In this city, you must travel a long way through excavated streets and detours, past the skeletons of new towers and their glassy forbearers, to find yourself at last in the old town. I suppose there are a number of ways to go straight away: in a car, solitary and anxious, or by the arithmetic of bus transfers, forgiving the trespasses of fellow riders. You may pedal madly up hills on a bicycle, dodging corrupt paths, battling the hostile gravity of the world. Were it Venice, or some sunken town amid the rising ocean, open to you by a lattice-work of canals, there would be no better entry to the old town than by a slowly rowed boat. But here, the sea is kept at the side, seldom invited in. Travel in any vehicle of your fancy, but know there is only one way to truly arrive in the old town: by foot. You must walk tall through the empty lots where demolition’s wood-splinter perfume infects your lungs. You must wade into the tide of strangers and disappear with the undertow. You must face your reflection in proliferating mirrors: chrome, shop window glass, faces, in phantoms blowing down alleys and dissolving in manholes. How you must temper your instinct to linger where a bell tolls, or where the ignorant machines achieve their hum. On this walk, you must convince others that you are one of them, a common traveler, who, with purpose if not grace, advances steadfast toward his destination. Dalliance on colorless streets is sport for lunatics, or young lovers. It is indeed a long walk, but the distance is not as tasking as the spirit, the filter through which you see the streets, always looking past the materiality of things, of people, into some other portal where their suffering is kept. What piper leads us here, to pass as strangers, to step from the street into imagined destines and back again? The people heave and growl as they birth their being in the forum of the streets, and the streets writhe and shift—their calculus governed by the ministers of order. You will find me where these two collide, dallying forth rudderless, lost, mad even, you may think, for I go down aching, expiring streets possessed by a spirit any good soul would exorcise. Alas amid the busted sidewalks, the sullen facades, I amble toward the perigee of my desire. Hidden among the ruins, I wait for the rarest of all birds to roost in the abandoned factories of the old town. I have only until nightfall to see them, a sad deficit were it not for the symphonies they conduct in the dark.
-Daniel H. Presnell Jr.
Daniel H. Presnell Jr. produces text, images, and sound. He owns and operates Incomparables Industries (print editions) and Feed & Seed Records. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
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