Time flies, but must we think “in a straight line”? Some people are obsessed with “straight” as a virtue, whereas our literature is packed with lines that deliberately aren’t.
Along those lines, we went a Wandering again, me and another guy who’d never been to St. Johns before, whereas I could pose as a kind of tour guide, although that illusion quickly faded when (a) I was surprised to find the new sculpture where I’d not expected it and (b) everyone local knows about the water towers, but we simply stumbled upon them randomly. A revelation.
The new sculpture to which I refer has to do with a certain cosmic fairytale our teachers use to introduce the wavilinear horizon that circles a ship at sea.
As the ocean surface curves out of sight, circumscribing a roughly horizontal patch of some square miles, one imagines a sea dragon , its humps both above and below the ocean surface around this circular perimeter. We call her Naga.
Naga was present at the Festival of Lights as well.
The sea dragon sculpture has deliberately rusty scales thereby fitting into the Portland palette, its rust motif.
So did I pray to the sea dragon and ask for toothache relief for example? No, this cult is more about converging back to that ship at sea, and navigating, at which point the stars become helpful. They feature in our cosmic fairytale as well.
And don’t think by “fairytale” I mean to be dismissive. I have the Annotated Mother Goose on the way, as I wanna pick up on that whole aesthetic again. Lets get back to those fantasy manga novels, like those Tintin comics, or like Little Prince.
