daisies (life in the west 8)
I used to count things […] Outside the window of the first floor office where I am typing this, there is a field of daisies and buttercups. Though the field is finite, reaching to the bank of trees and hedges that surround it on all sides, still the number of flowers is uncountable, though finite. Perhaps the meadow flowers are happy in the still morning air; they are brightly dressed in their white and yellowness. Only their colourfulness distinguishes them from the green grass of the meadow. The counting of daisies in a meadow was the most restful activity imaginable. One summer I was employed as a counter in a conservation office, we would mark out a number of metre squares and count the number of daisies in the squares every day for a two week period. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. Leaning out of an office window on the second or third floor and counting the heads of the people on the street, those in suits who are moving, those standing still, those smoking in doorways, leaning against glass walls. Counting the panes of glass in the building opposite, the lamp posts, the paving stones, the number of corners in the windows, the books on a bookshelf. Studying the flows of traffic on the junctions of city streets. The traffic flows as the rivers once did, what causes the tides in the otherwise uphill flow of the traffic? It’s not influenced by the moon as the rivers were. The flows of capital are caused by other strange attractors.
I do not know when I stopped counting, perhaps it was merely yesterday or a decade ago. I adopted technologies to escape the neurosis, software on my phone which counts things in a picture or a frame, GPS trackers that count my steps, that count and log the numbers of people ringing the doorbell, counting the daisies in a photograph, the numbers of cars we pass whilst driving down the road. That name the strange attractors, charm, spin, free-will, currents. I have stopped counting things, why would I when the technologies exist to liberate my mind from the act? The algorithms have removed the necessity for us to learn to count things. The code freed me from the existential and destinal questions that derived from this act of counting that conditioned my life, our lives, cultures, metaphysics, our minds. The algorithms eradicated them. Did the neurosis, the quasi-narcissism die with the technology ?
The office is dark, only the pool of light that is my office, outside the road flows. I will be leaving it for the last time soon. It took me 500 days to prepare to leave it. Late night planes descend into the airport a few miles away to the east of the city. Counting is a necessary extravagance (811, 812,813…) which alone can ease our prosaic sojourns in this world, turning our daily journeys into dances. Perhaps on other days they are operatic, sopranos telling you they love you. The pleasures of love are in the counting, the political act of passing along a street waiting to hold her hand. She has spayed your hand with anti-bacterial spray, laughing, without this fluidity , this love would be a simple movement of a machine. (3129 characters.)
