It isn’t Mesopotamia. And it wasn’t quite Berlin. Nobody could claim Los Angeles or Dubai. But as the shift went from their being a slow cartwheel sort of animal keeping somewhat apace with technological progress—having begun with fire, flint, and the club—it was a long time a-comin’ before the wheel itself ‘outstripped’, ‘outran’, outdid human biology. But even back then in the latter part of the twentieth century of their Common Era, it was hard to say who were the people the proprietor had had in mind. Nobody could have imagined. Nobody could have foreseen it. The idea of suspending Prometheus’ stolen flame a-high in a store window for all to see like this as though held up magically, supernaturally (balanced on a clear, plastic stand one stood there believing one did not ‘see’) was radical, and shocking if not comic. But like the Ghosts of Christmas, pieces of the manikins of tomorrow had come many decades back, a good two hundred years more behind when the limbs & eyes of the window-shoppers’ curiosity, need, desire and wonder along with the shopkeepers themselves had later been replaced by the gears & shafts of the future’s perfectly machined selves now viewing perhaps through another ‘window’ of some kind their own evolutionary updates, or reverse-engineered replacements.
Egbert Starr 