City Campus
To make a square of glass in the corner of a window
go to the corner, draw vertical and horizontal
lines from the bottom right corner of a square – set
into the top left corner of the window
until the lines reach the opposite edge of the whole pane
at the same height – so the line you have drawn
at the bottom horizontal of the square
is utterly parallel with the bottom horizontal edge
of the window. Voila: the view
through a compartmentalized heart.
Now a square and lines
at the other top corner of the window. Have
you enough lines, or too many? Is a vertical line
needed to bisect the window, or a horizontal
bisector, aesthetically or structurally? Too large a pane
and the glass will need a pattern of cloudy
translucent dots or squares as such. None here.
Older. It might be a laboratory or front room behind
in the compartmentalized heart.
Do this to recreate
the city that’s been destroyed. Begin
with the window, enough that a diary of
details from it make sense to descendants.
Some windows divide down in 6 parallel strips:
equal width. These bisect half way down on 3
strips – with a square half way down as if bisected
by total bisection, at the centre of the strip in the
other 3 strips. Thus, a distributed 50% of this window
does not bisect, horizontally. An
imaginary dotted line carried through the bisection
(where it visibly, materially bisects alternate
strips) centres the squares
in the unbisected strips. There is hope
of a whole new small heart in the heart here.
The unbisected strips do not
evenly divide vertically into three. It is more like
rectangle… narrow end on the horizontal, long end on
the vertical… then a square, then a rectangle like
the first rectangle. The future of a heart.
It might be a stairwell
or swimming pool behind. There are blue tac
blobs on some of the bricks on a wall. There’s no
poster. There is a rare wall where the
mortar lines of bricks form a grid
not imaginary bisections followed through
each brick on the line below: neat grid
lines. One needs an exterior – ever again
to have an uncompartmentalized heart.
*Ira Lightmanmakes public art in the North East, and lately Willenhall and Southampton. He devises visual poetry forms and then asks local communities to supply words that will bring them alive. He is a regular on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. Duetcetera (Shearsman, 2008) and volume forthcoming from Red Squirrel in 2011.
