What shall we be today?

This as part of a submarine. A periscope.
 
The Empire of England remakes its objects as they age, as purpose becomes obsolescence. Drains without feed are become submarines. Lamp posts without light, a temple's ruins. Alone, each seems to ask, "What shall we be today?"
 
I once attended an international conference on literature for children. Standing in the farthest reaches of the conference theatre, among the rafters like a planet in deep space, I heard "just-so" and "might-be" stories the likes of how coyote learned to call, or, crocodile came to smile, or, in translation from the near-Asian steppe, why mommy took a wife.
 

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You put your head to the window of the periscope and you can see them. The race that sails round and round the stationary scope. Traveling millions of miles if only in their own special sense of distance. Like a set of chattering plastic teeth at the end of a wind-up key held stationary, or, planets laid out on a mechanical form.
 
The mirrors that take the light down bend it along with the images of the over-land world above. I come out, below, with a broad nose and thin lips as is fitting an alternate reality. My eyes, sadly though, read like a bad poem. With gravity far beyond their years, those eyes - at first sight - spark broad panic. It dies down, but, not without much discussion of the blinkered code they might be sending.
 
Aware of your own distortion, you consider that the mermaids you see there, below, might be sea cows. Might they survive on the refuse washed down drains from the nearby open-air market's fruit and vegetable vendors, you allow yourself to wonder. Meanwhile, those below create myths in which we gain the role of gods. We should be honoured but wary. What goes down must come back up.
 
Indeed, whether mermaids or sea cows, they're ravenous with a propensity to belch. Initially, we've mistaken the gurgling sound for conversation. Attendant malodorous scents, however, neither suggest nor confirm that our hypothesis is false. But, they certainly rise as quickly as our hopes give rise to having discovered intelligent life beyond, if inside, our own world. If they, below, only knew what our scientists are saying!
 
Having described the submarine below as a kind of sit-n-spin, they've now moved on to postulate that those farthest aft experience age in advance of those closer to the spout. A society of contrarians labels the theory "Daft", outlining a mocking theory that considers those to the rear are stern and those forward are loopy. They refuse, simply, to allow prevailing theory to be edified by uncertain observations of the subterranean world. Indeed, reminding us of smoke-and-mirrors, they suggest, it may be our world, not that below, that is spinning.
 
   

The case of the Chimney Pots and the Spy

This was originally posted to JPG Magazine using ShareThis with an unrevised narrative.

Look up.  Don't point your camera at anyone.  These were the thoughts that passed through my view finder and out of the lens toward objects of unsung desire.  I was walking down one of the narrow streets of Cambridge (U.K.).  And, the crowd was growing more dense as the lane ahead narrowed.

Years earlier, while I had been photographing a library in Botswana.  The images were needed to illustrate a report on preservation conditions and structural enhancements.  One of the library's readers, who assumed that I'd been photographing her, took exception.  She broke the silence of the Rare Book Reading Room with a verbally violent attack.  Her index fingers were alternately making stabbing and jabbing motions into the air as she charged toward me.  Nothing short of sharing the images I'd taken with her would satisfy her paranoia.  When she got her fill of shots of doors and windows, glass and metal, and of the sunlight pouring down through the building's perfect diamond-shaped glass ceiling, she turned to me pacified.  Adopting a conspiratorial tone, she remarked simply, "So, you like to photograph things that stand witness."

Stand they do: these five red pots on a pedestal, demanding attention.  Five little Rockettes, they might just break out into dance as stand posing.   But, it is the crowd looking on that draws my attention.

The dull pot in the foreground. And, its sibling ducking behind a dormer. A third, revealed only in the shadows, painted on the canvas of white wall.

The north/north-west facing windows, themselves.  Standing poker-faced in hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil panes of three, they repeat themselves like the name, rank and serial number of a prisoner.   Turned from the interrogation of the sun, they reflect nothing.  They are not illuminated within, the life has literally gone out of them.

The drain-pipe standing sentry at the corner of the background building.  Functionally literate.  Yet, almost unnoticed among the lines of structure.  A quite character in an architectural morality play: black lines for a white building like the stain of sin or of a functional body.  The white trim of the black building, winking: only playing dead.  By nightfall each window will host a play of its own.

And, most of all, the spy in the scene.  The antenna, communicating silently with a subject beyond view.  The lie is put to it.  It turns in the shadows.  Quite unlike the dull chimney pots that present themselves forthrightly, it is smarter. Using lines formed of the painted mortar, it imagines a clock painted on the wall.  It can tell time.

I like to photograph things that stand witness, even false witness.  Everything has a story to tell.