arlingtonton
this morning i made my way north from newport news into the city to meet with publius/3. we had arranged to meet in georgetown once i had established that he was already intown. we met, for the first time really, in a formerly sleek and posh dining establishment that had become a staging area for recombinant masons and various collaboratives focusing on sculpture and landscape reclamation. the meeting was as unceremonious as the place, yet following the spirit of a things turned ass for ears publius/3 suggested we leave to check something out.
we headed back across the river to arlingtonton where he was staying. the cemetery rose eerily in the distance as we moved onto the grounds of the pentagon. security fences once erected in layers around the compound were prone and hovering above us on staffs and were all grown over with arboreal vegetation like pergolas. they softened the desolation of the approach and drew a loose boundary around the agricultural fields radiating out from this and three other faces of the building. the pentagon complex, along with other compartmentalized office buildings, especially ones that had once stood as symbols of the old guard, had been reclaimed as self-governing communities, hamlets.
the pentagon in particular was a shining example of microurban communal concentrations. some of the inner rings of the structure had been gutted and left covered by roofs to serve as open air spaces for trade that wrapped a central pentagonal courtyard. a portion of the building that ran transversely through the building that had been rebuilt after a plane crash was removed once again to give the building an openness that was both symbolic of the discontinuity affecting the command sequence of the land and a practical expression of the new way the building was used.
residents lived against the outer ring and had begun expanding and burrowing through to other cells and inner rings in continuous pixellated apartments. some residents, depending on their needs, cored out strange arrays of rooms in four storey loops or rambling serpents that folded back upon themselves in unusual ways, often capturing single room dwellings for thin ascetic draughtsmen or gourmet authoresses. facing this crevasse was a lawn dedicated to public activities and events. this was opposite the side we had entered the grounds on. this lawn was strewn with different sorts of public functions from small scall amphitheatres and skyspaces to public baths and perpetual sculptures. everything of the place had a communal aspect to it. even those people who were wont to be alone would drift off to tinker on some secluded portion of the sculptue or pull weeds in the shallow root crop field that spanned the earthen arch over the public baths.
somehow out of all the incredible transformations that had taken place in this compound that had once symbolized not only the unilateral cloak of a life expected for the people of our country but also the force necessary to shroud the world in western apathy, the public baths stood out to me. i think it was a resonant kinship with the fort ancient market i saw last week. the public baths were essentially a reclamation of a memorial of sorts related to the plane crash i mentioned earlier. it seems as though the polis had seen fit to imbue the hollow artifact with a life that was even more a vehicle for memory than it had been because it was helping to create new memories, collective ones. the people who gathered here to soak, or rinse their linens, or to cool off were not dwelling on past tragedies, they were not controlled by the menace of the lost memories of the dead, curtailed potential, or the silent bludgeon of life, in which we are impressed with an unspoken envy for the dead as they know the peace and freedom we know not. i would say that the laughter, togetherness, and empowerment taking place on this plot, where may lie the graves of many unknown even before that plane crash, may be the most sophisticated memorial act of all, that of living and being in life.
