It is hot in Adelaide tonight. It is still well over 35 degrees, has been for most the day and is likely to be so for another week. It's summer in South Australia folks. I'm suprised that more people do not die.
It's definitely airconditioner living. It is the only way we can survive. Bodies sweat. They don't sleep. They feel tired. They suffer from debilitating heat headaches. It is impossible to think or move freely. It is hard to concentrate to write anything on place, or space as chora or receptacle when home is a sauna.
Records are probably being broken all over the place. You know ---hottest November in 100 years etc. That sort of stuff.
And people continue to deny the phenomena of global warming in the name of reason. That reason seems to be a cynical reason.
We have jump started summer. Leaped right over spring. Spring never happened in South Australia. How can whole seasons just disappear into a void?
Few people walked their dogs in the Adelaide parklands before 6pm. Those that did hugged the deepest shadows, as did the dogs. The joggers are always an exception. Nothing less than the full sun will do.
Suzanne is junketing in Melbourne and I'm off to the cool climes of the South Coast early tomorrow morning. I feel alienated, estranged and alone in the city. It's a night like this that you imagine the urban animals (dingoes) roam the city as their ordinary habitat no longer supports them any more. So they find a new urban habitat to support them, and they adapt to ths empty spaces and become alien to a particular place.
My body is yearning for the cool sea breezes. Maybe the city is too hot for even urban animals.
The city is very unpleasant. It is inhuman. Shakedown street, as the heart of the town where the women are smarter than the men in every way, becomes a vacuum. Nobody wants to walk around. It is hard to look cool in 36-40+ heat. It is like living in a blast furnance when the hot north winds from the desert blow through Adelaide, burning the plants. We think in terms of the days the plants died.
Is this not bodies-in-places, rather than the yawning emptiness of atoms in the void (space as vacuum, or placeless void). Adelaide is somewhere not nowhere. It is more than pure position or point. As place it has real power; it has its own dynamism.
Place exists in the order of things as the ancient philosophers (Aristotle) would say. Place situates and it does richly.
The airconditioner is barely making a difference and there are no cooling breezes. My body cannot cope with the debilitating heat.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 14, 2003 07:59 PM | TrackBackHi Gary,
thanks for your visit and linkage.
We didn't even turn the aircon on yesterday. Mind you, it is bloody noisy, the dampening seems to have gone AWOL, or something. Spent most of the day training in Clare training and travelling. It didn't seem as hot there.
I find it amazing how there seems to be little thought given to how to make living in our climate less dependent on electricity. Much architecture and design seems to have no connection to the ecology that we occupy, even in the 21st century most housing is not geared towards living with hot summers, ubiquitous power and the ability to pay for it is assumed.
Posted by: dj on November 16, 2003 04:29 PMThe airconditioner is barely making a difference
At least you have an airconditioner. That's more than we've managed in 35 years in this country; we don't even have screen doors to let us leave doors open and let in fresh air at night. The summer heat here kills me every year, and it's the one thing I find to be unbearable about living here...
Posted by: James Russell on November 16, 2003 06:09 PMThirty five years after I finished my matriculation exams in Adelaide, I still have nightmares at this time of the year, no matter where I am, if the weather brings something like that hot, dry late spring November wind.
Fortunately Melbourne tends to be a bit wetter..
Posted by: David Tiley on November 17, 2003 04:50 PMyes Melbourne is more gentle on the body in the summer. The rains come and break the heat wave. Not so in Adelaide.
Early on Saturday morning I went to the Coles supermarket near the Central Market prior to going down to Victor Harbor. Even their airconditioner was not working. It was hot and oppressive inside---hardly any different from my place around the corner.
that means a big expense, given the effect of the national electricity markets--25% increase in consumer prices and the unwillingess of the SA to make solar power mandatory on new building in the inner city.
You have to have super airconditioners in Adelaide when the hot north wind blows through the day and night. Then the temperature does not drop below 30 degrees.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on November 18, 2003 10:32 AM