Beauty is a thing of might and dread. Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.
-Kahlil Gibran

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.
-Swami Sivananda

Ecstasy

Certain sites of urban exploration are to be tasted, others swallowed and some to be chewed and digested. I have had a love affair with Battersea Power Station, my Dark Princess, since arriving in London. The first time I rode past on the train and saw her crumbing dark brick and creamy smokestacks shining in the afternoon light, I began to feel a powerful desire to get closer. Slowly, over the course of 2 years, I have gone back to her over and over again, on foot, crawling through tunnels, by boat. I have visited her on lonely late nights of contemplation, seeking advice and solace, in the evenings, in the days, through changes of ownership and constantly changing security measures, running around the control rooms playing hide and seek and laying along the chimneys with friends in London’s early dawn light waiting for the ecstasy of her grandeur to eventually fade, which it never does. I feel that we have, over the years, developed a complicated and passionate relationship to the point that I defend her liminal status as being the best place for her to reside. I want her just as she is, now and forever.

No man's land

With intention

Last year, a plan was hatched to watch the city’s firework display from Battersea Park via the chimneys of my Dark Princess. Ironically, because of all of the traffic coming to Clapham Common where I live for the epic yearly display here, I couldn’t get there in time. I have regretted it ever since, determined to let nothing stop me this year from attending what has become a sacred urban explorer pilgrimage.

Security is part of the game. They know we are coming. They know we won’t give up spending this night with the Dark Princess. Last night, the place was swarming with workers and patrols, a large tent in the middle shooting blue lights onto the interior walls as we slipped up the scaffolding. The tremors of fear and roaming floodlights only added to the passion of the affair. In the end, 7 of us made it in even as others were caught in the yard below with screams and footchases we could hear while hanging from the steel girders.

And for our persistence, the Dark Princess rewarded us with the most spectacular beauty imaginable, aided in no small part the worker’s light show they unintentionally put on for us (thank you workers!).

Rekindled

The night

For 30 minutes, we sunk into the bliss of a successful pilgrimage, eyes closed with the sky flaring behind our eyelids, one terrible rumble after another awaking our primal imaginaries, drifting into the night. The evening turned into a fervour of laughter and play as we ran into the city to wreak more havoc in our intoxication of passion. I let the night go with a heavy heart.

In revelry

The whole universe will glow

Let us go then, you and I.
When the evening is spread out against the sky
like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets…
-T.S. Eliot

Passion

Hanging above bank station from a red crane that pulsates with foggy light warning off incoming aircraft, the metal making slow groaning sounds as the bitterly chill wind nudges the structure into a gentle sway, I look down at the bank of England and hear a cacophony of voices in the city.

But the voices I hear are not of the screaming hordes of city bankers, roping in whithered lovers for an evening of lust soon to be forgotten or morphed into office scandal, they are the voices of the past, explorers who walked these city streets in ours and other ages, who crawled into the dark folds of urban architectures looking for crack, photographs, walls to graph or poetry. I connect with myriad individuals who share my love for plenitude, the inanimate animated.

Dickens was a fellow nighttime crawler, a man wrapped up in a perpetual dream, an explorer of the uncanny who felt “a solemn consideration when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses it’s own secret; that in every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret the the heart nearest it!”

Beauty unmatched

Delving

Our secret is here, looking down on the city we work in, play in; the place where we encounter life in all it monstrous forms. And Dickens stands here with me, laughing at the audacity of this adventure, an approving smirk cracking his extravagant goatee.

I used to think of infiltration as an masochistic incarnation of urban exploration, a pale shadow of experience, disconnected from roots to history or respect for those that walked before us. But up here, staring down at this city that I am courting, the only city that has replaced my perpetual desire to be intimately attached to another human being, the city of blissful isolation where everyone minds their own fucking business, I am in love with the history of this moment and with the workers who are building our future, one brick at a time.

Building our future

In our limited time here on the planet, we can choose to stumble through life, working our job, drinking our beer in front of the blaring television in the darkness of “off-time”, blissfully uncaring. We can remain wrapped in an Indian Ashram, walking circles in the garden, in perpetual meditation for meaning, eschewing the trajectory of the age. Or we can hit back, head on, at the age in which we live, mining it for meaning and finding answers to questions both small and large, wherever those journeys may take us. None of these ways of life are better than another. They are just different, little epitaphs to tombs not yet constructed.

What luck!

The last time I watched The Big Lebowsky, I was stuck anew by the opening narration from the Old Timer:

“…Sometimes there’s a man…who, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.”

One day I may ask for your love London, but for now, thank you for returning my lust. For the first time in my life, I fit right in there.

Always yours,

The Goblinmerchant