"The city is being swept away by the metropolis. This action does not just replace one noun with another, but radically turns one state of affairs into a state of perpetual motion. As a collective action -- a verb more than a noun -- the metropolis destabilizes our concepts of time and place. With the dissolution of the city into the forever- emerging metropolis, our existence slides into permanent mobility." - L. Lerup, in After the City

4.25.2007


twenty-eight.
4.25 walk: last night in Hitachi
there is a soft drizzle as i head to the shore. i'm looking for remnants of childhood play: the red blue & orange playground (that was never mine?) the calm harbor where my sister waded too deep? the concrete fishing pier where i stood by my grandfather in silence? the bathhouse-beachhouse with fried noodles & multi-hued water toys?

tonight it is melancholy & solitary. summer is far away & the play of children is nowhere to be heard. fishing nets lay like tangled string, buoys pulled from the depths encrusted with the tenacious lifeforms that measure water's time. the shore is defined by manmade wavebreakers & the occasional household piece of mega-garbage (motorcycle, anyone?)

the sea is like no other. i walk 1/4 mile out to the lighthouse which stands as sentinal at the mouth of the port. to one side: the calm harbor, to the other: an ocean of such frothy gray intensity that i feel a palpable disquiet. walking along the solid breakwall is like walking on thread -- at any moment my body aware of the sea's potential to grab me over the pile of jack-shaped & stacked breakers. starfish lay like soggy paintings upon moist concrete-- a testament to the paltry efficaciousness of the breakwall & wavebreakers. i run, slipperishly, in the dusk, to snap my lonely picture of the small red tower against an endlessly empty & unchanging horizon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

your photographs are getting really nice - almost as sophisticated as your writing. alan sekula would be proud

ARCHIVE