City = desert

The serendipity trail brought me to this blog post, about the work of Melbourne artist Damon Kowarsky. Of course I'm always looking for art or writing or ideas that relate to my "journey lines", and in reading this I realised that "my lines" aren't just about the journey, or even the time taken up by daily travel (or time lost to the need to travel), but they are also about being an individual in a crowded city.

[From the Pakistani writer Quddus Mirza:] “The social setup of big cities – with minimum personal contact and huge crowds of unknown people swarming in the shopping malls, streets, parks and other urban places – aggravates the feeling of loneliness.

“In that sense, man rediscovers his self both in connection and confrontation with the city. [The] city assumes a great significance in the psyche of a citizen who perceives it as a combination of structures that are unknown, uninviting and unbearable. Perhaps, for him, roaming in the city is an experience not much dissimilar from moving in a desert, since in both places one tends to lose the sense of direction and gets an illusion of being lost.”

Mirza is not the first to draw links between the city and the desert. Francis Bacon [1561-1626] wrote “Magna civitas, magna solitude“ [A great city, a great desert], making clear the parallels between these places.

(Image from here.)