In my more meditative moods, I find myself inexorably drawn to photographs of entropy, and vistas that clearly show the ravages of time.
Perhaps it started when I was very young, and one of the most interesting road trips my family took was one to an old abandoned town. I don’t remember much of it, just that I found it endlessly fascinating to explore and look around at the old “ghost” buildings. Old windows, thicker at the bottom than at the top, showed the age and resilience of hand-crafted homes, ignored by looters. The relics of a forgotten people and a forgotten age resonated with me, by all accounts an extraordinarily somber and introspective child.
Some people find these things depressing. Some of the photos from this fascinating photo diary of a decaying Detroit can certainly be on the more gloomy side, if one is inclined to think along those lines. This collection of photographs from a local ghost town (Eureka, UT) might be empty at first glance, but then, there are stories to be told there. These artifacts of a not-so-long-ago culture aren’t just spawned ex nihilo, they are evidence that people lived, loved and dreamed. I find that curiously uplifting and hopeful, not depressing. People did the best with what they had and then moved on. Time isn’t an enemy, it’s just part of life.
Perhaps that’s the key for me. I don’t imagine the pain and the loss involved in the inevitable mortality of man and the works of man’s hands, I consider the good times. I look at the things that get left behind and wonder why they weren’t taken along. I wonder why that building was built, and why the road bends over there. It’s an occasion to exercise my imagination and whimsy, taking a mental journey to those days when a home was new and a family moved in in excitement, or a theater proudly enticed the town to a evening of entertainment. I imagine the music that once echoed in a dance hall, or the smells that filled a diner. I listen for the whispers of ghosts, telling stories of their glory days and remembering their loved ones, happy with how they lived, not mourning that they are no longer doing so.
Mortality for me is a curious blend of living in the moment, wistfully remembering and honoring the past, and wishfully thinking ahead. I believe that we need to understand as much of the full spectrum of time as possible, that the past has a great deal to teach the present, and that looking ahead means little without understanding where we’ve been and where we are.
There’s also a curious fascination I have with just how time and nature ravage the things we so often erect in hubris, monuments to our own ego. It’s almost like, as a species, we spit in the face of reality and try to bend nature to our whim, but no matter how much we believe we are masters of all we survey, we always lose in the long run. Nature operates on a geological time scale, and we’re just a blip in the calendar. It breaks us and grinds us down in very interesting ways, but somehow, we fight the good fight anyway.
Disasters are also fascinating. From the very-close-to-home, very real loss of a cherished historical building like the Provo Tabernacle to the vast fictional spread of dystopic storytelling in various media, I am deeply interested in how time and entropy leave their mark. Sometimes we bring destruction on ourselves, sometimes it just happens, sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, but in the end, everything falls apart.
I find it fascinating to see how other people lived and what they prioritized. There are usually lessons to be learned.
This is why I love looking through photographs of ancient Greece or the not-quite-so-ancient Scotland. It’s why I love taking photographs of old things and even just nature and how it falls apart. A newly built city, all shining glass and metal, bling and bluster, neon and noise… it’s just not very interesting. It’s complex and intricate, yes, but it’s… sterile. It’s not “lived in” or loved, it’s just a facade. (In a nutshell, the Millennium Falcon is far more interesting than Queen Amidala’s mirror ship.) It can even be creepy, as Mirror’s Edge (and plenty of other fiction) tries to illustrate. Clean just doesn’t stay clean on a large scale without some extraordinary statist efforts. This also echoes the Uncanny Valley effect; real people have many, many small flaws that fabricated people just don’t have, from quirks of movement to freckles, wrinkles and asymmetry. Our faces show the effects of time in quirky ways, and it’s fiendishly hard to fake that.
This is also very fertile ground for storytelling and even game narrative. There’s a huge amount of story that can be hinted at by crafting worlds that look lived in rather than pristine. After all, here in the Real World, we don’t live in a world that started with our birth, we’re just one player on an aged stage that existed long before us and will go on long after we’re gone. There’s a strong sense of place and presence to be found in sifting through the evidences of the past.
