Much of the rural imagery from the works of the Romantics included aestheticised, picturesque ruins from a previous age (usually, although not always, Classical temples, columns and statues). Early on, I noticed similarities between these images and images of the modern city in ruins in various Science Fiction films or read descriptions of in Science Fiction novels. It occurred to me that the image of a well-known city in ruins was a powerful one that people might use in a variety of ways to express a variety of ideas. What does it mean? Why the fascination?
(Via Mondolithic Sketchbook.)
For years I've had excruciatingly detailed fantasies (waking and otherwise) of abandoned, ruinous cities. Not so coincidentally, many of my short-stories take place after unspecified disasters. In the novel I'm wrestling with now I've tried to imagine a near future of unremitting suburban sprawl: lots of decaying megaplexes and dilapidated shopping malls baking under a discolored sky.
I recently had the opportunity to see a long-standing mall -- a sterile ghost of its former success -- ravaged by wrecking balls until one could imagine it had been uprooted by a nuclear blastwave. I found the landscape perversely attractive and enormously predictive, reminiscent of time-lapse footage of moss and fungi overwhelming animal remains and setting the stage for a new phase of unbridled growth.
This contrasts sharply with my imagined future, in which there is simply no room left among the dated concrete scenery to casually reduce failed shopping complexes to rubble and rebuild from the ground up. Instead, stripmalls become "stackmalls" -- unruly towers of commercial transience much like geological strata. Inexorably, our comfortable world of video rental franchises, ATMs and home super-stores gels into an uninterrupted heat island with profound effects on the climate and irreversible psychological consequences.
The distinction between "city" and "suburb" thus dissolved, people find themselves lost in what might as well be an alien landscape . . . foreign not because of any sense of unfamiliarity, but because of sheer directionless uniformity, the kind of rootlessness one experiences pondering an M.C. Escher drawing.
So while the world may in fact be growing at an exponential rate as the population climbs frantically skyward, into new electronic tombs and horizontal forests of demeaning fluorescent light, continuity is severed. The past becomes a dim montage, an Olduvai of the psyche.
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