You walk the grid and are faced in the dark alleys, the back streets, the main drags, with those who have come before you. Looking up you see the work of their hands, the words which once enlivened their lips. Valiant signs try to hold on to the boldness of their pronouncements. They labor against the flow of time to go on advertising products and businesses long forgotten. Bent arrows point to non-existent locations. Fonts and faces of real and imagined ideals struggle against the inevitable fade; These artifacts and artifices long torn from their intended contexts, they are the blood of the hustle coagulated to stone.
You are descended from mortal men whose mortality can be glimpsed beneath all the fresh coats of enamel and giant pixelated printouts which seek to guide your purchases and reassure your mind. You are mortal as well. You know this. Walking the grid you can feel time as if it were a physical force, a gusting wind or a punishing wave. You look at the strange messages left by your ancestors, the ads, the architecture, the signs, the photos, the tints, the scrawl, the sum-partial of their choices, and you realize that though they are familiar they are at the same time foreign, and you, the modern mover-and-shaker, can never really understand their meaning.
The beauty of the eroding, the fading, the disappearing is that of reinvigoration. As counterintuitive as it sounds, things which are half-lost, torn from their original contexts are in a certain way given new life. Stripped as they are of their intended meaning and divorced from their real purpose they are open to interpretation. In reclaiming obscurity they reclaim mystery, and hence, beauty for those with eyes to see it.
In New York when something dies the corpse is often left out to rot, slowly and fragrantly, in the public eye and nostril. The American ideal of progress overrunning all sentiment. No time for mourning or last rights! A penny kept from an eyelid is a penny saved! Left out and ignored long enough these things become strangely vital again, moving in their death-throes, with none of the living remembering quite how they came to be, or why.
If only my own remains could be left out on the street, to first bleach in the heat-wave sun, and then blacken in the taxi-exhaust. To be kicked into some corner and piled willy-nilly for passersby to wonder at; a hundred years from now becoming fodder for the imagination of observant romantics with an abundance of internal chop and too little weight to their anchors. I would smile at them and wink from a forgotten hollow, a ghost sign of bone, signifying nothing.
(The image for this post was adapted from the beautiful ghost signs flikr group.)
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I’ve seen ghost signs in other cities, Worcester and Asheville, etc. Some, by luck, are nearly intact, the space never having been demanded by any newer huckster. In particular I recall one in Worcester announcing that the building was once a corset factory! Seems Wormtown was a far more important industrial center a hundred years ago, when the thought of garment factories and steel mills in places like Saipan and Shanghai would have seemed ridiculous.