Rüdiger Moos - a nonexistent German place in Rotterdam

Imagining a place that I did not see in a dream - it was revealed in a bus stop

And now it exists at least on the internet.

Note: This is not the best picture. Better ones are below. This should be more subtle.

A long time ago I sat in one of those glass bus shelters and waited. Then the bus came and I saw its destination mirrored in the glass of the bus shelter. The bus said: Kralingse Zoom. But in the reflecting glass I read: Rüdiger Moos. From that moment that nonexistent German place has taken root in my subconscious. If I take the right Rotterdam bus, and drive it to its last stop, then I will be in Rüdiger Moos. How will it look there?

Kralingse Zoom is a big metro and bus hub on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Many lines go there. The explanation for Moos is simple, it's just the mirror image of Zoom. It is unclear where Rüdiger came from.

There is no Rüdiger Moos in Germany and these places gave the best fit:

• Rüdigheim, Neuberg

 

• Rüdigheim, Amöneburg

• Rudingshain, Schotten

• Rüdigerstraße, Wurzburg

And because there is no Google street view in Germany I just tried to find the nearest Google photo to these places. Sometimes these were far away. From these random places the following photographs matched my imagination the best and clarified my ideas about this place.

It must be a place on the outskirts, at the edge of the city. There must be some semi-wild nature, preferably neglected, but also traces of urbanity. 

There must be trees and some darkness. It should not be a totally open field. Preferably a clearing, with some dead trees, preferably birch trees.

Preferably at the end of the road. Where you can go no further by car or by public transport. Where it is dark and lonely at night. Like Thomas Ligotti writes in Noctuary in The Strange Design Of Master Rignolo:

 "So I was going to tell you," Grissul began, "that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?" 

"I now have a good idea," Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.

"This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn't planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don't know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. [*** see also below] 

The place might even look like the view from the parking garage of the Kralingse Zoom itself. The semi neglected nature next to the highway. Even though you're just meters from civilization you're also totally on your own there. No one goes there:

It might look like the semi-wild nature that you can see from your train window. Most likely you will never walk there. You most probably ignore it as the eyesore it is. And you ignore its haunting beauty. That's how Rüdiger Moos operates. It makes itself invisible, but in the meantime its haunting atmosphere permeates the whole city.

[***] I asked an early version of ChatGPT to generate illustrations for this story. And the results are here: Urban Adventure in Rotterdam: Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 1

The pictures are here:

 

Yesterday I asked Copilot to generate an image. But it is too romantic:

Copilot:

This scene captures the poetic tension between civilization and wilderness. A winding dirt path draws the eye from the moorland foreground into the hazy silhouette of a distant city, nestled among trees. Heather and gorse bloom in purples and golds, while a windswept pine tree stands sentinel, its twisted trunk hinting at years of weather and solitude. The sky glows with late afternoon light, casting a golden hue across the terrain and softening the edges of church spires and rooftops beyond.

It feels like the kind of place where you could walk for hours, letting the city fade behind you as the quiet of nature takes over. If you'd like, I can help you write a story or poem inspired by this setting next.

Copilot:

This isn’t the kind of place that gets postcards. It’s the kind of place that feels like it’s waiting for something to happen—or maybe like something already did, and no one talks about it. The clearing is rough and uneven, with stringy marsh grass and patches of standing water that reflect the gray sky like broken glass. A couple of dead birch trees stand like forgotten sentinels, their bark peeling in long strips, skeletal branches reaching out as if to snag the wind.

The bus stop is there, squat and utilitarian, with a faded sign that reads “RÜDIGER MOOS.” It looks like no one’s waited there in years, but the bench still holds the shape of someone who might’ve sat too long. Behind it, the forest presses in—dense, dark, and indifferent. You can just make out the edge of the city beyond the trees: a few rooftops, a distant tower, the ghost of urban order dissolving into the wild.

It’s the kind of place Grissul would talk about in a low voice, like it’s not just geography but memory. If you want, we could write a short story set here, or even build a map of the surrounding area. There's something hauntingly rich about this edge-space.

From a strange planet - 13

Road webcam fascination - The silent pictures of Scandinavian traffic-webcams have a strange fascination for me. My previous outpourings of webcam obsession are here: 1: Discovery, 2: From deep space, 3: Don DeLillo, 4: Scipting surveillance art, 5: Making movies, 6: Sightings and glitches, 7: More sightings, 8: Google streetview, 9: Changes in time, 10: Events, 11: Living streetlight and 12: Dino Buzzati. I've used video, fiction, literary criticism, art, topography and surveillance technologies to think through this window on far-away places.

