not root

At certain moments, carefully isolated like jewels in their settings, this city is mysteriously unifying: an image one had as a child, with a future seen and a past intuited in the sand, which one fancied, feared and was happy not to be a part of, in spite of its allure -- but here it is, encased.

No, this is neither New York nor Chicago, though I've often wanted to make the comparison with the latter. It is a strange amalgamation and I almost feel a loyalty precisely to this, to this magpie-city and its stranger-dwellers, whose ritualistic gestures I need not understand nor recognise (yes, they might as well be birds!). And for me, too, the glass-topped tables at this cafe speak softly, shuddering subtly at the sound waves given off from the music of the first half of the twentieth century. Let me sit here a while, please.

Well, but then Rousseau:
"That is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, when our gaze is held in passionate fascination; and how it is that the first idea it conveys to us is not that of truth."

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I still feel a sharp, if short, pain at the sight of a dead bird.

But thank you -- for 13 years of colour and sound: