Chance Mexico map

(Also see my chance world map.)

I've walked by this white blob on the Williamsburg bridge from the opposite direction several times, and wondered what it "looked like."  I turned around this time and saw Mexico, plain as day.  That brought up a few things:

1) Is the blob intentional?  The white shape to its left looks sprayed, so the "spill" shape could have been sprayed too.  And since New York has thousands of artistic types who see the city as their canvas, intentional "accidents" dot the urban landscape, from the orange paint line that I mentioned earlier (and saw meandering the sidewalk on Avenue B today; the artist seems compelled to drool a record of their every move), to the Critical Mass continental U.S. stenciled onto the bridge's walkway.  Anyway, this blob wasn't stenciled, and I'm 98% sure it is an authentic chance image, from paint spilled by a bridge worker or some slob of a tagger.

2) The footsteps made me think of undocumented migrants coming to the U.S., and reminded me of the phrase "break north" from Public Enemy's Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, a loaded reference to Canada as a refuge for (Vietnam war) draft resisters and to the Underground Railroad that helped fugitive slaves escape north.  And that phrase always reminds me of Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, even though I've forgotten everything about it but liking it, long ago.

I don't think the migrants face anything like the black experience.  Their story is that of undocumented economic migrants across the globe, hiding in containers and packed onto leaky boats, leaving countries that can't or won't give them a future.  Desperate as it is, it's still nothing like being kidnapped and brought here in chains, then systematically enslaved and robbed of your humanity and future.

But it is interesting that footprints continue to point north on the map here, as people search for a way to survive with some dignity.

And it's interesting how a blob on the sidewalk can trigger a web of associations.

The search for meaning -- trying to connect our brains to our hearts and our selves to the world -- is our chief burden, and we'll build scaffolding to the clouds or read a world into a paint spill to find it.