---

See update from 2024 down below >>>

I've watched this  curve in the road many times. It's not the road that's fascinating. It's not the view over the fiord towards the mountains that's fascinating. It's the silhouette of the house above that road that I find captivating. This is Fv17 Torsvika, and the silhouette is not perfectly visible in this view.

It's much better if you zoom in and view just the house, like I do below. Then you  can see a "dark painting" depicting a silhouette. A dark façade face with luminous windows for eyes.

Then you'll notice that the house looks quite ordinary in sunny weather, when it's illuminated from the front and you see all the details. It's also not that impressive if you search it on Google maps, there you see that it's a nice, interesting but non-mysterious building. But when you look in the proper light, the house turns into an Ed Ruscha artwork.

Ed Ruscha, 60 Watts, 1990

In his book Leave any information at the signal : writings, interviews, bits, pages by Ed Ruscha (and Alexandra Schwartz) the artist says in one interview:

TB: Let’s talk about the dark paintings. 

ER: I think they came mostly from photography, although they are not photographically done or anything. I feel that they are related to the subject of photography. I think these works somehow share something with photography. I don’t know why. I have a definite side to side horizontal brushstroke. It’s part of the concept of the landscape, I guess, and I painted all my pictures like that. These newer paintings are dark and strokeless. They’re painted with an air brush.

Ed Ruscha, Your Name, 1987

TB: What is the effect of absenting figures from your paintings? Particularly your gas station paintings, which are almost desolate.

ER: I think they become more powerful without extraneous elements like
people, cars, anything beyond the story. That’s why these lines, these planes in a gas station were more important than trying to create an Edward Hopper scene. It became something for me to investigate. I was able to subtract a romantic story from the scene - I wanted something that had some industrial strength to it. People would muddle it. There was a coldness that I liked when I painted those pictures.

Ed Ruscha, Pine Setting, 1988

BB: How do you make up the images, or do you make them up? How do you go from the elephant to the ship to the rows of houses?

ER: It’s the icon/logo concept, I suppose. Things that are immediately recognizable. The idea is that recognition and a silhouette go hand in hand. I get the imagery from all sources. I may have seen several ships and then I’ll work on a drawing, change it, put some masts over here, a sail here. I never consider the drawings anything but preparatory - they’re not things in themselves, that’s why I don’t show rough sketches. Finally, I just enhance the thing back to a silhouette position, a silhouette appearance. Then that goes on the canvas in the form of an outline, and that’s where I start working. The images just come from anywhere - a magazine, a photograph of an old ship.

Ed Ruscha, Home Management, 1987

For the last two or three years, Ruscha’s fantasies have also included “grand horizontal” paintings that nudge words and phrases into a kind of cosmic dialectic. The thirteen-foot-long rectangular backgrounds of these paintings represent Panavision-like sunsets or, more recently, the ionosphere at night, and serve as stage sets for expeditions from one extreme set of concepts to another. Tiny white letters on the left end of one canvas, for example, say “wolves/explosions/disease/poisons,” while on the other side of the curving globe, to the right, we find “home.” On another canvas “ancient dogs barking” is lettered on the far left corner, and “modern dogs barking” on the far right.

Name, Address, Phone, 1986

Update 2024

This is how it looks now. Still the same:

But the house has been blurred for privacy reasons.

This is the camera:

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 11

 In previous posts I have illustrated my favorite Thomal Ligotti story "The strange designs of Master Rignolo".  You can read, and see, the whole story here: 

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

But why is this story so fascinating? Let's ask Twitter and Facebook first. We'll search other sources in the next posts:

Antígrafo - @AntigrafoGris - wrote a long and cogent analysis:

TBH I never had an interpretation. I usually don't look for them, and more so in Ligotti, for whom meaninglessness is so relevant. I'm haunted by the characters' relation, conspiratorial, paranoid, despondent and opaque. It's impossible to say anything certain about them.

And even more by the painting's design. The concept of a man-made void in which one can dissolve and "inhabit", waiting, empty of thought and even sight, for the stars to blink out, is perversely alluring to me.

