Beyond the Map (from the author of Off the Map) by Alastair Bonnett

Author:Alastair Bonnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

IV.

Ghostly Places

All places have ghosts. I’m not thinking about haunted houses or creaky old villas on the hill, but about ordinary places: shopping centres, car parks, metro systems. Even when you erase the past, wipe clean the landscape, something always remains; a sense of unease, a kind of modern chill. That’s what blows down the tunnels of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station and, in a pathetic and far more dilapidated way, along the narrow spines of the once-modern Skywalks of Newcastle. Other types of ghosts can be found if you pick your way across the rubble into the Boys Village in Wales, or down the winding lanes of the Himalayan town of Shimla to a British graveyard, where the last resting places of the country’s former rulers are grown wild and presided over by a leopard. Some ghosts summon you, but others are called forth; so it is with the extraordinary recreation of a Soviet-era city fashioned by the director of Dau, perhaps the strangest film story of all time; all the more so since, years after it starting shooting, there is still no film. Also summoned into being are the mythological, spell-woven places of Magical London, although by comparison these magicians are eminently sensible; they tread lightly in order to listen to the city’s enchantments. We should, of course, have listened to the Tsunami Stones: dotted along Japan’s northern coast, they warn of the danger of building near the shore. Erected centuries ago, their message was ignored. Can one create places, such as Nuclear Markers, that warn of radioactive waste – that send messages to the future? How will we haunt people in tens of thousands of years’ time to warn them of danger, when our language, our culture, will be long forgotten?

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