The Liminal Nests
One of the things I find most fascinating this year is the kind of spiritual-physical interplay going on with the consequences of lockdown. Iβm sure by now everyoneβs been witness in some way to seeing businesses, other private buildings board up and close for good. The world is adjusting, itβs inner necrosis now bleeding over into itβs physical world. A place that feels increasingly cobwebbed, choked with decay and home to fewer and fewer shuffling figures wrapped in masks that turn away from strangers.
Two of them fascinated me though, more than others. I imagine to an older generation, the spectre of vast industrial districts becoming locked graveyards of a passing era, gradually cut apart for scrap and reuse gave them a similar feeling to what I see at the ongoing death of physical schools and malls.
These places have a presence. They feel like tombs to something that isnβt coming back in a way that a closed car dealership or real estate agentsβ office never could. Why would malls reopen when everyone has adjusted to buying online? What would keep a school going in the wake of people just skipping out on it or being forcibly migrated to some pointless digital imitation of it that yields nothing to them, not even a friendship?
I never thought people would halt their mass consumption at their vast temples of excess, I never thought the brainwashing and soul-breaking centre would just cease operation and I never thought it would come about through just passive disinterest and unemotional discarding of it as an entire way of life.
Nothing comes to replace it. Those that would have been wrapped up in these two forces for the first decades of their lives are now cast out of it without an alternative. They are become aimless, for now thereβs still some pretense of attending the corpse and pretending itβs real, but that winds down as time goes on and people realize the repercussions for not pretending donβt really exist and the people still advising them to appear more and more dead each day.
I see these places as ruins attracting energy and pulling things to them. I think the inertia and stagnation left by their deaths acts as an anchor for things. I think a year or so after theyβre gone youβll be able to go inside and youβll start to see weird things. I think people who crack under all this will go to them to remember things, to leave ranting messages graffitiβd on the walls, to kill themselves, to hide and be forgotten. I think theyβll become ill-omened monuments to a broken way of doing things and the people broken by them.
They become a storehouse of failed dreams and unfilled promises. Usually they are demolished swiftly and donβt linger on in the world but the sheer scale of their demise now coupled with the inability of the state to oversee their removal means that they arenβt going anywhere anytime soon.
I think after awhile they will be destroyed, but as a final act of scorn and by the arsonistβs match, not by the bulldozer. In the meantime, they become places of transient energy; where things and people that arenβt going to make it out of this time go to fade away and their parting agonies imprint themselves on the walls. But manifestation is a two-way street, and places that are charged as exit points for people leaving this reality become entry points for things returning to it.
Malls don't trigger that much for me. I wonder what physical space will be made obsolete that Gen Z will remember. Perhaps the real world itself. With gen alpha only remembering the tail end of it like I remember the tail end of malls.
