The mysteries of nature are nothing compared with the mysteries of the city. Not the least is the insoluble riddle of the petrol station. It is the culmination of one vast chain of evolution, that stretches back to the first lumpish cairns that our distant ancestors called home. It is the polished product, the masterpiece, of expedient ugliness. For any serious thinker who has time to spare from visiting the orphan and the widow, and so forth, it is the amongst the most momentous moral crises imaginable.
I hesitate to call the average petrol station ugly without qualification – and that for two reasons. In the first place, it is not positively ugly. It lacks all beauty; provided it is not too run down, that is its only aesthetic fault. It is far in arrears of the obscenities that modern sculpture has proven itself capable of. It is not, like an ancient toad, so ugly as to cause extasies of delight. It may be nothing more offensive than a concrete slab, with a rectangular canopy, and a worn down block of a building brimming from inside with plastic wrappers, plastic items, and ill-coordinated advertisements.
This last part is promising. In an old bookshop, or a record room, the abundance of random, disorganised, even clashing material may produce something akin to beauty. In all things human unstudied opulence produces a grand effect. But not in the petrol station: except in the smallest specimens, there is just enough room to deflate the energy of the superabundance of cheap materials.
What is worse: there is nothing venerable or grandiose in a petrol station. There were people who said, a hundred years ago, that a steam train, or a railway station, was ugly. And yet, there is a savage majesty in what Chesterton called the ‘shrieking steeds of flood and fire’. The truth is, whatever you think of the old smoke-belching burner school of industrialism, it was not wholly without poetic value. Even Tolkien put it to good use, if only in Isengard. But then, the old industrialism really did have something impressive about it: flashing lights, fire and coal, billowing smoke worthy of the fisherman’s genie, and noise like the demons in hell! These the petrol station does not have – except the coloured lights; and without the accompanying stage effects, these tend to seem fairly naked and bare. In the railway station there was nature in a thousand disguised forms – brown bricks and cavernous shadows, besides all the elemental chaos of the train itself. The very rust on the beams was like the crown of age. It is hard to find the parallels in a petrol station.
We are subjecting the poor petrol station to a thorough patdown now, I am afraid, but we have started and must continue. Replace the concrete slab with a grassy meadow, and at once you have something to work with. The pumps, the canopy, the little box-office booth, take on a new and alien aspect. Or put steel vaulting in the canopy, let it suggest the roof of a cathedral, only rusty and riveted: the battling forces add dignity to the whole construction. Let the booth be made of bricks – or fill it with paper wrappers and warm lighting – or top it with a triangular roof – any of these things would relieve the sterile artificiality of the petrol station.
Here then is the dilemma. Some time ago we used to build rough little huts of rocks, and they doubtless were not the prettiest things in their surroundings. I imagine the curmudgeonly old cavemen in those days used to criticise the disgusting fad for squares and rectangles, that found no parallel in the natural world. But love for humanity triumphed; now even the crude cottage is beautiful to us. A little later on our powers over nature increased. We learnt how to abstract it, twist it to new purposes. Perhaps this started with bronze casting. For while chipped rocks may be found everywhere you turn your eyes, and even weaving of a sort may be found in birds’ nests, bronze statues really have no parallel in nature. Wherever it started, it ended in iron girders and belching kilns, and once again, humanity protested, but humanity also came to love it. There were luddites who smashed machines, but there were also those who loved even bleak London itself as home and as human. But now we have passed on from there; we are able not only to transform nature, but even to eliminate it. I believe the turning point this time was the invention of plastic; but for the most part it is simply improvement of the previous stage that makes the difference. The difference made, for instance, by replacing cobbles with paving, windows with whole walls of glass, by eliminating dados and wallpapers and arches and façades, by replacing beige and brown with pure white, is critical. And critical too are we, or a fair few of us, at any rate. But perhaps here too our love of all that is human – our love of all that is artificial – could triumph again. Perhaps the true mark of a great and humane soul today is that it feels a thrill of pleasure at the sight of a petrol station.
theparsnipoftime 