The perfect city predated the city. It lay in a hectare of damp fields, formed out of pylons and the reach of old oaks along the hedgerows. I wandered from door to door, persuading neighbours of the value of a life without cars. Future roads superimposed over old roads, the routes, the hideouts. An act of longing, fused into one location, like two negatives placed over one another and forming a fictional photograph. I saw great tubes transporting us to the nearest town, a sky filled with transparent slides, children roaming heedless across the roads. Cow parsley thrived across the line of the central divide, belladonna, jasmine. We walked to the forest and ran from imagined werewolves through the pines. Once we heard machinery chewing through the woods, and discovered thin blistered glass outside a locked outhouse. The perfect city would remain invisible but perfect. Money would be superfluous, trade based on a complex system of bartering. The perfect city would be formed of glass. The perfect city would classify people from birth, and our vision would never be betrayed. The perfect city would be a place forever lost and real. The plans are probably gathered somewhere in a rural attic, or find themselves scratched into the lichen gathered onto a pig arc, or have been painted on the remains of the only service station, or line a rusted Empire biscuit tin filled with defunct electrical equipment, or have blown across those water logged fields until they mulch and soak quietly into the weft of the land.
from West South North, North South East
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Absence Club 