LDN_0.1
Scenes taken near Waterloo station, along the stretch of the National Theatre, Southbank Centre and the British Film Institute. A brutalist envisioning of the city. Shot by Ian Campo, made accessible through Plain Mag © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
The following writing comes to you not as a product of hours spent trawling through online indexes, compiling research on a given matter. That would be a misguided attempt to get the soul of the multifarious City as viewed by the person situated within, which I think is unfathomable via the impersonal. No, while archival footage, rave flyers, and maddened scrawl memorialize its occupied history—and may very much bring the intrepid outsider to take residence in the first instance—the frame of the City hinges upon how one interfaces with it. In elucidating my own experiences of exodus, I thus do so neither out of vanity nor wallowing in self-pity, but out of the belief that articulating the sorts of mercurial moods instantiated by urban living can bring clarity. Call it naivety, but perhaps, en masse, some stranger’s wandering eye may glean self-similarity in my codex—one informed by personal immersion, but seeded with profound disconcertion.
I guess it’s best to start with the cause preceding the effect. I don’t quite know where the idea first came from, but it’s long been there: a recurring conceptualization of the City as an uninhabited isle of warehouses and wires, its inner workings invisible—that of a model, ghost populace. Yet, antithetically, its presence and humdrum were always undeniable; at the firm heart of the capital, manufacture is pumped out, a summation of the nation, dominating its southeastern reaches.
This resounding presumption was clearly mediated in some capacity for it to have gained such a vivid standing in my mind, beyond a mere figment of juvenile expression. Be it the few tangible experiences I had had embedded in its claustrophobic geography, an intense parasocial relationship with larger-than-life, constitutional sci-fi ideals, a life hitherto spent suspended in rural harmony, or a literary education defined by Dickensian notions of the City as a hotbed of impoverishment and industry—not discounting some complex mélange of all these factors as the most likely condition—it has nonetheless been foundational. My tryst with the City has therefore been longstanding, and one born of complexity.
In some essence, I do believe that my imagination was onto something, a more gestational form of where my listless thoughts swell now. You see, in detachment, viewing the City as an insular technopolis, there was recognition of the hustle inherent to a life there, but also an inkling that it possessed a capacity for isolation. For those reasons, I long steered clear from it out of fear, and it wasn’t until graded exposure that an eventual longing and confirmation transpired: that this was the place I knew I needed to be. Much of the groundwork for this realization had already been laid by a year spent abroad in Amsterdam, which, strangely enough, hadn’t been clouded by such apprehensions. Maybe it was the exaltation of the capital within my own country, too often regarded as its be-all and end-all, that had jaded me in perspective. And yet, like that, I had surmounted that synapse, and my trepidations were upended, rendered baseless. The City became a flag on a hilltop, precipitating as-of-yet unexplored opportunity.
Cut to now, and when I wake up in the night, I have a tower looming over me. The hazy images I had come to ingrain never existed, but this does. Curtains ajar, there are no stars, but this and a satellite dish there before me—the City in a tuning fork. It emanates thoughts all over, and I am reminded that we are not connected. For you can refurnish the upholstery, but the innards remain the same; transitioning to a new environment doesn’t reverse anything. In fact, a mind that fails to unify with its body will only perform perfunctory allostasis, failing to function adequately while encased in aimlessness, tumult, and exertion. The toll is cumulative, but this is my constant—a new normal—and I must acclimatize and unlearn these, or else let my own light be dampened by sonder in the City.
Rest assured though, it’s not all calamitous; I do indeed love where I am, yet can’t help but often feel like just another pollutant here. At a distance, however, I seek solace in steeples, art installations, and riverbeds. My euphoria stirs from such moments out of self, not being rent apart by each day’s stressors nor the fear of going nowhere. I ponder the City’s fusiform, and it rewards me.
Come daylight, I take myself to still-alien place names out of befuddlement, to know them better, and subsequent mastery also fuels me. Chained to the desktop, watching events pass me by from the windows of innumerable cafes, I assume the role of an unobtrusive observer, inundating the timeline with small alterations, trespassing conversations that were never mine to discern. It’s wrongful to romanticize lives that aren’t mine—and I don’t, for I cannot even do the same for a life that, at this point in time, doesn’t fully feel like mine either.
Sometimes I do want to portal away to natural bliss, burned out by the back-to-back of it all, because not even breaks feel restful in the incessant machine. Yet, in a park—while contrived, and not the unfettered vegetation that so long surrounded me—I find cognitive restoration from the City within its frontiers, seeking oxygenation to alleviate my incapacitation.
Everybody wants that moment in the City where it at last reveals itself to them, rearing its head in a safety blanket. I know this is false, or otherwise an oversimplification, and that it will preclude me to no end nor avail, and yet I am still waiting. I chase possibilities, and they leave me wanting. But, I know, deep down, everything is going to be okay; this move was not miscalculated. For every street in the City comes anew—you turn a corner and the expectations can fall out right from under you.
