Over the last couple of weeks or so, while swilling like effluvium around the concrete
trough that is Elephant and Castle, I have started noticing something slightly peculiar. At
first I was only vaguely aware, but gradually my attention has become skewered
on the fork of perplexity to the point at which I now make a real effort to
wrest my distracted musings towards its particular focus.
The digi-boards hoisted like a central fort above the
swirling moat of the roundabout scroll through advertisements for the upcoming
’50 Shades of Grey’ film (although anyone circulating Elephant & Castle has
quite enough shades of grey to be going on with...), smart phones, new savings accounts with a
bank, as well as a ‘Missing Persons’ profile of various disappeared individuals.
...Andrew Faria (36) who has been missing from Clapham since
July 2006; Lana Purcell (26) missing from Kentish Town since 2011; Isha Dunduya
(16) who went missing from Streatham on the 2nd of February this
year...
I find this a rather curious oddity, particularly when you consider the chronic anonymity that so characterises 21st century urbanism. In London, a city of 8 million people, the only natural state of being is one of constant disappearance, an endless migration of ghosts that materialise and dissolve through our waking consciousness. Pondering on this, I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel ‘Less Than Zero’, and its iconic image of the billboard on an LA freeway reading ‘Disappear here’; an ideal slogan for a place that long ago surrendered itself to the spectacle of transience and illusion.
I find this a rather curious oddity, particularly when you consider the chronic anonymity that so characterises 21st century urbanism. In London, a city of 8 million people, the only natural state of being is one of constant disappearance, an endless migration of ghosts that materialise and dissolve through our waking consciousness. Pondering on this, I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel ‘Less Than Zero’, and its iconic image of the billboard on an LA freeway reading ‘Disappear here’; an ideal slogan for a place that long ago surrendered itself to the spectacle of transience and illusion.
Indeed, there is evidently a real dichotomy here, that
although high density city life tends increasingly towards anonymity and
loneliness, with pervasive modern technologies the practicalities of actually
affecting a disappearing act is perhaps harder than ever.
We have so indiscriminately invited surveillance upon ourselves with digital appendages that can track our precise coordinates and online movements, profligate CCTV and facial recognition systems that follow our physical actions, not to mention the trail of fiscal breadcrumbs left by our financial transactions. All of which serves to illustrate that to go missing (and stay missing), one must immediately adopt a manner of living which is almost wholly antithetical to notional reality in the modern world.
But clearly exceptions abound, and when they come to light our shock is all the more palpable. Take for instance, the case of Joyce Vincent who died in her Wood Green bedsit in 2003 but was only discovered three years later with the TV and heating still switched on. The confusion as to how a woman, who lived an active life and was by no means hermetical, could have been stranded in undiscovered death for so long was compounded, I would suggest, by the often maddening proximity to the masses that we experience and tolerate in our increasingly congested lives.
We have so indiscriminately invited surveillance upon ourselves with digital appendages that can track our precise coordinates and online movements, profligate CCTV and facial recognition systems that follow our physical actions, not to mention the trail of fiscal breadcrumbs left by our financial transactions. All of which serves to illustrate that to go missing (and stay missing), one must immediately adopt a manner of living which is almost wholly antithetical to notional reality in the modern world.
But clearly exceptions abound, and when they come to light our shock is all the more palpable. Take for instance, the case of Joyce Vincent who died in her Wood Green bedsit in 2003 but was only discovered three years later with the TV and heating still switched on. The confusion as to how a woman, who lived an active life and was by no means hermetical, could have been stranded in undiscovered death for so long was compounded, I would suggest, by the often maddening proximity to the masses that we experience and tolerate in our increasingly congested lives.
For all the obvious heartache and anguish of the reality,
there is something profoundly mysterious about the act of disappearance. It has become a romanticised phenomena,
resounding with the weight of occult mysticism, supernatural intrigue and tantalising
enigma. Throughout literature there are
innumerable great disappearances, from Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz, to Nabakov’s
Lolita, to Beckett’s Godot, and of course Agatha Christie, the grand dame of mystery,
who herself went inexplicably missing for several days in 1926.
A particular favourite of mine is in Thomas de Quincey’s ‘The
Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ when the narrator becomes enchanted by a
character known simply as Anne of Oxford Street who, try as he desperately might,
he cannot find again after their chance encounter; she is lost amongst the
crowd of ghostly figures forever.
Then of course there are the infamous disappearances that
have peppered history with black holes.
From the bodily remains of the warrior Spartacus, to the stories of
Spanish conquistadors who vanished on their quests to South America, to the
Nazis who disappeared to the same continent after the Second World War to
escape justice. Of course, there is a
perfect lineage of disappearance throughout theology; particularly in Ancient
Greek religion where it was thought to be a way the gods made some physically
immortal. Not to mention the resurrected
Jesus who, according to the New Testament, ascended from the world into the
heavenly ether.
Indeed as I trog past the ‘Missing Persons’ billboard now it never fails to exercise my imagination. For these people did not dissipate into some void; in terms of physical matter these people are occupying a place in space-time and yet no one is able to discern where precisely that might be. In a society that thrives on informational corpulence, controlled risk, predictability and ‘safe bets’, with limitless data at our fingertips (all the while being prised away and stored by the powers-that-be under the pretence of ‘security’), that sense of mystery, that undetectable truth, is captivating and powerful.
Indeed as I trog past the ‘Missing Persons’ billboard now it never fails to exercise my imagination. For these people did not dissipate into some void; in terms of physical matter these people are occupying a place in space-time and yet no one is able to discern where precisely that might be. In a society that thrives on informational corpulence, controlled risk, predictability and ‘safe bets’, with limitless data at our fingertips (all the while being prised away and stored by the powers-that-be under the pretence of ‘security’), that sense of mystery, that undetectable truth, is captivating and powerful.
It explains why the world becomes subject to bouts of
delusion and irrationality, as was witnessed in the aftermath of Madeleine
McCann and Karen Matthews’ disappearances, or fixation as with the MH370 flight
last year as we struggle to comprehend the sheer absurdity of a plane with 239
people onboard seemingly evaporating into nothing.
Given that the ordinary faces staring out of the digi-boards seem to be refreshed daily, a small part of me now cannot help but see the Elephant & Castle junction as being the Bermuda Triangle of South London, where one day the cosmic planes of dimensionality will shudder and I too will become one of the disappeared.
Given that the ordinary faces staring out of the digi-boards seem to be refreshed daily, a small part of me now cannot help but see the Elephant & Castle junction as being the Bermuda Triangle of South London, where one day the cosmic planes of dimensionality will shudder and I too will become one of the disappeared.
It is this superstitious concern that I believe truly
animates and enforces our fascination with the idea of disappearance, because
we know that sooner or later we will all be subsumed into history. Time curls and withers us away like burning
leaves, and yet far from being a cause for gloom, this pre-emptive awareness
should serve as a kind of reassuring balm, as well as an invigorating reminder
of our brief and valuable tenure of existence as together we move inexorably
towards our vanishing point.
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