a whole series on allan sekula at the c.c.a. this year, exhibitions, panels, seminars, film screenings, tours. and here i am, at home in of the great modern port cities of the world, through which global labour and capital is flowing unceasingly.

in part because i am reading (on and off) from from the aeneid in latin — for the first time i could not shake the feeling that this was the epic that spoke directly to our times. where in the english translation my eye would have flown over the lines, the descriptions merely set pieces in a narrative we already know so well, when read ploddingly, workhorse-like, in a language that was never my great strength, and to constantly look up nautical vocabulary, one could not but feel, in a visceral way, how much resonance it has for our age — for ours is the age of the refugee crisis through illegal migration by sea. i am obviously far from the first to draw this comparison  — in fact google tells me that the EC years ago had a resettlement programme for illegal immigrants called precisely project aeneas.) but when I read the aeneid in college illegal migration at sea had no meaning to me: the vietnamese crisis was too long ago, before i was born, the mediterranean too remote. i had not then spent a semester reading maritime law and shipping law and international refugee conventions, i had known nothing of the treatment of seafarers and fishers, their working conditions, nor spoken to human rights activists who worked in trafficking and migration at sea, or the absurd litigation that rescuer ships faced, and the difficult balance of national policy between humanitarian aid and border control.

and now i feel the sun, the sea-suffering, in the latin, in every word.