Steel Feelings

~

24.November.2003

I am stationary in the middle of a rushing path, flanking me on either side the trains grumble forward in unison across the sides of the platform, there is a real rush of rotating metal that sweeps all your senses along with it, the moment is particularly prolonged, as are all moments of pure sensation, sensation that words and images cannot capture. And even once the sound had finished screaming to its diminishing point over me, the wind those two trains created continues to wash over me, keeping me in the embrace of their motion.

The sound of worn out clunking escalators captured my senses then, another sound difficult to describe exactly in the way so that someone else might immediately recognise it and know it well. I shall struggle to do so anyway, it was a kind of clunk but not so sharp and jarring as a clunk, yet too distinct and high pitched to be a sullen thump, perhaps a thunk, but all of these suggest dull monotonous, the sound was a little more melodic than any dull falling gravity splatting thumps of sounds, yet not melodic enough to be song, and whilst it was repetitive, monotonous is too heavy and negative a term for it, there was perhaps a hint of comfort to the sound, a sound of Time's mechanical cogs continuing to spin against each other and propel us forward, or perhaps a memory of childhood when escalators were older and less streamlined and thunked more often. I have not captured this sound though, to my ears it is familiar but rarely heard or noticed, but can one define a sound merely by what it isn't, not a clunk or a thump or even a thunk, how can I capture and define it merely by association and not in its own terms.

The sound of cogs continues with the increasing motion of the train as it heaves itself away from the platform. When the doors are open I stand still as a rock whilst the people swarm past in another surge of sensation, I am so swept up in these abstract emotions of steel and mechanics, I am breathing their oily spirit. Normally I don't wait here at Town Hall, I usually hop forward to Central and wait with the pigeons and open air, but today I am so entranced and immersed by these sensations I have to pull myself away when my train finally arrives.

As I write these words and emotions up in my notebook my body is dragged along with the trains movements, it shoots ever forward, my body stationary inside yet caught up in its furious rocking energy, my words are scrawled illegibly and my ears only hear the changing fluctuations of the train, the sound of the steel wheels against steel tracks, a sound of whistling an unpiercing shriek, unbroken yet stable and not building up in a crescendo of splitting ear drums. I am only vaguely aware of other people, at Town Hall amidst the masses all I could hear was the mechanics, the only voice being that of the tinny announcement service; I was amidst an ocean of people and all I could feel was these steel mechanics, this engine room of the city. The trains movements are varied, shunting akwardly as it starts to move after a stop, the rumbling and rustling gathering strength and speed and stability as is propels itself forward and the whine of steel whirring against steel. There's a sense too of the emotion of the materials, tinged with a hint of rust, steel and mechanics rumbling, rushing, whirring and clanking towards their own destruction, and what of me, I feel perhaps I too am being propelled forwards into something, but what exactly I cannot know. From today I am half way through my uni degree and about to prepare for travelling abroad by my independent self, but will what I am being propelled towards be as I hope it might, or are the cogs of my life also rumbling on towards destruction.