Ecce Homo

It was to have been a great enterprise – a port, far from the sea, in the centre of a continent, on the edge of a landlocked empire. Barges carrying everything vital for the newly industrialising; materials to fabricate and all the exotic goods needed to support a booming middle class and expanding toiling subclass: the rich furs and wild silks of the East brought along the Danube from the Black Sea; the blacker solid gold called coal from the German Ruhr and the iron and copper, the wood and clay needed from central Europe. All were to change from barge to train from train to barge in what was envisioned. Strangely it was not vision enough – never was it big enough, never the shallow waters of the Bega wide enough to deal with the smallest fraction of the traffic, never the spider web of rail extensive enough for anything other than a circuit of the town and a moving on. Some journeys the Orient Express passed through – but never this side of the river and not stopping.

It is hard to imagine now – with children playing in the fountain; with push chair full of sleeping baby, mother, in tacky, short lived imitation of last year’s even shorter lived fashion, on her ‘mobile’, blowing the smoke of a cheap cigarette before lifting the stuck remains of chewed roasted sunflower from her lower lip; with a well disciplined, fuzzy-at-the-edges species of heavy guard dog, on short lead and excitable yapping white poodle, whose only discipline is in carefully managed curly hair, bouncing at the end of a red box with infinite length of fishing line.

Usually ‘the man’ walks the dog in this park.

Earlier in the morning, it is the younger, fitter, t-shirted and swimming pool bronzed specimens; young men off to work, men with wives who also are off to work, with dogs liberated for a brief moment of exercise and excrement before a day locked in tiny furniture cramped apartments; a dog whose life resolves itself into fatness and the lonely longing for pack, who can, for a fleeting moment, twice a day. run again.

By mid-morning it is the more fortunate animals released from the toil of pet-hood with retired workers, ex-officials who knew a better/a worse time before now and are willing to spend twenty minutes or so telling you; retired men-of-the-house, getting ‘under the feet’, sent to walk the dog and fetch the drinking water from the well sunk to tap the thermal groundwater hundreds of metres below: The sole purpose of the park for most who visit; afraid of the council delivered domestic tap water; devolving a mystery and benefit to the frequently street-child sucked taps and workman-washing location, exposed to all weathers and all the dust and grime or the busy city around.

An ill-fitting and even iller-constructed tattoo of paths marks the routes most people follow. Benches, newly en-whitened but most missing slats and uncomfortable to sit on, line the principle walkways. On these there is the constant workman – employed by whom none knows but in blue overall and drinking from a bottle some substance which renders sleeping through the day a benefit.

These docks are well used by the watchers – a mixture of the loneliness and frailty of age or infirmity, bored with the darkness of their officially appointed then purchased living space and seeking, even if only in the ability to censure, conjunction.

At weekend or after the morning school session teenagers glue themselves together for half an hour then move off to do homework and take the necessary private lessons that guarantee what is called success in this post-empire society.

Above and immune from all the anxious, lackadaisical human activity the magnificent trees. Cloister-like supporting trunks rise to a canopy enshading the ground with a flickering luminescence. Birds and insects fly above sometimes in a dance of extinction. Blackbirds sing matins and evensong and throughout the day the constant chatter of the assembled choirs counterpoints the crude politicking and inane positioning of the people.

It was to be a temporary park, a park before the port – but the storm passed quickly over and the space, forgotten and odd in shape, remained in a dream state. It is a place of unattempted intention where the only cargo is aspiration and the dross of failed industry washes into dock.

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