POSSIBILITY ON THE URBAN EDGE

in
Bali Streetlife, 2013.

Bali Streetlife, 2013.

Possibility is the long view, and our orientation towards it. It is also the spirit of that orientation – the attachment we feel to the projected future. 

There is a special kind of possible that seeps through the everyday, and is an embedded trajectory within the lived-place. For Henri Lefebrve, part of the urban project was the continual regeneration of the idea of the urban. He asks us to continually re-look at what exists, to reconsider the possible.

Productive sites for thinking and making in this way can be found at the edges of material, spatial and conceptual categories. For me, Bali is a kind of 'urban edge', at which slippages occur. With this instability comes the possibility of knowing things differently.

Bali is tied up in its possibility of urbanity. For Lefebvre, the “possible is also part of the real and gives it a sense of direction, an orientation, a clear path to the horizon” (2003: 45). Bali is the edge of the possible; it straddles the current urban thing and what the urban thing might productively become.

MEMORY TRAPS

in ,

Paris, l'Opera. 2010.

It doesn’t take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight lingering on the upper floors of a row of buildings and the sidewalks down below already deep in shadow, may get some old movie in our heads rolling again. Since we are ordinarily better at forgetting than remembering, it is often a mystery why some such sight has stamped itself on our memory, when countless others that ought to have far greater meaning can hardly be said to exist for us anymore. It makes me suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.
 - Memory Traps, Charles Simic.NYRB Blog, November 2012.

Paris is, and will likely forever be, my memory trap.

I think it was that way before I had even been there the first time. But it was our second time, although our first together, which hangs in my mind most often these days.

After stashing our bags at the hostel mid-morning, we snuck out and wound our way through the tightly cobbled lanes of the Marais. The air was crisp, with a cool blueness settling over the rooflines. I can't seem to remember anyone else being out. In my mind, the streets were impossibly ours.

Each with a white-specked brioche tucked into a brown paper bags at a quiet boulangerie, we found a place to sit by the canal. The cobbles were warm, and the roughness didn't bother us. Our teenage knees and travel-worn legs dangled. We couldn't help ourselves but to grin.

We were here.

Thanks to the Paris Travel Guide over at A Minute Away from Snowing for bringing it all flooding back.