Ozymandias vs. New York

Here is an evocative article about the New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair.

"Once there were elevators gliding up the sides of the towers to reveal a city unfolding; now they are rusted in mid-rise. Once there were stairwells winding within those towers; now they are rotted through. The call for a better tomorrow, for “Peace Through Understanding,” is answered by the flutter and coo of its hidden inhabitants."


Apparently the 1960s future is rusting as fast as the Gernsback Continuum did before it. I've visited plenty of space-age ruins in my time, but not this one. I've put it on the list.

Having said that, it has literally never occurred to me that a traveler would look upon Ozymandias' colossal wreck and despair because it was broken. At least, I assume that's what the writer means here when he says: "But the more years that go by, the more the structure becomes New York’s own “colossal wreck,” begging, as Shelley wrote in “Ozymandias,” that we look upon it and despair."

Here's the sonnet to which he is referring:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:'
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

I've always thought that the power generated by the poem comes from the fact that time, the great leveler, has freed us from any need to despair. Ozymandias, with his frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, and his granite stand-in of same have together gone the way of all flesh, and apparently of all stone too. Hooray, good riddance, happy days are here again, etc.

But others are apparently despairing at the decay, at the hand of time itself. I feel as though I've been caught out in a blatant lack of imagination. Call myself a writer? I clearly don't understand how other people think at all. And I've even been to the Ramesseum, looked on the colossal wrecks, and, if not actually despaired, at least felt a little tinge of regret and a whimper of existential angst that such strong statues were broken and scattered over the ground.

Folks just melted away

I've always loved abandoned houses, and by extension, abandoned cities. The currently most famous abandoned city is Detroit in the USA. In 1970, about the time rock musicians like David Bowie were working up entire theses on TEOTWAWKI and making dance songs about them, the population of Detroit was 1,510,000, down from 1, 850,000 in 1950. By 2000, the city's population was 950,000 – about half that of its heyday. The spectacular hollowing out of the city has taken place while the regional population has grown normally - from 3,350,000 in 1950 to 4,740,000 in 2000. For an archeology rat like myself, convinced that something horrible has to happen to cause people to flee their centers – as I had always been told happened to the classic Maya in 950 AD, for instance – it's been a weird thing to watch. Or as I should more properly write, observe from a safe distance. I doubt if the Detroit natives would like me rubbernecking their empty skyscrapers.

Time Magazine recently had a photospread on Detroit, the beautiful, undisturbed decay of ornate buildings and fine furnishings captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
Here's one of their photos – a nice Victorian house, almost settling into the earth.




And here a great theatre is so far gone it is not even fit for its ghosts.




A few years ago, the writers of Detroit Blog posted their adventures exploring these ruins at night, stepping between squatters and dealers and avoiding the police to catalogue such heart-wrenching sights as trees growing from gutters, the glamorous Book Cadillac Hotel reduced to fragments, Mayan symbols painted over the beautiful United Artists building, and flotsam and jetsam drifting from the Motown Building, including chits of Marvin Gaye's benefits statements. Motown, man! The music I grew up with. And these papers were not even snatched up by fans or historians, just scattered on desks and on the floor like autumn leaf litter. (Edit 2017: Detroit blog is no more, but the author has published this book.)

Most abandoned places are either abandoned entirely, like Pripyat, or run by successors to the original inhabitants who will, for several periods every era, vaguely tolerate a visitor for the tourist dollar they bring in, like Petra. My lifelong if rather diffuse ambition was to visit Babylon, and people do keep having wars over it so I haven't managed yet.

But I have been to Egypt. To fail to go to Egypt would be a serious omission indeed. Here we see the Colossi of Memnon, now in fields and towering over geese, repaired a few times over history and still standing, grim and hellish looking doorkeepers now, not fair guardians.





Nearby is the Ramesseum, with the fallen statue that inspired Shelley's Ozymandias.
Here's the view from the top of the pylon – the desert and the fields. On the skyline over the fields you can see the Colossi. They are aptly named.





The area – the Valley of the Kings – is still inhabited, as this picture of our guide shows. I say guide; he was actually a local man who would show you the way around the ruins if he got a kiss from a pretty girl. (Luckily I'd brought one with me.) I'm not really outing him too badly, I hope – the photo was taken over twenty years ago.





Dubai's next, of course. Now the entirely imaginary pile of money that fuelled its growth has disappeared, gone when we stopped believing in it, as with so many other ancient gods, the buildings are being abandoned in mid-skyscrape and the workers are going home, some so fast they are leaving their vehicles at the airport with the keys still in them as they flee their debts in a kingdom not particularly nice to debtors. Shame, in a way. I'd always hoped Dubai would be the Vermilion Sands or similar folly of Western Civilization, but it would have taken a few more years to truly cement (no pun intended) its place. If the towers fall in the desert, will they inspire the same (complete lack of awe) that the Ramesseum inspired in Shelley? Or would the giants be so tall that future explorers will genuinely despair at our mighty works?

