Every process, pushed to its limit, reverses all of its initial characteristics:
The mini-skirt is non-erotic
The high-rise apartment, lacking in all “human” qualities whatsoever, takes on the monolithic dignity of a prehistoric pyramid.
The paradox of the apartment as a non-human pyramid was matched earlier by the grain elevators of the Western prairies. These primitive, monolithic sculptures rose at the behest of advancing railway lines. The railway is antithetic to this: a perfect example of visual, linear, civilized space – created the “wild west”, and the non-visual world of oral values, where the ballad reigned supreme once more:
Bury me not on the lone prarie!
Thus, the civilized continuum, when pushed to an extreme by rows of cast steel, returned us, as Joyce punned, to the barbaric values of the folk and the Rose of Castille:
“The punman
and the penman
Meet, in pure
oppugnancy.”