It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the rush towards the modern -- there will always be the lure of the lost. There will be vampires' lairs and Gothic castles, there will be Roman ruins romantically crumbling, there will be stone idols with jeweled eyes in perfumed jungles, there will be Addams Family-style Victorian houses gnawed at by a century and a half's termites, there will be petroglyphs carved into desert rock, depicting the creation myths of indigenous societies long-since extirpated. All of the Ozymandian reminders of the things that once were.
But what happens when those things are not the remnants of long-lost civilizations, but the remnants of something familiar? What if, instead, of widows' walks and parapets and flying buttresses, we have industrial carpet, fluorescent lights, a world fully delineated by economic feasibility studies, electrical diagrams, environmental impact assessment reports, legal due diligence, linear programming charts?
It's something that's long since bothered me, ever since the first time I remember seeing a fully modernist building abandoned -- I was 12 or 13, and I wondered what could have happened. And there was something far more sinister about that bit of 1950s postwar optimism left to rot, covered in a mix of anarchy symbols counter-argued with swastikas, than anything that Piranesi or Poe could have ever dreamed up.
Which is perhaps why the Internet phenomenon of the liminal space has drawn me in.
Some reflect the machinations of commerce:
And others a mirror-maze reflection of the domestic:
And with all, a terrible sense of emptiness and loneliness:
In his 1909 text Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep described the liminal state as a particular moment within the rite, in which the subject of the ritual has passed through symbolic death but has yet to pass through symbolic rebirth, via a treacherous in-between space in which actions and words must be highly scripted to ensure safe passage.
A memory: a summer program for gifted elementary school students at the one high school in my hometown, empty for the summer save for a few of us little nerds and some assorted burnouts, several years older, roped into summer school (it was the late '90s -- they were still all about the flannel, as I recall), complaining about how bad their munchies were. Empty corridors. The sound of R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" on the local rock station reverberating from a janitor's distant boombox. The endless rows of lockers painted in primary colors, the sheen of distant fluorescent light on industrial tile floor was to be expected. But the darkened halls of the newer wing of the school, painted with the more abstract murals of art students -- those seemed to possess a stillness and a darkness that was beyond terrifying.
Another: it's winter. I'm in a building in our little downtown that had once been a department store, split up before I was born into an assortment of small businesses and a few apartments, a little bookshop, a hairdresser, a deli, and most attractive to me, a store selling baseball cards and collectibles. I remember the walk-up with its smell of carpet long since left to mold, even over the long Upper Midwest winter still somehow moist, mixed with a bit of cleaning fluid and the oily fryer-grease smell left on dry December days when all other smells are purged from the air, the ancient windows shivering in their frames in the gales that blew down from Alberta. I walk into an empty unit, the door left open. Maybe it had been an office, maybe a dwelling. Detritus had been left there from a previous tenant, or maybe just some other wanderer like myself. A crushed up Whopper wrapper, a trade paperback with a spiderwebbed spine, the corpses of last summer's yellow-jackets facing heavenward, never swept away. With chipped electrical outlets and broken thermostats, cheap off-yellow paint on the wall, industrial carpeting curling at the corners, it was someplace in between use and disuse, between past and present.
What was it that I experienced as a child? And what is it that is making its way around the Internet?
Perhaps -- and this is a first thought -- it is something that speaks to the human psyche itself, a discomfort with the in-between places, something that finds a comfortable analogy in the discomforts of the uncanny valley. And that very uncanniness is overlaid onto the banality and familiarity of these scenes. The once familiar -- something that we walk past every day, and are more than happy to ignore -- is caught in still frame. And when you look at it in focus, you realize on some level that you're not supposed to focus. That these are places designed to be functional and at least a little bit invisible. By being rendered from the functional into the aesthetic, their in-betweenness becomes more glaring, and all the more compelling.
And there is a social level as well. These places are the detritus of advanced industrial society, a society in which market logic triumphs above all else. The Soviet cartoons of piggish Western industrialists in Monopoly-man outfits with dollar signs for eyes got it wrong -- the purest elucidation of American industrial capitalism is, au contraire, a Comfort Inn just outside Peoria. And to see that representation of the animal spirits of some long-forgotten entrepreneur transformed into something naked and shivering reveals the disconnect between the material and the image, everything laid bare.
Or perhaps -- on the opposite end of the spectrum -- it's more personal, something ensconced deep within memory. Perhaps it's the memory of the alley you always avoided on the walk home from a school as a kid, with its trail of trash leading out of the dumpster, crumpling in the autumn rain. The time you woke up in the middle of the night and snuck down to the den and caught a viewing of The Shining on cable, the repeated carpet patterns and the domestic lighting mirroring your own environs, seeing yourself in the child pedaling his Big Wheel through empty corridors. The cold light of a gas station on a family road trip, a pockmarked cashier ringing up full tanks of premium unleaded and cans of Skoal, the way he snarled "you gonna buy something?" as you wondered whether or not to pocket a Snickers, as if he could read your young mind. The way you clung to your mother in a parking garage in early winter, unseen enemies lurking behind every Cutlass Ciera and Caprice Classic.
Regardless, the result is the same as the Gothic ruins that inspired the imaginations of the romantics -- what once was has become, in some way, no longer.
