Interstitial

As I grew up in the U.S., I always sought out and found what later William Gibson would call interstitial space -- the extra space at the edges of formal systems of property, logic, and propriety -- so it was the odd-shaped back lots with fences all around them, slowly filling with trash, attics, parking lots, backs of the big stores, abandoned public parks, condemned buildings - I have always loved the way that texture abounds in forgotten places, the way that ancient gestures, that would ordinarily have been forgotten, frittered and diffused into the shifting background, here are frozen in time, captured, and in the calm insignificance of forgotten spaces they grow into epic monuments to the forgotten, trivial past, mysterious without their previous context. In SF, we have interstitial people -- such as the homeless, and their creations and dwellings have that overwhelming texture as well.

But in general, in the places I grew up in and inhabit -- in the U.S., and also in the "developed" world, most spaces are stitial -- entrenched in the system, minded, cleaned and kept current. In India, almost everything is interstitial; the press of population times time has worked over every molecule, and few resources are spared to erase the decaying past, texture runs out of control, multiplies, rumples and folds back on itself in eerie, beautiful decrepitude, spilling into everything -- the lichen growing in a black cascade down a concrete wall etched by acid rain, the heavenly lightness of plastic ripped so many times it loses all its shape and form and flutters in the tiniest breeze, bizarrely delicate but unnoticed in the blaring, urgent chaos.