Spinning Yarns

Among the people I’ve talked to who care about this sort of thing, Trent Reznor is a man who, by most accounts “Knows What’s Going On.” For the rest of the world, it may help to know that Trent is the primary motivating force behind the music of “Nine Inch Nails,” a group which plays a curious emotional fusion of pop and “industrial” music with a surprisingly accurate cynicism of lyrics.

It is perhaps surprising, at first blush, to consider that NIN’s music is often comforting to people, but upon further reflection it is not so terribly shocking. People like knowing that someone else thinks about the world in the same terms they do, even if those terms are fraught with bitter reminiscences and anger. Perhaps especially then. So to say “he knows what’s Going On” is to say, in a somewhat quieter voice, “I feel like that sometimes too,” without having to be all explicit about it.

NIN fans will probably object to my characterization of his music as having anything to do with “pop,” since this is a term heavily laden with connotations of moussed and shellac’d junior high kids playing the petty games of social entendre — but I mean it only in the technical sense that “pop” music is characterized by a 32-bar organization, with two or three basic musical statements repeated in a familiar, well-recognized pattern. It’s performed with mostly electronic instruments, such as keyboard synthesizers, drum machines, and such — plus electric guitars wherever appropriate. The best-known and most belovéd pop artists are those who have some kind of distinctive voice, and, just as in the operatic tradition, the higher male voicees are the heroic clarions of virtue, while the low seductive voices are the tool of the villain, the unsavoury character, and the Devil. The lead singers are usually (though not always) men.*

* Although I’m not sure where that puts Boy George.

“Now hold on a minute,” you say. “Where do you get off making generalisations like that?”

Well, think about it for a second. First consider the Beatles, possibly the most widely-idolized popular group in recent history. Paul McCartney was a pretty, angel-faced boy with a vibrant tenor, the darling of young females all OVER the place. Contrast this with Jim Morrison of The Doors — certainly idolized, perhaps even worshipped, around the world — but his dark, seductive baritone branded him a troublemaker, the kind of person your parents tell you to avoid. Contrast again, the sound of Duran Duran with that of Wham’s George Michael. Again, both were very successful, whatever else you may say about them. Duran Duran were heroes; George Michael was a “bad boy,” at least in the minds and eyes of the 8th-grade American female.

So, the model works — but that’s not the point I’m trying to make anyway.

What I really wanted to say is this: Back in the early part of the 19th Century, there was another young man who “knew what was Going On,” but he didn’t make it big on MTV. Instead, his biggest hits took the form of poetry. He went by the somewhat curious (if not auspicious) name of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley died in around 1822, at the ripe old age of thirty…but before he did (about three years before, in fact) he left us with this delightful snippet, which you probably recognize:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things –
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In addition to being the kind of poem that would sound fabulous if read aloud by James Earl Jones (sans the Darth Vader mask), this is one of those marvellous pieces of human experience that lets you have two perspectives at once — something which is both very cool and a little unsettling. On one side, you get to stand beside your good close personal friend Ozy as he surveys, with dread countenance and a sneer of cold command, the vast and unlimited reach of his imperial domain. Then, a moment later, you get to stand with your feet mired in the dry, restless sands that inexorably consumed him and all his works. Lasciate ogne speranza, baby. Whether you look forward or back, despair is about the best you can hope for.

Just like good old Trent Reznor and his commercial-grade industrial angst, this double dose of stark perspective can be kind of comforting at times. And while we’re on that subject anyway, I’d like to tell you about such an experience, from my own Ozymandian view of things.

The Upper Connecticut River Valley, often known as simply “the Upper Valley” by its residents and local radio personalities, is home to many things which are otherwise anomalous in the New England landscape. For example, due to the curious microclimate created by having a good-sized river trapped between two fantastically old mountain ranges, the winters here in the Upper Valley are much less obnoxious than they are even a few miles to the east or west. Also, the economy, like the weather, has been sheltered from some of the worst ravages of the recession that hammered much of Vermont and New Hampshire in 1990 and 1991. Even more importantly (at least for the point of this story), the Upper Valley is home to one of the premiere medical facilities in the United States and perhaps the world — the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Today, the DHMC has been moved into new facilities a few miles south of Hanover, a looming conglomeration of architecture which is, by itself, roughly the size of a typical New Hampshire town. Something like 18,000 people are employed by the Medical Center in various capacities, including doctors, nurses, secretarial staff, janitors, outside consultants, and so forth, making DHMC a bigger employer even than Dartmouth College, which is right here IN Hanover.**

** Now, perhaps, you get an inkling why the Upper Valley didn’t do so badly during the recessions.

DHMC wasn’t always in this shiny new facility, though. Until about two or three years ago, they were housed in a smaller hospital building (only the size of a small city block) just north of the main Dartmouth College campus. This was the “Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital,” and I’m convinced they only really changed the name because “DHMC” is a much more aesthetically pleasing abbreviation than “MHMH,” although both of them are completely unpronouncable.

DHMC moved out of the old building some time ago now, and ever since then, the question has been lingering on everybody’s mind as to what ought to be done with the old monstrosity, now that the hospital is gone. Well, what exactly can you do with a big old building that was designed as a hospital? The students, I think, were afraid it would be converted into a dormitory (“Where are you living?” “Oh, I live in the old Surgical Prep room.”), the staff were afraid their offices would be moved there, and the faculty were just afraid on general principle.

Fortunately, the Administration came through as usual with a brilliant plan to save the day. When presented with the question “what do we do with this big, empty building that cost millions and millions of dollars to build, but which is currently unoccupied?” their answer was plain:

“We’ll demolish the building,” they said, “and build…a PARKING LOT.”

