crossing and a lady who will vanish stares out at you and a tall cooling tower rises above the train in the distance. A tower that you will not see again until you are on the ferry returning across the water… On the way back. They stop at H. for a few hours to have lunch and wait for my connection, he waits on Marienstrasse and sees a small cemetery and park where Lucy (or is it Lotte) is buried, supposedly a great bourgeois love story but which will be utterly forgotten when our societies become debourgeoisfied after this end of the world. At the moment however its still a famous story which literate people are supposed to read but which they probably don’t. The cemetery is a small park, full of mature sweet, chestnuts, oaks and plane trees, there are families sitting around and playing, office workers drinking take away teas and coffee in waxed cardboard cups. Some are in meetings discussing some irrelevant financial project or other. There is a man sleeping in the sunlight, sunbathing in the midday sun. A few homeless people sit in one corner eating some food discarded from a local cafe. There is a sense of mortality in the air, finitude falling from the sky at the finite velocity of light. Lucy’s grave is a square stone box with a cross engraved on the head with an exotic decoration that once had words inscribed around it, forgotten and faded now. Only the date of birth and death being legible. Finitude is indifferent to passion and desire, they after all are dependent on finitude. It cares nothing for affairs of the heart, and instead reduces every being to the constructed order to which they appear to belong, perhaps to their gender,class, race and caste. They will vanish and only the text remains. In this constructed life Lucy, the one who is entombed here, smiling at him, was married to the Samuel, had his children and shared his life, but only loved Susan. In the present she would have entered a civil partnership with her and been happier. Samuel would have married his secretary whom he loved for decades and been happier as well. These lives which are so much more interesting and humane, than the deeply bourgeois novel that has documented them and is regarded as a classic, bourgeois novels always present the awfulness of existence in romantized and tragic terms which he has avoided reading for most of his life. It’s a long trip back, they drive across half of France to St Malo, where they stay in the Sofitel overnight. Eating in the hotel restaurant and talking about the strange non-european TV series they are looking forward to watching when they get back, the books they have been reading as they wandered around the hills and towns of southern Germany idly following the footsteps of _____ _______ . Neither of them was comfortable with the german culture they had just left behind.
But here, after this nostalgia for a past that may never return has passed, I return from my longish walk down into the edges of the farmland to the southwest of here, past the orchard and along the empty footpath, past the small council bungalows, inhabited by the downsized old age pensioners and back into the outer suburbs. Full of british arts and crafts housing stock and the occasional modernist house… step, step, step avoiding the other people walking in the other directions. The regime of work has changed, somethings have vanished entirely,
