in my everything is everything (or nothing) era

seeing there is a connection is a very different thing from making meaning of the interconnected

“You do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking”

from Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End

Late on Friday night, after shedding unexpected tears at the finale to Season 3 of Stranger Things, I knew exactly where I was going as I drove the familiar road north-west to drop my daughter’s boyfriend at home. I don’t often drive over the bridge that connects the north and south of the city and not want to take a photo, and since the teenagers in the back seat were consumed by one another and also by something on one of their phones, I had to do as I always do and rely on my eyes and, later, my memory of what I saw, which was this:

Driving towards the light while Glasgow behind me darkens. In the far distance — beyond the silhouettes of 1980s, 90s and 00s-built Clydeside — is the black spire of Glasgow Uni. This, the landscape upon which I map my relationship to the city. The backdrop almost regal. Inky indigo gives way to deepest emerald then cerulean then teal then turquoise then duck egg then — at the point far, far in the north-west where the land meets the sky — there is a slash of white gold.

By the time we made the return trip just 20 minutes later, all of that was all gone. For that day, at least.

Our soundtrack was Radio 3 which is the station I listen to for its soothing properties when I’m the last one downstairs of an evening. On Friday night, however, the bedtime programming departed from form because the station — along with what seemed like the rest of the BBC — was celebrating the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough who has transcended his human form to fulfil a talismanic and unifying function that, arguably, even the late Queen couldn’t quite manage. I suspect that when he does eventually die, we’ll be mourning much more than one man’s passing.

Unlike the sunset, which I had and have words for, I couldn’t then and can’t now begin to describe what I was hearing. It wasn’t music in the way our impoverished ears have been taught to understand music, and music’s not the right word anyway, so let’s call what we were listening to abstract fragments, each of which felt to me representative of Attenborough’s century not just on planet earth but in it and across it. In the show notes, which I looked up afterwards, it said the programme explored what the sonic and the creaturely realms share in common: a freedom from ownership, a resistance to neat categorisation and [created] a space where connection can happen and that felt close enough for me.