Imagine for a moment that the inanimate is animate. Place yourself on the utility-room wall as a boiler (“combi”; hot water and heating) and feel its need of gas. Every atom of your casing, pipes, valves and dials bent towards ignition, longing to draw on the hydrocarbons of life held in a nearby tank.
It’s so easy to gaze disparagingly, even mournfully, on the site of an LPG tank in a garden. Easy to consider it misplaced, miscreant, a boil on the face of a view. An objection at a local planning meeting to its placement was met with a wry smile and a Councillor’s statement that, “I can’t imagine you choosing to put it in your front garden if there was another option – am I right?”
Further frowned-upon because of what it says to the conversation about the mounting climate crisis, it is rebuked by the body language of those passing-by as much as in murky mutterings in the pub.
And yet… and yet. Imagine not the life that may be had by the home’s boiler but by those who are really alive there. Without mains gas, and so subject to the rising tide of electricity prices, look at their relief as tap-turning and radiator-activation produces heat and hot water.
There’s more – the micro-environment provided! Where there was once a couple of cubic metres of nothing there is now a top, bottom, ends, and underneath; an inside and outside. A whole new dimension has been added to the world – a possibility exists where there was once no location at all. I wonder what micro-atmospheric phenomena play around this new place, what colonising opportunities it gives?
It focuses attention onto air previously seen-through, holds us into the present of this place at this moment, and so grounds us in the way that mindfulness encourages. Just as certain mindful practices enjoin us to intimate observation and acquaintance with, for example, a raisin, there is a chance here to suspend judgement and take the tank as it is – neither fair nor foul. On this wet November day I decide to be in the vicinity of a propane gas holder.
It’s round, I know that seems obvious, but it is very round; there’s nothing flat on it at all, the whole thing is a curve. It has a straight cylindrical central section and two bulbous ends. Held in place by some sort of soldering, one end holds a silvered plaque showing various numbers including a design code; this thing has been designed! It has a design number, 251586, debossed directly into the metal of the tank. I’m surprised to realise that this object has been laboured-over by someone.
This thing I’ve so taken-for-granted has been someone’s work, not just in the manufacture but in its conception; its details of shape and function have occupied someone’s thoughts. Above the plaque there’s a metal plate with a hole that a key is tied through – this unlocks a plastic cabinet at the top of the tank hiding the valves and important things I can’t make out. At the other end there’s a fitment to support a pipe coming out of the tank into the ground.
Today it’s pouring with rain and it’s falling down onto the surfaces, streaming down the sides and ends. Lower down, where the raindrops come around the curves, there’s a sort of condensation. The raindrops are running through this to produce really interesting patterns; who’d have thought? I’ve never touched it – only ever looked; it’s cold, really cold and it’s not smooth! When I run fingers over it I feel little bumps. I guess these are where the pale green paint has dried unevenly. It reminds me of phrenology, though feeling these bumps doesn’t give a clue about what’s inside. Maybe if I could understand better the data figures below the design number on the plaque I’d have a sense of what lies hidden – capacity 1400 litres, pressure 18.65 bar.
I notice there’s no symmetry side-to-side on the cylinder. The side furthest from the house has a diagonal thin bar incorporated into it, presumably as strengthening.
I’ve not smelled it and hope no-one is looking as I bend forward to take a sniff, a close sniff, of the surface. Nothing, not even a smell of gas (which is reassuring). Maybe this is because it’s a cold day, perhaps the metal gives off some sort of smell when it’s warmer?
On one side there’s a work of art – a transfer announcing the contents as propane and symbols indicating not to smoke or light matches because it’s flammable. Although one of the symbols is printed to show a line across a match being struck the writing beneath says, “no naked lights”. I wonder why it says “naked lights” and not “naked flames”? Why should you not expose the tank to naked lights? Maybe it’s ashamed of itself in some way or has a sense of dignity it believes it would lose by being bathed in an unadulterated beam.
I haven’t looked underneath yet, so kneel carefully onto the wet grass. There are 4 bent legs holding it off the soil and in the centre at the very bottom a large bolt that looks like the kind of protruding navel some people have. Thinking this way about an umbilical connection suggests to me that the tank has had a mother. As an intentional object I suppose in one sense it has.
It’s beginning to decorate itself with leaves falling from trees nearby; perhaps it’s camouflage? Maybe it has a desire to hide away – to observe rather than be observed, or perhaps it indicates that sense of shame again?
It’s utilitarian, but it’s here. There is Something in this space. If it was in a gallery it would attract attention as an installation but here it just is… but it’s now blowing a gale, pissing down very hard and extremely cold; my mindful moment is finished!
Taken from someone’s mind
onto a draughtsman’s table,
a liquefied habitat compressed
in metal and plastic
screwed to the soil
by concrete.
Exposed, abused by thought
and word and deed,
noticed only by bird shit
and leaves, I take time
to caress your dimpled hide
and wonder
at the lives of the fossilised
who were crushed
in the making
of what lies inside.
In recent years Roger Hare has redisovered and developed his joy in creative activity – his own and others. He’s exhibited poems and photos in three art centres around England, been published in the small journal Elbow Room, recently had a poem commended in a Gloucestershire competition, and enjoyed being part of poetry readings in London, Ledbury, and elsewhere. After a recent move to Herefordshire he’s now giving himself permission to experiment with all sorts of word-based creativity. He can be found on Twitter: @RogerHare6.