Architecture of Cities: Color and Light Into Pictures of Cities
I stood half naked: I tippy-toed just over four-feet tall. I was mostly six years removed from the womb: The spectral of the candy colored skies angled above:
The blue whale appeared resolute in its pose: The whale was still, quiet, dead: I imagined almost alive: Her large eye looked me up and down: My imagination dithered: The summer blaze begged me to get a bit closer: The shade and shadows of the 60, 70, 80, 90 foot behemoth, posed: The whales’ vapors moved about:
I had heard a rumor: A family of Pika’s had lost their way: I fused all of my young imagination into one thought: The blue whale most likely circled the seas for quite sometime: She espied a Pika family ashore on a tiny embankment: She might have been blinded by sunlight reflecting like a mirror on the Pacific: The Pika and embankment turned out to be a mirage: The huge mammal obviously lost its way: It skidded atop the shoreline in Southern California: My uneducated guess is explained: The Seven Seas can be a dangerous place.
The California amusement park, P.O.P ( Pacific Ocean Park) stood a few dozen feet south: Dozens of wooden piles held the pier aloft: Screaming children and rumbling rides filled the air: I listened: I now know the whale and eventually the park would die an unceremonious death: The juxtaposition between the whale and the wailing voices saddened the moment: The noise and the quiet death of the whale was deafening. If there is only one way to define “an innocent”, just maybe that day was mine.
Yes she was dead: I am less than one hundred years of age and more than ten: I have remembered that incident as if I remembered even the time of death: The entirety of my camera life has been reliving experiences of my own defining synesthesia: The very first time I touched the sky, I saw the colors that my camera might see: The very hallucinatory moment is about touching colors with music, music becoming colors: touching the colors of the sky with a bit of music: Experiencing synesthesia seems to live in my every snap. If you might imagine Keith Richard’s Gimme Shelter just above me in the sky with a bit of treble: If you might imagine Jimmy Page’s first notes from Going to California: If you might imagine them as dueling guitars as in Deliverances’ “Dueling Banjos”: Maybe then my visual life makes sense:
From the moment my whale lifted her underbelly, my mind merged her currents of yellow diatoms and blue base to every color I have ever opened my camera to: I imagined her dipping into the waves back to her Seven Seas: I imagined all the colors of the sun’s prismatic glow in a single frame:
I imagined the blue whale for an instant dreamed that she would be back with the seafaring pod: I imagined she dreamed as death stood near by: Her underbelly again appeared like a current of yellow diatoms breaking through the waves out to sea: It was not psychotic chaos: It was not an angelic caress: I imagined I heard her plea: It is the way I see what I hear: She faced death: I was young: When I remember this moment my camera lines brighten and then I snap.
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