Architecture of Cities: The Light in the Night

Night Witches flood the sky in silence: In the midst of darkness there is only their wind not heard: Their flirting languid shadows stretch through the night- -then there is their fright: The heart stirs: My eyes feel like bees in hives multiplying: I hear one snippety-snap-snap: The night is done- -I see: An abundance of satellites amplifying radio waves capture the darkness that are blips: Only the sky knows.

My cameras’ eyes open wider than a blue whales’ dilated: Much more so than all the planets’ observatory’s sky domes: My enormous human aperture peers through an 8mm lens: The visual language seen is ensconced in the idea of a fisheye: The world is wider than my ideas: I imagine somewhat more: I consider zooming into focus- - zooming out of focus: My head feels the whiplash as in a cinematic crash: My eyes are sensationally disoriented.

Darkness steps forward: I imagine Impersonating the great Gordon Parks- -His specially made f1 lens made by Nikon changed his life: The lights in his darkest moments peerlessly came to life: I again imagine more: The superior NASA Zeiss Planar 50 mm 0.7 lens is more- -I dreamed as it would be fictitiously mounted on my camera: I pause and pray for what dreams may be: The camera held in my pillow soft hands, shivers and shakes: The entire vista in every direction explodes in a single frame like an entire planet recounted in Black Magic ink: Every known pixels and dots vanish: The conquest of film revealed- - appears as Spartacus would - -victorious in enviable vibrant resolutions:

Madison Square Park Tower: KPF Architects on the left: On the right: One Madison: Architect Cetra Ruddy

The expanding silent brilliance awakens the universe: Darkness that is above our eyes becomes a brilliant lullaby: The light that is our stars is seen shimmering like marmoris from the far galaxy’s: An astronomers story about a star is heard- -Let us listen and remain until the end:

An army of wolf-packs baying into the face of the night encroaches: Maybe the astonishing delight that becomes one-hundred wolf men seen as Lon Chaney Jr. Maybe a morning’s pitch black light seems like a phantasmic tale to tell. The night happens at night: I rekindle and resume my nightly walks along tracks for trains: Vagrants, explorers and aliens- - accompany me to my architectural captures:

I gather for my mind’s sanity- -fictional companionships: Alone in the darkness I kneel (as in prayer) for a few more eyes to accompany me into the night: Alone myself alone, Under the Volcano’s Malcolm Lowry’s Geoffrey staggers aside: This Geoffrey drunkardly appears as my Albert Finney: Side by side we seem to walk like two men dangling and fractured- - in dangling conversations:

Cityscape looking south from Murray Hill on Fifth Avenue

Enmasse, there is strength in numbers: If Oz’s Dorothy was me- - If Kipling’s Daniel and Peachy were me- - If O’Toole’s Arabian’ Lawrence was me- - we would all share tales told about the darkness; the adventures into the unknown that appear in the dark: We might, as I would, dance towards our destinies hand in hand: We would as most fiction may do- - glorify in bold embellishment what our eyes have seen: Histories and architectural histories may have been splayed with entire nakedness before our eyes: Startling but true, the past and future had been built magically before my eyes: We all appear as gawkers in the circus. We applauded thunderously.

The camaraderie among my friends- - soothes the lurid deafness from the night: Though me, myself and I feel a twinge of loneliness- -my eyes- - I, embrace the darkness that is shared and illuminated among my experienced travelers- - and friends.

All shades from twilights to dawns are filled with interwoven tapestries’ nightmares and tales that have not been heard nor seen: One day I will share more of the brew that holds my architectural experiences past and the new ones ahead: Cities dressed and undressed have stories: Secrets from above and below the streets are us: From Seville, Southern Mississippi, South-Central Los Angeles, Bangladesh, Shenzhen, Tbilisi, Samarkand, Mexico’s Condesa Park, and Moscows’ Golden Rings and more- -skeletal shadows whisper in the night.