Blocklist
by Ruaridh Law
The piece below should be read whilst listening to the Blocklist Mix by Ruaridh Law / TVO - live on Reform Radio on Sunday 9th August at 6.26pm, and then via the stream above and via mixcloud.
How do you fall back in love with a city?
To map a city is to map yourself. You can study as many A to Zs, aerial photography and OS grids as you want – they don’t show the true image. Streets are functional worms of white, pushing through and into their siblings; some form a listless grid, waffles left to be scraped into the waste, whilst others curve and entwine like congealing spaghetti. These lines lose meaning when you look at them for too long – a trick of the light switching avenue to cul de sac and back.
The true map is the one you carry around with you. Ingrained on the insides of your eyelids, tattooed on your heart; grey blocks that cause anxiety attacks just by proximity, a rise of greenery causing elation. Memory and geography are so matted together as to become interchangeable.
To see the true map of a city, height is needed. Outlying hills, tower blocks, a spire; from here the city lies arranged out in a radius. A cordiform projection of the viewer’s lived experience – buildings sparkle from the corner of the eye, when sweeping the horizon. But so too are whole sections of the city greyed out.
Because to map a city is to map the pain that comes from living within it. And as emotional bonds within sever, so too do the connection between self and territory. When love comes to an end, so too does the landscape; buildings become greyed out, Qlippoth-like shells to be divided up like the more prosaic belongings; CDs, keys, clothing.
It’s possible, thus, to be forced to separate from the mapped sprawl as it is to leave a lover. And the sites of pain become no-go zones, locations to be blocked to match the phone numbers and emails to be blocked from your phone. It’s easy to forget these; until a wrong turn leads to
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without warning. The building is there, sure, but a grey veneer – no features, like a mask. People pass in front and disappear, only to appear from the other side; but the camouflage is complete.
Or perhaps chance brings these into closer focus. New relationships, new maps and landmarks to claim; but without warning the areas-of-no-egress still push their way in, the subconscious easing through. A chance meeting suddenly reveals
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an A-board sign sitting in front of another grey husk, hinting at what lies inside – past infidelities, sublimated pain.
It takes time to erase these tracks. And denial, erasure of all evidence, can only go so far – there’s more under there, gnawing at the hidden recess. Instead, peace needs to be made with the old ghosts.
So suddenly music deemed off limits become nostalgic. Books lain untouched for fear of catching the virus of longing can be thumbed through, carefully at first, and then with more energy; for the ghosts being exorcised don’t wear the scowl of demons, but instead a hopeful smile as they move into the ionosphere. And as they release, so too come the memories, un-trammelled by base-level pain and instead put into context – you, the map and the territory, indelibly altered but for good as well as ill. Time as healer – a cliché, its true – and a leveller, giver of a perspective and new way of reading the trail laid out. Suddenly, moments come into focus with buildings no longer grey but instead glistening with a possibility of the future and leaving the past behind;
A grey tenement with a model plane hanging above the spare bed
A pub holding its breath as a door bangs open
The alley behind a café with the smell of cigarette smoke like a haze
The lights of the city twinkling in the distance, reflecting on a reservoir
All the little lights sparkling, pushing through the monotone fascia.
And you throw the map aside, and strike up, out, onwards, pen in hand, blank paper in a clenched fist, ready to draw new maps, and no longer frightened of the faceless grey shapes that now – from height – resemble a horizon of beacon fires, drawing you towards them, and the future.
