Swimmers

A city: driving at its centre, crossing an intersection through the green lights, a playhouse sideways to a church not lit, then a road, then a night-time avenue, then a dark football stadium, I was reminded once again of how sometimes it looks as though cars - their oblate fish-like shapes, their colours, their smoked glass - seem to to originate from a Philip K Dick world - to exist as precursors perhaps: to our future robot identities or existing perhaps as contemporary with them (supposing a car a kind of proto-robot): except that we are not aware of it.  They don’t seem fully real, modern cars.  Like those swimming pools with windows cut into the sides below water level.  Looking through the greenish glass one sees a series of headless bodies in movement suspended impossibly, feet kicking; and then suddenly a complete swimmer appears, perhaps having dived in or jumped.   They coalesce holding their noses, a stream of bubbles behind.  All this in silence.  Like a street light caught in the bulbous glass of a car’s rear window, the yellowish stain of the lamp a lozenge exploding and sliding into oblivion.  Cars are like the swimmers that never fully appear; they hang there in reality but are never truly present; or they are present but for a moment. 

Tags: Cars