Homage to Uncertain Futures

By Clara Dudley | August 2020

i. Poem of Portobello

In the shadow of the cranes in the month of April, a little girl of three sits on the street curb as her mother shows her how to rub her hands together with sanitiser. They sit beside the big white service van that the father of the family owns on a quiet, sunny day. Eventually, they put on face masks before piling into the front seats of the van and driving away. Most often, though, the little girl is in the window across from me.

The houses on our end of the street are cut into many flats and apartments, unlike the low-standing single-family homes a few blocks down. There are a lot of us tucked away here at this corner of Portobello, in south Dublin City Centre. In the flats beside the girl’s house, tuxedoed housecats sit in the windows, tails ticking. The copper pipes of old chimneys are a warm terra cotta against a pale sky, empty of airplanes.

It used to be noisy on this street, especially on weekends. Sometimes a suggestion of violence caught your ear late at night, before disappearing like a phantom down an alley. Just beyond the row of houses, massive construction cranes tower like guards protecting a hidden lord; up until a few months ago, they moved methodically every day. Then all went quiet and the cranes stood still.

The view out this window is dissected by heavy power lines, hanging low across like pulleys above a stage set. Power lines snake in a loose geometry across the house facades, pinned up and over in thick bundles. At some places, the lines just hang off the side of the building into nothing, and sway with the wind. When it rains, the gutters run like a river, and the lines jump around like sails of a ship in a storm.

The Irish wind blows over the street in fits and sighs, a restless springtime mood punctuated by the blunt cries of seagulls on the rooftops. When the garbage bags are put out for collection, the sidewalk is strewn with waste wrenched out of them by foxes during the night and picked over by gulls during the day. The bags sit heaped against cast iron gates with gaping wounds in their sides, guts spilling out and tumbling away.

I spend many days now staring out the window from a small fold-out school kid’s desk we bought online, watching nothing pass by on this block in Dublin.

I think back to all the things I saw growing up, idly staring out the front room window of my house in San Francisco, on a similarly quiet block on the outskirts of the City center, between the eucalyptus-scented park and the violent, cold waves of the Pacific ocean. Raccoons slipping between the dull spotlights of the street lamps, the dense fog blurring the globes of light. A brilliant red comet shooting across the sky and exploding at the end as I chatted on the phone with a friend. Our murdered neighbor in a white body bag, shuttled into an ambulance, the police car lights casting red and blue projections into our living room late into the night. Solitary grandfathers in house slippers walking the block every day around the same time, for years. Minor car accidents.

At 12 noon every Friday, a test emergency siren wails solemnly from across the canal in Rathmines. In San Francisco, the emergency warning test siren sounds every Tuesday at 12 noon, with the distinctly starker detail of a male voice echoing across the top of the city: “This is a test of the Outdoor Warning System. This is only a test.”

In the world that this corner of Portobello existed in just a few months ago, the siren sounded like just what it was: a formality. But breaking through the workday, it could idly turn one’s mind to threat, to unsafety. To archaic and abstract things that happened in times far away, not relevant to now.

But as the people disappeared from the streets, the siren sounded different, like a hymnal to a new world which could shake without notice. An undertow that could swallow.

ii. Disaster Dreams

My grandfather and his friends are about to board a cruise ship. I am trying to talk him out of it, becoming increasingly panicked as they laugh and refuse to listen. They are waiting on the dock, and in the background I see an infographic chart of the cruise ship itself on a TV screen overhead. The edges of the ship are lighting up with confirmed virus cases, spreading like a flame, as the passengers blithely wait to board. The cases light up more and more as I beg my grandpa not to go. But he just wants to have a good time. (Dublin, recorded March 2020)

I wake up and remember that my grandpa died over twenty years ago - one of the few that I don’t need to worry about.

…

It’s nighttime in the Richmond District of San Francisco, and all is dark and empty. The street lamps have gone dead. Abandoned cars are burnt out in the road, ramped halfway up on the islands in the middle of the boulevard, and stopped still at awkward locations like the arm of a clock that has run out of batteries midway through the hour. Big cats escaped from the nearby zoo are roaming quietly through the debris. Panthers, leopards, lions. The sky is massive, black, and full of stars usually hidden by the city lights.

But a curious thing: a 7-11 corner shop is still open, the fluorescent lights on as normal while the cashier rings up items. A line of customers wait patiently through the store and out around the side of the building. It’s a quiet doomsday, fit for Edward Hopper. (San Francisco, recorded 2005)

iii. Uncertain Futures

Soon after moving to Dublin in 2015, I was in the backseat of a car close to the airport, driving in the direction away from it, and looked over as an airplane was landing - flying low in the opposite direction from us. This resulted in an optical illusion of complete stasis, as the plane looked still and suspended, frozen in air. It remained for about ten seconds, and I was totally struck by the concept of this mighty beast of a machine, iconic for its physics, just frozen in space and time.

I created this digital image around that time and titled it “Homage to Uncertain Futures” - because that’s what I felt like I was looking at in this uncanny optical illusion, the haunting of the unknown undermining the might of our trusted mechanics and ways - the true fragility of it.

So I suppose we must now reckon with the vulnerability of these technoscientific bridges that have long enabled the building of international families, relationships, work and lifestyles. “Perhaps we will look back at the decades before the pandemic as a historical aberration,” writes Rebecca Onion (‘The Next Pandemic: Homesickness,’ SLATE, 26 May 2020), “a singular time, when a certain, privileged group of Americans could expect to use air travel to sustain their family ties and choose their homes accordingly.” 

And all this comes up now, I return to this concept, sitting thousands of miles away from home in a life built only by way of air travel, for which I have much anxiety and ambivalence towards but am filled with nostalgia for the taxi ride, passport control line, in-flight gin and tonics, and the predictability of the now-absent flight path over the Arctic circle, passing above Iceland, Greenland, Isolated Canadian tundra, and down the West Coast to the raw sea-scented southern peninsula of San Francisco of which I’m unsure when I will be able to safely see again.