Geometry

The light falls in odd ways on the modern buildings we create. Using small pieces of granite and large pieces of darkened glass we make monuments to modernism. Sometimes I wonder if anyone still really tries to act upon the maxim of letting form follow function.

On an early summer morning the light hits the window of the House Office Building for the State of Michigan. Stand in the right position and you see a geometry of light that playing out along the concrete sidewalk. Nothing grand but waiting to cross a street the gently differentiated rays can be a mild diversion. Today I snapped a shot of the web of light and put it up above. Maybe the fact that this dance of light caught my attention enough to snap a picture shows a little of how my mind works that this game of light caught my eye.

Over the past week I have been working on a piece about working in a vegetable packing house when I was 14. The work lasted only a month or two but it really opened my eyes up to the layers of this world. The hours I spent were key in defining what I wanted in life, that is to be doing something other than manual labor and to be somewhere other than New Jersey I want to get the piece right.

Writing this story is both hard and easy. I remember splintered bits and pieces with great, great clarity. But other parts are large soft fluffy clouds of feeling that I just can’t get my mind around so as to conjure words to capture what I want to say. I wrote a couple of pages of narrative and then stopped. Right now I am just writing vignettes about people and things associated with the place. In a few more days I will go back and try and integrate everything into a whole. We will see what happens.

Enjoy the geometry of daybreak.