The Apocalyptic Sublime
Something few New Yorkers ever say: I’ve fallen in love with New Jersey. And yet I am saying it here, right now on this blog. Commuting daily on the PATH train through the beautiful landscape of the so called “meadowlands” of New Jersey across the river from Manhattan has inculcated me with a deep and abiding love/hate for this strange and horrible place. What had once been the estuarial fens of the Hudson river delta, complete with astonishing biodiversity and vibrant migratory bird habitat, it now hosts rusting hulks of long discarded bridge structures, many sprawling square miles of near vacant rail yards, collapsing infernos of bygone toxic-waste plants, abandoned power stations, all crisscrossed by endless traffic jams and overhead highways, even while in and throughout these ruins are the diminishing shreds of river and swamp; the collapsing habitat of archipelago New York. An apt example of the apocalyptic sublime, this ruined landscape provokes in me the overwhelming feeling of waking up to the profundity of an intricate natural environment that has already been destroyed. It is like realizing that whales are complex social beings with their own language and high emotional intelligence even while we continue to murder the last few remaining. I feel like John Cusack, in Being John Malkovich, ejected from John Malkovich’s mind, falling out of the sky onto the trash strewn shoulder of the New Jersey turnpike; arrival in such an apocalyptic wasteland is exhilarating, terrifying and banal all at once. We are all John Cusack waking up inside of an ecological catastrophe that we are powerless to stop.
John Cusack on the Turnpike
