Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Shyness: me interviewing ChatGPT 3.5 on August 24th, 2023 (unexpurgated).
Victoria Amelina wrote that ‘as long as a writer is still read, they remain alive’. I found myself looking out to sea in the west of Ireland the day after she was buried. I wept into the rain on hearing the breeze whispering fragments of swimmers’ words.
Evidence of absence can be hard to find. Since our minds are endlessly inquisitive and infinitely creative, belief doesn’t have to mean an absence of doubt. Agree or disagree, David Farrier suggests our signatures will remain when we will be absent. Maybe those fossilised traces will be concreted radioactive waste among middens of chicken bones wrapped in plastic but what about narrative, myth and metaphor?
I created this chapbook after my van’s side mirror was clipped and broken by a passing truck. I cursed its crossing into my lane on the narrow suburban road. Then I exchanged shards of mirror-glass tidied up from the tarmac. Perhaps I should have exchanged insurance particulars. My thinking was that the delivery truck company would have recorded the incident, establishing their driver’s culpability beyond doubt.
This chapbook started with oat milk sweetened coffee. Truth and consequences took over.
The fundamentals of graph theory, the mathematical structures that model relations between paired objects, may only have been formalised recently but lattices have been recognised since humans started to trap, build and weave.
