Loop
Small groups of people run down long narrow streets; there are snipers on the rooftops, petrol bombs and shouting. Individuals become objects to be carried are surrounded by two or three or four who bend under the weight and hurry away from the ambiguous front line. Everywhere fear binds the elements: the surface of the street to neighboring apartments through the windows of which residents watch to the architecture of the highway flyovers to the straight lines flashed by tracers.
When he stops moving the cold stings his face; he can feel the war give way and hurtle backward, its organization breaking apart until it disappears into his memory again.
Again he moves out onto a vast white plane. His focuses narrows to include only the arrangement of thin black triangles in the medium distance like a geometrical barricade and the ways in which his hearing is filled with details uprooted and swirled about by the wind. He slows and pulls the black fabric tighter that is wound around his head.
When he stops warm air and the smells from the subway wash over him; he can feel the white plane and the arrangement of thin black triangles in the medium distance give way and hurtle backward, their organizations breaking apart until they disappear into his memory again.
Small groups of people run down long narrow streets; there are snipers on the rooftops, petrol bombs and shouting. Individuals become objects to be carried are surrounded by two or three or four who bend under the weight and hurry away from the ambiguous front line. Everywhere fear binds the elements.
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Author's Note
i have a friend who has been trapped in an apartment just off tahrir square in cairo for a few days. today things may well be different. for a while when the net came back on, she was posting what she could hear and sometimes see outside on facebook and asked us out in the wider world who were watching to tell her what was happening outside in cairo. it became a very peculiar communicative space with people from chicago and essex and texas and baku all posting in a chain information about cairo for someone in cairo. and the images that we were relaying haunt us. i wanted to make something about the in-between space that caught it without replicating it. so i let the narrator float, be identified variously by the fluctuations of his memory.
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Ramshackle Review
Public group49 members
Stephen, this is powerful, graphic reportage, and the loop effect is disheartening, so I know you've created a powerful tome. Like the news coverage of this event, it scares me, the individual's fears, and the massive destruction that is war surrounding the innocence (innocents).
The combo here of someone going mad from an experience, and the terror of that experience, in the visual sense of reading this, is done very well here. I saw it as a geometrical moving painting, like an art installation with "undertones".
Like this a lot
thanks much for the reads and comments. this one is kinda personal even as i tried to transpose the imagery onto a more abstract/generalized register. pleased that you both found it to have some power to it; it's hard to know when working with freighted material whether a piece works to you because of the weight of immediate associations or because of the writing. likely both, but still.