The closed, boring environment of this skyway serves as a utilitarian backdrop to the people moving from point a to point b. If you are looking for something, there are few clues to help you find your way. There is nothing to entertain or delight you here. It is a prefabricated environment stripped of leisure or pleasure or distraction.
When you get to where you are going it is just another nowhere on the way to somewhere.
There is your car, surrounded by absence. It doesn't threaten you, and within a few minutes the whole passage from cell to freeway will be forgotten. We have come to take these elisions of sense for granted. The experiences of featureless, entranced movement through anonymous space creates gaps in our psychic fabric. Our internal landscapes are erased, bit by bit. Anything can fill these holes. Fears, promises, the assertions of urgent people who want to borrow your attention and faith for a while to build pyramids of mass emptiness...anything can fill these holes. Tomorrow, it will be the Royal Wedding. Today it is the birth certificate. Yesterday it was the weather going rogue and terrorizing whole states. These wild disparities seems connected by the visual continuity of television, which is the information equivalent of the skyway, connecting emptynesses, providing passage of attention from abandoned place to abandoned place. Or as the computer operating system marketing rhetoric puts it: "Where do you want to go today."
The people are full of life, and the potential for joy and fascination. They are dense fabrics of memory and hope, feelings and dreams, needs and abilities. Why do we throw our landscapes up with the haste of scenery designers? Why did the program of Modernism in the urban world strip out the texture and push the utility forward with such a vengeance upon the human spirit? Was it a kind of gnosticism, a despair of fulfillment in this world that can only be a waystation on the way to the next world?
The people are full. The cities, alas, seem empty.
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