27.06 

Duskball Caucasus, they play as the sun falls into the sloped head, look at the shadow, falling on this place. I remember long nights, kicking a ball as the shadows of a quad fell open…kicking a parabola…the world cup dreams highlights of England/Belgium. We beat Colombia two nights prior, sat on the Caspian. I couldn’t watch the Pickford moment..one giant hand padding down, duskball Caucasus – there are a hunder duskballs unfolding all a one / I surf the wave at a distance, football is coming home – A cloud mist rolls in following the game. 27.06 – passing LPG, Borjomi 32, Alkhaltskine 80. 
The road of – is it dual monopeak – the road signs seem to point the old way / an effort has been made to shade out the top of the arrow but it allays nothing, Georgian driving alloying into metallic suspension, disbelief carriees maneuvers, heads poking out sides of flagging machines, to dual carriage that once went both ways cuts across the bow of Omen Interstate / a clammed up Looshus 
—> went into the dance of frenetic blind path judge, stop distance, tailgate pass, close opening to new  / decision cut 
Camera cuts into the Caucasian valley, slowly falling into irreducible blue. 

18:37 05 July 2018  

concrete pillow Alat – closure of another chapter. The sky is azurine, generators hum, we board at 21 hundred hours, leaving behind Azerbaijan and its indistinguishable character. Carving toward Beijing’s gravity machine…this place, this place, Alat, the correlation constellation on the edge of a flat blue skylake…somewhere west of here lies Qobustan, the petroglyphs and volcanoes that burn irridescent plumes into the air/oil – we drive past SOCAR, mad max plants, the stretching dry…two men meet between motorways cutting north and south, they exchange an indistinct item…we curve past, their lives slip. 
I have grown in the habit of chasing balconies. Tbilisi. Baku. I am of the thinking the road from here will be less vertical. I do not know what balconies I’ll find, whether a balconology ends at the Caspian. From here, we find Steppe. 
What draws starkly into relief is the centrality of landscape to infrastructure, topography cements the reality to its form. 

05.07 

The day swallows into customs procedures, several bureaucrats, shipping containers, Nadir, blue overalls, Nadir strong jowelled. Nadir takes us through this Middle Corridor of frenetic conversations had, having, coming, this is the real belly of the infrastructural fold, folding interiors into a collapsible stage, the bureaucracy of papers passed into the wry air conditioned pocket of a winking port. 
We are on the roof of the car outside of Alat Port, blue neon signs read: BORDER AND CUSTOMS CHECKPOINT (i also write it out in the alphabetic system see notebook] 
Border Asshole – discontiguous bureaucratic lenglong out of the homogenous Bakian sludge 
It is Friday 05 July 2018, I am sitting atop a jeep as the wind blows in from the Caspian. We speak briefly with one of the crew who tells us the winds are too strong, the waves up to 15 metres in the mid-region of the sea. At a time these waves can reach 25 metres he says, we stare across at the white pillars of checkpoint 1, imagining waves curving above. 
Perhaps we will leave tomorrow morning at early dawn, set off against the back of a country whose lifeblood sits underneath our static present, foaming. 
Azerbaijani’s movement toward non-oil diversification mirrors that of other large oil producers, in a post-oil period, with diminishing revenues expected, the government begins its task of directing revenues towards tourism, agricultures – hyrdocarbon stilts.
—> Sarah is undertaking a path of bending yoga aside her car when a military uniformed man joins her, asks something, no doubt overstepping…she quickly regathers her matt and ceases, the Hereford couple begin preparing their bikes, we’re moving onto the boat 12:56am, boat will not leave tonight. 
Georgia —> delicate balance between domestic industrial strategy and international trade strategy (Look on the news since, the riots in Tbilisi Parliament) 

20:19 // Friday 05 July 2018
The sun set far out to the west during dinner. Another Caspian a2 vessel scythes past . A ladybird climbs my left shoulder up to the orchestral caver of the ears, chasing moonlight. We are headed toward what looks like an oil rig jutting on a stretch of land thart curves west to the setted sun. A man in blue stares pensively between the water and his phone. 
I moved to the front of the ship chasing the flling sun as it dropped out of its hold. I film four minutes staring out on the flat, before two deckhands beckon from the bridge to return immediately. I tae one lasting shot of the bdige and they smile 
A man joins me to the side with a fishing pole and begins cutting bread, he threads up the line, I count 12 vessels across the horizons, the desk is lit by a column of blue lamps. The man casts his net. What has brought us to this strange encounter, fish, Caspian, road, man, rig, sky, held in tendential relation. 
I feel an intense peace. Back where we came from, a streak cuts the ceiling of the Caspian. The fishing man stands pensively as the lights around begin to alight. We have been moving in slow motion, drifting. 
I find it hard to write of infrastructure at moments like this. It feels as if both worlds sit inverse at this very moment, this serenity, thoughts of the Middle Corridor pale. So we danced and broke down barrelling into the blue of the bluest wave we knew. 
I suppose we did begin on wrong capsular pretences. 
A light breeze pulls across west. The man checks his line, diagonalising into the water below. There aren’t waves so much as sheets of glass, folding away. 
A second man joins the fisherman and exchanges words. The horizon folds a yellow to brown to blue, southward it is a darker blue. 
The horizons overlap this vessel is one large hoirzon-hold, I think of the harsh Russian language of the truckers, each set on their own logistical course.
The serenity prior is cut by a hum underneath. I remember the cargo laden below, the night folding out horizontal in Alat Port awaiting cargo. The truckers outspins its load, straining habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit. COLLECT WEATHER REPORTS, NEWSPAPERS 
The deck is livening up, fifteen minutes have passed as he shakes the line / ORGANUM, Max Richter. 

