Desolate

Something from my Krakow notebook, which kind of matches my mood today...

Katowice: On the train back to Krakow. Evening. Between the coal-mining/processing plants and the suburban railway station...six blokes leaning against a wall, between the railway line and yet another set of derelict industrial buildings -- all displaced bricks and jagged-glassed, metal-framed windows. The blokes with beer bottles, woolly caps, echoes of West European street/urban dress styles. Unreal MTV wardrobe. Posturing for a video that'll never be made.

I don't think I've ever seen so many decaying, part-demolished buildings in so small a space. Christ, it's depressing.

It's been raining, and the sky's still overcast. The evening is coming down prematurely because of all the cloud and dirt. Katowice isn't pretty. For the first time on this trip, the general decrepitude and run--downness makes my heart sink (rather than appearing interesting/characterful/historically revealing).

It's as if an entire industrial age is collapsing and crumbling back into the earth: brick by brick, building by building. An overwhelming atmosphere of decay. Signal boxes that look like forts in enemy territory; outposts against hordes of hoodied barbarians. Badlands. Ashy wastelands. Wild, abandoned zones of drink, drugs, gangs, rape, glue-sniffing, unremarked death.

It's getting cool now, with the sun invisible and low behind the clouds. You can feel the rain coming, see it in that flat, 'white-between-slate-grey-clouds' light. In the gloomy carriage interior, the drunks who seemed amusing earlier now seem threatening, and the empty seats look ominous rather than luxuriously spacious.

Fences, gates, locks, dogs, ashy earth. Deathly. Gloomy.

Abandoned buffers in old sidings -- the tracks long gone. Weeds where the rails used to be. Shit.

As the light faded under that cloudy sky, that sense of desolation became almost frenzied. As if I was in the grip of a strange, unbidden, panicky fear. A most peculiar feeling, like a panic attack. Every rain-soaked, ashy house yard looked like the end of someone's sad, impoverished life; and every puddled mud track curving off into the woods took on the aspect of a path to World War Two killing site.

This evening, feeling like this, and tired, and wanting to get home, and knowing what I know about history, Poland feels like a country -- and a landscape -- that has death hovering over it in the rain and the rising mist. Drear and desolate.

Ho hum. If my life was a country, at the moment it would be Poland.

Bollocks. I wonder if I might be 'clinically' depressed? I've been anhedonic for weeks.