parkworld[diary style selfindulgence]I'm sitting in the park opposite Sydneys' Central Electric railway station waiting for my life blood and watching the parkworld contemplatively. A million people must pass by here every week and i catch a few of them and some brief snippets of their lives. A man exercises tai chi, slow motion karate movements - a substantial commitment considering his determined uninvolvement with the world surrounding him. I contribute a dollars-worth of a girls' fare to Wellington - not the city in New Zealand, she assures me, but its more humble namesake near Dubbo, New South Wales. This exchange is our only shared experience- we bond over the puerile joke, and she moves on to the next timekiller. A man thrusts breadcrumbs vigorously against the breeze. To fit these movements, the breadcrumbs should be much larger, rock-sized projectiles, but the swarms of well fed pigeons and grey stained sea gulls aren't complaining. The afternoon wanes into evening and the light dies under the optional gaze of working-back office employees in the city's tall buildings. The temporarily homeless set up camp, some of them displaying their transitoriness with bedrolls and plastic supermarket bags of food - possessions that separate them from those for whom homelessness is entrenched, or more of a 'lifestyle thing'. A group of drunk Irish tourists wander through, one mock-eating a small tree branch, his friend scaring away the bird flock with loud aggressive yelling that strangely seems noisy despite the constant sounds of traffic. A man with an unruly beard passes in a daze dragging his accumulated belongings in a vinyl trolley. His life seems uncomplicated, his transport mode efficient. Who gave that woman the pink carnations she so consciously carries? Or whom will she give them to? Did somebody close and meaningful to her die, pass through a rite of passage and celebration, or have an expression of romance? I don't ask, I'll never know and never think of it again. There are no swings, slides or seesaws in this park- it is a far world from the ordered sanctified spaces of suburban child rearing, clearly 'not that sort of park'. No children wander and explore unattended, no cricket games or bicycles with training wheels, no frisbees, picnic spreads or games of shuttlecock. It is not a weekend-only park: people's faces are screwed up, loaded with disaffection and a not-wanting-to-be-here vacancy that transports them back to their residences. The park benches are ninety-five percent empty. They are never full all at once, offering more an aspect of situational choice than pure utility. Between their wrought-iron arms is an emptiness that mimics the park itself, beckoning to approaching bodies but rarely receiving a reply. Most people pass through. The park is their fastest journey route. Their thinking is as-the-crow-flies. In passing there is probably time enough for a quick whimsical contemplation, always invaded by thoughts tied elsewhere. Back to their home spaces bordered off from this public, un-peopled space. Some just stop here for a drink or cigarette. But others appear more satisfied with this place, as a refuge from the hairiness of the concrete of the city, a shaded grove of respite and rest. Around the corner, discarded refuse is reassigned with function, put to new creative uses by the city's' homeless. Plastic shopping bags, wheelable trolleys, sheets of cardboard, an electric blanket, cords removed, packing foam, cask wine bladders.... On the surface, their lives consist solely of these material artefacts of our culture's disposable-thinking. These things are the manifestations of 'disorder', largely rendered invisible even in this ordered generic city feature-the central park- where uses are inscribed and aberrant reappropriations of property discouraged.
And it is beautiful, and i am reminded of why it is that i like cities- this disorder that resists, however slightly but inevitably, the neatness of human rational attempts to define and categorise space.
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