deposition

I was walking passed the new water feature at the railway station in Sheffield today, a big piece of public sculpture, carrying on the theme from the previous ‘regeneration’ of the peace gardens. It’s a stepped series of shallow pools that follow the contour down from the road to the station. Each pool empties out over its brim into the pool below, before the last pool ,which contains a fountain, empties into a gutter below it. I, in an uncharacteristic bout of trusting idealism, suppose that the water is recycled round the system. I also suppose the water pumped by electricity and the stone all came fresh from a big hole in the ground somewhere, all at great cost and effort.

It is a luxury, an unnecessary edifice placed to beautify a public space, it speaks, nay shouts, of our wealth, the stone we can spare, the water we can waste, the power we can fritter away. As new clothes go, they are well cut.
And, I have to confess, they are well cut. If we lived in some Iain M Banks style post scarcity utopia, it would sit very nicely in some space on a Culture GSV. But it doesn’t, it sits in Sheffield, product of a culture that seems to have no real grasp of scarcity, though constantly surrounded by it and it’s consequences.

And then I see the silt, graded by the flowing water into light and heavy sediments, large and small grains. Silt that has come from I know not where, blown or washed in, from the feet of paddling children or the hands of the homeless grabbing a quick wash before the City Centre Guardians move them on. But it’s there. Accumulated, deposited buy the eddies and surges of current into sinuous skeins and shoals of sediment. Mapping out the invisible dialogue between water and gravity, a glimpse into the world as felt by fish.

And accumulating. Left to its own devices, and it won’t be, someone will notice and clean the stuff out, it would steadily accrue, slowly forming sandbars and banks. These would slow the flow of water, releasing still more sediment, finer sediments, form the streams fluid grip. Eventually, the banks would break surface, and grasses would take hold, rushes, shrubs, and then tress, willow and alder would come, and all those roots would gently work themselves into the blocks and slabs, and the water would flow freely. Well, until someone turned off the tap, or the tap ran dry.

We arrest succession. We hold the world in an infancy that suits us and our purpose. It wants to grow up, and the way we’re behaving, it could well get its chance. Very soon. There may be a beach beneath the paving stones, but there is also a forest between the skyscrapers.