If you forced me to torture out some sense, I could say that R thinks that he has found a way out of existence free of any effort and suffering, but it is in itself a trap. Rignolo exists reality two times betrayed. First, it's painful and, second, it's a mockery of his design.

And the unseen forces that observe and churn beneath it all is the same universe that R tries to cheat with his landscapes. He even states that you can inhabit his paintings unobserved. A solution to the presence in the window that worries N so much, we don't know why.

The bottle at the end it's what N and G wanted before all of this started and their reward for understanding that there's no easy way out, no sense or design possible and particularly for ignoring all of it.

And maybe that's the reason we all are so conspiratorial, paranoid, despondent and opaque, because we know that it's unavoidable, but we have to choose to ignore it to avoid the worst

Serhiy Krykun - made a very good illustration - it also fits my impressions of the story:

Rignolo made me doodle it while on the verge of falling asleep. An illustration to "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti.

Nicole Cushing - @NicoleCushing:

"...countless stars stared down like the dead eyes of sculptured faces."

"The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti in NOCTUARY, magnificently dark.

And then I discovered that I myself had already made some illustrations for the story, based on real photographs of Rotterdam:

It was well into evening and for some time Nolon had been been seated at a small table in a kind of park. This was a long, thin stretch of land - vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass - bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth below. ... There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf.

" ... I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?"

“The face,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It was right there, about the size of, I don’t know, a window or a picture hanging on a wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant’s mask."

Ian Davey - @unapersson:

Two men visit a landscape artist whose work has an otherworldly life of its own, and they help him reach its source.

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 10

Using OpenAI to illustrate my favorite Thomas Ligotti story, and to make my inner pictures visible for you. And for myself. First I fed the story text directly into the AI. Now I make my own description of what happens in the story. This works better.

This is the final part. You can read, and see, the whole story here:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

"Exactly. Now let's just take advantage of the situation and drink our drinks before moving on."

"I'm not sure I want to," said Grissul.

"I'm not sure we have any say in the matter," replied Nolon.

"Yes, but — "

"Shhh. Tonight's our night."

Across the street a shadow fidgeted in the frame of a lighted window. 

An evening breeze moved through the little park, and the green glow of a candleflame flickered upon two silent faces.

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 9

Using OpenAI to illustrate my favorite Thomas Ligotti story, and to make my inner pictures visible for you. And for myself. First I fed the story text directly into the AI. Now I make my own description of what happens in the story. This works better.

You can read, and see, the whole story here:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

"Something like that would have happened sooner or later," Nolon replied.

"He was too much the dreamer, let's be honest. Nothing he said made any sense to speak of, and he was always saying more than he should.

Who knows who heard what."

"I've never heard screaming like that."

"It's over," said Nolon quietly.

"But what could have happened to him?" asked Grissul, gripping the shallow glass before him, apparently without awareness of the move.

"Only he could know that for certain," answered Nolon, who mirrored Grissul's move and seemingly with the same absence of conscious intent.

"And why did he scream that way, why did he say it was all a trick, a mockery of his dreams, that 'filthy thing in the earth'?

Why did he scream not to be 'buried forever in that strange, horrible mask'?"

"Maybe he became confused," said Nolon. Nervously, he began pouring from the thin bottle into each of their glasses.

"And then he cried out for someone to kill him. But that's not what he wanted at all, just the opposite. He was afraid to you-know-what. So why would he — "

"Do I really have to explain it all, Mr Grissul?"

"I suppose not," Grissul said very softly, looking ashamed. "He was trying to get away, to get away with something."

"That's right," said Nolon just as softly, looking around. "Because he wanted to escape from here without having to you-know-what. How would that look?"

"Set an example."

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 1

 I tried to use OpenAI to illustrate this great story:

You can read, and see, the whole story here:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

“So I was going to tell you,” Grissul began, “that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there’s a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don’t know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?”

“This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn’t planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don’t know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. 

Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. I’m telling you, Mr. Nolon, it was right in the ground. It appeared to be a part of it, like—”

“The face,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It was right there, about the size of, I don’t know, a window or a picture hanging on a wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant’s mask. Only the edges of the face seemed not so much buried as, well, woven I guess you would say, right into the ground. The eyes were closed, not shut closed—it didn’t seem to be dead—but relaxed. The same with the lips, very heavy lips rubbing up against each other. Even complexion, ashy gray, and soft cheeks. They looked soft, I mean, because I didn’t actually touch them in any way. I think it was asleep.”