A more prosaic explanation for the fall of the classic Maya civilization is, simply, crappy government.

So what happened in the collapse, at least in this part of the Maya world? It was a bellicose place," Emery acknowledges, with evidence of warfare and walls across some ceremonial sites. "But the bodies aren't there," from any massive fighting, she says. More likely, there was just a political collapse in which rulers came to be seen over a two-century period as no longer delivering the goods, better crops or more rain." Modern-day Maya still live relatively close to the abandoned sites, after all, descendants of the folks who lived there long ago. "Folks just melted away" from ceremonial centers, Emery says, just like people today changing rulers come election season."

(USA Today)

Much like Detroit, then

Ref: Buildings Are R Us Population Change.
Did Environmental Disasters Play a Role in Mayan Decline?

(Edited to renew links, where possible, 07/2017)

Look on my works, ye mighty

I have a favorite pin-up.

He's been my favorite pin-up since I was a kid, when I first got a copy of C.W. Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars. I've always been interested in archaeology. I suppose 20th century western children came in three main brands – dinosaur kids, airplane kids and Ancient Egypt kids. I was the latter. I loved Ceram's book and currently have two editions in English, one in German and one very similar book of his with more pictures in it. I reread one or more of them every now and again. This photo, more than any Egyptian stele or Assyrian frieze, is an image burned into my imagination.



Click on the small picture for a larger picture. The smaller is from a paperback edition; the larger is from the German hardback edition. I believe the hardback is the original and the ppbk is the flopped copy. (Giles G Healey)

The photo is of a Lacandone Indian, standing against the walls of Bonampak. The photo is credited to Giles G. Healey, which means it was taken in 1946.

Ceram published the photo to show the similarity of the modern jungle dweller's profile to the silhouette of the ancient city dweller. The man, who could well have been called Na Bor, is a descendant of the Maya who built Bonampak. He, Na Bor, lived in the jungle on subsistence rations of cassava, maize, sweet potato, tomatoes, beans and the occasional monkey shot with a flint arrowhead. His family also grew tobacco. His relatives still live there today – I hope. Eleven hundred years before this photograph was taken, his ancestors built stone cities, reservoirs and observatories. They had a written language and studied astronomy and mathematics.

I've always found the picture moving. Na Bor is beautiful. When you see the other photos of him standing next to Giles Healey himself, you realize he is not a tall, dark hunter but virtually a hobbit – probably about 5' 1" tall. He's barefoot. Na Bor looks so serious as he emulates the warrior's face in the plaster. In other photos, the local Lacandone families have open, cheery grins on their faces. They are dressed in identical grubby single-piece shifts, woven by the women from locally grown cotton, giving one the impression of complete inability to buy or trade any goods whatsoever. They are still smiling. They love their world and apparently they were happy enough to see Healey or Tozzer or later travelers to come by and chat with them or photograph them, as long as the white men didn't offer them any of their god-awful food. [1]

I believe I've discussed Ozymandias here before – and the melancholy feeling that comes with understanding that great civilizations fade away. Na Bor is a different teacher, because he is not looking on his ancestors' great works and despairing, either from awe or from regret at what he's lost. The ultimate impression is that he can't comprehend the changes. Maybe I'm wrong, but...

Looking at it, I can never shake the eerie feeling that one day our children, six inches shorter than us, armed with bows and dressed in cotton shifts, will be standing outside our dead cities trying to look serious.

Except our cities won't last eleven hundred years.


[1] The Four Suns, Jacques Soustelle, p. 26

Stonehenge

I'm still reading  Electric Eden, by Rob Young - it's a long book - and today I reached the beginning of the end of the Folky road: The Stonehenge Festival's growth and its subsequent short sharp death at the Battle of the Beanfield.  It's an appropriate thing to be reading at the solstice, even though it was simply an accident. 


Displaying a better sense of organization than I do, Will Self has a piece in today's Guardian about Stonehenge and its modern history, that is the history of people who looked at the history of Stonehenge, and British Heritage's recent guardianship of the stone circle. (No Grauniad pun intended.)  It's entitled, "Has British Heritage ruined Stonehenge" - and I suspect that "ruin" is a pun - and is worth a read.  Self mentions the festivals, the hippies and crusties as he calls them, and the Battle of  the Beanfield. 

The Stonehenge Free festival began in 1974, and during the following decade the numbers of celebrants and revellers descending on the stones to dance the shortest night of the year away grew and grew. The so-called Convoy – a cavalry of hippies, anarchists and crusties that moved around the country from festival to festival – became the focus of the secular authorities' displeasure. Goaded by local landowners, in June 1985 the then chairman of English Heritage, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, took measures to suppress the Free festival. Riot police with helicopter support were called in, and the Convoy was tracked down to a Wiltshire bean field on the border where many hairy heads were unceremoniously cracked. The following year, the Public Order Act was passed by parliament, in part to suppress events such as the solstice celebration.

