Between Ruins and Hypermodernity: Reflections on Dublin's Docklands
A passenger sitting solely on a white and blue vessel, I await the immersion of the centre of the city known as the Black Pool, Dubh Linn. Emergent from the Dublin Port Tunnel, the asphalt boat sails it's rubber oars through East Wall, a town where Gaelic nativist fires burn bright amidst a splintered, atomized cosmopolis.
It is around the time that we sail past the 3Arena that visual juxtapositions make themselves clear. Archaic, majestic redbrick of “repurposed” Georgian and Victorian build contrast with obelisks of high finance and big tech, symbols of foreign sign regimes that have no organic history here, but which were more than likely given right to muscle in through the treachery of maladaptive natives.
The crude contrast has been engineered to look fitting and rendered aesthetically “pleasant” to the average eye. You’re not supposed to remark that it looks in any way unpleasant because it “looks nice” to said average person. They aren’t supposed to question. You’re not meant to shake their unwillingness not to. Only forces from beyond this can achieve that. Their energies will be absorbed by what is convenient and in vogue. Remember that a Roman arch is a mud hut to them if Joe Duffy tells them so, and that likewise Tracey Emin is on the same level as Rembrandt. Anything for them to save face.
Taking a sharp right before the Tom Clarke bridge and veering steadily down the North Wall Quay, we enter the liminal space between urban desolation of generations previous, and visceral hypermodernity.Glass and steel buildings impose themselves as far as the eye can see, and an endless array of multi coloured lights, as well as sepia colored streetlights burn viscerally. They burn brightly beneath a clear and autumnal skyline, forever black and all enveloping. The power of the artificial lighting resists the night it so that the nearest layer of skyline may be rendered as the darkest azure.
Through this brief excerpt of this nightly voyage, the minutes feel like hours, which is strange owing to the absence of any traffic flows or congestion, which is typical for this part of the city. One consistent sight that does not disappear from view is the river Liffey, whose water is a dark, ethereal mirror that reflects a vast, boundless prism of neon polychromes reflecting from the buildings of the Grand Canal Docks.
This is some kind of dystopia, no doubt. It is not as vast and sweeping as Mega City One, but it is evidently inorganic and too expensive for the average proletarian to be able to call home. Nonetheless, natives do dwell around these parts, their generational council homes dwarfed by the glacial, jagged towers that are the abode of various Fortune 500’s.
Many foreigners work, live and dwell and walk around here, many of them denizens deracintaed, seduced by the crack cocaine of the woke mega-capital life. Some drift in more overtly ethnocentric currents. How many there are exactly is not easy to substantiate, but one can only recognize blatant patterns. Unlike the plot of Blade Runner, humanity has yet to dwell and tame outer space, but as far as Ireland and Dublin is concerned, these are the off-world colonists if there ever were any.
The vessel veers ever closer towards Custom House. Looking out of the window to my left, I notice a small Japanese eatery, it’s name and calligraphy lost to my mind. It’s aesthetic is true to the new Docklands form, a large yet lonely rectangular kiosk of fine glass and neon, deterritorialized and melancholy, largely devoid of patrons. It is here that the bus will eventually proceed to take a left turn to cross the Talbot Memorial Bridge.
Before taking this turn, I see a group of about five or six Indians gallivanting around the Famine Memorial statues in puffy designer winter jackets. One of the two females among them strikes a leisurely pose, embracing one of the emaciated, funereal statues whilst awaiting to be photographed. Carefree and of new money, jovial and oblivious, this symbol of great tragedy is merely a pleasure for them. The shadows of Erin’s ancestors look back in anger, and their cold, still ghosts glisten in the electric night, sullen and forlorn. Amidst long slumber, they are subject to a gradual and rude awakening, destined to return.