The slopes of the mountains around the quarry had been blown up and it was called the “avalanche zone.” You could see the thrusting chunks of cliff flesh from every point in the town, the twisted, unnaturally smashed rock, moved by the centrifugal energy of the blasts; the avalanche zone took up three sides of the city horizon, the blown-up cliffs huddled on the slopes as if beyond the point of equilibrium, frozen in midfall.
There are pictures, a combination of lines and angles, that humans should not see: looking at them is like chewing ground glass to see what flavor it is; they painfully damage the sensory foci of perception; the view of the avalanche zone was one such picture. The world after a catastrophe; the world cracked open, disjointed, with no possibility of bringing it together again; I was amazed to understand that the raw material extracted from the quarry is for fertilizer which is then sprinkled on fields; I saw the joyless cereals growing on those fields—as if sprinkled with ash from a crematorium.
The gray bread of my childhood, the loaves of bread on the bakery counters, people lining up an hour before opening, the line darker than twilight; women in gray scarves, men in gray coats, faces gray with lack of sleep, and the gray salted urban snow; I understood now where that bread had come from, delivered in vans that looked like Black Marias; where that ubiquitous gray came from—not in a belittling sense but grayness as the absence of color or as the color of dust.
You stood at the quarry edge and told yourself this is how hell looks; but the image of hell, the circles of hell marked by the spirals of the quarry road, came from culture; you were using it to save yourself from what could barely be described in artistic language, because the quarry was an anti-image, the negation of imagery as such.
It was gaping; they say a gaping wound, and if you can move away from the details of the flesh you can see in a wound not the outline, not the shape, but the incursion of destructive shapelessness.
The quarry sucked up your gaze, where it was lost; it encountered nothing but emptiness, traces of the work of emptying; it was impossible to deal with the absurd, to let your mind think about the volume of absence.
Something was done in this place that should not be done; some line was crossed that should not be crossed in human nature—the hole of the quarry gathered the city around itself, pulled in the region.
The view of the quarry materialized the hopelessness of life, verging on despair, translated this sensation into a visual one, existing in the world as a thing; the quarry did not threaten to swallow up anything, did not beckon with fatality, it simply was—in the dull steadiness of a hole, the most immutable thing, and that man is transient compared to its immutability was almost unbearable.
I left the quarry, but I could have stayed; distances meant nothing here. The quarry was carved into my consciousness; before I did not know how the human world looked without humans; now I knew.
At the bus stop—a shift had just ended—I heard that the rock in the quarry was deteriorating with every year; they were working with an ore content per ton that would have been considered without prospect in the past.
This was another point of view—the impoverishment of the rock, the impoverishment of the urban environment, as if the two processes were connected, not directly, but connected. Old theater posters hung at the bus stop, two months old, and no one was putting up new ones; the city was as washed out as these posters and had nothing fresh on offer; its fate was covertly intertwined with the basic activity of the residents—extracting ore in the quarry in the mine that opened veins leading away from the main mass of ore. The rock was being depleted, and the city was being depleted, for it functioned as a factory, unable to create an urban environment on its own, and people were lost within it.
It was evening; I walked along the outskirts of the town, past warehouses and garages, built close together, clinging to the neighboring wall, as if the building would fall down without it. There were rubbish heaps and packs of stray dogs, shaggy, with dried mud and burdock in their fur; each garage and each shed was built differently, but they had one thing in common: the garage and the shed were built while looking over the shoulder, with an uncertainty, with a sense that the construction was not quite legal—did you have to get permission or could you get away with it; and the sensation that the building did not quite trust the ground on which it stood combined with another sensation: that all the construction materials had been either blatantly stolen or picked up along the way. The combination of the two sensations created a third—the sensation of a life that did not look at itself, that had shrugged itself off.
The garages and sheds had been built thirty or forty years ago; the five-story buildings of the town had moved right up close to them, and the balconies on their facades—as if by an airborne architectural virus—had turned into the same dilapidated sheds, slapped together and glassed in sloppily; the houses had looked at the sheds for so long they took on their features; people lived in the concrete boxes as best they could and they increased their living space by an extra forty-three square meters, and those balconies poking out of the building facade presented a pathetic, almost illegal private life, ubiquitous and unseen, like mold; life resembling something base, self-sowing, all-penetrating.
People here bought cars to have a garage; in a city that did not know about beaches, in a city you could cross on foot in an hour, a car was just a form of winter clothing, fur-on-wheels. The crowded apartments, where men’s clothes and women’s clothes had to squeeze into a single closet, where everything was dual purpose, served two functions, like a double bed, and every spot always had more than one person—the crowded apartments got additional space with the garage, something that in the general asexuality of life, with the exception of the kitchen, had a gender specificity. Men visited one another in the garage; the garage was storage for everything that would not fit in the apartment, it was storeroom and cellar, for potatoes and pickling; a creature of the housing deficit, an appendix of lifestyle—a garage, a shed.
The town’s five-story apartment houses were ugly in their anonymous similarity, while the garages stunned you with a different ugliness; monotonous and extremely functional—walls, roof, door, that is, simply useful cubic meters—they still differed a bit; every builder tried to create a distinguishing detaiclass="underline" make it stand out, different from the others, add a stovepipe, bending it a special way, attach a small overhang above the door, weld an iron corner over the lock so the lugs couldn’t be broken—and these small changes became unbearably noticeable. Accumulating in your view, they repeated as attempts to be different somehow, with no possibility of doing so. I sensed that boredom was more usual here than yearning, because yearning refers to something that does not exist in a given life, while boredom asserts that there is nothing to yearn for: there is nothing anywhere, every place is the same as here.
I grew up in place just like this; it had a glue factory, and trucks from the slaughterhouse, carrying bones covered with a red-stained tarp, drove there along a pot-holed road. The trucks bounced, bones fell out, and all along the road dogs lay in the bushes waiting for a windfall; sometimes a clumsy old dog, perhaps wounded in the melee, slipped and fell under the wheels; dark wet tracks remained on the asphalt.
In the winter, the trucks going to the factory were joined by others, carrying snow to the melting station, which was under our windows; snow fell, now was beautiful—but there, behind the fence of the snow-melting station, it lay dirty and splotchy, piled up like defective hides at a slaughterhouse, and all winter I watched the absurd transport of snow to be melted, another sign of quiet, habitual madness.