Posts tagged Room for Romanticizing

Beautiful Ruination

— By far the best article I’ve read on Braddock thus far.  It’s probably the ONLY piece I’ve seen that gives you a clear idea of what Braddock is really trying to do.  Wow, what a terrific article.  You can be sure that some large chunks of this will be making their way into the next “Room for Romanticizing” segment.  BIG thanks to Sippy once again for pointing this out to me.

Response to “Room for Romanticizing (Part II)”

The following was posted by my friend Sippy in the discussion section of the “Room for Romanticizing” post.  He’s one hell of an ecocritic and he has some excellent points here.

I really like your formulation of absence, presence, and potential in relation to the various landscapes you discuss.  Also, to add to your metaphor—which, the more I think about it, the more and more apt it becomes—the forest landscape after a fire can actually be more fertile, alive, and diverse (with insects, mycelium, and small plants) than it is when it is dominated by old or mid-growth hardwoods or pines.  Similar to the urban landscapes you mention, it’s all about decay and potential.

Also, we like distance.  In terms of landscape, distance give us space and safety while also vicariously providing us with the fear of the sublime (much like horror movies perhaps, except the distance in those is more predicated on the gaze).  Humans evolved to feel uncomfortable in very closed-in and wooded spaces; we like to see where the predators are coming from.  So when a forest is burned out and we can see to the next ridgeline, we’re more comfortable.

You hit upon one other point that I find evocative: “So why do people still stop to look and take pictures of these grim, inhospitable pieces of land?”  Whether it is my photos of Lawrenceville or of the Badlands, I am drawn to places that are NOT my home, places that I know I can leave if I have to or want to.  But then again, being in those places makes me wonder (somewhat creepily I suppose), what if this was my home, what if I had to live here all year long, what would it do to my psyche, how creepy would I be (Edward Abbey seems to approach similar questions regarding his red rock landscape in Desert Solitaire) if this was my home?   And similarly…. “What if I was the one being stalked?”  Or, perhaps even more disturbing, “What if I was the psychopathic killer?”

Lawrenceville (photo via fellow rambler, Sippy)

Lawrenceville

(photo via fellow rambler, Sippy)

Room for Romanticizing: What’s in an Abandoned Building? (Part II)

Read Part I here

So, what did I mean?  In what way is an appreciation for the Pittsburgh aesthetic anything like the thrill we get out of watching a Rob Zombie movie? … okay, maybe not a Rob Zombie movie, but you get the idea.  At what point is creepy cool?

While I was traveling these past two weeks, my friends and I made a point to stop at places along the way that are more or less unanimously considered “beautiful” or awe inspiring.  Take Yellowstone National Park for example.  Every year millions of people flock to the park to catch a glimpse of something beautiful, something unique that has been preserved there - In other words, a place where life has endured and continues to thrive, a place not unlike a booming metropolis with preserved ethnic neighborhoods.  But as you drive through Yellowstone, or any other national park on the west coast for that matter, you’ll inevitably come across a piece of forest that has been ravaged by wildfires - a lifeless and desolate shell amidst the flourishing land of which it was once a contributing part.  So why do people still stop to look and take pictures of these grim, inhospitable pieces of land?  Why do some of us write about creepy Carrie Furnace as much as the New York Times writes about the preserved authenticity of, say, Bloomfield.  When we see these “creepy places,” we find ourselves uttering the same word we did when we caught our first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains - “Wow.”  Sure, it’s the difference between the “wow” we give to someone who’s just completed a marathon, and the “wow” we give to someone who just lost their job in a mass layoff.  And in this sense, our reaction is one that is dictated by surprise and to a greater degree scale.  But our reaction and our curiosity, I argue, has much more to do with what’s there, what’s not there, and what will be there - In other words, questions of Absence, Presence, and Potential.

Stay tuned for Part III: Absence.

Room for Romanticizing: What’s in an abandoned building? (Part I)

Recently I had the pleasure of giving a grand tour of Pittsburgh to a couple of friends visiting from Boston.  Although we didn’t make it to Carrie Furnace (sigh), I was sure to show them some key points among the remains of our Industrial past while giving them a personal and cultural thumbnail history as best I could.  While we were walking along the Allegheny near the CMU Robotics building in Lawrenceville, my friend, a fellow fan and student of the old, the rustic, and the abandoned, remarked about a rusted out piece of equipment along the railroad tracks, “This is SO cool.”  Then paused and asked,  ”Do you think we’ll ever be able to stop romanticizing this stuff? Why do we like this?”

Giving the question about same amount of consideration I might have given it if he’d asked me what I wanted for lunch I responded, “Probably for the same reasons we like horror movies.”  He looked at me with a polite look of confusion and we moved on.

I had no idea what I meant by that, really.  But in the days following, the memory of that answer began to haunt me (see what I did there).