HUMAN WRECKAGE

Relics and Ruins

Early last week I bought a two-foot tall resin reproduction of a moai. It cost me three yard bags of empty beer cans – the recycling depot is just a few blocks from the local Home Depot and its outdoor garden centre - and so the monumental art of the Rapa Nui people has been appropriated for arguably tacky lawn ornamentation. But I really wanted an Easter Island head. I’d been hoping for a concrete one with its cranium scooped out so it could double as a bird bath, creating a concussed cartoon character effect. I settled.

It’s possible I spend too much time in my head. It’s staggering to realize what I don’t accomplish because I’m too busy sitting on the front porch or staring out the backdoor window. Still, a lot of thinking and processing gets done. Consequently, I’ve been dwelling on the root of my moai fixation. There’s no rational explanation; I’ve never been to Chile.

In my rock fan costume I arrived late to the Pink Floyd party. Many of my high school classmates worshipped the band. Fitting in with the stoners or any other clique did not suit me. I had a couple of their albums because everybody else did; I rarely played them. Later on in life I got around to really listening to Pink Floyd; I heard their music for the first time. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been such a calculated contrarian.

Some years ago, a friend of mine in Calgary, a graphic designer, took a welding course. The result of his efforts was a moai made of scrap iron which he installed in his backyard, already an eclectic place. His metal sculpture reminded me of Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell. Of course it did. The cover of that album features a massive pair of angry robot profiles going nose to nose in an empty field, a manor house in the distant background. If you look at the two heads long enough, they blend together to become a single face, full on.

I planted my moai in the front garden bed so I can contemplate its stony expression from my usual perch on the front porch. It stares blankly back at me from under a dappling canopy of shrubbery, low scrubby juniper bushes near its base. It didn’t even blink when the cat sprayed it, so why the long face?

That stoic countenance doesn’t remind me of Pink Floyd whatsoever now. Instead, it transports me into the wondrous world of pulp fiction: H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, lost jungle cities and mysterious monuments on distant planets somewhere else in the cosmic spiral of the Milky Way. Home Depot sold me another portal to my imagination, cheap. Pith helmets and ray guns.

I took a picture of the moai nestled in the greenery. I saw it as the primary background image of a derring-do paperback; intrepid explorer, galactic queen, title and author to be superimposed later. Sort of a neat shot, I thought. As I swiped through the rest of my trove of some sixty saved digital photographs, I noticed a pattern. My eye is not drawn by the mundane. The pictures I take are usually from odd angles and perspectives. I like old buildings and tend to focus on their architectural flourishes, gargoyles. I like decrepit, crumbling things, tumble-down homesteads, dangling black iron fire escapes askew and rotting, weathered docks; places where things happened once and perhaps still do albeit in a different way.

My favourite photograph of mine is a landscape of an abandoned sugar factory near Kihei on the Hawaiian island of Maui. There is a single strand of rusted barbed wire in the foreground. There is history in the distance, the story of the “Big Five” sugar cartel, their foreign workers and their miserable working conditions, their baseball teams and the environmental toll of annual cane burnings. But I was dumbfounded too because that intricate, disintegrating hulk looked exactly like the liquid methane refinery I’d constructed on the Saturn moon of Titan as a setting for a short, dystopian science fiction story I wrote in 2014 (you can read the serialized Last Chance Gas in meGeoff’s February 2014 archive); I’d initially been inspired by the structures of the refineries east of Edmonton.

Every picture tells a story. Two of them. There is the documented history, incomplete with gaps and inevitable inaccuracies. And there is the secret history, the one created by the viewer’s imagination. In reality, my moai is a moulded hunk of resin mass produced overseas and since plunked under a lilac in the cat’s al fresco litter box. And in reality, on another level, it is so much more than that.

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