“Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.
But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Dallas Skyline at dusk (click to enlarge)
The time, the light right around sunrise and sunset is called the Golden Hour or the Magic Hour. In the central downtown of a big city, surrounded by the crystal canyons of mirrored glass with the actual sky only visible in an irregular sliver overhead (though reflected between the ranks of colossal ziggurat prisms) the light takes on a surreal artificial quality. For an instant at dawn and dusk the dirt of the evil city disappears, the armies of worker drones melt into the cool pavement, the honking traffic mutes.
I walk along a familiar street, the echoes of decades spent working and commuting ringing back – yet everything is suddenly fresh. The city engineering and architectonics takes the place of geology, but changes faster – compared to eternal living stone, the steel, concrete, and glass is quicksilver. I can feel the silent movement.
And there, reproduced in some mysterious modern process, is a woman in a red dress, twenty stories high, a runway model in a hat. She is an illusion in a tablet – an illusion inside a delusion wrapped in a deception – blown up into a cyclopean beauty.
She is selling something.
But I’m sorry – I’m not buying.