Yes, boys and girls, where once stood the proud and imposing edifice of the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, one of the finest medical facilities in the world, we will now lay down a layer of asphalt, paint some lines on it, and let people put their cars there, adding to the already abysmal traffic patterns in town by actually providing parking within walking distance of campus. Well, we could hardly expect anything different — after all, this is a bureaucracy we’re talking about here. I’ve concluded that University administrators have the same relationship to professors that Darth Vader has to Obi-Wan Kenobi: They have the same incredible powers, except they’ve been twisted and corrupted by the dark side of the Force (or, in this case, the Economy). The only thing worse than a ruthless dictator is a well-educated ruthless dictator, on a committee with several other ruthless dictators (e.g., the Trustees).

In order to effect this miraculous conversion, of course, it was first necessary to remove the old building from its present location, so that the aforementioned pavement might be laid down at a reasonable altitude (i.e., ground level). To perform this minor miracle, the College employed, at fairly significant expense, the firm of Bianchi-Trison, a national company that essentially gets paid to do what Timothy McVeigh did for free in Oklahoma — viz., blow up buildings.

And so, a few weeks back, the old building was surrounded by a big palisade of lath and green (painted) plywood, and the company’s engineers set to work gutting the building. Their first order of business was to pull out everything that could be easily turned into hard currency (for instance, there was a sizable number of nice green marble panels on the exterior). Having accomplished this, they poked out all the windows, drilled holes in strategic places throughout the building, and laid in a truly prodigious quantity of powerful explosives, the kind you need to have permission in quadruplicate from God and the CIA to even think about possessing.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my usual vision of demolition involves those big iron balls on the end of a crane, where they swing it back and forth until the ball slams into the wall and converts it into small bite-sized pieces. Of course, I’ve seen films where they implode buildings — skilled technicians can do funky things with explosives so that the whole building just kind of collapses inward upon itself. But that’s not the kind of thing you can really grasp from just a picture. Therefore, I was naturally curious when they announced sometime last week that the building was going to be demolished with explosives, and that everything within about four-hundred yards would have to be evacuated, for safety reasons.

I showed up bright and early this very morning at 7:30am, with about half the rest of the local population, to watch Bianchi-Trison blow up this building. You could hardly tell it was 7:30am — the streets were packed with cars, there were cops everywhere, and throngs of people lined up just outside the safety cordons. Let’s face it — no matter what we might say to the contrary, people think destruction is cool, or at the very least, worth watching.

My engineering friends tell me that the principle behind imploding a building is fairly simple — you use shaped charges to kick all the load-bearing members out from under the building, and it just kind of caves in. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that in practise. If your target were out in the middle of a big field, with nothing else around, you could go hog wild with TNT — but when it’s less than thirty feet from a bunch of other buildings you want to keep safe and sound for a few more years, you have to be a little more careful. Not only do you have to kick out the supports, you also have to do it in the right order, so that everything collapses inward, and nothing falls out onto somebody’s car or gets blown into the stratosphere, whence it might come down and ruin somebody’s picnic.

It was probably just as well that I was groggy at the time I witnessed the event.

At 7:30 sharp, a hush fell over the crowd. Nobody was really sure what it was going to look or sound like. A few people had their hands cautiously over their ears.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Twelve charges, as evenly spaced as if they had been fired off by a clock (which they probably were) fired rapidly along the length of the building.

For a brief, desperate moment, everything stood stock-still — the building, the people, everything. It was probably no more than a fraction of a second, but it seemed like an eternity. And then — the most amazing thing…

The building just … dropped.

Have you ever tossed a rock off a really high something-or-other, and been amazed at how quickly it got to the ground? This was like that. I swear, my whole heart lurched, not from the loud noise, but when the whole corner of the building suddenly skewed and went downward. The sound a building makes when it does that is kind of sickening…it’s almost not a sound at all, just a subsonic rumble,

9.8 meters per second per second — it’s not just a good idea, it’s the Law!***

*** At least, near Earth.

It took the building maybe seven seconds to go from the aforementioned huge, imposing structure, to a huge, imposing heap of rubble, and a giant cloud of dust and combusted toluene.

The dust hung there in the air for several minutes afterward, and I stayed around, mostly because there was a big part of my psyche that didn’t want to believe what I’d just seen. My eyes remained glued to the dust cloud, and the little lizard brain at the back of my head was swearing incoherently in a very confused dialect. Everything functioning at a lower level than the gray cells was fundamentally convinced that the dust would clear, and the building would still be standing there — as if someone had just pulled an amazing movie trick.

I really didn’t expect to feel like that. I figured it’d be just another neat spectacle. But honestly, I almost cried, and I really don’t know why. There wasn’t any rational reason — it’s not as if I had any attachment to the damned thing. I only ever went in there a few times. Maybe part of it’s that it feels like such a colossal waste to blow up a whole building just so you can put down a parking lot. But I doubt it’s that simple.

I think the real reason it felt so emotional and strange was that, for just a split second, I knew what it was like to be Ozymandias, King of Kings, before the dust washed over it all, and reality became memory.

Most of the incoming Freshmen, having never seen the old Hospital, never will, except in pictures. How quickly time passes — a quarter of the student population already thinks of it as gone. To next year’s freshmen, it will be a story mentioned by upperclassmen. Four years from now, it’ll just be an amusing comment on progress, and maybe people will have friendly arguments over where the foundations used to be. History moves quickly — traces are kicked over and blown away before we even have time to look around.

Ozymandias was indeed mighty, for his words to remain, even after the dust claimed his bones.

I may not be one of those people who “know what’s Going On,” but I’m sure glad to know someone is. If you run across Ozy in your travels, tell him I said hi.

Filed by Michael at 11:27 under Personal, Philosophical, Story
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