On the 13th day of September 1922 the stone and metal bollards of Emmet Place shook, clattered and clanked. ¹It was a painful noise. Sore to the ear. Funnelling through the drum. Violent in volume. The noise echoed through the area. These typically mute bollards were as loud as a storm. Their movement did not look like fear nor courage. They were mindless and repetitive. Their behaviour, strange. Left, right, left, right. A couple of feet in height, they made impact in numbers. Close enough together to hit one another. Their spherical tops meeting each other at accidental angles. Clank, clank, clank. They shook and made unbearable sounds for most of that day. As the day moved on, the clanking eventually stopped. Leaving a ring and tremor in local ears. The noise had shape. It shapeshifted to fit the complex tunnels inside ears until it settled, at the bottom of stomachs, making them sick and making new ground for what would become silence. The clanking broke again on the 20th and 22nd day of September. ¹Same movements and more impact. Existing remnants of noise grew. It would thrive inside flesh. The walls of stomachs and guts unknowingly allowed the noise to clog and silence instinct and power. These weren’t the first times the bollards shook. They had dents and crevices from ferocious movement almost two years prior. On the night of 11th December 1920 the bollards bolted side to side when the first drop of petrol hit Alex Grant & Co. ³They didn’t stop until the next day. Clanks could be interpreted as uncontrollable laughter, emerging from a place of ignorance.⁴Shattered by the burning, they survived to witness in pain. Sometimes, utterances from rooms materialised into irregular shaped matter and filed out of windows, second floor, third floor. The shapes hovered across Emmet Place. Zig-zagging like bunting. Each one spoke, repeating a word that was said inside at a meeting. It was difficult to make out what each shape was saying because they all spoke in unison. Mr. B decided to create a contraption in his workshop. The new tool would help him isolate the utterances from the hovering shapes and identify what each one was saying. He worked on a side street, adjacent to the multiplying shapes. He used his metalwork tools to elongate an iron tube, the width of a dilated pupil and the length of a railway. He installed the device on the roof of his workshop so that it reached across the rooftops and protruded onto Emmet Place. He brought a stool, paper and pencil up onto the roof and he sat to listen; ‘dance’, ‘theatre’, ‘violet’, ‘drake’, ‘duck’, ‘hockey’ were some of the words he picked up. ⁵A specific and powerful shudder of noise collaborated with shaking bollards on 6th December 1922. ⁶On this day, some bollards shook so hard that they uprooted from their position. ⁷They lay flat and forgotten and permanently mute. New minds showed up as busy left to right eyes. Heads buried in bounded knowledges. Ready for subtext and speculation. ⁸A witness is still. A gaze is frantic.