JK <<people tell me that despite the "urbanisation" of rural spaces here
the "rural" still well and truly remains a state
of mind.>>

I was writing in on or around the Cornish landscape - a poem I wrote around
Marconi's Poldhu for Eric Mottram in particular - and that poem especially
started a local-to-me debate which began with someone endorsing my work for
expressing the beauty of the landscape - 

there was discontinuous first person about the geological survey, jokes,
quotes from Marconi biographies, discontinuous first person about
discontinuity; and then it stopped

but the word _cornwall_ evoked beauty for this other - all i needed to do
for him was the intro, i could have spared the poem - much as you can make
some people laugh by saying _parrot sketch_ - leaving aside my tendency to
salivate when the phone rings this did not please me

following up the debate - i got not just _beauty_ but _mystical_! i
responded that Cornwall is an industrial landscape in great decay and
poverty - what isnt built upon for mining or agricultural exploitation has
been excavated - very little of it is in a prehistoric state... 

it's not just a moon landscape but every other sci fi landscape and in
among it sets of people

the rural is largely seen from without - martian canals - and vanishes when
you actually look close up... but the rural-mind-set don't see it - don't
see they can't see it I mean.... they live it regardless anyway... the
proximity of the sea takes away a lot of the air pollution and they grow
exotic plants in their gardens, happy in their paradise, cornish stone
walls do not a prison make... but you find how rural it is if you try to
find somewhere to sleep under the only half obscured stars - from Penzance
over to St Ives and beyond, Camborne-Redruth, and from both coasts with
Truro at its centre, there are urban sprawls a-sprawling, full of people
getting back to nurture they think nature... same thing in the east which I
know less well, same thing in south devon et cetera

when i was a lad you could go to lands end

now you go to the lands end experience

reminds me of an e m forster story in which in heaven there is a stage from
which the christian scientists are allowed to argue that they havent died

anyway, we have lots of trees in my street, sorry road, lines of grass and
trees... and at the bottom of the hill a row of shops - and quite a few
insist it is a village street... which is interesting as this road was
built in 24, infilling from the previous decades, and it is continuously
urban to croydon, no haywards heath, no brighton... but we are a village,
big dogs and 4 wheel drives - i have a squeaky wheelbarrow ... now a mile
north, that's not a village

L


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