Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 3

A silent dialogue hovers above. My imagination shaped (as in once read comic strips) like a Cupid’s heart: My eyes hear “let’s play. I witness the here and there. The real and the phantasm walk the same line: Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Museum asked me to feel the holocaustal death below: I take a more objective step: I visualize massive projected horrors: The apocalypse arises: My dreams merge with global catacombs: Lava spills like across continents: Real horror-real dreams-real past-real future: My eyes then and now tiptoe through 100 million years of unimaginable cemeteries: Cemeteries where I have mingled just to hear the sounds of the past.

The architectural history I seek is not for a mere capture- -it is intended for my camera to recognize the living past in a real moment: A belief in a sense of place: A sense of where you are: Stories await just ahead: Cities await ahead and beyond: My own past just a step ahead: The future’s liquid dreams motivate me today and again:

I need to make the photographs I see: I move through each day celebrating my sights and sounds with five naked paleontologists: We as one (imitating Henri Matisse’s “Dance(1). Paris, Boulevard des Invalides”)celebrate as five In the night: We see nothing but anticipate the tomorrow light: We dance/walk about: Our stories amass. We build and rebuild memories:

The cities I remember, the cities I have forgotten patiently remain. “… through the eyes infused

In my imagination, mine I made”:

Dante Alighieri/ The Divine Comedy

If there was as such paranormal powers, my camera might pretend to bend time- -bend the life of architecture to make my captures become true: My architecture, the buildings often seen and  dreamed about, appear as transmutations in real time: My camera sees seconds, minutes and millenniums pass through time: I follow the evolution in almost untamed filmed resolutions: The  details reveal seemingly impossible possibilities: The real time begs for my presence: My camera abides: The captures remain.

Ernest Hemingway had white elephants: Joan Didion had church spires:

I often imagine what a return to Hemingways’ Hills Like White Elephants on heroin might be like: Dreams are addictive: I dream continuously that my captures are real: The voices that live in my  dreams travel with me as pets would follow- – just to be near: The memory of those Hemingway words- -those damn elephants have riveted my lenses for decades: It is as if I had left my soul to be found: The mere string of Hemingway’s words- -the shadows embedded in those are alive for seconds until they are not: The frame of “…White Elephants” might never be filmed in my time, but- -positively- – will be gone in the blink of the wind: They, those shadows are my “forever” Melville- -my whale:

The shadows across those hills remind me of every pose my camera has made: My pose of readiness; my  pose of conjecture; my pose that frames my life: My eyes pause: I stand in wait: I stand, framed: When the shadows are gone- -there will not be elephants: The picture perfect inflection of memory lost heartily remains- -and becomes merely my ongoing nightmare.

Joan Didion en route atop the highway- -spotted dozens or hundreds of elevated church spires dotting the California twilight sky: In one or a few seconds the direction of her car will veer: The night sky will darken: The spires will vanish from sight, but remain in the light of her mind:

Joan Didion told stories that were real in her moments: Didion’s readers stood to believe the stories were real and we walked with her: She recounted her days; we immersed our eyes in her words. They were real for her and gone before the next pages:

I am constantly toggling between Hemingway and Didion: I drive the highways scanning the sky for the spires in twilight; I careen as I drive through hillsides looking for white elephants: They have tortured my mind’s eyes for decades: They had abilities: They spotted passing moments before I was born: Their pages in words will last for an eternity: I am only living in a world of mere fractions: My moment leans on the light, the light that may never appear anew: My picture(s) vanish before my eyes; before I can see what I saw. Didion and Hemingways’ words will remain again for eternity: I want to hate them for the torture their eyes have imparted on me: My camera cannot see the fleeting moments they describe fast enough: The cities await: I march.

Architecture of cities is a lifetime in one day: A picture in frame: My cities need a bit more time: My forever moment, my closeup is a fleeting fraction of time: I am a dying Snowy Owl with one yellow eye glimpsing into my past; my other eye hiding, waiting in a vortex of anxious rhythms pleading for futures. I wait accompanied by immense patience: