Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XVIII

Fictional Truth

Miles and miles…of celluloid have captured the embodiment of my realities: The reels of stories I have seen for a few lifetimes do not merely invigorate the eyes, they act like reels and realms of fireflies impregnating the skies: My mind ignites and gravitates closer to the OLED screen. I have a  powerful need to be closer to film’s truths: Their stories are ours but mostly mine: The dreams filled with popcorn and malted chocolate balls. I daily find  refuge in my sanctuary of futures.

I have repeatedly witnessed the actor as Pharaoh, Gangster, Nazi hunter and Poker gambler. Films’ star Edward G. Robinson was always my little giant. A genuinely short man who played characters larger than life: A generational and beyond favorite: His,  most audacious  character that tangled with my hearts’ eyes and infatuated my imaginations was the naked little man from Soylent Green:

The entire Eddie G. film catalog is spell binding:  His performance as Sol in Soylent Green (the book researcher/hoarder) I see as the ghost of my future past.

Robinson’s Sol learned the truth about our future and his past in one swift cinematic performance: The role compelled him to make a difference even before his death a few weeks beyond film completion. In the climatic scene he walked to his final destination as if holding my hand as my grandfather once had: He made his funeral arrangements and snuggled in a hospital to savor his posterity: The screen swiftly presented  Sol watching his cherished past encumber the present. The exhausting CinemaScope beauty of another time (played on his hospital screen as I watched from my movie theater screen): His life’s Fantasia passing before all of us was never to be seen again- -I imagined: His painful serenity in the migrating tonal darkness of a life before and possibly the near ending ahead is among the character’s reasons he chose euthanasia to end his stay on earth: Stirred (never shaken) and stirred again: The lethal injection ghosting equally as a elixir and placebo for him became a North Star for me. I knew then and know now, I will rest like Sol with a stirring end:

Everyday I encapsulate my dreams with the likes of Sol’s and other multiple reels of film: I imagine as I watch film story after another I listen for the projector pulling film slowly through the sprockets: I dream I stood with Eddie in kinship: My silhouetted standing six foot three: Eddie G’.maybe five foot three standing as Mice and Men’s(Lennie and George) in kinship: We watched our worlds in evolution free fall: It was as if we were framed as beauty embedded in nature’s enviable bliss- -I imagined: Our vanishing worlds’.

I lifted my ear to listen for a magicians wand as it waves goodbye to Soylent Greens’- -in a dream: it all seems too real: Sol, nearly naked and nearly death laid back to grasp his life’s final glimpse: My worlds’, Sol’s world mingle  for a final non-emotional bereavement. Something magnetically guided me towards the enviable “more”: I stepped forth passing by into another time. More time…

I, alone stare hopefully at everything a lifetime of captures has produced> I see Soylent Green’s fictional world> I just want everything in my world to matter: I wave to Sol one more time with something in mind- -The extinct Kaua’i’ō ō.

Just as it is said that the Kaua’i’ ō’ō called out in vain for his mate: You must imagine the emptiness of a world no longer yours as you pass and the world you have always imagined- – is no longer.

So here I sit: I listen and wonder how it all may end- -and then again…