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2002-07-28 15:14:19 ET There is a place i have dreamed of, a place of hot concrete cooling under a darkening pink sky. A dry, dusty industrial wasteland, beautiful in its solitude. Rusted hazmat barrels lie right side up and sideways in what might have been a parking lot, and quietly the streetlights come on, lending their orange hue to the twilight. I try to remember, try to describe, but it slips away because it is a place that is a feeling, and a feeling that is a place. Mnay songs I have loved, have been written about this place. the abandonment stays, the loneliness that is accompanied by beauty. the "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing" of T.S. Eliot's 'J Alfred Prufrock'. You could lie down on a warm hood of an abandoned car, letting the sun's energy warm you in a more indirect way, getting hte fine layer of dust that covers everything here on your skin and your clothes, and not caring. Just staring up at an evening sky full of stars that aren't there quite yet, surrounded by the more abstract residual artifacts of human commerce, empty unused factories and the like... the humanity stripped and the abstract shapes remaining. A plane leaving a thin line of jet exhaust, catching the purple-orange of the sun's last rays, comforts you with the thoughts that there are people somewhere, just not here. Here there is only remains, refuse, the unwanted. Unwanted by whom? is the question, and your presence here, your content, is the answer. you could be on that plane, you could go where it goes and in no time at all you would be in the glitter storm of the city again. you turn your head away from the sky, where one star has appeared, towards the broken glass that glitters under the orange streetlights, all the more beautiful for being unplanned. and the very fact that you *could* be in the middle of the towering clean steel, in the heart of all the action, beating fast, intoxicated by the different dreams of millions of minds, the very fact that you _could_ be there if you chose to, liberates you from having to be; lets you lie on an old dead automobile, in the very graveyard of all the dreams across the river, and for every shattered one there is a piece glinting underneath this streetlight, amidst the dust, and they are all beautiful. *july 7th 2002* |
