Under the same cloudy sky, beauty and ugliness share spaces.
What makes one or the other?
Is the sky always beautiful? or the dog? or the heron?
How about the street?
Like a poem, which calls our attention by the estrangement of words and images, our streets call our attention when unusual combinations of elements occur.
Not everyone pauses to look, of course. Most are too lost in their worries, sadness, or anger to see anything remarkable in the mundane and customary reiteration of ugliness.
Our streets seem always the same, and yet they are not.
Like us, they change their look with every interaction.
Beauty is not simply in the eye of the beholder, though. Like us, our streets can be beautified, but in order for that process to make an impact, the beautification must be drastic. We know the difference between clean and dirty.
People keep saying that our city is beautiful, but nobody cares for a city that is allegedly beautiful on the inside.
"Show; don't tell," they reccomend writers. We might as well tell the same to tourist promoters.
