Nuance is aesthetics
Our World
His uncle traveled far and brought back places.
He would begin his tales with objects.
Walls pockmarked by uprisings’ failure, music halls sullied by sweater vests, swimming pools shadowed by Cézanne’s sunsets, red lights flattered by ladyboys. Dark clubs debauching the fractures, city beaches burning Erasmus hordes, Christian dogs in pursuit of Muslim cats, ring roads ensnaring dynasties in smog. The markets awaiting the chaos of blonde, the canals beckoning in cold continuity, the assault rifles guarding sea views from tinted windows.
Before he got to the people.
Brush, with a soft spot for baseball; Furtive, others Mukhabarat; Languid, in colonial humidity; Bobbing, in rickshaws through jungles; Splintered, filled by bunny chow; Trapped, exiled in country clubs; Prideful, on the graves of empires; Didactic, from magnetic rebirth.
And their activities.
Happy hour politicking. Stepping quietly through ghosts of machetes, boda-ing through yellow helmeted hustle, debating the future of aid, serving the unlucky confusing good times with business.
Then, voice lowering, he would begin to outline their fears.
Running red lights to avoid carjackings, swarming Rolls-Royces for breadcrumbs, hiding emotion from even themselves, building museums in search for their relevance, gluing posters to find their disappeared, fishing and sailing to hide from a sell-out.
Voice raising, he grinned with their escapes.
Garden croquet in safari hats, Quaaludes in high rises, balls over flip-flopped sands, one drink away from the flush, forgetting the fools that left, raucous and talking and paid-for-companions.
Before reflecting on how they see their towns.
Mountained escapes. Snowcrashed revelries. Courtyarded mysteries. Surfers with pastéis de nata. Post-Soviet emergence.
His father would laugh. I recognize Aleppo in pockmarked walls, Beirut in dogs chasing cats, Johannesburg in carjackings, Britain its repression. But, aren’t you overselling the difference? Cities are human and humans are universal. Juliet’s Romeo, Gatsby’s fireworks, Pip’s spiritual fall. The stories repeat themselves wherever you land.
He sat and listened and wondered.
“Mostly you put concealer on and then later take it off and nothing life-changing happens in between.” All Fours
“We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,” he once said to me. “The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.” A Moveable Feast
“Correct understanding of a matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter are not mutually exclusive’” The Trial
“Little did he know that I had enjoyed thinking about all this for weeks, checking the weather and planning everything down to my lingerie and a bath with scented salts.” A Year In Hell with Mr Hell
“What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.” The Bell Jar
“It is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear.” Invisible Cities
To see the connections, open the site below.