Especially if they are falling apart.
Those pictures are amazing! I especially love the library one in the Detroit set, even if it pains me a bit to see those books so neglected. The sagging house is dang cool, too!
Decay and entropy really are truly fascinating. It’s interesting the way we fight against time. We build things that we think will last forever, when nothing we create ever will. But we keep trying! The human race is an interesting one.
Oh, this reminded me of “The Second Coming” by Yeats. A strangely beautiful and slightly creepy little poem: http://www.online-literature.com/donne/780/
I mostly just like the first stanza, and to be honest, I’m not sure what the poem is trying to say, but it just SOUNDS cool.
Such a beautiful post. I am certainly with you on the fascination with these pictures, but then I’m not sure they have the same effect on me every time.
Walking an ancient road, imagining all the centuries and people who have walked it before you, can be a very exalting and remarkable feeling. I’ve toured somerset and parts of Scotland myself two years ago and visited as many historic sites as time allowed. there’s something solemn about ancient places and humbling, too.
at the same time it’s always a bitter-sweet thing to me; nothing makes it more apparent that we are stuck and running in circles, than looking at the past. we might wear different clothes and our tools have become more complex in places, but we’re repeating history every day. it puts things into perspective, and also makes them a lot less meaningful. like you said, we’re just dust specks – but it fills me with sadness standing in front of a historic monument, thinking abut how fast man forgets and how little all our greatest efforts and accomplishments matter in the long run.
yet I guess there is great comfort in that too; that no matter what we do, nature’s always going to take us back and outlast us. we can only do so much harm, after all..
A very ambivalent topic.
‘Hubris’ is an excellent description of civilization.
It just boggles the mind looking at those photos. They’re like photos from a warzone. Oh wait, they are. It’s just this is a financial war being fought on U.S. soil. The general population and our esteemed leaders probably don’t like to think of it in that vein.
I’ve always been confused when I looked at pictures or drawings of old Roman ruins or castles. Such amazing creations. I couldn’t figure out how they just were left there to fall down. Or worse, forgotten entirely and lost to history. It’s a bit frightening to see history repeat itself, especially right next door, figuratively speaking, since Detroit isn’t so far from Chicago. History repeats itself over and over and it makes me wonder, why do we use fortune-tellers when we already have historians?
Making scenery in art or game environments is crucial, something I took note of a few years ago also! I will start refering to this as Entropy from now on, good call, I like the term.
The way I insert these tidbits is to consider who lived there, and what natural forces have been at work. Also remember that there are typically more than one occupant of a given location.
Examples to consider:
A previous human habitation, once destroyed, now occupied by goblins who’ve built under the remains.
Nature will continually try to fill in the cracks between the stones with weeds and weather its way into wood, even in the most magnificent city.
[...] Falling Apart [...]
[...] Arkham City is a grungy, dystopic place, beautiful in its decay in a terrible sort of way, not unlike the photos of Detroit’s urban decay that I noted a while back. It’s great to just look at… but a lot of the gameplay of Arkham City is about moving [...]
[...] wrote about this before in my Falling Apart article. I highly recommend going and checking that out, as it carries the bulk of the [...]
LaRene,
I like deep and you think deep. There is beauty everywhere you look. The past and the old is the most beautiful of all. I can remember Eureka when is was not a ghost town and there were good hard working people that lived there.
My favorite picture from the Detroit photos is the one at the library. Knowledge is the foundation of what makes us who we are. I am partial to a blue book. Not a popular book for most people around the world but one that would fit perfectly in that Detroit library. That picture of the library brings me peace and happiness.
[...] So what’s the first big photo shoot? Something old, if I can help it. That’s just where my mind inevitably goes when I think “explore and take pictures“. [...]