Ambience of the Busted Mind

What is the worst ambience, the most depressing landscape designed to suffocate the soul and inject a feeling of dread straight into the gut? No, we are not leading anywhere with this...there is no punchline, no knowing references to Brussels or Stamford Bridge. What we have here is an exercise in atmosphere porn, throwing adjectives around like hyperactive toddlers.

The abandoned hospital, then. Let the camera roam for a while...emerge from between a pair of dying yews and follow a trail that leads through overgrown paths that feed into a main gravel drive running up to the main door. A Victorian creation, the wood is now splintering and rotten and barely on the hinges.

Wander inside now, past chunks of fallen plaster and exposed wiring, being careful not to trip over an upended wheelchair and end up sprawled across a network of puddles formed from the drip, drip, drip of a leaking roof. Sunlight leaks in through shattered panes, illuminating a few spots of ancient blood on the tiles.

We stumble through a door into a room full of bad instruments...tools to gouge and to hack and to cauterise. There are walls covered with restraints and entire racks of jars with toxic medicine to burn out the insides with their ignorant acids. In the centre of the room there is a table that appears to be designed to take one fully grown person, and there are metal loops to secure the arms and legs. A shiny metal colander is held firm where the head would go, and next to this is a rack of – let’s say – chainsaws. Why not?

Right...the pitfalls inherent in this exercise are emerging already. Are we being sidetracked by a combination of horror and melancholy? Dread and lamentation? Hmm. If all we are going to get here are cupboards full of corpses ready to tumble about our feet, it cannot give us the right hit of weird unease. Hell, this is almost a hymn for a time where medicine came at the end of gardening implements and psychotherapy used steel machinery to make its point.

This is no good. And had we come here by night, perhaps with a storm raging and thunder crashing all around...then we are only one step away from being sent straight to video. No, we are swimming in the wrong waters here.

What we need is some reality. Unfiltered by hysterical film-making and teary-eyed reminiscence of a bygone age, we should now examine a contemporary example.

The most obvious example here is the office. Every day a fresh hell, a thousand cuts by the hands of a clock ticking idly away. Here we are forced to spend more of our waking time during the week than at home and frequently there is no end in sight. This would seem to be the crux of the matter, the profound unease we experience that we are trapped in a nasty, fluorescent box whilst our lives dribble away and nothing creative can get in through the sealed windows. The environment is artificial and sterile and has no good ambience whatsoever. Hence we have fulfilled the criteria...depressing and dreadful with no positive atmosphere of which to speak.

But the office atmosphere is less tangibly gut-churning and more...well, lacking. That feeling of stillness, the deadness, the pointless clicking of keys and mice...it lacks anything and everything. What we need is a tangible sense of doom. The feeling of being in danger, of being perpetually on the verge of being threatened. Only then will we feel that rotten feeling in the gut instead of the numbness created by office life.

Let us therefore stalk the streets of the inner city, drenched in sodium and dodging under decrepit railway bridges that shelter an assortment of junkies, needles, Ford Escorts and shopping trolleys. Generic KFC-style boxes litter the gutter, and everywhere you look ugly graffiti tags speak of some pathetic bravado shown by a bored teenager.

Again, here, we have the feeling of being trapped in a terrible artificial environment. Sure, we may be visitors to this bleak landscape, but there are many who cannot so easily escape. This may be important for our understanding of the atmosphere we are chasing. The hospital example does not work because it is a piece of crumbling humanity that is being reclaimed by nature...and to our weird minds this feels like a victory. No good for our bad gut feelings.

So we are not looking back; echoes of bad history must not concern us because there is something about time that changes evil into myth and emotion and the strange feeling that something epic is going on. You know...cycles of life, man versus nature, lamentation of past deeds, yadda yadda yadda. If we do not feel fearful of the present then we have failed to capture the right atmosphere.

Speaking of streets, in the news today was a human version of Pac-man in which people in virtual reality headsets run around the streets chasing one another and eating virtual dots. Ye gods, and I thought I made this shit up; the date on the paper is not April 1st. The story is silent as to what happens when you end up jumping in front of a car; Pac-man has always been partial to a cherry, but not the kind built by Nissan. Strips of yellow flesh and half-digested dots all over that road...

What? A bad digression there, but what the hell.

This argument about this atmosphere being confined to modern life, though, is not entirely logical because we are just as at ease with unreal landscapes than the ones of harsh everyday life. Writers have long sharpened their pencils and dipped their quills as they relish the thought of putting something fantastical down on paper that will stick a dagger in the reader and poke around in various organs until the blood begins to pour in great rivers of anguish and pain. Er, not literally...otherwise the word “lawsuit” would pop up like numerals on an old fashioned cash register to the sound of cher-ching.

Writers are, by and large, not violent people. Not externally, anyway...

So we have Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote dense jungle-like paragraphs of twisted verdure and terrible, terrible deeds by cruel creatures, the worst of which was man. He created countless landscapes of macabre fantasy, each one overwhelmed by depression, decay and dread. Wander through one of his forests and within a few seconds your flesh would be slit open by crystalline leaves from predatory plants or pounced on by some cruel demon with razor blades where his arse should be.

To hell with the temporal argument...yes, his worlds contained suffocating senses of history, but the words conjured up the most by his prose are ominous, malevolent, and death.

And perhaps that is the key...ominous. Not of the past or the present, but for the future. That things will not get better, just slide slowly down the mountain into a valley of black despair. This is what is truly depressing, why we feel the dread of one particular landscape over another. Reality does not enter into it...but then, does it ever?