On Time, and

.

IN FULL

.

I TRY NOT TO

post my personal thoughts on the topic of Time. Whenever I try to explain what Time means to me most people quickly go glassy-eyed and start mumbling excuses for immediate departure … ’twas ever thus.

ERGO

my efforts with cameras. I’ll leave out the homilies but be warned—these shots are every bit as mundane as they appear. But I will tell you what they are with a brief backgrounder and leave any interpretations to you.

This was taken in New York about the turn of the millennium. As far as I could tell, just one other human being was anywhere near, solitude rules. The last time I stood on this spot was April 1964 and the place was packed with hustling-bustling happy vibrant awestruck people. So?

So what’s the difference …

GIVEN

that turnbuckles aren’t cheap and never were; that artisans, miners, machinery and high temperatures were all involved in creating the rusting masterpiece above … then some bugger had good reason to invest in this setup. At the time, and quite gone now … perhaps the below might help—

—it’s an abandoned tennis club: club rooms, lockers, showers, social, storage and possibly even a good bar. And courts. All for demolition, the nearby Invercargill Museum is down for expansion and will overflow in this direction. Forlorn? No … just timely. En passant, as it were, the sport rooked and mated by culture and the passage of time.

SO, RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO

McDonald’s very own burgery—

—this minor portion of what was once a very impressive wee estate. Have you never looked more closely at the label on a bottle of Mateus Rosé? This is much the same and you are looking at the facing right wing. To give a better idea of the decay—

—this is its feet. The site was once extremely impressive—

 They say the Lion and the Lizard keep 
 The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep:
 And Bahrám, that great Hunter–the Wild Ass 
 Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.

—but today, as Shakespeare might have said, it now serves in the office of a urinal. And fair honks …

So if we’re getting a bit maudlinly questioning—

—this is a sight I see all over Invercargill. In this case the one wall but at least three different bricklayers … but why?

Someone designed that wall, laid it out from his mind to paper with all lines carefully scribed and materials specified. The designs had to be approved (and obviously were) and everything, of course, paid for … and at a later date his erection so cavalierly modified to suit the mores of the then-now times.

QUESTION: at the time when the original bricks were being lovingly laid by the original craftsmen—was there anything that anyone could have done to prevent the constructive vandalism we see illustrated here?

If you answer ‘no’ … I love you as a kindred soul.

If you tell me ‘yes’ then I think you’re probably a great person but you are trapped by your own upbringing—no shame in that either; we are what we are.

AND NOW

 whose now, exactly? Don’t ask, just accept—herewith a shot of an ancient deceased tree in the gravel of an ex secondhand car sales yard, now used as a short cut. I say ancient, it may even be three years or more in that position. All very artistic, to be compared with the larger snaps below which are of ex-trees that I trotted past yesterday morning—

You’ll notice that bits are falling off, I collared a couple of those and brought them home to add to this lump—

—which I collected a few decades back from the top of a high hill in the central North Island of NZ (the Home Valley, Waiouru); being some two and a half plus thousand feet above sea level and a long way inland.

According to the museum’s sign those fossilised logs were enfossilated some 160 million years ago. But I have no idea how long since those fossil shells were alive and on the bottom of the sea … but I’ll happily hazard a guess that it was a lot more than 160 million years ago.

AND NOW

by way of a calculated anticlimax and very weak ending:

how about that?

.

KISMET

* With gratitude to Melissa, whose works inspire me. (On the web much would-be poetry isn’t, but hers is — and is well worthy of multiple slow readings.