Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXI

Truthful Fiction

 I knew I was dreaming while cityscaping. My mind wandered celestially. Contrails soared equally across the winter and Indian Summer skies: I never wanted to be on the receiving end of the word of the world: I never imagined to be seen as the great Khan, the great Kublai Khan hearing stories about worlds- -a world I knew nothing about. I wanted to be Italo Calvino in the guise of the real and fictitious Marco Polo dispensing truths and fictions for others to imagine.

Dreams are laid bare to be foretold: The illusion that memory’s fade is false: They live in personal curatorial revisionisms: Rewinds in real time: Everything we knew we know: Just press replay format: Everything is remembered differently: Pictures remember the facts.

The first glimpse of any new city is a contagious hello: Stepping off of a train, out of an airplane, out of a car, away from the space shuttle, lilting away from Mars reveal refreshingly new exposures: The camera articulately calibrates: There will be no optical illusions only optical allusions:

The camera is not a diarist: it is akin to antiquity’s card catalog: A critical and definitive archive of  evidence hidden in a forever space capsule: The eternal archive will  be a reference to where, when, and why my camera lived:

I have tried to explain for decades the mechanical camera’s emotional eyes: The emotions it ponders and manners: The camera resides in its own auto-motor-drive:  Analog and digital functions maintain an Hello mode: The fleeting sensation that we all remember as our first. The camera witnesses the emotional high and low perspectives that are us: The camera nails down the emotional experience of the new- -The tenuous tensions are like a morning with Aspergers’. Like walking a tightrope on a single toe nail- – a gift of life- – like surviving a churning hundred-foot Nazaré monster: Inhale- -life and death are only separated by a hiccup in the aorta.

The camera never decides what will be the first picture: It is alerted to what it knows:  In case there is no return- -an entire city canvas becomes a single frame like a woodcut with an infinite amount of layers- -the permanence within the impermanence moments: History in a frame- – years, days, seconds and fractions.

Hello and goodbye are bookends: The two words frame the life at the beginning and the one before the end: They remind me of  times not always remembered: Winter, freezes whispering of an end: “Goodbye” appears like a Goshawk nakedly moulting in private: Goodbye to the past hello to the future: Oh to be a witness  to our beginnings and what transpires…

It can be nerve-wracking not to know if the the new friend- -the city will remain: It can be nerve- wracking if it may be the last time you see the friend- – the city:

Every afoot, every glimpse is a reminder of the the fragility that is ahead and behind.

In Jaipur, India I had a nightmare naked: My mind appeared naked: My eyes were naked: Natures’ best and a nature not known were too- -naked. The wheels under moving along quite quickly froze as did earth for the cover of the Good Earth Catalog: All the possible imaginations hidden in plain naked sight: The eyes paused to see the raw: to see what I saw.

A woman by the river legs crossed in a colored cotton red sheath prayed: Her breath found in white- -also frozen: I watched as she doused in oils the seemingly dead body wrapped in a white sheet: A flame a sacrifice with prayers abound were now and near:  Her world not mine: My camera said hello and …I promised that day: Not a frame would pass without a capture ever again: There must be a beginning and an end to every capture: A single frame at best: The image haunts…not for what it was but for what the camera remembers:

I want to dance with Beatrice Potter, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll J.M.Barrie

and the clans of those who give a voice to the unimaginable. What we hear are what our eyes see what we see are the voices afoot: Afoot in the hundred or so cities tucked into the archives numbering hundreds of thousands, now.