Original subtitles

There are streets, paths, trails, alleys, causeways

and freeways.

Highways, esplanades, tree-lined roads arcades and boulevards.

Side streets, main streets,

ring roads, avenues,

expressways, village roads,

play streets,

crossroads,

country roads, coast roads,

asphalt streets,

parallel streets,

one-way streets,

thoroughfares.

Bypasses, intersections, switchbacks,

gravel paths, roundabouts,

footways, forest paths, sand paths,

mazes, beaten paths, squares.

Entire networks, entire escapes.

And there are life paths, dead ends,

rough patches, ways of grief, ways of the cross,

detours, escape routes,

paths of sacrifice, pilgrim paths,

roads into the abyss,

ways of love and trails of longing.

Journeys from A to B.

In the case of actual roads,

these journeys take place in a network that allows for endless connections.

Viewed metaphorically,

a process is envisaged as culminating in an inevitable or intended end.

The streets serve as a set and a theater

on which all of life's possibilities are played out.

Their networks are the model for stream of consciousness in literature.

Abandonment to a flow of thought,

the joy at the path of writing,

the automatic writing of the surrealists, of the Beat poets,

writing "on the road,' the endless possibilities of writing,

which are coupled with

infinite combinations of landscape modules and urban particles.

This wipe effect,

the overlay and resurfacing of parts of memory,

the extinguishing and evoking of memories,

is also a passion.

Main streets and main clauses,

dependent clauses and side streets,

paragraphs and neighborhood streets,

chapters and districts.

The geometric figure of the streets and the syntax of sentences,

traffic signs and punctuation marks.

The urban road network as a story from district to district,

from chapter to chapter.

The street vendor interrupts my thoughts,

or he offers the right ware at the right time.

He profits from that instant of concurrence,

from someone finding what they weren't seeking.

Arrive at a period,

make a paragraph,

complete a transition.

"And then... And then... And then..

"And then...

"And then.."

Step out onto a street, walk it, walk down it, stroll and stagger.

Living and writing on the street.

The world is inscribed in a circular process.

The unstructured collision of architectural intentions on roadsides.

On the streets we become extras acting out life.

We become the passive audience of a staging

of dealings and actions.

If the street is a stage, then it presents the drama of the simultaneity of events,

their emergence and re-submergence.

Instead of walls

the sky closes in on you.

Cities, suburbs,

landscapes, mountains and deserts.

With them, people's sentences about their relationships,

their travels, their crises and their duration.

The endlessness of the streets implacably collides with human finiteness.

Entire empires drew their power

from the transport networks that they bred:

Roman road construction,

military driven autobahn planning, Chinese trade with transport networks,

international standardization of roads.

Streets have a mirror symmetry to their layouts.

Along the longitudinal axis, both sides of the street frontage

allow views of buildings and glimpses into developments,

or perspectives of the lines and horizons of the surrounding landscapes.

The horizontal axis offers outlooks and retrospective views

of the course of the road from a frontal view.

Points in the distance evolve

into complex architectural shapes and landscapes.

They pass by us laterally

to then shrink back together,

becoming a lingering point in the distance.

The street is also a non-topic.

It seems a run-of-the-mill place

and, in its ubiquity, a genre exhausted and over represented

to the point of triviality.

Streets are seen as filmed to death,

the viewpoints one can take towards them covered from A to Z.

The uniqueness of their paths is disregarded, as with media in general,

and the destinations they reach idealized.

Roadside buildings have it rough.

Lots on cul-de-sacs are popular.

A building represents the "bound" story.

The street represents the "unfettered" story,

an experiment, and, as such, possibly nothing.

Streets are containers for feelings that one passes again later.

In contrast to buildings, they represent the variable components of history.

As media, they are extremely fleeting. They must constantly be improved.

From the anonymous mass of memory matter that is not actively retrievable

places and streets suddenly stand out.

Out of nowhere, the memory of a crossroads shifts to the center of the conscious mind

and one cannot say why.

Every thought springs from a junction of place and time.

If one were to have lost faith in the connection of thoughts to place,

no completely shaped image of reality would make sense anymore.

An imagery that no longer feels bound to places encountered in reality

is nonsense.