I could stand on this bridge for hours.
The steady stasis of light industry and dark housing. The steady north-south flux of strangers. The steady external gush. The steady internal hush.
Modernity is alienating but sometimes I want to be alienated. The comfort of being a stranger comforted by strangers. A desert island fantasy for the now. Me, my mind and I. Me and my mind's eye.
In the year after I was born, J. G. Ballard wrote a short novel called "Concrete Island". An architect crashes his Jaguar at a motorway intersection. He becomes marooned on a triangle of wasteland. He is left with nothing but his mind and the incessant vehicular roar. Ballard knows the drill. From his introduction to the 1994 edition:
Marooned in an office block or on a traffic island, we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.
I will miss my mini-marooning experiments above the A12.
But I will conduct new experiments with new roads. American roads. Freedom of the freeway. Isolation of the interstate. Hermitage of the highway.
