rain in winter

Sitting at your desk, pen in hand looking over your notebook and enchanted by the large rain drops streaking across the glass. Rain always hangs around longer than than we would want it to — especially the rain in winter with its cold and heavy drops — it is unwelcome as it falls on the already sodden ground, obscuring the day and placing an unpleasant sheen over the world. It challenges the representation of the day, bringing a new limitation of what can be seen, an obscurity that dulls the day, bringing horizons miserably closer as breathing becomes harder in the cold air…

The water falls in discreet but not unique droplets which become obscured as they fall faster than the eye can see, the never quite vertical fall of the water, raindrops fall through the void carried by their own weight, to begin with they follow parallel paths without colliding and merging. This laminar flow of raindrops gives way to turbulence,which brings the raindrops into contact with one another, leading to vortices in which the atoms combine to form a quasi-stable order. [It was out of such a vortex that our own world was formed, the combinations of atoms arising from chance encounters and remaining held by the regular movement of the flow, until the mutual attractions of gravity took hold.] The rain is sent flying in all directions, the drops scattering with the intricate chaos of a Bach fugue, whilst over there, across the courtyard and through the alleyway into the street and beyond where the hydrogen fuelled coach passes on the way to the Seirra del Fuego, it produces new spaces. Unnamed courtyards, gardens, niches with bee hives, flexible footbridges between rooftops, the paths leading into and around parks, ordinarily these things are hidden from sight, but here they suddenly become obvious in the rain rising to the surface and begin to describe this tiny event, reflecting back on itself until soaked and wet it defines the event itself.

The raindrops (always entropic) falling forms new spaces within spacetime itself, foregrounding another landscape behind this first one which when revealed, displays an industrial landscape that you imagined had long ago vanished, big sheds and warehouses filled with sacks, drums of polluted material destined for vast recycling factories, leaking containers, the steel girders and winches are begining to rust. The cold winter rain makes visible the hidden reserves of the places we live in whether houses, flats or lofts, so that in addition to the infrequently used cupboards and corners, the sound of the rain hitting the windows, drumming on the flat roof takes us into rooms never entered, it takes us just a little further from the surface effects or events, though it does not mean we neglect the surface affects of things, the world as everyday…

The reverse may still be true; the winter rain flows over their nakedness with an icy indifference to whatever meaning we may imagine the objects have. The surfaces of things reveal little of their internals (a fetishist speaks of how long light takes to rise to the surface of the sun, how long water takes to flow down a river), the drumming rain drops refuses a difference between speech and noise, both becoming more obviously ambiguous. Perhaps there is no depth of meaning possible in the language spoken, always perpetually immanent in their ambiguity. The winter rain connects the surface and the depths, falling from the clouds striking infinite surfaces and merging back into the depths; pulled by the gravity of the moon the water is distorted creating swells and waves reaching for the moon which imperceptibly tries to escape the influence of the earth, outside the raindrops striking the metal grid of the garden table which will glow when the rain stops and the suns rays strike it in a few hours time. The rain expands the spaces that we can be aware of, though it will stop raining soon, the pollution will no longer be washed from the air depositing it on the surfaces of the roads, houses, bodies.

Splash! the noise is more related to the theatre than any of the other dozen or so arts, more theatrical than the dream work we imagine it is, because the rain reduces theatre down to its component parts, the multiplicity of small events translated into a logical world that fades and becomes mere information as we leave the theatrical space behind us. In this sense the winter rain that falls in the night touches on the bleakness of Blanchot , the cold transparency of the night, like a day of snow. Transmitting to us how terribly late it is, that we will never succeed in the limitless searching for an always impossible unified subjectivity. The sudden flashes of light, a clap of thunder which sounds through the wood like a natural explosion, water cascading across a tin roof, an overflowing water butt, the discarded remains brought to our attention even through they are mere memories of what they were once made for. Whilst further away in the night, on the margins of the town figures dripping with rain are wandering around the shopping centre car parks searching for out of date food dumped into containers, some are human. The rain is all that can acknowledge their hunting and gathering. Some are still walking purposefully, though still miserably, the heroic bureaucrats of the weather, weighing the extra kilograms of the rain in their coats, their faces gleam as they look forward to the measuring of water, besides them a wet dog walks drinking the water.

Others appear speechlessly in the theatre, bouncing from wall to wall, the swing arching out across the audience, just as the rain threatens and distracted from their tasks stand before the windows and look out at the glowering sky. It is only a short time later that we are out walking, heading back towards the car when the rain begins to fall, we drive north the windscreen wipers swishing the water away so that we may see the distorted world we drive through. Whilst out there on the edge of nowhere the raindrops measure space and time as they begin to fall on a desert it hasn’t rained on for a hundred years.