Transgressions in Time
by D.Fyans
What drives the explorer? A desire to feel the past, find the forgotten, to walk dusty corridors, a living memory left to entropy, the feeling of wonder when somewhere in your mind – time becomes a flexible commodity and you can feel all of time spread out and overlaid infront of you. To claim dead and dying spaces, record the past and speculate on the future, to observe as man (through abandonment and vandalism) and nature, work silently together to return once purposeful space to dust.
There is a deep psychological trigger. The best exploring is done alone (perhaps the explorer is a selfish breed), the isolation and solitude become heavy, tangible, a zen moment, the sound of your breath and the blood in your ears mingling with the foreign ambience.
You tune into your surroundings, feeling the resonance of the space acoustically and psychogeographically. The mind goes back, conjecture on the happy or traumatic times, the industrious, the time before this existed, the architect conjuring the topography, the heaving construction by the kind of men that no longer exist, the residents – each with their own sprawling stories and personalities each spanning decades. Their histories and yours now share this space, separated only by a 4th dimension integer.
A quiet space where their ghosts and now yours stack up, you become a part of the story, quantum in size and relevance but this building, this silent temple is now embedded in your mind.
Sometimes, when daylight fades and time becomes less focussed, you lie there recalling the most insignificant of detail, revisiting your own footsteps, recounting routes taken and opportunities not yet explored. Sometimes you can still smell their plaster and bricks, taste their damps stilted air.
In the age of high premium space and disposable laminated design options, these are experiences to be cherished, treasure these mighty relics, observe their history, breath in the atmosphere, remember.
Neglect and obsolescence has destroyed so many things of beauty and significance, things that took years to construct, cost lives and became the backdrop to a myriad of memories for all whose lives intersected. The recording and sharing of your own experiences serves to reinforce their imprint on time and gives oxygen to Memory.
Buildings may, at the end of the day be simply bricks and mortar but their imprint in the minds of those linked are what makes them exist, even long after they finally turn back to rubble, then dust.