Unmeaning Flattery
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Repurposed

Wednesday 04/27/2005 12:01 AM

People once walked here. They worked here. They went back and forth here because this was A Place. Now it is nothing — forgotten and well on its way to becoming one with the forest.

Have you ever been to the Hoover Dam? The concrete is so thick in places that it's still not completely solid. Decades later and water vapor is still slipping through the stony pores as the aggregate and binder continue to cure and strengthen.

Take a look at those cinderblocks (also called breeze blocks for, I think, obvious reasons), cast from cement and tied together with the same. Their binding is weakening more and more each day as the elements un-cure their earthen glue.

In Neil Gaiman's first Sandman story, the Lord of Dreams is summoned to our world and trapped in the basement of a house for decades. While his summoner, and later his summoner's son, try to bargain with him, Morpheus just sits on the floor, speechless and motionless. When he finally escapes, with his first and only words to his captor, he explains that, had he needed to, he would have waited until all the stones in the house turned to dust if that's what it took for him to be free.

Everything is impermanent and these cinderblock walls are no different. This is something I know not just because of the obvious inevitability, but because I have used the soles of my feet to strike these concrete blocks and free them from the moss-covered husk of a forgotten building. Wading through the leaves and ducking under the low hanging limbs, I moved many of these blocks to their new homes, just a few feet away.

I have given them an opportunity to be useful again. Scores of years ago, old stones were crushed and formed into these man-made double squares of concrete, but before they return to their old rock form (weather, time, dust and all), I have a new role for them. A new role in an old play. Older than The Asylum. Older than Candy's 93-year-old grandmother. Older than most buildings standing today.

Coaxed out of retirement, they have been asked to work one last job. Given an opportunity to have value again, to stand for something, to protect that which needs to be kept safe, how could they refuse?

How, indeed.

File Under: Asylum, The; Cemeteries; Writing Sample
Music: Garbage "Bleed Like Me"

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