This evening on the bus I observed life,
as everything observed proved to be, but
in process, most evident in the movement
of people, and traffic, against a background
of what appeared as permanent, stylised
in streets and buildings, shops as clearly named.
The phase of process is the present, but
presence is its context, presence in
identity, from the interior of
a bus, a street, to the expanded city;
here the process of life, so varied by
the moment, is based in the ‘permanent’.
But the ‘permanent’ is in appearance
only; the seasons of nature provide
context for processes, though bound up in
change; mortar and tarmac degrade where once
they upheld permanent street names and buildings;
permanence is in conceptual reference.
Identification is rendering
of permanence in change, and life depends
on it, it makes of our streets and our cities
permanent places, quite forgetting their
conceptual basis; or say, by that fact,
proving the eternal city is our home.
