I once could not imagine that someone human could not respond somehow, at some time or another, to the natural world. Impossible, I would have said. No matter how entrenched in the urban one was, how enmeshed by the artificial, surely the whir of a bird’s wings, the flash of a butterfly’s colour, the shape of a cloud in the sky, green grass nodding in a breeze; something would drag one’s attention away, for just a moment. Distract you for a heart beat with the rhythm of a firebug’s light pulse, an SOS in the night.
Now I know the unimaginable is real. It is named Trump, or Bolt, Devine or Bolsonaro. Or Adani, or Palmer. It views any natural thing – movement, noise, colour, light – as distraction from the real business of living, which is, of course, the business of power. Of MONEY. They are not figments of my imagination, alas.
Inkstained fingers 