Flow Charts: Alexandria

From Flow Charts Alexandria, for Sydney Review of Books

"The Alexandria night-walks give me regular epiphanies, startling little bursts of beauty or revelation that gleam out in sombre-soft places that scowl differently in the day-glare. I noticed this metamorphosis most vividly a couple of years ago when I set myself the whimsical exercise of taking the camera-phone out of my pocket at 22.48 each night while out with the big hound, to see what tiny wonderments might get snared by the lens. Most nights I come home, post-22.48, with some little starburst of poignancy caught inside the camera-phone. I make no big claims for these pictures. They are just a dabbler’s indulgence. But I do share them on Instagram. (You can find them on rossgibson_starburst)

When I review my years of nocturnal snooping, I find that the nightly epiphanies have combined to map a version of Alexandria that refuses the daily fist of exploitation. The 22.48 revelations help me feel not too badly hurt by the diurnal pummeling as I try to flow through my town in my own way rather than in the way mean Sydney money wants me to go. I can look at the night-pictures in the daytime and tell myself I belong here. I care about the town. And I let myself think it cares about me, as evidenced by the resonance in the pictures. Thus my suburb represents my town. Every night, details emerge as blooming gifts that unfurl Sydney’s fist even as I know it will re-clench every sunrise, when the town’s grabby forces reach again across the roads and parks and drains and sandy hollows, pressing the city’s innate wonder temporarily out of sight again into the underworld. So the cycle goes.

But as we know about Sydney, as I know about Alexandria, the underlying beauty is strong and hard to beat. Who can guess how much longer it can survive, but least until now, the beauty has kept finding a way through, thrilling us beguiled citizens regularly enough even as it maintains us compliant and staggering, paradoxically happy under the fist."