For a stranger who looks at this picture, there’s no way to date it.
From the dilapidated water-worn concrete wall to the ancient looking pedicabs, and the tall masted sailboat in the distance, it could be any year since the end of the war. This is the Dumaguete waterfront, seen on a gloomy day in January in the late 1990’s.
The dark skies and the restless sea seem separate entities, divorced from the world of man. The sea in particular seems enclosed by sharp straight lines of concrete, almost as though it were a different picture, cut and pasted in; as though the city were making a geometric distinction between the human and the inhuman and saying to the sea, “stay away”.
Straight lines and right angles are almost unknown in inorganic nature- except for regular forms like crystals and certain strata of split rock. Natural entities like oceans, mountains and deserts are amorphous in outline. If you see a straight line, it’s the work of something that is alive.
And abstract geometric figures are a pure invention of the human mind. Points, lines, angles, triangles, circles squares and planes have no actual existence; they are constructions in mental space, overlaid on a formless world to help us form it, to bend it to our needs and to protect us from it.
With prisms we shatter light to pure color, we produce thrust from sails formed of triangles, and power with magnets spinning in perfect circles, on bearings made of perfect spheres.
Disasters like fires, floods and hurricanes are shapeless happenings, but we fight them with constructions based on geometric forms- strong buildings in the forms of fireproof cubes and cylinders, canals and seawalls of concrete- formed by solid straight lines and planes.
In this picture, for example, everything is shaped in regular forms- the billboards, the light poles ship’s masts, even the rectangular roofs of the pedicabs; most of all the massive seawall, severing the human from the inhuman, proclaiming to the shapeless water, “this far, and no farther!”
Another picture, taken from this position today, would certainly look different. The roads have been repaired, the seawall has been rebuilt, and there’s a new ferry terminal on view in the distance.
The things we humans forge and shape are always subject to decay and alteration. Only the sky, and the sea itself, remain unchanged- inhuman, formless, and permanent.
