Against any kind future,
Nostalgia will kill.

This is to be read in the same way that precious images are revisited, whether as celluloid suspensions of silver nitrate pressed in pages, or as those peculiar recurring thought patterns we label ‘memory”. In fact, if this were an image instead of a text it would be shot in soft focus, by some photographer’s trickery, as though through a veil darkly.

As through a veil darkly,
Nostalgia will kill,
Any kind future.

 “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.”
                                                            Virginia Woolf, from her journal, 1915.

Meet, to come into the presence of. Teem, to be full, prolific or abound. You are standing at a point of origins, not so much a place as an idea. An idea of ‘place’, an idea of how to be in the presence of, and an idea of space for us to abound. John Q. Public pouring forth and converging on common ground, openly; before an audience of ourselves. This is Public Space. A space for things public. The space of the public. A place for republic. A convergence and divergence of the public, the people, of us. A place for us. It seems simple enough. This is our space, a place for walking, a place to gather, a place for the collective collaborations of the public. A space for face, to face and know another. A place to walk, and meet and have conversation. A place for speech. A space to converge and through that convergence, emerge as a common.

We live in an environment of words. An environment  that we quite literally breath into existence. Hot,  air pulled into our lungs and expelled across taunt vibrating vocal cords in agitated expulsions. James Baldwin said that ‘what we hate in others is a reflection of what we fear within ourselves.’ Fear and hate…… that is what we are left with, when we can no longer find common ground. The isolation of our wealth of privacy  affords us the luxury of an apathetic stare. Apathy is a cool dis-impassioned attempt to make our overwhelming fear into a protection…into a style of emotion, worn as a symbol of our detachment, with none of the embarrassment of true feeling. Quite frankly we can’t afford it, this apathetic cocoon. We must strip it away in the felt face of our fear and find our understanding for one another; a resolution given to one another and ourselves that we call love. I don’t know much but I know that it begins with a dialogue…. words, even ones subject to misrepresentations are the beginning of a way out, but different types of words. Not more rhetoric, but frank words of understanding. And for speech and understanding, we first need space. Public space for public dialogue. So dialogue first and then understanding and possibly through that understanding, we will see humans in front of our aggression, instead of the one-dimensional figures that we have come to hate, that in fact we created, to embody all that is in us, that we fear. Can we find a way to love 'them'’, these dark reflections of ourselves? I hope so, because if we hate others as a reflection of that thing within ourselves that we fear most, can’t we love others as a reflection of our best hope?

Public space is a place for freedom to happen. What does it mean to have free speech without a space to practice said freedom?  Secrecy happens in private, democracy depends upon the transparency of  public space. When we stopped walking, we lost our way. Walking conceived literally is movement. Walking conceived politically, a movement marching through public space, moves more than bodies but moves minds, as well. Our collective mythology has told us that the automobile made us free and much has been made over the connection of the American free spirit and America’s car culture. While it is true that the car has given us the ability to roam further a field, this is a poor freedom in comparison to the freedoms that the car has helped to disappear. Driving is an insulated and isolated act, an act individual in nature. Millions of Americans commute to work every morning in the isolated, compartmentalize space that is their car’s interior. Driving is active passivity. As we hurl along at 60 miles per hour in our individualized, isolated space, 10 feet in front and 5 feet beside, maybe a car length behind, stretched out for miles, across highways and cities and indeed nation wide, crowded in gridlock- we, the collective we, are utterly isolated and alone. Commuting or Community-Uniting. Commuting or community muting. Communities deconstructed into the individual spaces that are the individual compartments of each individual’s car. Driving space is communal space only in the sense that it is for communal use, but in practice it is used as a sort of public isolation.

This is our space, not because it was given to us but because we have taken it for ourselves and now we only take it for granted. What good is free speech without free space in which to practice it? Public domain, where the public is dominant. Step up on this box and speak your mind. Thoughts flowing out as words. We are sheltered in our words...in fact words build our reality. People believe the world is flat because we collectively say so, people change with the discovery that it is instead round by passing the word to build a new belief, not merely held in language but shaped by the process of recording and recollection.  Changing language is changing life. Limiting language limits life.

I have words collected
Against any kind future,
And so have you,
and so I view.

And so I’ve viewed perfection
Manufactured nostalgia
For life-gone collections
Of life long collusion’s
While fighting for purchase
Against any kind future.

What happens when corporation squeezes out all space for the public to function within that has any function beyond commerce? Public space is fundamental to a free society and the health of a democracy. Public space, that is to say ‘free space’, could just as easily be described as ‘equal space’, for it is space where any one and indeed every one can speech up and speak out.

Res publica is a Latin phrase, made of res + publica, literally meaning "public thing" or "public matter". It is the origin of the word 'Republic'.
"Public property"
Res publica usually refers to a thing that is not considered to be private property, but which is rather held in common by many people. For instance this park, this garden, indeed this city are all (part of the) res publica.

Space to be public.

Public space, inner space, outer space,

We are the public. This is our space. Have we forgotten and lost ourselves in the forgetting? Will we find ourselves if we remember, maybe in the recollection we’ll reemerge to reclaim and re-public? Our republic.

Now, we begin this reclamation.

 “Freedom: To walk free and own no superior.”