The Bunker

                                  

It was by chance that I first found the bunker. I had been heading out towards the beach, walking atop the dunes that swept the tip of the remote peninsular. Reaching the peak of the furthest dune, the view of the ocean opened out before the long silvery coast. And there it lay – A nonchalant grey visitor on an otherwise unremarkable strip of beach.

            Compelled as if following a path preordained, I stepped down through the scrubby dunes and onto the wet sand. It was rectangular in shape, bulky, mean and squat, and sat right on the shore, its coarse concrete walls meeting the waves half way along its length. Water pooled around its lopsided margins, making a shallow basin where the sand had dipped, as if sucking the bunker down.

I walked around the structure, tracing its walls at arms length. Up close, I found its bulk imposing – a rough grey monolith, about three times a man’s height, fifteen metres wide, and perhaps twenty five metres long. From here on the sand, its surface admitted only one opening: a pair of heavy iron doors set deep into the concrete.  I pulled at them but they held fast. Sand had blocked the entry: it had sucked the bunker down, sinking the entrance and setting the doors permanently shut. The rest of the structure was blank, save braving the icy water hiding its front side from view, I could find no other way in.

I sat down at the base of the dunes and looked down upon the bunker. Peculiarity of the vista aside, it looked strangely at home in this place. Something of its quiet brutality matched the grey ocean and its deaf coast. It was eroded, worn smooth like the landscape. It was as if the massive concrete bulk had simply been uncovered by the to and fro of the sea, like some long-waiting ancient remnant suddenly revealed. Or washed in during a storm, and remained stubbornly ever since.

   ***

It was two days before I next saw the bunker. Eager to return and restless in the office, I left the city at midday. To the left and right of the car the city disintegrated; the space between buildings grew into suburbs, suburbs gave way to bush, and bush fell to sand and scrub. I made the trek from the road and to the dunes by late afternoon. As before, the coast opened out below the dunes to reveal the dormant bunker, its tomb-like form sagging into the ocean.

I had resolved to enter it this time, and followed the walls as they ran out towards the ocean, wading through the deepening water to the front side of the bunker. Here waves turned to spray against a mess of against broken concrete fragments. Above them, at about head height, a thin slit ran the length of the structure. Inside, I could just make out a quiet, dank interior. Getting a foothold on the broken concrete, I hoisted myself up through the opening, sliding on my belly and across into the bunker.

I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. I was in a wide, low room, framed by bare concrete surfaces. In the darkened wall farthest from me a single corridor ran out of the room and into the black towards the direction of the dunes. Here, away from the wind of the beach, and sheltered from the waves, the air was still and old, and the breakers registered against the thick walls as low, muffled booms. The ground was soft and damp – sand had overrun the structure, forming a smooth floor. Through floor's centre, sand fell into a great crack,  from which I could hear the slosh of cold, black water beneath.

Away from the slot the bunker quickly darkened, but I felt uneasy turning my back on the unexplored area. As I walked down the rear corridor, sets of rooms paired off either side. Here the sand had remade the floor, it spanned cobweb-like between the frames of doorways and the crooked, narrow walls. The series of rooms were absolutely dark, a flat, blind black which pushed out at the light. As I passed each the air became stale and cold with age and permanent darkness.

I reached the end of the corridor, where a short set of stairs led up to the iron doors that had been stuck by sand from the other side. Beside them, another set cut down into the sand. The bunker  continued, buried below.

I moved back to the front room. The space must have been meant as a fortified observation point. The slot which ran length of the forward defensive walls ran from just above chest height to head height. Its view framed a very wide, thin strip of steely horizon. I stood before it and my sense of the landscape was transformed. Looking out though the slot my vision seemed pressurised, laden, and aggressive. The horizon seemed to expand, becoming a flat nervous band, pushing forward onto the heavy, closed, bulk of the bunker. The bunker turned the blank ocean into an anxious, threatening, space.  The great stillness of the waiting landscape seemed to call out to a force, a nervous spectre waiting just beyond the horizon.

