Hradčanská (Prague Metro)

So fast, so direct, so immediate, the vehicle of necessity. Under the ground the passengers read and stare inside the tidy carriages. Words in their books and looks of ambition in their eyes animate the spaces below the earth. They are that much closer to the fires inside the planet, that much further away from Baroque-blue sky. Temptation is only a moment distant away, or the resolution to accept what is given. Books close. The carriages come to a standstill. To alight may mean returning to the scene of bureaucratic inertia or the maelstrom of power decisions or the locality of the official crime. There’s always going to be someone with a problem up top, and someone else who has to find an answer to the problem. Those without a problem stay seated. For us, time to alight. What reasons drive educated beings to think it worth going to the top? They are much too busy to ask the question, far too efficient to factor in doubt. The clamour of dozens of unknowns, well, unknown to one another, that is, fills the doorways and rushes over the platform before it is too late. Too late for what, though? It is early in the day. The escalators are not selective. No syncopated step has your name written on it. So it is wise to become friends with the escalator. Its rhythmic rise is purely functional, but we are given to think it is (actually) a great leveller. No one will be particularly sorry, in the long term, at least. Then, what is up above, only what we always suspected? Where one decade is much like another. The king of flowers stands in the gallery of his heated subjects, about to watch the whole thing fall. Suave ambassadors wheedle and outwit who won’t be back tomorrow. The lookouts have more influence than the princes in a city ruled by diamond-eyed invaders. Most anything you care to mention is here in files, ready for questioning, ready to trip the switch. And as they come up into sunlit streets from Hradčanská below, all the windows of the Castle stare silently at the city below. Because as usual it is this year in this story, the first year of the world. The old streets going up there wind and divert, made in an age with more time on its hands. Briefcases fly like drones parallel to the ground. Faces assume the bearing of acquired control, playing on their keyboards like fingers of rain. When will be the day of reckoning? Does it come to us in laughter and tears? Was it always there in signs and wonders? Or is it solemn the way commuters are solemn, going up to the environs of the Castle one morning? Their faces set to the consequences, their demeanour deliberate, their minds immersing in the task. Yet every word for the Castle and environs confounds their individuality: keep, court, cell, juryroom, office, bureau, chamber, labyrinth, purgatory.