Urban re:passages

Ghost city.
Beatrice Jarvis

An architecture that breathes and shakes in the force of human interaction.
The city as an emblem that moves us to remember what humanity can be and should approached with a sensitivity of a gardener that plants sweet peas in his garden in the cold bleak mid winter, he plants with hope, just as we should construct with hope.

The city is confusion, a tirade of an interrupted symphony which repeats and degenerates. We muse that we understand it. We cannot. It is permanent flux, a state a permanent transition. The dictionary does not understand the city as a name; it is a thing with no fixed identity. Crushed it tries to reshape itself, to the mould of London, Trying desperately to conform to all the books which state what the tourist should be excited to see. Nelson’s Column. Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Circus. Soho. Little Italy. Canary Wharf, the Isle of Dogs. Places. Not people. Not the individual marks that allow such areas to have an identity.

I fear the loss of identity the city has to encourage. The sudden coldness that cannot be mapped but exists as emotionless zones. We are all robots in a fallen utopia. We march because we have to march we shout for we fear to cry. This is a science experiment, city dwellers in a Petri dish who are all seeking lost love and a free ticket to paradise.

So, now perhaps you ask what is all this leading to, what reveller in such rants. There can be peace in madness. To note such things Is a way is to create a personal response to such absurdity. To draw your own map from fragmented realities and half drawn conclusions. A ruler, some string and a heap of old photographs neatly traced on to browning paper. This game is absurd I hear them whisper in the morning crush of departing bodies and souls. But still we continue through the tunnels and arrive dishevelled in a shattered maze of distilled illusions. The city yearns towards a broken dreamscape, we march through with bleeding toes, place ballet has broken us today and we yearn to soothe softly with green scenes and a different paradise.

There are key projects which have allowed a little softness to merge our heavy hearts. I wonder what it is that consumes a thousand weary souls. A parade of discordance, a dance of the souls that are consumed with the art that is the every day. The elegance of concrete that burns in the over high lit sun sculptures.

The street translated into neat black walls, we now make signs neatly marked in chalk that washed away in acid rain. Our bodies hold bruises of the cold concrete streets

Police on horse back, riots, the city goes mad, it enters the asylum, quickly released on false charges as it changes its colours and no further comment is issued. The gun baffled and the corner shop shuts.

Endless symphony of trains
Tirades of confused sentiment
We enter
Counting grass stalks in the afternoon
A picnic from the garage
The flakes that fall out of Ali Baba’s Van
Luring us like fallen angels to tempt
Struggles to depart
Drink coffee be consumed.
Warm feet in broken beds
Stumbling a noisy maze
A herd of led sheep
Gems of knowledge in rubbish heaps
Dawn walks us.
Follow
Jesus loves you.
Get on with it.
Certain memories rise
I remember you
Gone
We depart
Singing to strangers
Flying through congested lungs
No certainty of repetition.

This is a suggestion of a certainty that can exist in glass houses where children throw stones in angry tirades. This is the city that cannot sleep for fear that it will not remember the form that it must take to adhere to the guide books. I wonder then why we must send so many postcards. Why do feel the need to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. What happened to simple effective communication? The city cannot display its symbols with clarity. The city that forms and reforms, a simple digestion

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