Gift

 

Seminar on Street Art 4: Gift. On cold days with rain on the window I want to give thanks to the divine truth of breath and the pathos of someone’s seven-foot alphabet glimpsed from the wet freeway. Someone had taken the time, joining the crew, to fill in their own official form signed in blasted colours, then left for public admiration. And diverse opinion. The seven-foot letters join the labyrinth of cause and effect decorating walls above the daisy-speckled mud fields and lonely carparks of outerness, seven-feet being the comforting reminder of human height. I give thanks for these human beings, their diversity of being, reaching for the stars with spraycans and rollers to find that in this singular universe, seven-feet is the arch of heaven, their chosen wall a mere clay tablet in the larger scheme of things. Or on another day, walking by the creek in leafless winter, I see more reasons for thanks, gifts along fences and all over power stations that will never give up dreams of lettering go their seven-foot faces with perseverance and love, letting us see them who otherwise go unseen. Solid diamonds, flowing water, spattered algebra, exact crystals, mystic coins, blazing fires, mystery roses, coloured vowels, innocent birds, tiger's stripes, exploding inevitables, unhidden treasures are the words spoken, the names declared this morning where wattles blossom and boost buckets rot. I give thanks for their hours of forethought, their stealthy choice of site, their haste in rendering, as they add one more chain tag to Melbourne’s one thousand and one nights. Their dreams have set firm on frosty mornings in the cold white sun, their gift a message of hell or heaven, too hard now to tell. On some days I stop in secret and immemorial backstreets, ice-hard bluestone and repatched bitumen, to let converge on me the twenty-first century language of codes unknown. I give thanks for seven-foot inner city nicknames and the young daring of their makers, yet rarely can I discern their exact intention, or their form. I know they are word music (Deo gratias!), that they were wished for, but they may be anthem or apology, epistle or epitaph, inscription or insult, ode or oracle, understatement or umbilical. All or none of those. Their presence arouses awareness and amusement, excites euphuism and ephemerality, invites investigation and illusion, overnights opprobrium and opposition, uninvites unctuousness and umpiring. It could be taken for wisdom. The seven-foots plea to be noticed, but never give their artist’s name. They ask to be remembered, even as they flirt with anonymity. On winter days I wish to be home, where I was always going anyway, past the sum of all created things under the winter sun, giving thanks for all variations of irrepressible, soon forgotten, street art.