06 JULY 2018 || 07:30

Today the Caspian is back with a vengeance, the wind whistles through, untrusting a nest of dead flies onto the mattress. I flick them off and they fall like dust. 
The surface is turning || Come Down to Us || the cove holds off the worst of the waves. Seldom thought I’d be strung here on the morning of the England World Cup quarter final. I hear over breakfast from one of the deckhands, Belgium beat Brazil 2-1. 
My mind palls back to Joycey, breaking out of his London office on the early to don his bucket and bullet cans. 
Mhairi and I spoke the other day over WhatsApp of that film we saw at th Goethe Institute in South Kenginston: Deadweight. The Filipino sailor being knocked during the lashing, the interminable silence gulfed between the Phillipines and his resting loss at sea. 
The director speaks of the three years the film took to film, gauging the layout of the vessel, moving he camera through compressed spaces, he describes the vessel as a heterarchy, Odyssean, I need to find the information sheet that came with. 
I remember the two truckers from yesterday. This place is not dissimilar, culture cluster, the men at the silent heartbeat of world trade, unsung heroes. At breakfast over eggs and stale bread and tea, I speak of dad and mum’s families. Bantry Bay; Poland and 13 Children. Catholics. After breakfast, Charles gives a weather forecast. 
We will check again at 20:38 and see whether the storm has passed. 
I am listening to the Harmony of the Spheres, reading the capitalist world interior. Rainer Maria Rilke, almost meets Adam Smith || Almost all things beckon us to feeling 
Through all beings extends the one space | world interior space, silently the birds fly, through us. O, I who want to grow / I look out and the tree grows in me / I care and the house stands in me. 
In this mode of experience, the horizon is encountered not as a boundary and transition to the outside but rather a frame to hold the inner world. The emanation of the soul can grow into an oceanic feeling of coherence, a feeling that could plausibly be interpreted as a repetition of the foetal sensation in an external scene. 
I stare out of Cabin 20 at the building sea. 
In Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, Rilke’s basic stance is associated with the experience of ‘intimate immensity’ / containers of a life that feels equally at home in its de-restricted environment or in a cosmic skin / the sunset over the Caspian. 
The Caspian waves look like mountains. Shifting hyper-tectonic, liquidine || Through intense boredom and heat, we bore down to the hold on suggestion of the bearded Hereford man. 
The gap between lorries closed off toward the vessel opening and so we sidled our bodies through sideways. As I passed a large lorry it kicked into life, startling in the Co2 haze. As the gap tightened, I imagined migrant hands reaching out from the under-carriages. I quicken pace. At the last of the 26 lorries stacked and tightening opened up to the clearing. A large industrial aluminium refinery part stilted and strapped, the Jeep lay quietly over to the right in acquiescence to our tresspass
Aqualine mountains unfolded, but more diminutive, from the cabin, the angular position throws the light off of the collapsing waves but here in this belly they look like calmer lifts, the right hull of the boat gently bows. 
I count 26 vessels awaiting clearance orders for the Middle Caspian, where will laying trucker clans in the Covian queu. The aluminium part Is strapped to the back of a Turkish lorry, its engineers I guess might be German. Its presence places a faint hope we might be of importance to someone, somewhere east. 

Saturday 06 July 2018 || 15:40

I wake up in the cabin from an afternoon slump and stumble through the corridors looking for England v. Sweden televised, when I reach the top deck of cabins and find the Hereford and French couples sat in a brown room. A television in the corner half time, channelling I hear England are 1-0 up. The majority of the truckers onboard are Ukrainian, in the frenzy of returned passports, the Captain is sure to line up their blue passport covers in rows and rows on the table.
The sun is dropping out of its berth when the final whistle sounds on a 2-0 win. I think of the pints thrown in celebration. I hum football’s coming home as I draw through the vessel’s internal corridors. The distance, the stretch between London and Caspian gulfs. It is bittersweet knowing England could win the World Cup while I am caught in a storm on the Caspian, lying in the cabin listening port to the howling winds and the curving mountain wave breaks. My horizon for now is here. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Sole structure. 

Monday 09 July 2018: 08:33

Rhubarb – Aphex Twin – the pumped Caspian on deck, the engines over, the madmax stilts, waterworlded structures protruding from the lattice of the sea, the flat open expanse, the lines. I wonder how many horizons hold up the stiltmen, from their dig into the vertical bed / contrastive tension, extraction’s beauty 
Introversion / oilmen – givers. 
The sun holds above the blue, painting a sheen of glistening waves in a polychromatic fold, shine a torch through a foamy aqualine neighbourhood and the light will scatter. [NOTE VIRILIO ALLUSION AGAIN, OPACITY, EDGES, BRUSHSTROKES, THE BLIP] 
Yesterday, I caught the deckhand dropping the Azerbaijani flag, was this the threshold zone, the border zone? Was it the Caspian Five dispute mattering? Leaving AZ EEZ jurisdiction?
The spheric edge of the western world. Does he know his role? The Mephistopheles of Flags?

Tuesday 10 July

Leaving Gul 
My ester cargo cutting Ukraines, spaceba, best of luck brothers, solving east
Lstara alternative 
40000TEU current capacity 
Possibles
Loop graph
The Caspian
Shimmers
Carving faces
On edges
Who are you oilers
Cutting the middle
Where do your structures fall 
High cheek 
Broad nose