While trying to figure out what enthralls me about the messes that I see so often in this old, beautiful city, I’ve begun thinking about the restorative powers of decay.
Some say it’s a city built on trash. Although the disgusting levels of littering and general disregard for the environment is disturbing, there is something strangely aesthetically appealing about seeing stuff rot and decompose in urban spaces.
Part of what’s interesting is the juxtaposition of these beautiful spaces (old government buildings, long skinny stairs painted with poetry, curvy bridges, walls of mosaic, colorful houses) the beautiful scenery (the sea to the west, the overlapping hills, the lighted trees that line the streets) and the beautiful people that make up this city with an abundance of scum and squalor that just doesn’t exist in Madison.
I watched a lovely little girl play on a bench surrounded by broken glass as half-drunk inhabitants of the underworld stumbled into Sunday and flea-ridden dogs barked at nothing and leftover food rotted on the ground. Her mother sat next to her and smiled, a woman sold flowers, people in jumpsuits swept away food wrappers and bottles and the salty waves washed away regrets from the night before that lingered on the faces of disheveled young people with blurry eyes and messy hair. I saw an old man fall asleep at the bar with a drink in his hand just after sunset. His glass fell and shattered and the bartender just swept it away as he poured himself another and proceeded to fall asleep again as a table of drunk men chanted singingly at his expense and another looked on with tender eyes and thin lips.
People carry their music in their hands and it comes pit-pattering out in parks, restaurants, the streets. Anyone can become a percussionist at the moment when they start hitting their thighs in the circle jam that is born at some twilight hour in the plaza. Anyone can dance cueca twirling a napkin for a scarf with some fire in their eyes, and a rhythm can make any place a home. Salty autumn wind and endless patchwork nights and the friendliness of the piss-covered streets strewn with discarded avocados and kiwis are turning me nocturnal. Sordidness and beauty bleed together as I increasingly choose the messy paths and notice things growing in garbage corners accidentally converted to fertile soil.