The Movement of Crowds (Architecture 45)

When the circus comes to town, what do you want to do, join or hide?There are more options, but as on election day, this choice is binary.You hear the train, you see it on the horizon, or are you already on it,boxcar open, your hair a swirl of options in the wind?Like clowns, you're also an abstract concept, alien as the country you rose from,imaginary as the dead. So it follows that in all searching for alien lifethere's this desire to join the circus, calling out "ALIENS!" on sketchy documentaries.It's Close Encounters of the Third Kind day, and they're all spiderlike and slow,because that's the state of special effects in 1977, and the question is,do you go with them, or just play the song? Boop be ba be boop,time's up. The fear is that you'll find out they placed you here,you and the pyramids, that you're E.T., and they've come back for you.Die Erde ist keine Heimat—the Earth is no home, Bierbichler says. You're reallya secret agent, so secret you didn't even know,and we don't want you to go. Please, don't go. Please.Or you're the castaway, finally back after years on an island, you and your basketball,and your life moved on without you, unrecognizable now.

It's not the world that changes, just the lens, we say, hopingin the face of rising water we're right, as you and the body fracture,so that you're looking at the world through it, apart. You're in a house.The roof leaks. Something's wrong with the door. You go from window to windowconstructing yourself. Distant train. I'd be happy on a trainthe rest of my life, watching stations go by."Where did all my friends go?" one asks. "I am your friends," distance replies.When I was young, we were always moving. Where did Kansas go,California, Alabama, New York?They say it wears you down, but I don't know, maybe you wear it down,as the miles also make a music, a calliope, like last night,in the middle of the night, coyotes started up, their high yippingin the field behind our house, and our dogs barked backthrough the door, full of their own thoughts.