Trinidad Trinity

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

November 14, 2017

Solid, liquid, gas, i.e., snow, water, clouds…and cold and wind and rocks. That was Trinidad today. 14 November 2017. The time of year when the elements as atmospheric forces become unruly and dispense their “ugliness” upon the landscape and all that is about it. Most would snap their collar up, turn their back to the chilling wind, and walk away in search of soonest shelter; preferably warm. I guess that’s one way to “look” at it. But it’s not nearly the only way to look at, or rather, to “see” what is at hand. Call it potential if you will. Perspective-potential? Yup. To be able to eek out something relatively pleasing (hopeful) out of what appears to be unpleasing (hopeless). What was it Andy Dufresne said, "Get busy living, or get busy dying.” Yeah. I know. I got it, but don't get it. The doctrine of divine, unblemished sunshine or nothing at all – still? – reigns supreme, though I say "Sic semper tyrannis!" and go my way come hell or high water; rain or shine(ola). By crikey! I will apply my mind and all I’ve installed therein to what is before me to do what I have come to do: capture the scene regardless of inclemency. That’s right: improvise, adapt, overcome. And what I “saw” here was a teeny-tiny train conducting its Sisyphean exercise in the midst of this primordial landscape misshapen by unimaginable cataclysmic forces, weather notwithstanding. So what about the train? Seems completely irrelevant, save to provide a pedestrian perspective of how infinitely “small” man and his machine are in sardonic comparison, and I kinda like trains too.