Are We Tomorrow Yet ? (The Other Face)

Are We Tomorrow Yet ? (The One Face)

Lost and recovered things - November

This month I have lost - at least
A black hat, a red scarf
The hat was woolly, and itchy, and stinky
The scarf was a part of last Christmas costume
A bright yellow jacket which I wore on my bike
A pair of sunglasses, from our trip in America
The same month I celebrated
The return of a beloved book
Hadrian's Memoirs - or Memories
For the French title is ambiguous
Since then, my bold head exposed, my throat exposed
My eyes unshaded
Blending in the dark I have
Reveled, carefully
For, as it is said on page one hundred and eighty
Any happiness is a masterpiece.

The Book Sill - Mémoires d'Hadrien

I bought it four years ago. I started reading it more than six months ago, after it had mysteriously made its journey from a shelf back row onto my bedside table. Then, as I reached page 107, it disappeared.

Two months ago, I met a friend of mine in a pub, for a session of what he likes to call "Viby Thursdays" - a guarantee that you will have to call in sick the day after. As I was handling him a cosmopolitan (we were out with our respective halves), he threw a book across the table to me.

"There you go. That's not English. I don't know who else would have dared pollute my car back seat with such pagan object".

Mémoires d'Hadrien landed in a pool of English ale, on the table of a bar near Angel station, North London.

I have no words for this book - not yet. I have not finished reading it. I cannot start expressing the awe that rise in me as I slowly step through. The only way for me to make it justice is to gather here a patchwork of extracts. The list will no doubt lengthen, as I read and re-read it.

All references are to the Folio 1974 edition.

"Construire, c'est collaborer avec la terre : c'est mettre une marque humaine sur un paysage qui en sera modifié à jamais ; c'est contribuer aussi à ce lent changement qui est la vie des villes" (p140)

"Mais notre art (j'entends celui des Grecs) a choisi de s'en tenir à l'homme. Nous seuls avons su montrer dans un corps immobile la force et l'agilité latentes ; nous seuls avons fait d'un front lisse l'équivalent d'une pensée sage. Je suis comme nos sculpteurs : l"humain me satisfait ; j'y trouve tout, jusqu'à l'éternel. La forêt tant aimée se ramasse pour moi tout entière dans l'image du centaure ; la tempête ne respire jamais mieux que dans l'écharpe ballonnée d'une déesse marine [...]" (p146)

"[...] les beaux vers où le vieux Terpandre a défini en trois mots l'idéal spartiate : La Force, la Justice, les Muses." (p149)

"Une barque à fond presque plat me transporta dans l'île de Bretagne [...] j'apercevais ici pour la première fois un Neptune plus chaotique que le nôtre, un monde liquide infini. J'avais lu dans Plutarque une légende de navigateurs concernant une île située dans ces parages qui avoisinent la Mer Ténébreuse, et où les Olympiens victorieux auraient depuis des siècles refoulé les Titans vaincus. Ces grands captifs du roc et de la vague, flagellés à jamais par un océan sans sommeil, incapables de dormir, mais sans cesse occupés à rêver, continueraient à opposer à l'ordre olympien leur violence, leur angoisse, leur désir perpétuellement crucifié. Je retrouvais dans ce mythe placé aux confins du monde les théories des philosophes que j'avais faites miennes : chaque homme a éternellement à choisir, au cours de sa vie brève, entre l'espoir infatigable et la sage absence d'espérance, entre les délices du chaos et celles de la stabilité, entre le Titan et l'Olympien. A choisir entre eux, ou à réussir à les accorder un jour l'un à l'autre." (p151)

"Chaque glissement nous ramenait à ce point qui, parce que par hasard nous nous y sommes trouvés, nous paraît un centre."
P163

