“Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring
“Large Marge”
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Dallas, Texas
(click for larger version on Flickr)
Clearly messed with using Illustrator and Photoshop.
“I would hate to be murdered in a lounge chair. You would lose not only your life, but a chance at a nice nap.”
—-Armando Vitalis, From Hell’s Heart I Stab At Thee
Continental Bridge Park,
Dallas, Texas
(click for larger version on Flickr)
I try not to take so many photographs that don’t have people in them. But there aren’t many folks on the Continental Bridge Park on a workday afternoon, even on a preternaturally warm autumn day.
The few people that did walk by as I ate a takeout sweet potato were interesting enough:
A large young man with headphones – he sauntered by and I saw him at a distance once he reached an unoccupied section dancing by himself.
A young couple, very casually dressed, moving around in some sort of elaborate ritual in each open area. I think they were planning a wedding on the bridge – or at least a photo-shoot – and were trying out all the angles.
A couple with two chihuahuas. They passed one way with the dogs on leashes – then returned with the dogs loose. I later saw them chasing the pooches along the Trinity River Levee – they must have seen something interesting.
—-but the bridge is very long and narrow, and the interesting stuff was too far away. So all I did was sit in one of the lounge chairs and read a couple of horrifically gruesome short stories.
For example, in one an astoundingly stupid young man is experimenting with an ethanol-based homemade hair gel when he accidentally ignites his coif with a cigarette. Aflame, he runs into the road in a panic where he is struck by a speeding wrecker. The impact flips him over a rail into the Sabine river, which does serve to extinguish the flames – but before his friends can rescue him a large alligator drags him off by the head.
Things go downhill from there. If you don’t believe me – the story seems to be available online.
“Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
Keeper of the Plains,
Wichita, Kansas
“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Capt. Bill Slatten
Towboat
Mississippi River
New Orleans, Louisiana
Capt. Billy Slatten towboat information
“Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m bout to turn myself loose!”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
It’s a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930’s swoop-facaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof gardens and turning to wave as you pass.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
(click to enlarge)
“since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
Shade structures on the Continental Avenue Bridge Park, Trinity River Bottoms
Dallas, Texas
Continental Bridge,
Dallas, Texas
My Xootr folding bicycle, Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas
“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”
― Galileo Galilei
Trinity River Bottoms
Dallas, Texas
Trinity River and Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
—-Pythagoras
Downtown Dallas, Texas
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
—-Federico Garcia Lorca
Trinity River
Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
Almost three years ago, while the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge was still under construction, I took a photo of a train going by on an old railroad trestle next to the new bridge. Now, the city has opened up the beginning of a network of trails in the river bottoms, and I was able to pass underneath that old trestle.
I never realized how old it really was.
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
The Santiago Calatrava designed Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge rising over the trees of the Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas.
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein
Bill Chance 