In my search for the soul of the city, I saw school busses playing hookey.
I saw a warehouse in which boxes and bales and barrels brought from all points of the world came to rest on shelves so men could break them down into parts and parcels to mete out to the masses, goods and favors.
I delved deep into the vortex of the city, finding in my journey an abandoned cement mixer.
This high wuthering height of Humanness, so far from the storm blasted heath of my youth, it makes me proud that we withstand.
It's adventurous, it's dangerous, its a Dag Day in the big city, I do think so.
2 comments:
You've got some good snaps there. Wooden warehouses (in once wood and coal-burning cities) and fire hydrants: these are signs just as great as our sewers and manhole covers, and even plastic, of what has helped build our civilization: the fire insurance industry was built up in response to the Great Fire of London and as it expanded across the English-speaking world became one of the key forms of jointly shared social and industrial capital. The interest of merchants to protect their stock, especially in new cities in a new west built up quickly from the wood of the surrounding forest was an incentive to all kinds of civic discussion, voluntarism and institution building, from the volunteer fire company to the civic professionals, to the ingenious inventors of fire-suppressing chemicals, to the duly cognizant citizens, responding to the fire alarms in ways that the "fire bug" arsonists could never overcome in their sordid resentments of a reality growing, step by step, apart and away from their violent desires.
I look at these things in a state of envy for the creators: the designers, the tool and dye makers, the builders, the ones who create the things that make our world so beautiful and useful and that give us the reach to be decent. What a great life we live. If only I weren't color-blind and dyslexic and generally inept I might have made something too. But I can still gaze in wonder at the work of others and appreciate it. And how good it is to take a walk with a friend and shoot a couple of photos on a borrowed camera just because I can. And then post it for the world to see and perhaps sigh longingly.
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