The highest form of reason is love without reason. My deepest insecurity is flawed memory. So, memory for what?
There is a voice that doesn’t use words. There is a place of no ambition, just a sure mission to submission without ego. To throw your imagination forward and let it speak its own language, like living in a lighthouse to summon the ships. Who knows who steers them and what stories they hold. Just keep the light on for whoever can see. Only the bold can arrive and there is no thirst for understanding. It’s not in your interest nor theirs. We’re not in the business of fixing the world, our place is beneath the surface of things where passion dwells without bounds. There’s a voice that doesn’t use words, it overflows and floods the world inside and out.
The city is noisy with honks and engines roaring. The sun is a red blur over a dense layer of smog. The three of us walk and wander in humor with the goal of finding the canal district Ben had heard of and seen online. I drift in and out of conversation as my attention cones toward the trees. They are full with the green of spring, lined up along the madness of the roads. The wind gushes through the leaves for a symphony of sounds and fluid motions waving about. And birds sing and fly swiftly, too quick for the eye to see. These affairs that predate the city trump the smog and noisy streets as we search for the canal district, said to be like the Venice of Shanghai.
We pass through mass surveillanced roads and trampolines and the periodic airplane descending overhead; and every time one does, Ben drops everything, races for his camera and points it at the sky.
After some mapping and walking, we finally arrive at a murky runway of water near the freeway. Andrei begins to roll a girthy rock toward the ledge and then stands, saying, “It’s too heavy.” Ben tells him, “Nothing is impossible!” So Andrei picks up the rock and swings it into the water for a big splash and black tar rises from beneath. I ask them what if this water was totally clean, what kind of society would be around it?”
A bit disappointed at sundown not having seen the reflective canal district from the picture. We walked back through the woods and toward the subway station with a 1 liter beer can in one hand and some mysterious street meat on-a-stick in the other, laughing the journey home.