Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,71
having read a warning somewhere about the perils of sitting on and leaning against things in the Zone, quickly relocated myself away from the rusting metal. I looked at the others, almost all of whom were engaged in taking photographs of the fairground. The only exception was Dylan, who was on the phone, apparently talking someone through the game plan for a current investment round. I was struck for the first time by the disproportionate maleness of the group: out of a dozen or so tourists, only one was female: a young German woman who was at present assisting her prodigiously pierced boyfriend in operating a drone for purposes of aerial cinematography. (Through the course of two days in the Zone, we crossed paths with three or four other tour groups, each of which was itself a heavily male enterprise.)
There seemed to be a general implicit agreement that nobody would appear in anyone else’s shots, due to a mutual interest in the photographic representation of Pripyat as a maximally desolate place, an impression that would inevitably be compromised by the presence of other tourists taking photos in the backgrounds of one’s own. On a whim, I opened up Instagram on my phone—the 3G coverage in the Zone had, against all expectation, been so far uniformly excellent—and entered “Pripyat” into the search box, and then scrolled through a cascading plenitude of aesthetically uniform photos of the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, the swingboats, along with a great many photos employing these as dramatic backgrounds for selfies. A few of these featured goofy expressions and sexy pouts and gang signs and badass sneers, but the majority were appropriately solemn or contemplative in attitude. The message, by and large, seemed to be this: I have been here, and I have felt the melancholy weight of this poisoned place. (#Chernobyl #amazing #melancholy #nucleardisaster)
Pripyat presents the adventurous tourist with a spectacle of abandonment more vivid than anyplace on Earth, a fever-dream of a world gone void. To walk the imposing squares of the planned city, the broad avenues cracked and overgrown with vegetation, is in one sense to wander the ruins of a collapsed utopian project, a vast crumbling monument to an abandoned past. And yet it is also to be thrust forward into an immersive simulation of the future, an image of what will come in our wake. What is most strange about wandering the streets and buildings of this discontinued city is the recognition of the place as an artifact of our own time: it is a vast complex of ruins, like Pompeii or Angkor Wat, but the vision is one of modernity in wretched decay. In wandering the crumbling ruins of the present, you are encountering a world to come. (“Something from the future is peeking out and it’s just too big for our minds,” says one of the interviewees in Chernobyl Prayer, the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the disaster and its aftermath.)
And this is why the images from my time in Pripyat that cling most insistently to my mind are the fragmented shards of technology, the rotted remnants of our own machine age. In what had once been an electronics store, the soles of our sturdy shoes crunched on the shattered glass of screens, and with our smartphones we captured the disquieting sight of heaped and eviscerated old television sets, of tubes and wires extruded from their gutted shells, and of ancient circuit boards greened with algae. (And surely I cannot have been the only one among us to imagine the smartphone I was holding undergoing its own afterlife of decay and dissolution.) In what had once been a music store, we walked among a chaos of decomposing pianos, variously wrecked and capsized, and here and there someone fingered the yellowed keys, and the notes sounded strange and damp and discordant. All of this was weighted with the sad intimation of the world’s inevitable decline, the inbuilt obsolescence of our objects, our culture: the realization that what will survive of us is garbage.
* * *
—
“You ever read any J. G. Ballard?” I asked.
“No,” said Dylan. “Why, is he any good?”
We were standing beside an empty Olympic-size swimming pool, staring over the edge into the deep end, the inclined floor of which was caked with dirt, glittering splinters of glass and paint, a damp mulch of leaves. An illegible graffiti throw-up, bubble-style, extended across the near width of the pool.