my thumb is swelling a bit, but the cat seems ok, he's now sleeping on a windowsill. above is a picture that i took on my way to the supermarket. these things have fascinated me for years now, it's just the side of the reservoir. it seems that they truncate the view on every side around here. they are rather like elongated heaps. this is flat land, these parts. i can imagine the archeologist leaning, face down, against one of these. or with his ear pressed against it. his fingertips dug into the earth, sensitive to the slightest vibration of the lost.

of course, i mildly got harassed by rednecks (they are all rednecks here) whilst coming back. for the length of my hair, i believe. i do not believe that i am beholden to take seriously the opinion of any male over 10years who wears 3/4 length shorts though. (or possibly shorts at all).  

at present, i am at my parents cat sitting. one of the cats has refused to come out from under the chest in the bedroom, and when i tried to coax him out he bit me. hard. the hiding is not too surprising, as they are not the most outgoing of animals, this lot, but the bite did take me by surprise. the bleeding has stopped now, but it really did hurt, and ben is really not that sort of cat usually. i need to work out if it's because he's ill, or what. he looks fine, and purred as he sank his teeth in, but he doesn't usually do that. he did once spend a week in hiding after getting a paw tangled up in a plastic bag for five minutes, he seemed to think it was following him...it took him a while to recover, so maybe something like that has gone on, unbeknown to me. i hope he's not ill.

i am also meant to be writing my dissertation at present, apart from worrying about cats. i cant blame the cats, really - i've done very little reading for it recently, though a lot of (largely shapeless) thinking. my BA dissertation was far more focused, into a narrower area. this one has spread. it started with thoughts on Benjamin, Piranesi and Soane, but now i don't know where it's going.

the initial idea was of an examination of piranesi's work as a series of dialectical images. in piranesi world, Rome was never new, and newness acquired the status of ruins almost immidiately. it seemed to me to be what benjamin's angel of history would see; everything as already finished, an anachronistic jumble of costume and ruins. Soane also figured, or his museum/house did, a structure that he already invisaged as a ruin as it was being built (he produced a satirical pamphlet describing future archeologists excavating the remains and speculating on their possible use).

as i have started to write, in fragments, though, the images that i have hit upon are: myself and my girlfriend having a drink in the revolving restaraunt at the top of the berlin TV tower, and a family trip up the london eye for my father's birthday, on the way home from which we chanced upon the 30 year old sign for his bookshop, revealed by the refurbishment of the drycleaners that it had become. the third figure is the picture above. the caption describes him as an archeologist, he could be a corpse. staring into a hole in a featureless plain. his perspective is diametrically opposed to the panoptic vistas afforded by both TV tower (over the now conquered east) and the eye (over the now tamed and commodified city). the bird's eye view does tame and commodify though.

the archeologist stares down into time, through strata, all equally present to his gaze. but only as fragments, burnt stuff, garbage.