The universal symbol for "NO" is not enough, someone felt the need to specify temporal parameters as well. "NO... NEVER." Someone else has modified the sign to better reflect the hidden meaning of the double negative. "NO" becomes "LOVE" and "NEVER" is rewritten as "forever and always." This is the only photograph here that is my own. I stumbled upon this representation of the ultimate struggle on a small side street in Wells, England.
It is the signs of age on this sign that may signify more than the letters themselves. The scrapes and dings in the metal suggest that this sign has been here (wherever "here" is) for quite some time. The color red signifies an urgency, as does the ALL CAPS. It is IMPORTANT that we be aware of invisibility, and has been for quite some time.
One day, about five or six years ago, a local anti abortion group organized about 100 people with signs along both sides of Meridian Street in downtown Indianapolis. Meridian Street is the street that runs north and south and divides the city in half; it runs through the monument circle which is the exact geographic center of the city. The signs were the usual, "abortion is murder" "abortion stops a beating heart" and the like. As I drove down Meridian Street that afternoon I thought about finding a shop that sold poster-board and magic markers and fashioning a large "SHOW US YOUR TITS" sign and sneaking my way toward the front of a group on a crowded corner. In Indianapolis this would have the further connotation of someone who got the dates for the Indy 500 weekend wrong.
This is wonderful. The first time I saw it I was struck by how it manages to, in a single word, express the same meaning as Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet, "Ozymandias."
This recalls something that Captain Kirk might have used to defeat the logical killer robot. How can something be here, and, at the same time, north of here? Perhaps it is a more proletariat rendering of Magritte's "The Treachery of Images."
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