“I had a dream yesterday that I was trying to pick up a big stone. It was among the other grey and white stones along a river. Trying to hold onto it, I squeezed it with both hands. As soon as the stone felt the slight pressure of my fingers it popped; exploding like a clump of dirt thrown at a road sign from a passing car.  I wanted to hold one of these stones by the river, big round stones.  

I saw another stone and picked it up, again the sand passed through my fingers.  Wet sand.  But this time I noticed that some residue remained.  A tiny ball, made of quartz, sand and glass shards. It was resting in my palm.  As I went on picking up stones and having them burst and crumble the cumulative residue slowly grew and hardened into a new and complex stone.

This is how things could be. Visitors to Tokyo find themselves trying to hold onto something solid. Artless orienteers; ticking off personal lists of sites that correspond to their ideal image of the city. But you can’t choose your own projection of the city; it wont be held; it passes through fingers; it leaves you with whatever residue it chooses. In Tokyo there is no center, no horizon (literally), and no space or time for understanding what you are seeing with anything other than the simplest prototypes. Which is why you can’t hold onto anything, only bits, shards, and after long enough, perhaps a crystalized conglomeration of something.”

Text for a magazine from Melbourne on ‘Ways of seeing Tokyo’.