Things Fall Apart; The Center Cannot Hold

Abstract

“It was generally believed that losing one’s life to a hurricane is… something that happens in far-away places,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh wrote in his 2017 book ‘The Great Derangement’ (p. 26). The current climate and environmental crises are in the very first place crises of culture, crises of imagination. [...] An idea in close correspondence with what Joan Didion famously mentioned when contemplating the American countercultural phenomena of the late nineteen sixties and early seventies: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (The White Album, 1979). To be at home in modernity is a constant struggle between space and place. The essay considers in a narrative way the longing for places which are stable and deep-rooted, which might be point of reference, of departure, of origin, in times which have declared change to be the purpose of life. It contemplates on matter inventively moulded into the reassuring concealment of ‘a world as we know it’. But also on ‘characters of the road,’ the mad ones, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” (Kerouac, J. On The Road, 1957). [...] The writings of the Beat Movement among others, unintentionally initiated the downfall of the American dream from moral clarity, pioneers and heroism to vague, meaningless freedom and decades of turmoil, violence, apathy, and a shaky morality. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” (Yeats, W.B. The Second Coming, 1920), but in order to make life possible on earth, we, as human beings, construct the world, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote. We, as human beings, are in need of a stage for what Arendt defines as ‘action’. A durable situation upon which we can speak, communicate, share and discuss. The shift of modernity from place to space and from durable to more and more temporal artefacts, of which architecture is a very important part while action takes place in the public sphere, renders the homeless mind of modern man. One who becomes hardly able to turn feelings of melancholia, insecurity and imperfection into creativity and reflection. But instead focusses on power, matter and scattering. Imperialistic concealments which narrow his frame of reference and increasingly shorten the range of the probable. A man-centered world that cannot cope with the questions the Anthropocene era poses. Questions of climate crises, hyper-objects and environmental instability, confronting a people who seem to have forgotten that “recognition famously is a passage from ignorance to knowledge” (Ghosh, A. The Great Derangement, 2017 p. 4). [...] A more suitable balance between the human and non-human is being advocated to widen the range of the probable and expand the understanding of modern man. By acknowledging instead of rejecting that technological and natural incomprehensibilities are not something outside of the human, but being human precisely exists out of the continuous scanning and incorporation of it, it becomes possible to confront oneself with the non-human actors and their effects on being human. By considering the human mind as ‘artefactual,’ an object made by human beings, it can be levelled with non-human actors and be recognized as a part of this. As long as architecture, a physical translation of the relationship between man and his surroundings in search of a place to call home, is understood and developed as an ‘attempt to bridge the gap’, it can be a vital practice in questioning what it means to be human, at home in longing.