please be still and put your madness in a jar

I was the passenger in a car taking me around the outskirts of a city where all I could see for miles were factories and what seemed to be the skeletons of civilization. It was dusk. I've always loved dusk. It's that moment of the day where all colours have the same values and the usual contrast that bathes everything in light and shadow subsides in favour of a soft hue embracing every living and non-living thing. I particularly love that shade of near-electric blue that seems to be the perfect canvas for red and reddish neon lights to shine - as if fighting against being engulfed by the evening sky, and shining all the more brightly because of it, much like radioactive blood drops arranging themselves in the form of letters one doesn't really pay any attention to. And this was precisely what I saw at the margins of the long highway I was travelling on. As I was driven on and on, it dawned on me that I really fucking loved what I was seeing. I always seemed to be drawn to urban decay and sterile brutalist landscapes like this one. But wasn't I the guy who fought against excessive industrialization and would surely rather lay his eyes upon miles and miles of untouched nature than on any concrete pipe? Why was the fascination with all things urban impossible to shake, as if anchored within myself, shaping my whole aesthetic perception of the world? The answer I was able to give myself was rather dull, but the one plenty of artists have been giving themselves since way before I ever saw the light of the world, and it was isolation. After all, what is capable of describing humanity and its contradictions better than dull-looking blocks of cement travelling their way up towards the sky? Aren't they the quintessential proof of our constant technological progress while simultaneously carrying a sadness greater than that of all weeping Virgin Marys? And with them the ever fascinating neon lights reflecting themselves on slippery grounds, synthetic light meeting synthetic earth, being our unreliable providers of a light nature denied us to get ourselves through dark nights. Was there ever anything more poetic, tragic and terrible than our puny little efforts to dominate the Earth with inadequate hands and inadequate minds? And so I figured Hopper's diner in Nighthawks was the poetic carrier of loneliness and isolation not because of the figures not acknowledging each other within its perimeter, but for the emptiness of the street and houses around it and for the greenish light reflecting itself off a spectral pavement that talked about humans more than any painted figure did. And I thought of how incredibly fitting it was to be listening to Late Night Shopping's glitches and droning while all I saw was concrete upon concrete around the metal box I was running on. Electronic glitches seem to evoke in me the same kind of questionable euphoria that silent neon-lit streets and concrete factories do. The breaking of sound itself, the malfunctioning of digitally synthesized sound waves, the deterioration of analog tape - these things all make me feel at home more than any string quartet ever did. Do they have anything to do with what I was seeing, at all? I certainly thought they did, while images and sounds merged together in my mind as we went on. I thought about it some more, and I now reckon they are the survivors of men's attempts to create beauty only to be met with the limits of the physical world, and of their trials to turn these too into beauty - never quite achieving the goal, much like our failed attempts to turn the Earth in our favour. I believe there is some truth in the clichéd idea that we can find beauty in the dirty and ugly too. Or, at least, a desperate search and longing for it. And that is, itself, beautiful.