"Depuis les nuits de mon enfance, où le bras levé de Marullinus m'indiquait les constellations, la curiosité des choses du ciel ne m'a pas quitté. Durant les veilles forcées des camps, j'ai contemplé la lune courant à travers les nuages des cieux barbares ; plus tard, par de claires nuits attiques, j'ai écouté l'astronome Théron de Rhodes m'expliquer son système du monde ; étendu sur le pont d'un navire, en pleine mer Egée, j'ai regardé la lente oscillation du mat se déplacer parmi les étoiles, aller de l'œil rouge du Taureau au pleur des Pléiades, de Pégase au Cygne : j'ai répondu de mon mieux aux questions naïves et graves du jeune homme qui contemplait avec moi ce même ciel. Ici, à la Villa, j'ai fait construire un observatoire, dont la maladie m'empêche aujourd'hui de gravir les marches. Une fois dans ma vie, j'ai fait plus : j'ai offert aux constellations le sacrifice d'une nuit tout entière. Ce fut après ma visite à Osroès, durant la traversée du désert syrien. Couché sur le dos, les yeux bien ouverts, abandonnant pour quelques heures tout souci humain, je me suis livré du soir à l'aube à ce monde de flamme et de cristal. Ce fut le plus beau de mes voyages. Le grand astre de la constellation de la Lyre, étoile polaire des hommes qui vivront quand depuis quelques dizaines de milliers d'années nous ne serons plus, resplendissait sur ma tête. Les Gémeaux luisaient faiblement dans les dernières lueurs du couchant ; le Serpent précédait le Sagittaire ; l'Aigle montait vers le zénith, toutes ailes ouvertes, et à ses pieds cette constellation non désignée encore par les astronomes, et à laquelle j'ai donné depuis le plus cher des noms. La nuit, jamais tout à fait aussi complète que le croient ceux qui vivent et qui dorment dans les chambres, se fit plus obscure, puis plus claire. Les feux, qu'on avait laissé brûler pour effrayer les chacals, s'éteignirent ; ce tas de charbons ardents me rappela mon grand-père debout dans sa vigne, et ses prophéties devenues désormais présent, et bientôt passé. J'ai essayé de m'unir au divin sous bien des formes; j'ai connu plus d'une extase; il en est d'atroces; et d'autres d'une bouleversante douceur. Celle de la nuit syrienne fut étrangement lucide. Elle inscrivit en moi les mouvements célestes avec une précision à laquelle aucune observation partielle ne m'aurait jamais permis d'atteindre. Je sais exactement, à l'heure où je t'écris, quelles étoiles passent ici, à Tibur, au-dessus de ce plafond orné de stucs et de peintures précieuses, et ailleurs, là-bas, sur une tombe. Quelques années plus tard, la mort allait devenir l'objet de ma contemplation constante, la pensée à laquelle je donnais toutes celles des forces de mon esprit que n'absorbait pas l'Etat. Et qui dit mort dit aussi le monde mystérieux auquel il se peut qu'on accède par elle. Après tant de réflexions et d'expériences parfois condamnables, j'ignore encore ce qui se passe derrière cette tenture noire. Mais la nuit syrienne représente ma part consciente d'immortalité." (pp162 to 164)

"Saisons alcyonniennes; soltices de mes jours... Loin de surfaire mon bonheur à distance, je dois lutter pour n'en pas affadir l'image ; son souvenir même est maintenant trop fort pour moi. Plus sincère que la plupart des hommes, j'avoue sans ambages les causes secrètes de cette félicité : ce calme si propice aux travaux et aux disciplines de l'esprit me semble l'un des plus beaux effets de l'amour. Et je m'étonne que ces joies si précaires, si rarement parfaites au cours d'une vie humaine, sous quelque aspect d'ailleurs que  nous les ayons recherchées ou reçues, soient considérées avec tant de méfiance par de prétendus sages, qu'ils en redoutent l'accoutumance et l'excès au lieu d'en redouter le manque et la perte, qu'ils passent à tyranniser leurs sens un temps mieux employé à régler ou à embellir leur âme. A cette époque je mettais à affermir mon bonheur, à le goûter, à le juger aussi, cette attention constante que j'avais toujours donnée aux moindres détails de mes actes ; et qu'est la volupté elle-même, sinon un moment d'attention passionnée du corps ? Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre : la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourdeur le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit. Le mien n'est responsable en rien de celles de mes imprudences qui plus tard l'ont brisé : tant que j'ai agi dans son sens, j'ai été sage. Je crois encore qu'il eût été possible à un homme plus sage que moi d'être heureux jusqu'à sa mort." (pp179 and 180)

