I.
This weekend I had the opportunity to go see the Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s premiere new-music ensemble, perform the climate catastrophe inspired piece Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus, composed by Liza Lim. The piece contains some incredibly evocative musical tableaus: In the first movement, Anthropogenic Debris, the ensemble spins around a series of buzzing cicada-like instruments which give way to the crinkling sounds of a huge plastic sheet passed from player to player. The fourth movement, Transmission, is a conversation between a violinist and a percussionist playing a cobbled-together banjo, a bowed string tied between a drumstick and the center of a snare. Dawn Chorus, the closing movement, starts with more whirring, croaking, buzzing, and chirping instruments whose players scatter through the audience leaving the low tones of a cello, bass, trombone, and a comically extended contrabassoon alone on stage.
II.
John Walsh (aka SuperEyepatchWolf) put out a recent video essay on the internet’s fascination with liminal spaces, those haunting photos of familiar-looking, empty waiting rooms and highways. Walsh believes the attraction to these spaces is that they are equally unnerving and comforting. Hotels, especially their hallways, sit directly in the center of the uncanny valley, both domestic and impersonal, it’s the place where you sleep and shower and eat and yet no one there can tell you who you are, you don’t belong there. So do you wear shoes or slippers to the continental breakfast?
III.
If you step into this blue elevator in a carpark in Dublin city center and hit the button for the fifth floor, you step out into a cocktail bar where there shouldn’t be one. Wait staff drop whiskey sours and palomas at the wooden tables and sheepskin covered benches scattered across the slanted floors. Tunes from a DJ booth echo off the concrete. Paintings on white gallery walls break up the space, one of which depicts the green painted columns of the empty parking ramp, without cars or chic furnishings.
IV.
Aside from their emptiness, the thing all these liminal space pictures have in common is that they are all anthropogenic. When we’re given pictures of empty “natural” landscapes, we see them as beautiful or peaceful, but an empty Fulton station is unnerving. Is it because we see rural places as “wild” or “unpeopled,” despite histories of occupation or removal? Is it because we feel less comfortable in the monocultural habitats we’ve built than when we are enveloped in biodiversity? Or is it because we are comforted by the world without us, but uncomfortable with the debris we leave behind?
V.
We’re in the climate catastrophe waiting room, the uncanny valley that might flood, might catch fire, might yield a nourishing harvest. The dawn chorus and the moth snowstorm have thinned out considerably. Crab fisheries have been swallowed into it, cities have been swallowed into it. We’ve lost things without noticing they’re gone. If we knew, we wouldn’t know how to mourn them. Economies and governance structures could pull through/could collapse/are collapsing/have collapsed. Half of 2005 emissions might be enough/feasible/placating/suicide. We could be wiped out/we could survive/we could be alone in this waiting room for quite a long time.