Radio Free never accepts money from corporations, governments or billionaires – keeping the focus on supporting independent media for people, not profits. Since 2010, Radio Free has supported the work of thousands of independent journalists, learn more about how your donation helps improve journalism for everyone.

Make a monthly donation of any amount to support independent media.





Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children

The wand stirs the planet’s cauldron below and imagined: Transformative powers arise: There is a real subconscious: It resembles a dream: It resembles a reality that I have not known: A singular place where metamorphous believers Ovid, Dante, Kafka assembled as a cabal: Nightmarish realities alight among spectral prisms. Dreams do come true. Imagine my More

The post Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Architect: Calatrava: St. Nicholas National Shrine.

The wand stirs the planet’s cauldron below and imagined: Transformative powers arise: There is a real subconscious: It resembles a dream: It resembles a reality that I have not known: A singular place where metamorphous believers Ovid, Dante, Kafka assembled as a cabal: Nightmarish realities alight among spectral prisms. Dreams do come true. Imagine my youthful thrill: Far from the madding crowd is where worlds of imaginary dreamscapes live: Far from the madding crowd is where my eyes meet unsparingly my three tenses:

I sit in awash of dreams: I see billowy clouds as in the dream is where I imagine fictitious eyes breathe: Eyes of the real Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s atmospheric truths, live: It is a place where I caress the Pyramid of Cestius: The exacting execution is simply imagined: One day my camera will emulate the exquisite precisions: To be a draftsman with my mechanical eyes:

One day I will capture a dreamery likeness to Piranesi’s The Round Tower: A simple investigation into a troubled brilliance: The exactitude of a surreal mind: A maze for the imagination: A tour of architectural designs my portraits may become:

St Nicholas Shrine after 9/11.

I feel a kinship with a mechanical tool: My camera: It must send up red flags to networks of institutional asylums: All on twenty-four hour alert to my preposterous visual expectations: The sky above illuminates faces in my crowded mind: Ken Kesey, Randle Patrick McMurphy and Chief appear: Who better to dance around the maypole than a cuckoo’s nest of a few good men:

Piranesi I seek for visual answers: Bizarre nightmares reconfigured dreams and creative forces live inside my lens: The metamorphosis is a constant. If only to make sense of Kafkaesque like ideas:

I once traced the origins of horse racing: Maybe seven thousand years before today: A transformative experience that I never witnessed, occurred: The desert, mountains and windswept sands felt the power of four hooves: More modern episodes followed in Chester, England, Hempstead Long Island,and more across the natural world: A race became a story that beget another: At dawn and twilight I listen for the thundering hooves of ghosts: When time before me passes I realize something was where I am before I knew: Echoes of a real life made memories that an orchestra of citizens cheered and applauded: The quoted orchestra is only a wind in the past: Like the entire planet something was always before: My camera begs to see that apparition and make a story-a mechanical story:

I dream again: My days and years sit in reverie: Not a true second passes without a bit of naïveté: I sit, where the other realists sit: I still pause for Ben-Hur.

The newer version of the Met Life and One Madison.

The pages of One Thousand and One Nights comes to a close: The true romance of my real life dangles powerful stories about my vanishing world: Real buildings in real time: Architectural footprints never disappear: The lives above and below may: It is a happy scary metaphor about the lives that were and the ones we dream about: There is no infinite number: Lives and buildings have become mere numbers aside from when I travel to all of my continents, countries and cities:

I utilize my spot meter, the one lofting atop my irises: The history of me is cloistered in an imaginary glass Matryoshka doll: Beneath me and above architecture has become lives of others and my life from afar.

It seems I could be like Kafka’s Gregor from within and aboutIt is a ridiculous science fiction account of a life on the streets: What if it is true. Why would I sit awash in vacillating dreams: Why would I swim through voluminous ponds reveling atop lily pads where tad poles reign! This curious child’s mind is innocent: The mind elevates atop a trampoline and aboard a seesaw

Unsparingly my eyes ride among my three tenses: Transformative powers engage: The light of the world is my moment to capture:  What was, what was once: Did I imagine: What remains: a storage capacity on steroids: So I dream:

I sit alone and alert as if in the darkest quarry: Enclosed in a Swedish like wind-eye is a happy place: Science Fiction becomes reality: Nightmares are fabulous dreams: The past is replaced with the present: A nano second of frivolity is near: Memories are present in different guises: No time for more; Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues plays just around and near: Take a listen. I have pictures to take about my vanishing world.

The older version before the transformation: Met Life sans One Madison.

The post Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Schulman.


Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates

Leave a Reply

APA

Richard Schulman | Radio Free (2025-04-11T05:35:30+00:00) Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/

MLA
" » Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children." Richard Schulman | Radio Free - Friday April 11, 2025, https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/
HARVARD
Richard Schulman | Radio Free Friday April 11, 2025 » Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children., viewed ,<https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/>
VANCOUVER
Richard Schulman | Radio Free - » Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children. [Internet]. [Accessed ]. Available from: https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/
CHICAGO
" » Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children." Richard Schulman | Radio Free - Accessed . https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/
IEEE
" » Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children." Richard Schulman | Radio Free [Online]. Available: https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/. [Accessed: ]
rf:citation
» Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children | Richard Schulman | Radio Free | https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/ |

Please log in to upload a file.




There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.

You must be logged in to translate posts. Please log in or register.