Issue #15, Winter 1998
Voice Over by Rod Clark
It is not easy to explain how I come to this place. I stumble across it as I am trying to awake from a dream, or perhaps a series of annoying and unsatisfactory dreams that do not seem to have jelled, as if lacking some pectin of coherency. And then, suddenly, like turning a corner into an unknown neighborhood I am there in the city: a dead, crumbling urbanscape stretching out in all directions as far as the eye can see. Some of the structures, half-collapsed palaces and crumbling domes, are obviously of great antiquity; others are industrial ruins that might have been erected in the thirties or forties: moldy brick edifices sprouting bones of cast iron, or orange arms of rusted steel. Through it all, as if to mock the stillness, trickles a sluggish gray river, passing under bridges of carved stone and rusting steel, lapping banks strewn with rubble and decay. Is it Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia? Some forgotten corner of Albania perhaps, or a little-visited enclave of Alexandria or Dubrovnik? Clearly it is a city that has experienced some great misfortune resulting in this condition, but of what nature I cannot guess-a war? an earthquake? a plague? But I have the feeling that no sudden disaster has eroded this city. It has been softly and slowly crumbling for uncountable years, like a rocky shore abraded by the caress of wave and sand.
From the moment of my arrival here, I am suffused with a feeling of dread. It is my constant desire to awaken or make my escape, but escape from this place is more easily thought than done. The time I spend here is time spent seeking a way out-an alley into some sunlit square, an avenue to some bright plain, a gateway to anything different than this. The problem is-this place has no edges. Wherever you turn, there is only more of it. To see the truth of this, you need only to climb a staircase. (No matter if the steps are interior or exterior-such things matter little here where so many walls have fallen.) Below you it stretches out beneath a late afternoon sun that never descends in the sky. A bad feeling attends this city without edges, a feeling that consists half of horror, and half of an eerie calm. The feeling recalls the lines of Emily Dickinson:
There's a certain slant of light / on winter afternoons, / That oppresses, like the weight / of cathedral tunes
The streets are reasonably clear, but rubble spills onto them. There are crowded decaying tenements carved out of what look like old mansions, and tiny dusty shops and cafés. As far as I can tell, there is no vehicular traffic, and, tellingly, there are no wires or TV antennas anywhere. I find myself combing the bleak horizon for some hint of relief. Even a bright red roof or a pair of yellow arches with a clown selling happy meals under them would be a break from this oppressive grayness - a cheerful fart in this solemn cathedral. Instead - dead feeling surrounds me. Dust, spider webs, garbage.
It is never obvious at first that I have been here before, but as I walk these streets and pass through these corridors, a weird familiarity descends. The longer I am trapped here, I remember more of other visits, and gather clues as to the kind of place I have come to. Embedded in this sprawling architecture are remnants of my past. In one great palace-like building, for example, I recognize elements of old theaters I have worked in or performed in since childhood, their velvet ropes and dusty curtains blending mysteriously with the dangling ropes and hardwood floors of high school gymnasiums. And there are pieces of old museums I have visited and fragments of dead factories along urban river fronts and halls of old palaces and castles I remember from a boyhood visit to Europe and old university buildings.
One building in particular I have returned to on several visits. It has the feeling of an abandoned opera house with a rather severe magnificence. There are murky portraits and great faded curtains, dark red or purple curtains with water stains that ripple faintly in tepid breezes. It has large hallways in which people are dwarfed by its scale, but whispers echo, and great staircases ascending or descending of astonishing breadth as if they were designed for parades to pass up and down them, but nothing like that has clearly happened for a long time, nor is likely to happen again. And on these staircases, slanted light though broken walls falls on a decayed arras depicting the murder of surly, unidentifiable beasts, by pale-faced knights in rusty armor. But neither beasts nor slayers seem to be gratifying themselves. The painted onlookers who serve as the audience for this languorously murderous entertainment have the same odd detachment, as if their energies are devoted to dreaming of a world other than the one in which they stand imprisoned forever - perhaps our own.
And there are real people here too - at least I presume they are people. Persons who slowly stroll or creep about their daily business with a kind of deliberate and measured irony. Exactly what their daily business is, however, is difficult to determine, for if you stay and watch they will seem to pass a great deal of time in small, meaningless conversations and activities with each other-saying little of substance and accomplishing nothing. When I try to attract their attention, they look at me contemptuously, as if I am an outsider-one who does not yet understand what they already know so terribly well. Do I think I am the only visitor who has ever come to this place, their sneers seem to ask?
In fact I know without asking that I am only the most insignificant of tourists, a child wandering in the wake of giants. My city is a poor copy of many others. Places like it or that suggest it can be found in the work of myriad writers, and clearly I have purloined this place from them as much as from my own experience. Here is the rubble of Otranto and the haunted ruins of the Romantics. Here are "the dark satanic mills" of Blake. Here are the uncertain purple curtains of Poe's haunted manses in ancient Venice or some decayed city on the banks of the Rhine. Here are the labyrinthine libraries (and imaginations) of Borges. More modern echoes can be found in the ancient urban cores of cyberpunk literature, the dark British fantasies of Clive Barker, and the eerie atmosphere of Ian Banks' remarkable, ostensibly science fiction novel The Bridge... All of it is there - but what is the meaning of this dreaming architecture? These palaces of dust with their surly ghosts?
Even in decay these buildings are pretentious. They push their importance at you, dwarfing you with your ignorance of what they are - why they were built, and why they are falling apart. "If we are rotten," they seem to say, "you and others like you are to blame." Perhaps all this is the junk heap of everything I have passed by or tossed behind me in the journey of living. Things, my conscience tells me, that I should have studied harder, taken more seriously, spent more time on. Maybe, but maybe not. This place seems to be more about guilt than substance. Once I entered a huge library here and tried to actually read some of the large, disintegrating volumes on the shelves. For all their formidable bindings and strange illustrations, the tomes were boring and unreadable. And unlike the kindly librarians of my childhood, the archivists were arrogant and unfriendly, acting as gatekeepers to exclude the curious, not promoters of knowledge.
I do not believe, as the Romantics did, that the past was more wonderful than the present - so what is it that brings me back six or seven times a year to this somber place? Is it regret? Doubtless, with study and sifting there is much of value here: remnants of great art, lessons of architecture and science that dwarf my current understanding. Have I been too hasty in my casting away of things? Perhaps I have thrown out things of value, things that through greater humbleness, diligence, scholarship and imagination I might have acquired. But who has time to review everything that sweeps past us and into the turbulent wake behind us? And if our eye lingers too long on what lies behind us, how can we deal with the present that roars past and the future that hurtles toward us?
I am not a Romantic, and this city will never seduce me to stay. This metropolis is not the best of what lies behind us. It is the shell of a past that has been looted and abandoned - and those who inhabit this wasteland today would have found the vital past in its bright moment-to-moment passage as loathsome as they would the waking world to which we return. The past is precious. We can visit attics and find treasure there, but we cannot live in them and remain sane. Ours is the avenue of the unfolding moment and the world it leads to. In imagination we may look far ahead, or look at the life behind us - but in the end, this is the place and time we return to-the place where we live.