1

Let's consider, in preface, Jorge Luis Borges' Tlön -

a world that 'is not a concurrence of objects in

space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts.'

A world of actions or events, rather than of things.

2

Maybe this heterogeneity is part of what Borges is getting at

when he writes in his poem 'The Instant':

'The present is singular.  It is memory

that sets up time.'

3

Or maybe, as Gaston Bachelard fears

in The Poetics of Space, 

'Memory would encumber [an] image by stocking it with

composite memories from several periods of time.'

4

It was September when she first came across the garden,

surprised by how quiet it was, despite its proximity

to Market Square. But then Robert Harbison points

out that 'gardens are built on the idea of contrast: one

thing superimposed on another thing, art on wilderness.'

5

She didn't go in; three homeless men sat inside, chatting.

Harbison writes that people need "two homes, a green

one and a brown one, a grown one and a built one,

two worlds in tension' [2000:20]. So 'there are gardens

which could not exist without their walls' [2000:5].

6

The day she first took a camera into the garden

one of its regulars showed up.  They had a passing

conversation about Cambridge, the homeless community. 

When he arrived, she was filming the stained glass

window; he introduced himself as Tom Cruise.

7

He glared,

"Just to get your

facts straight — I sleep in car park D

when it's raining and when

it's not I sleep here."

8

The church affirmed, "yes

we're aware of how the space is

used and we have mixed

feelings about it."

9

In a poem called 'A Vision of the Last Judgment',

William Blake touched on this — the relationship

between space and time.  He wrote:

10

Time & Space are Real Beings

Time is a Man            Space is a Woman

11

The man was angry when she invited him

to watch her film, shouted, "I can watch?  Why would I

want to watch your intellectual pap?"

 12

Later, in an article on anti-homeless laws she read 

"the hope is simply that if homeless people can be

made to disappear, nothing will stand in the way of

realizing the dream of prosperity, social harmony..."

13

When asked to explain, the Revered replied:

"On the one hand, we want to be hospitable, Christian,

but then they keep others from using the space,"

14

That article on anti-homeless laws argued that

"homeless people scare us: they threaten the ideological

construction which declares that publicity —

and action in public space — must be voluntary."

15

When invited to act in her film,

the homeless men declined to appear.

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