BLOG POST SPECIAL: OAK AND STONE

BLOGPOST SPECIAL: an extract from a work in progress.
OAK AND STONE       in draft, 23.1.2017. 
     

37. TIMELESS HERITAGE AND DIGITAL HUB

You know the river is not only history. It is also current events. And it is future speculations. You stand beside it and, looking upstream, you are back in time. Looking downstream you are forward in time. But you never stand still. Your history is your current event. It is your future happening. It is all time.

The adman sells and tells it with one breadth. With one sweeping image of a twin-sparred Peace Bridge that chicanes across your river, as a glory of movement and architecture. Visitors come and photograph the bridge and themselves in an orgy of selfism. Here you see them, brochured by the adman. They ride on bicycles and wheelchairs; they walk on foot, singly and in pairs, in a digital unreality rendered in splendid colour. The adman’s layout is sublime and ridiculous in good measures. The figures are automatons, avatars, icons, cursors blinking on a graphic designer's screen of ideas and appropriations, until they are stilled into place, a fake place, by the detached click of a wireless mouse.

You see the lego woman in the wheelchair; the playmobil man in the tench coat; the meccano shopper, angled to the river-bank in a purposeless pose, determined by the designer's need not to have every figure facing either forward or backwards. The unreality disturbs you. How can your river be trumpeted if the notes are so bum?

The adman's vision is not yours. The vision of low wages, low cost, low expectations and low aspirations is not yours. You do not want to paper over the cracks, digitally enhance the image or sex up the dossier. You want to see, touch, hear, smell and taste the world, the river and its flow under all the bridges of chicanery, which wobble as you traverse them, for being river-based, the foundations are insecure and they are vulnerable to the winds of Time passing through them, past and future, creating the perpetual present you inhabit.

Oak or stone.

This is not a hub you are standing in. This is a quest. Your life is a quest, a narrative of endless heritage. Downstream and upstream, yes, who knows? You are questing your way into it. Your only yearnings are that it be real, not virtual; present, not at a remove; in your face and under your skin, not mediated by screens and digital clouds.

The figures on the bridge appal you. None of them could be you. Or anyone who could actually be. The effort to puff the river and the city demeans the city. It demeans the river. It demeans you. The city is not a thriving hub. It is a vibrant, living organism of vital and innate material, breathing and breathless beings, architecture, botany, gaseous mixes, leaky hydraulic machines, mental and physical stirrings. It is not hub. It is hubbub.

How do you live in such a place? Where the adman oversells, where the gap between actuality and aspiration is wider than the river itself, where you don't even know what you want, because you can't fully, properly frame the questions and so you buffet along, askance to the graphic designer's screen, in a state of maverick meandering, along banks, over bridges, up and down streets, catching glimpses of water through gap-sites and over roof-tops, where pigeons commune and plot their eschatology of the future.

You put the brochure from you. The digitally-doctored image offends and the final offence is the fear that the stick figure pulling the small suit-case could be a simulacrum of yourself, on your way to the time to come, all suited and desert-booted, a dapper cap on your head, a man making for a train perhaps, or a lift with a colleague, beginning a journey into the arms of a lover and the traumas that loving brings, sweet traumas that convulse a future into actuality and determine your own eschatology.