I remember all that nonsense fairly well. Not only was I living in England at the time, but I'd been to a festival at Stonehenge, and although I was not part of the travellers' group (that was after my visit) a great time was had by all. I can't remember a thing about the music or the festival itself, except the part where just after dawn on the solstice, after the Druids had done their ritual, a large number of us crawled under the barbed wire and sat around inside the stone circle. It was a great deal of fun, mostly because we thumbing our noses at The Man, as one did in those days, but it was not particularly magical, or sacred or visionary.


Will Self from the Guardian article.

In fact, I'd been once before as a small child, before English Heritage roped it off in 1977, and had wandered around inside the circle at that time. Like Will Self in the referenced article, I would recommend that a traveler looking to find The Old Weird England go to Avebury instead. Stonehenge is tiny. It's a marvel and all that, they dragged 11 stones 160 miles from Wales and so forth, but it is not that impressive to a modern person used to skyscrapers and even boats the size of palaces. The sheer size of Salisbury Plain dwarfs it. As flat and as closely cropped as a football pitch, the surrounding nothingness reminds one of the failure of Ozymandias to impress us with his works - all around the lone and level grass stretches far away. Avebury, by contrast, is enormous and the modern buildings in amongst the standing stones give you a sense of scale, and some sense of how important it must have been to the builders to put these things together. Why, we'll probably never know, but you are very impressed with their determination to do it.

As well as stone circles in the Cotswolds, Northern England, the Orkneys, there are more in Ireland and France, which I have not yet seen. Electric Eden is doing a good job of reconnecting me with the sheer age and gravity of Britain's landscape, but has not (at least yet) mentioned that the borders of this landscape don't match the modern borders of Britain.

Memories of the Space Age

The Internet Review of Science Fiction (iRoSF) has an article from Gary Westfahl on JG Ballard and the space race. It's called The Man Who Didn't Need To Walk On The Moon.

This month is the fortieth anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, so I'm sure we'll see a number of articles on the subject. Covering JG Ballard is a little weird under the circumstances, as he regarded the space race as a dead loss - though he found it a very fertile ground for stories. Many of them concern crazy astronauts, dead astronauts, abandoned Cape Canaveral buildings, rusting rockets and a general air of total rejection of outer space, a sense of it being pushed in to the past to be safely compartmentalized and dealt with as history. When he began writing stories on the subject, that was an outrageous position to take. Fifty years on, it has almost come true. The astronauts have not gone nuts, though at least one - Lisa Marie Nowak - has not been exactly normal. There's a few rockets still wheezing half-assedly into Earth orbit, but the zip, pizzazz and vigor has gone. Generally, the space age seen from today seems to be more of a Taj Mahal than a great leap forward for civilization. More pretty than useful.

Westfahl seems to be approaching the work of Ballard as a fortune-teller or futurologist, though this could be the slant the editors asked him to take. I doubt if Ballard saw himself as the Faith Popcorn of the Space Age. But apart from that, it's a decent round up of Ballard's infatuation with strangling the space race at birth. He describes the corpses and monuments to the Space Age that litter Ballard's works like some Ozymandias of Apollo.

One interesting point was:

But Ballard did make one error: he assumed that humans would abandon space
travel because they were shattered by the revelations brought by ventures into
space; instead, humans have largely abandoned space travel because they are in a
state of denial about those revelations. That is, I would regard the following
phenomena as direct results of the Apollo lunar missions: a huge resurgence of
belief in the absurd pseudoscience of astrology, which maintains that the
positions of stars and planets are primarily important as reflections of, and
influences on, human behavior; [and] a growing refusal to accept the validity of
Darwin's theory of evolution by people who would rather trust in the wisdom of
an ancient religious text which explicitly argues that human beings live at the
bottom of a crystal hemisphere surrounded on all sides by water.

He concludes, although I don't really agree with him, that part of the pullback from space was a Ballardian realization on the part of humankind that Earth is sufficient to drive us crazy; we don't have to be astronauts to go mad. The alienation and insignificance we get on the surface of our own planet is quite enough for us.

Thanks to the JGB, the JG Ballard mailing list at Yahoogroups for pointing this article out to me.

Again with the legs of granite.

After a quick poll I decided most people don't associate the "despair" with the broken statue. If you want to get emotional over broken granite legs, here's the poem for you: - Horace Smith's sonnet (inspired by the same news article that inspired Shelley)

"On a Stupendous Leg of Granite":

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:--
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." -- The City's gone, --
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,-- and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness --
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

I like the reference to a vanished London.

Then again it's easy to see why people quote the Shelley poem more often than Smith's one.