Horror vacui
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The abyss is seductive. Be careful, lest you become one with the void.
I became one with the void on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. We all did. It was a communal experience. A commuter communion.
The train came to an unscheduled halt somewhere between Linlithgow and Falkirk. A few seconds later, the engine cut out. There was no reassuring vibration from the motor. No sign that this was a temporary delay. We sat in silence for several minutes. Just the ticking sound of metal components contracting as they cooled.
Ten minutes turned into twenty. No movement. No communication. Our ears strained into the silence, but the tannoy was as dead as the engine. We were stuck between steep banks of dead bramble piled up on each side like razor wire. There was no visual distraction from the awful aural absence.
Twenty minutes stretched to thirty. There was some exasperated fidgeting. There were a few exaggerated sighs. A smattering of tutting and muttering. Mostly we fed the silence. It was as if, by nurturing the void, we could create a powerful communication vacuum that would suck information into the carriage. The negative pressure of our ignorance, measured in Atmospheres, would be of sufficient magnitude to draw an announcement out of those in the know. The comedian Sean Lock once started his Edinburgh Fringe routine by talking about atmospheres. He said, “I can feel the expectation in the room. There’s an atmosphere of expectation. There’s that expression that you can cut the atmosphere with a knife. But if I pulled out a knife right now…”
Where is an atmosphere knife when you need one?
Sudden static over the intercom. A throat is cleared. A uniformed sleeve brushes against a microphone. The promise of public address. Twenty-odd people hold their breath and cock their heads.
“Ladies and gentlemen…”
News at last. A formal greeting. A strong Scottish accent minding its Ps and Qs. A long, portentous pause.
“this train…”
Relevance. Tantalising specificity. Another pause.
“is a failure.”
Over and out. A single sentence delivered in three comma-separated clauses. Somehow the whole is less than the sum of the parts, communicating with empty calories, delivering no nutritional value.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow describe bureaucracy as ‘mechanical stupidity’. It would be easy to dismiss this episode in such terms - mechanical stupidity from both the train and its guard - but I think there was something deeper and more textured going on. The train hasn’t failed, it is a failure. It hasn’t made its guard angry. It has disappointed him. The failure is not an event, it’s a stigma.
And the dilemma of the guard. His ignorance was as great as ours. But his burden was greater. His void was, if anything, deeper than ours. He had to say something but he had nothing to say. And the longer he left it the more farcical it would inevitably be. He gazed too long into the abyss. The abyss gazed into him, as it did into us. He and we conjoined in the vacuous void, in our shared horror vacui.
Ladies and gentlemen, this train, is a failure.
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