The Lower Way

Walk along the bike path this morning. The weather was mild, everything was peaceful and comforting. A Sunday morning walk like I've always liked. For the first time I realized that there was ANOTHER path, parallel to the one I use like every walker, paved, well cleared, wedged between the railroad (inaccessible, fenced) and thick, inextricable thickets. This other path is located below, behind the thickets; it is almost invisible but very real. It is dark, unused, the more one advances, the more the hedges and the intertwined shrubs, with the tortuous, clawed, threatening branches, prohibit the entry to the curious ones. But it is incredibly attractive. One suspects that it leads to dark but unseen things. It is almost an unintentional metaphor, in the landscape, of the two paths a man can take in his life.

The canal

Walks along the canal. I park my car on the gravel parking of the marina. It is still cold – a film of frost, almost imperceptible, still covers the landscape and the things. 

A sheep's carcass, or an animal I can't identify, on the frozen water. At the same time atrocious and atrociously photogenic.

I walk along the water, towards the farm where E... and I have been a few times, and continue on beyond.

I take pictures that look like post-apocalyptic, Chernobyl-like landscapes, mixing tall grass, rocks, blackened walls, drainpipes coming from who knows where.

I am in a strange mental state. Following this river, in absolute solitude, sometimes punctuated by a dilapidated barn, a brick warehouse or a bare metal structure, on a winter morning, gives a curious sensation of spiritual, religious experience, a kind of local equivalent of the Ganges revised by Tarkovski.