The Un-Making of Place

23 Mar, 2024

I have been struggling to figure out my first piece for this new iteration of my blog. My intent is to anchor my words in place, because as I get older I have come to appreciate just how much place has contextualized and created who I am. Yet I have grandiose thoughts of how the first piece should go and sometimes I have to let go of that and write about the thing I have been thinking about the most lately.

Namely rust.

A couple of weeks ago at my job, I sat through an AIA-approved presentation on rust and rust prevention for buildings. Since I am neither a degreed architect nor someone who actually builds the buildings, my level of interest in these presentations is largely curiosity. As is often the case, while the presenter was speaking about how rust forms—rust as a term is really only accurate when speaking about iron or iron alloys (like steel); copper is verdigris, silver is tarnish, etc.—I found myself thinking about how the earth has its own agenda and is constantly seeking to un-make the places we create for ourselves throughout history.

The process of rust involves metal coming into contact with moisture and air. Rust is inevitable, however how quickly it forms varies based on the atmosphere in which the metal resides. Both moisture and oxygen have to be present for rust to happen. If one thinks about sunken ships like the Titanic completely submerged in water, they end up largely staying intact. Because air isn’t as present outside of that oxygen that is present in water itself. Air by itself would not cause metal to rust either. It is the atomic exchange of particles between moisture and air on metal that creates the perfect conditions for the chemical reaction to take place.

Of the building materials that are used in our modern societies, the one that ends up holding up the longest to natural elements is concrete, whether it is foundation work or tilt-up concrete walls. And while concrete is still a man-made product, its constitution more resembles natural elements with smaller amounts of industrial production involved in its creation. However, even concrete depends on the skill of the person(s) who pour and form it. Whereas steel is highly industrial in its creation. Since it is an alloy of iron, this means that the raw material of iron has to be manufactured into steel. One might say that nature’s ability to deconstruct man-made structures over time is proportional to the level of industrial alchemy involved in the making of those structural elements.

When thinking about rust and the power of nature to un-make, I suppose it is undergirded by thought of death and the cessation of existence. Sure, we fabricate our built worlds for many reasons like comfort, shelter from the atmospheric elements and profit, but I find myself bothered by the thought that those are all secondary reasons. The primary reason is to avoid death. We are but dust and to dust we shall return. Most of the existential dread of life is grounded in the fear of death, or the cessation of existence. Hence why legacies are a thing or recent attempts to “contain” a person within technology to live beyond their actual breath. And nature knows this inherently. It’s un-making of the structures we create is a reminder that nothing that exists on this side of the veil will exist forever.

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding’.” ¹

Toni Morrison made this profound statement. She ultimately tied it to the work of a writer, however the truth of her imagery remains outside of her analogy. People manufactured sections of the Mississippi River; they made it in their image. They poured foundations and grew crops, some native to the region and others were intrusive. They straightened out the river, changed it course, in order to make their built context because nature does not heed our presence. Like I said before, it has its own agenda and its memory, as Morrison notes, is much longer than ours. So floods naturally happened. Those floods were a reminder of the failure of humanity to contend with the truth of their place and, further, their own mortality.

From our perspective, nature can be vicious and its non-human species can be “red in tooth and claw.” There is a realm of philosophy out there called post-humanism which attempts to conjure the “world-without-us” as put by Eugene Thacker in his superb In the Dust of This Planet. There is an import in this thinking that is tied to the long-term consequences of built human environment, namely the so-called climate crisis. The thinking is two-sided: first, it seeks to capture how nature lives and moves outside of human thought and perception—ultimately a futile goal which they often note—and, second, to paint a picture of nature untainted by human interference. Where the this stream of thought often goes off the rails is it seldom denotes that human cultivation of nature can be good and can help nature thrive. There is an inherent fatalism in post-humanist thought. Yet, I still think there is benefit to their strain of philosophy in that it confronts us pointedly with the cessation of our existence and reminds us that we are not the only actors in our world. Nature is quite efficient at maintaining itself and reclaiming those areas that were manufactured by humanity.

Yet my argument here, if there is in fact an argument to be made, is that in order to understand ourselves and our place, we must understand that everything we do, everything we create and our very bodies are tinged with death. We build knowing, consciously or subconsciously, that the work of our hands will come to an end and that nature (or the “world-without-us”) will maintain its memory longer than its human inhabitants. Secondarily, perhaps recapturing what it means to cultivate nature instead of manufacturing it would lead to longer periods of flourishing for both humanity and nature. This means contemplating what nature is apart from our interference—hence the import of post-humanist thought—and what cultivation really means in a death-tinged world. This means that until death is overcome (if indeed it is overcome) nothing will last. The disintegration of the world and its inhabitants is a constant reality. Perhaps confronting that reality for what it is would give us a wisdom for living and thriving in the places we live. And maybe we can then contemplate what it means to heal those parts of place and humanity which are being continually un-made.