"La nuit qui suivit ces célébrations, du haut d'une terrasse, je regardai brûler Rome. Ces feux de joie valaient bien les incendies allumés par Néron : ils étaient presque aussi terribles. Rome : le creuset, mais aussi la fournaise, et le métal qui bout, le marteau, mais aussi l'enclume, la preuve visible des changements et des recommencements de l'histoire, l'un des lieux au monde où l'homme aura le plus tumultueusement vécu. La conflagration de Troie, d'où un fugitif s'était échappé, emportant avec lui son vieux père, son jeune fils, et ses Lares, aboutissait ce soir-là à ces grandes flammes de fête. Je songeais aussi, avec une sorte de terreur sacrée, aux embrasements de l'avenir. Ces millions de vies passées, présentes et futures, ces édifices récents nés d'édifices anciens et suivis eux-mêmes d'édifices à naître, me semblaient se succéder dans le temps comme des vagues ; par hasard, c'était à mes pieds cette nuit-là que ces grandes houles venaient se briser. Je passe sur ces moments de délire où la pourpre impériale, l'étoffe sainte, et que si rarement j'acceptais de porter, fut jetée sur les épaules de la créature qui devenait pour moi mon Génie : il me convenait, certes, d'opposer ce rouge profond à l'or pâle d'une nuque, mais surtout d'obliger mon Bonheur, ma Fortune, ces entités incertaines et vagues, à s'incarner dans cette forme si terrestre, à acquérir la chaleur et le poids rassurant de la chair. Les murs solides de ce Palatin, que j'habitais si peu, mais que je venais de reconstruire, oscillaient comme les flancs d'une barque ; les tentures écartées pour laisser entrer la nuit romaine étaient celles d'un pavillon de poupe ; les cris de la foule étaient le bruit du vent dans les cordages. L'énorme écueil aperçu au loin dans l'ombre, les assises gigantesques de mon tombeau qu'on commençait à ce moment d'élever sur les bords du Tibre, ne m'inspiraient ni terreur, ni regret, ni vaine meditation sur la brièveté de la vie." (pp186-187)

"La mémoire de la plupart des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, oú gisent sans honneur des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir."
P228

"Les siècles encore contenus dans le sein opaque du temps passeraient par milliers sur cette tombe sans lui rendre l'existence, mais aussi sans ajouter à sa mort, sans empêcher qu'il eût été."
P229

"Je passai tout un soir à discuter avec lui de l'injonction qui consiste à aimer autrui comme soi-même; elle est trop contraire à la nature humaine pour être sincèrement obéir par le vulgaire, qui n'aimera jamais que soi, et ne convient nullement au sage, qui ne s'aime pas particulièrement soi-même."
P240

"Les pédants s'irritent toujours qu'on sache aussi bien qu'eux leur étroit métier;"
P241

"L'heure de l'impatience est passée ; au point où j'en suis, le désespoir serait d'aussi mauvais goût que l'espérance. J'ai renoncé à brusquer ma mort."
P303

"Si j'ai choisi d'écrire ces Mémoires d'Hadrien à la première personne, c'est pour me passer le pus possible de tout intermédiaire, fût-ce de moi-même. Hadrien pouvait parler de sa vie plus fermement et plus subtilement que moi."
P330, notes

"[...] le graphique d'une vie humaine [...] ne se compose pas, quoi qu'on dise, d'une horizontale et de deux perpendiculaires, mais bien plutôt de trois lignes sinueuses, étirées à l'infini, sans cesse rapprochées et divergeant sans cesse : ce qu'un homme a cru être, ce qu'il a voulu être, et ce qu'il fut."
P332, notes

Language and confidence

Trusting language took me years. Then, just when I was starting to get a good enough grasp on it to feel confident about the meanings it was conveying, I moved to the UK. 

