Edge
I walked to the edge of the city today until it yielded its unremarkable secret: it's just one of a thousand exits and entrances, a hurried path of screaming trucks and whooshing cars, pot holes and mud puddles pitting the surface like inverse braille, a palimpsest of commutation. I picked a path around the asphalt, furtively edging the road, gripping angles in the tempest-wake of yet another hurtling semi.
Brackish water and weedy embankments skirted the road, indolent, stultified and pierced in places with red hot pokers. A fiery assault from South Africa. Torch Lily is the vernacular for these green linear shoots with their shocking heads of orange scales. Beautiful and wrong, they choke the antipodean habitat with their scorched abundance.
I passed houses on heights with views and sights, each heavy with the need to impress. Swimming pools, brick porticoes and bunched curtains, affectations of countrified gentility, a sickly ring of suburban rosies. What is it about fringe-dwelling that glorifies the monumental? Why dominate the landscape with ugly hulking edifices? Why sink your fortune in a concrete tomb?
All this is alien to me, although understandable, in as much as any human behavior can be rationalised.
But I want wildness, I want the non-linear path, the spiraling track edging the vast, magnificent unknown. I want spider webs and wombat holes, the messiness of nature, the unkempt pledge that no concrete pillar nor neat edge can hedge.
I want the ultimate, resplendent, peaceful order of chaos.
Brackish water and weedy embankments skirted the road, indolent, stultified and pierced in places with red hot pokers. A fiery assault from South Africa. Torch Lily is the vernacular for these green linear shoots with their shocking heads of orange scales. Beautiful and wrong, they choke the antipodean habitat with their scorched abundance.
I passed houses on heights with views and sights, each heavy with the need to impress. Swimming pools, brick porticoes and bunched curtains, affectations of countrified gentility, a sickly ring of suburban rosies. What is it about fringe-dwelling that glorifies the monumental? Why dominate the landscape with ugly hulking edifices? Why sink your fortune in a concrete tomb?
All this is alien to me, although understandable, in as much as any human behavior can be rationalised.
But I want wildness, I want the non-linear path, the spiraling track edging the vast, magnificent unknown. I want spider webs and wombat holes, the messiness of nature, the unkempt pledge that no concrete pillar nor neat edge can hedge.
I want the ultimate, resplendent, peaceful order of chaos.