Immense concrete walls shielded me from the horizon – I was looking through a fortified peep-hole,. This bunker was not merely defensive, it was aggressive, provocative. In its very nature it prefigured an enemy equipped to destroy it. Even on this remote grey shore, its form described the features of its attacker; its brutally functional concrete contours expressed both its power and its inevitable weakness, its very shape formed contours of its debris. On that day, it seemed to me that I had become implicated in a pressing, absolute conflict between the force which the dormant bunker represented, and the spectral power that it made its enemy.

   ***

I visited the bunker every day over the following week. Each time I felt myself pulled into its conflict. The bunker had brought into being for me a terrible, vital, absent power, an opposition which to me seemed immediate, constant. To me, the structure seemed no longer to exist in itself but in relation to the force, the force it framed through its slotted window, the force which prefigured its destruction, and which suggested absolute ruin. Not combat but complete destruction, of everything, always, forever and ongoing. The bunker stood for a paralysis of the present, where in the very fabric of the future there lay the constant imminence of total dissolution.

Yet it was so solid, physically so composed. I hoisted myself up onto its roof, finding a foothold in the craggy wall. I lay flat upon it, facing up to the sky, and its heavy form chilled my back through my T-shirt. Its thick defensive walls, its low, half buried position, its blunted shapes, all called for catastrophic pressures, for atomic, total, war.  It was simultaneously feral and composed, hostile and indifferent. A violent gesture set in stone to last centuries. In this way its bulk became a signal not of strength but of fragility, of the fragility of the ideology it defended. A bunker will inevitably be destroyed, whereas ideology which it defends is fluid, undying. To build such a defence is signal the fragility of the powerful ideas which you defend.

During the days spent on the beach I came to discern the drift of the dunes and the movements of the shore, over time shaped by the pounding of the breakers. Day to day the position of the bunker changed, it sunk into the sand and sagged down deeper into the waves. Soon, the water line almost reached the observation slot, threatening to flood the room. Just a week later the bunker was nearly completely submerged amongst the white spray of the waves.  One end stuck up out of the sand, forming an immense cenotaph.

   ***

My final visit to the peninsular came with its usual sense of obsessive deference, as well as great anxiety. As always, I headed up through the dunes towards the beach where the bunker lay. Coming to the peak of the last of the dunes, the ocean came into view. The coast was totally bare. I ran down to the area where I knew the bunker to have sat. Blank, unremarkable. The sand ran smoothly down into the surf. The bunker was gone.

I squatted down on the hard, wet, sand. I felt relieved that it had dissapeared, I think, to be be free of my solitary burden. But also frustrated. It surely still sat right beneath, buried and waiting below. Wind whipped across the beach, raining sand lightly over my back. On the deserted coast I could still feel the spectral force, and suddenly I perceived for the first time the ghostly forms of a hundred dormant fortifications, emerging all over the peninsular. Facing away from the beach, I saw bunkers atop the dunes, and beyond those dunes, more forms revealed themselves as if from the corner of the eye. A system of ghostly structures, silvery and spidery, set into the sand. And in every one, ravaged by the push and pull of the forces of time and nature, which sink and suck at those things which are always present but lie only dormant or hidden, lay a call to a spectral meaning at all times present, as powerful, immediate and compelling as the forces of nature themselves.

   ***

I have now come to find my time away from the beach intolerable. I think only of the bunker. The hours I spent there have somehow become more important, more immediate, than the features of my city life – my job, my home, my family.   

In my mind’s eye, my reality has began to shift, the corridors and streets of the city have began to darken and twist, become damp and old. In everything I perceive the struggle of the bunker, my office window – all windows – become a concrete slit, through which spectre of the bunker’s enemy is framed. Sand sweeps across the city, dunes overrun gleaming office towers, burying the diamond streets below. And looming over and through all these phantoms: the cataclysmic conflict, the Big Other which the bunker presupposes, turns the features of my life ghostly translucent and promises in every aspect the shadow of dissolution.