On Good Governance in the City

　

　

1.

The sun wounds the banks of snow at the edges of sidewalks. The snow bleeds water onto the pavement. Night freezes the water solid into ice and the covers the slippery surface of the remnant snow with crystals the color of dirty quartz.

No one wants to be slain by the last bullet in the last battle of the war. Similarly, I don’t want to be thrown to the ground and hurt by a nondescript puddle of ice that will not survive the week. Extra caution is required when I walk my dog. Spring is still some weeks away but the sun has already altered the landscape and, so, the peril, because inconspicuous, is greater.

　

2.

Because late afternoon is warmer, I encounter children playing outside. My dog sniffs the air and wags her tail when she scents them.

A little girl has two identical buckets beside her on the sidewalk. With a trowel, she fills one bucket with dirty snow. She is filling the other bucket with slimy water dark with an ooze of mud. Her hands and forearms are black to the elbow.

A few blocks away, I encounter five kids, all of them coatless, prancing around in an alleyway and backyard. An eight year old girl wearing tight, elaborately patterned stretch-pants is condensing in her fist a snowball. A couple of small kids in the alley way, apparently under her supervision, are stomping around in a pothole filled with muddy water. A fourth kid stands along the chain-link fence in the backyard, enigmatic under a heavy coat and hooded sweat shirt. A boy stands on the redwood porch jutting from the back of the house waving a cell-phone in his hand.

"There!" he cries. "There! I’ve dialed 911."

The girl in the stretch pants laughs and cries out: "Good! Good!" She pitches the ice-ball at the boy on the porch, missing him.

The girl in the alley is dancing with joy. She jumps up and down and wiggles her ass.

"Go ahead and call!" the girl yells.

"I’m gonna get a restraining order," the little boy says, "I will get a restraining order on you."

"Go ahead," the girl laughs.

Dogs in adjacent backyards are intrigued by the ruckus and they bark enthusiastically.

3.

Not just one robin, but six storm a tree, perching amidst the leafless branches. The birds sound shrill warlike cries. With their red breasts, the robins look armored like Saint Michael. They are equipped with pewter-colored breastplates.

The robins have come to restore justice to the world. Their sharp beaks are like sword points.

　

4.

At the end of the quattrocento, Lorenzetti painted the mural sequence known now as "Good and Bad Governance in the City." The paintings adorn the walls of the City Hall in Siena.

The most famous of these paintings, "Good governance in the City," shows an intricate wall of buildings stretching from one end of the surface to another. The buildings support many chimneys rising up into a sky that is incongruously pitch-black. The city itself is lit with an uniform white radiance that casts no shadows. The buildings are salmon-colored, blue-grey, and russet-red, all interlocked like pieces of a puzzle or like the adobe and brick cells comprising an Indian pueblo. There is no path through this thicket of buildings. To the right, a castellated pink wall, a mere membrane the width of a piece of cardboard defends the city from the outside world.

Gaily dressed people are promenading in front of their city. There is a bright proscenium in front of city backdrop, also brightly lit so as to banish all shadow. At the center of the fresco, four women clad a bit like the goddesses in Botticelli’s Primavera are dancing in a ring – each young woman takes the hand of her sister and all of them face inward. Five similarly clad women, all of them facing outward perform a similar ring dance next to them. Between the two groups of dancers, a woman in green holds her head up as if seeking inspiration from the invisible source of light illumining the city. The stately woman in green holds a sort tambourine. All of them women wear golden garlands in their hair. Scholars think the women are the Muses dancing to music made by Venus. Other critics argue that the dancing women represent celestial bodies moving in dignified orbits both pro- and retrograde in geocentric patterns surrounding Venus. Thus, the order of the heavens is reflected by the civic order shown in the mural.