The rain opens up traversable fissures in the city, walkways, alleyways, staircases, crawlspaces, a subset of sites and navigable vectors leading to them and from them. You don’t notice passages when the city is dry. Architecture, the raging built-ness of the city, ‘redistributes narrativity” (the phrase is Philippe Hamon’s in his indispensable book, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p. 30). The city usually feels horizontal or vertical in your mind, but in the glistening rain, its trapdoors open, its gradients yawn forth, its balconies tremble like spider webs, and you become more inmate than citizen, walking the endless, carnivorous spaces of a world-around, proliferating, omni-directional prison.
