Truth Be Told

Truth is always someone else's privilege.

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

Confronting virtual worlds and the fleeting apparitions of AI, the Signs of the Streets beckon. Hard copy analogues position Truth Fact Belief Hope as ready-made visualities. Events, communities, attitudes frame and mirror the Zeitgeist.  Streetside photos late 2025/early 2026   

CODA

To achieve the long view, one steps further and further back from lives as they are lived to that more tranquil position from which one sees only the crowd. From that perspective human beings become a species, worth preserving. But take another step back and it is no longer necessary to preserve the species. There will be another following us, after all. Until the view lengthens to such an extent that the world disappears and one is left with only the cold reaches of space, in a private pas de deux with God. Was it possible to accommodate the contradiction between action and being, to incorporate both long view and short view in one’s attitude to life, to be both reflective and active, detached and involved?

—Robyn Davidson, from Desert Places (1996)

WORD on the Street

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future, 
the first syllable already belongs to the past. 

When I pronounce the word Silence, 
I destroy it. 

When I pronounce the word Nothing, 
I make something no non-being can hold.
—Wislawa Szymborska

Why write? Why do anything? Why not write? It's the same as the impulse to make a handprint in wet concrete or trace your finger in the mist on a window. What you wrote, as a kid, on a window was the simplest version of the vision. Why not unburden yourself of the vision? (But why that vision? Why that vision, and why you?) —Elisa Gabbart

 

NOTES
—WORD on the Street continues the ongoing VEXICON sequence spellbinding in syllables and exclamations, longings and foretellings, the lost wisdom of the Marker-Makers of the realm. PHOTOS appearing during the faltering weeks of 2025, as in-drift the Eugene street scene.
—Top, Wislawa Szymborska (Polish, 1923–2012), 1996 Nobel in Literature.

—Above, Elisa Gabbart, in Any Person Is the Only Self (2024) 
—Below, Pirouette, a poem by Federico García Lorca (Spanish, 1898-1936)

CODA
If the alphabet should die
then everything would die.
Whose words are wings.

The whole of life
dependent on
four letters.

Animating the Underpassage

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. 
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

If you find yourself strolling the Underpassage, you will immerse in an animated world. Today, this world: A fenced dog park zone along Jefferson Street between 5th & 6th in Eugene.  A profusion of larger than life murals completed this year by Esteban Camacho Steffensen @ecomurals.  

Underpassage.  As I’ve name-coded the zone covered by the Washington-Jefferson bridge lifting and conveying vehicles over the Willamette River via I-105 terminating at 7th street.  The covered zone ranges from 1st Street to 7th.  

Shelters dogs and their human-walkers.  A variety transients in random encampment.  Temporary food serving tables. City Park staff.  Skateboarders.  Graffiti writers. Concrete bridge pillars bearing pleas, accusations, unsanctioned expressions, erasures. Public-art sculpture-artifacts. Posters and stickers. Sanctioned and official murals. 

Animating the hope and glory of urban aspiration.  

The Three (dis) Graces

“The three standing figures located west of the Council Chamber are three women dressed in their best gowns to come to the town square, and are executed in a manner representing the great Oregon rivers, the McKenzie, the Willamette, and the Columbia. These figures are the largest single pour aluminum castings ever made in this country.”

—Dedication brochure, Eugene City Hall, June 1964. Sculptor: Jan Zach

Today, these three 9-foot-tall totemic figures entitled “Three Rivers” stand in a storage yard off Shelton Mcmurphy Blvd since removal from City Hall in 2014 prior to its demolition. Eugene City Hall is now located on the banks of Willamette River. To date, despite occasional vague discussion, City staff has decided to not decide what to do or not do with Three Rivers and other artwork from the former City Hall, all in storage. 

Below:  The aluminum sculptures stood next to the circular council chamber at Eugene City Hall from 1964 to 2014.  

Three Rivers is representative of a number of works Jan Zach created during that phase of his long career:  totems and dancers. The sculpture clearly derives from the tradition of representing in art the Three Graces originating in Greek mythology.  

Below: Today, Three Rivers, displaced; Three Graces, disgraced.

CODA

The earth, being earthwork.

That I am on earth, howsoever,

to draw breath: beneath the firm-

ament over us, overall.

The earth and its rivers;

her rivers. Now and again a

river goes underground, holing

up for a while in caves.

Some rivers end in sand.

The earth as worthy of mention.

The world as quicksand.

—Hans Faverey 

(trans Dutch in Against the Forgetting: Selected Poems)