.
Hallway of abandoned hospital in former East Berlin: photo By S-b, June 2008
The Avenida sin Nombre, as, if you have looked about yourself, you may have already gathered, is a street that has lost its memory.
It is a street that has forgotten it is a street and thinks instead that it is a tunnel, an intermediary passageway leading the approximately living and the intermittently sentient -- those who have managed despite the depredations of the present to retain at least some dim awareness of their surroundings -- toward, it is to be supposed, a place where oblivion will at last be complete.
It is lined all along on either side by high walls covered with peeling paint and here and there, sometimes for extended stretches, by commercial hoardings decorated with strange palimpsests of obscure hieroglyphic markings, maybe they are the texts of some sacred or for that matter not so sacred creed, no one now living has ever been able to make them out in such a way as to decipher their meaning, indeed many suppose them to have no meaning at all.
No one is quite sure where this street has its provenance or its terminus.
No one is quite sure where this street has its provenance or its terminus.
West Lawn -- Wrong Door: photo by Justin Hayes, 18 March 2009
An urban explorer under Hobart, Tasmania, Australia: photo by JJ Harrison, 30 May 2008
Looking into the horrible beauty of these images, Tom, fills me with a profound disquiet. I get the feeling that I’m staring into a world that’s been a long time coming. Those markings you speak of, and the ones so prominent in the Hobart photo, for example, were/are made by people not unlike ourselves, who resemble the sane. Surely, along that street coming out of nowhere and eternally going nowhere, Nepenthe is offering up her cocktails that taste of oblivion.
ReplyDeleteHazen
Hazen,
ReplyDeleteThat drew a laugh out of the sane person in the house.
"...who resemble the sane"
(Lately there's the insistent sneaky feeling any resemblance to living persons is strictly accidental... as they used to say in showbiz.)
Under the cities and beneath the streets the Zeitgeist leaves us these opaque notes and then fades back into the double exposure, everybody's ghost melting noiselessly into the walls...