I had to start again the painful journey through the opacity of words and sentences to access what people meant.

Ten years later, I have found that it was possible to trust language -to an extend. One should never lose sight of the moving, uncertain, ill-defined nature of its relationship to its referent - the outside world. Words meanings change, with time, with context, depending on who is using these words, or how many times they have been used, depending also on who hears them and how he receives them.

Recognising the fluctuating nature of language is a skill, not a gift. It needs to be acquired. It is however so fundamental that it is almost never taught. This is a great wrong. Only by getting familiar with this nature can one gain confidence when listening, or reading. Understanding one another is a much harder task than what people think. It can only be achieved if we stop reacting to what the other person says, and start listening, very, very carefully.

"[...] for the theatre is a great emphasizer - especially to young people, who have no great experience in life by which they might judge the experiences they encounter in literature; and who have no great confidence in language, neither in using it nor in hearing it. The theatre, Dan quite rightly claims, dramatizes both the experience and the confidence in language that young people - such as our students - lack. Students of the age of Dan's, and mine, have no great feeling - for example - for wit, wit simply passes them by, or else they take it to be an elderly form of snobbery; a mere showing off with the language that they use (at best) tentatively. Wit isn't tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize on-stage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; on-stage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is."

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Black Swan edition, London, 1990, p:539

I wish to always see...

I wish to always see
The beauty of the tilleul tree
Under a wet autumn
Its bark dark ebony
Its leaves a blazing gold
Alike some Egyptian vessel of gods against
St Paul couleur blanc-gris

Hypnopompicture11

I heard say               that a man
Could not stab himself to death
                So I tried

I found it untrue

John Milton Passage

John Milton Passage is in a state of perfection
Its cream facade stretched in straight lines
So beautifully angled their ninety degrees
Moving as I go by in meaningless fashion

John Milton Passage is so short
There is just enough space for a long cold white hall
Framed by four pillows each as sharp as the law
That four bushes ornate, green tough spheres cut tight

In John Milton Passage its unique empty hall
Moves with the pictures of three giant screens
On the left on the right charts and figures compete
The one in the middle reports child abduction

White John Milton Passage cares little for this crime
It's enough for a street to keep straight in the wind
Between two stiff bushes, against the first sublime
Pillow, wearing brown, a single woman blinks

She smokes. She blinks. The smoke curls in the wind
Soon explodes in a cloud, tenuous like a breath
In John Milton Passage a woman breathes to her death
Her brown coat, her big breast, her old face, all, sagging.

Albalablanch 2

As a universe, Albalablanch is the most laughable, insignificant, pointless universe ever made. Not that there was ever any other universe, mind you. The point of a universe, what we might call its claim to glory, is to be unique. As such, Albalablanch is no exception. It is unique, and alone, in the vast desert of nothingness that surrounds it. True, its size is considerably smaller than the size of a universe that would be made of, say, an estimated ten exponential eighty tiny tiny balls which would all gravitate around each other at a distance between ten thousand and one exponential one billion times their size. Such an absurb universe would surpass in size Albalablanch by a factor so great as to be meaningless. But, come to it, if all the inexplicable space between the tiny balls was collapsed, it is not beyond imagination -it could even be within algebraic laws- that it fit into a tower fourty kilometres wide by twenty kilometres high.

Let's thus consider Albalablanch as the compacted version of a universe of tiny balls - this, of course, purely for ease of understanding. In any case, Albalablanch remains what it is : a universe unique in space and time as only a universe can be, and as such, incomparable. The question remains as to how such an object can be surrounded by a desert. More to the point, how come such a solipsist entity can be buried under the level of anything up to a quarter of its height. This is a very good question indeed, so interesting and difficult a question that, to this day, asking it in Albalablanch remains the only offence which will grant you the death penalty.

London leaves and I stay

Sur Bow Churchyard un rayon de soleil passe
Il frappe les carrés rouges de l'église de briques
Sous son porche imposant, plain-cintre de pierre blanche
Une grosse lanterne pend
Elle est en verre épais et en fer forgé blanc
Dans un style qui rappelle celui d'une acienda
Comme le faisait l'Art Nouveau
En 1910, dans les vieilles rues de Lisbonne
Tandis qu'à Paris une poésie fleurissait
Eblouissante
C'est dans ces années que furent écrit tous les textes que j'aime
Les Pâcques à New York et puis la Jeanne de France
Et Zone, tout Alcool
Et Pierre Reverdy depuis Narbonne
Arrivait dans le nord
Dans les journaux on lisait Cornélius, la magnifique Guerre du Feu
Le fantôme bleu Fantômas
Sur Bow Churchyard autour de la dentelle d'une lampe
En fer forgé blanc dansent tous mes fantômes
Chansons, écrivains, mondes qui se bousculent
Sur quelques mètres dallés entre un fleuriste et moi
Sous son toit de toile verte que tiennent des poteaux minces
Le fleuriste, seul, travaille sans relâche
Il assemble en six mouvements un bouquet de roses blanches
De roses roses et de quatre fougères
Il en assure les tiges d'un petit cordon vert
Et encône le tout d'un plastique transparent
Puis il prend une feuille de papier crépon pourpre
Y enroule son bouquet
Avant de le poser dans un haut vase en fer blanc
Il y pique un gros lys crème
Le vent s'engouffre sous sa tente faisant claquer le toit comme une voile
Car Londres n'est pas bien loin de la mer
Le vent couche de beaux iris, la longue crête des glaïeuls
Arrache aux boules de neige quelques flocons de pétales
Il neige en septembre sur Bow Church la Rouge
Aujourd'hui mon père a soixante-neuf ans
Tout le ciel de Londres vogue, bleu et blanc
Ouvert comme un sourire quelque part vers le sud
Le vent frais (brisk) est plein de l'odeur d'un seul lys
Même l'ombre du platane aux formes noueuses
S'étire vers le sud
Septembre en attendant que les beaux jours reviennent
Tout Londres veut émigrer
Et mon coeur toujours plein de l'appel des voyages
Cette fois me dit: reste
Londres est un port: reste
C'est un navire: reste
Sur son pont si tu restes tu t'en iras toujours
Car Londres tout ouvert s'emplit du vent du monde
Et j'entends toutes les langues
Dans les cafés les serveurs ont épinglé sur leur poitrine
De petits drapeaux d'acier peint
Espagne, Brésil, Grèce, Paris, Auckland, Roumains
Ces Roumains qu'on chasse en France
Qu'on appelle Gitans
Tziganes, Romanichelles
Qu'on insulte, qu'on accuse, dont on dit qu'ils sont sales
Et voleurs, et menteurs, et puis quoi d'autre encore
Qu'ils ne se rasent jamais ou qu'ils ouvrent des gorges
La nuit
Qu'on juge, qu'on condamne et qu'on renvoie chez eux
Ces Roumains qu'on Interdit comme on a Interdit
           Les Juifs
           Les Indiens d'Amérique
           Les Noirs de Partout
Ces Roumains à Londres viennent et je pleure
La honte de mon pays
Debout sur Bow Churchyard dans l'odeur d'un seul lys
Où le vent tourbillonne
Où sur la crête des glaïeuls un toit de toile se gonfle
Où les nuages filent tout joyeux vers le sud
Où la ville comme un navire titube sous l'automne
Je pleure mon petit port apeuré
Mon mouillage que le monde emmerde
Ma ville que tous les vents évitent
Aujourd'hui comme sonne le chant du voyage
Je reste
Ici
Et j'attends passer la Terre.

Albalablanch 1

As a tower, Albalablanch is something of a monstruousity, an architectural marvel and a maintenance nightmare. Its sheer size would offer ample space for its population on one level only. Yet, Albalablanch has a recorded seventy of them, spread over a height of some twenty kilometres.

It would be wrong to infer that each level is separated from the one above by approximately 330 meters. The average height is of little significance here. While some levels, particularly the middle ones, can have up to three kilometres of sky, good-sized hills and deep lakes as well as meteorological phenomenons, other levels, specially the lower ones, form a mere system of caves, some so low that the population living there has to stoop. An ideal place for a prison, would you think, and you couldn't be more wrong. For reasons specific to Albalablanch the prison has been set up on the highest level, with its innumerable trapholes and its open roof.

But enough on this topic. Everything in good time. We will come back on the social configuration of the tower. This fascinating subject will unveil as we proceed with our story. As for now, let's stick to figures : twenty kilometres high, seventy levels (more than half of which underground for the tower only rises fifteen kilometres above the desert). Its walls are so thick that they shelter their own indigenous population - a population with a bad reputation, not so much because it lives in the margins (Albalablanch has many different margins which are a constant threat to the cohesion of the middle class) than because it is the only one with - limited - access to the truth.

The maintenance of its walls should really be everybody's concern. But for most of us, sharing a responsibility means that this responsibility is not ours. As a result, after millennia of existence, the walls of Albalablanch have grown into a weird compound prone to geological accidents and reshuffling, helped by the fact that, fifteen kilometres above ground, the climatic conditions are widely different from the warm stable environment of its lowest caves. The stress induced on the fabric of the tower is considerable. It releases here and there in thundering cracks, causing in the population closest to its walls epidemics of deafness. This in turn is often used as an excuse by the person who doesn't want to entertain social conversation : a couple of shouted "WHAT ?" and a pointing at one's ears stop any inquiry. "He was probably thunderstruck", people whisper, shrugging. And they leave you in peace : being thunderstruck means that you live close to the walls and that, therefore, you will most likely turn out to be some sort of weirdo.

Why I prefer London to Paris - Reason 3

On rainy days London sails by

Ship of iron and stone
Hooked to the clouds by Wharf and Shard
Soaked to the last of its rats bone.

I pass a bridge wide as a deck
Choked by winds at war
London wobbles, this drunken wreck !
Its empty streets ajar.

Hypnopompicture 10

Sun and rain
Mere stain
On a still sleeping mind
Deaf and blind
Cannot find
Their way to an escaping train

Albalablanch 0

Albalablanch is a good fourty kilometers wide. It is a respectable size for a town. It is a monstruous size for a tower. It is a tad narrow for a universe.

As a town it has everything one would expect: prisons, police stations, morgues, cemeteries, crematoriums, plus all the industries gravitating around the business of death, violent or not (non violent deaths have been recently reported on the increase): weapon factories and shops, fast transportation, cigarettes, alcohol, a few drugs, hospitals. Unexpectedly, given its particular shape and situation, Albalablanch also has the kind of old, heavy infrastructure which takes a toll in the tens of thousands every time it collapses - and it collapses every other week.

Of course it has all the amenities to produce and care for death's main ingredient: life. Hence a substantial human population -around thirty million as I write-, profusion of cattle on the top levels, fields in the lower levels (the natural weather being so unreliable), schools and offices (whose main purpose is to provide  favourable ground for mating), maternity wards and nurseries.

Albalablanch even has these little facilities humans are so fond of: clothes shops, food shops, houses and flats, hotels (entirely dedicated to business or sex and at their most succcessfull when combining both), places where humans can indulge in their bodily needs: bars and museums to keep the brain busy, sex-shops and prostitutes for a quick and easy fuck, millions of toilets to satisfy the pleasure of emptying their bowels, Churches, Mosques, Temples and Synagogues for the few remaining souls.

In short, Albalablanch could be described as a vibrant city by an outside observer, were there an outside left to observe it from.

On modern gods

"Whoever starts from economy as a non deductible fact, initial cause of everything and unique reality which cannot be questioned, transforms economy into its own product, in a thing, makes it an autonomous historical factor and falls into economy fetishism."

Karel Kosík, die Dialektik des Konkreten, Frankfurt, 1967, quoted in HR Jauss, Pour Une Esthétique de la réception, Gallimard Tel, Paris, 1978
(1974), p. 35 (my translation)

Hypnopompicture 9

Standards of Summer !
The Earth shakes under the Sun
Worms, snakes scrape its
Hot burned moist skin
And the rusted glories of man
Rise into the sky

Hypnopompicture 8

Summer anger / anger summer

Colours cut like shadows

The dark sharp blade of shadows

I wake up on a perfectly normal day.

I get ready for work. I walk out of the house to the train station. My head starts listing down what needs to be done, who needs to be called, which paperwork needs scribbling and sending, which problems need addressing and among all this, what I can reasonably expect to do on the day. I start choosing - tasks, ideas, budget, products, colours, materials, providers.

Suddenly life overwhelms me - stronger than me, it uses me as a tool. The me that says I is seized by this feeling : there are fewer and fewer chinks in my life. I am living inside them.

And literature comes to the rescue. How many times has it done that now ? Again this morning : in an essay published in 1954, Jean-Pierre Richard dissects Flaubert's mind through his writing:

"Et s’il est en effet un choix de Flaubert, c’est le choix de ne pas choisir, ou, plus négativement encore, le refus de la vie dans la mesure où elle oblige à se choisir. Mais ce refus engage Flaubert dans une très authentique expérience de la liberté ; l’être y vit dans l’impossibilité de jamais adhérer à lui-même. Pouvant être tout, il n’est rien. « Pas plus là-dessus que sur la question principale je n’ai d’opinion à moi » écrit-il lorsqu’on lui propose de publier des extraits de Saint Antoine. « Je ne sais que penser, je suis comme l’âne de Buridan… Voilà que, dans la question la plus importante peut-être d’une vie d’artiste…, je m’annule, je me fonds, et sans efforts hélas ! car je fais tout ce que je peux pour avoir un avis quelconque –et j’en suis dénué autant que possible… Je me déciderais à pile ou face et je n’aurais pas de regret du choix quel qu’il fût » (Flaubert, Correspondance, II, p : 320)  (1)"

"And if indeed there is a choice from Flaubert, it is the choice of not choosing, or, even more negatively, the refusal of life in the sense that life forces us to choose. But this refusal involves Flaubert in a very authentic experience of freedom; the being living in it cannot possibly ever adhere to himself. Because he can be everything, he is nothing. “On this as well as on the main question, I have no personal opinion” Flaubert writes when offered to publish extracts of The Temptation of St Antoine. “I know not what to think, I am like Buridan’s ass... Suddenly, in what may be the most important question in the life of an artist..., I offset myself, I melt, and effortlessly alas ! for I do whatever I can to have an opinion, any opinion –and I am as opinionless as it is possible to be... I would flip a coin to decide and I would have no regret about the choice, whichever it might be.” "  (1)

Dilution is a feeling. It is a state of the being. It is a problem. I create and tell stories in an attempt to make sense of my own life. But who needs it ? There is no need for sense in order to survive. There is no need for consistency. There is no need for choice. There is only the need for food.

So then, what should I have for lunch ?

============

(1) Jean-Pierre Richard, Littérature et Sensation, Seuil, 1954, p : 193 (my translation)

Why I prefer London to Paris - Reason 2

Nunhead Cemetery, up the hill
Flowers open from the graves
On my bike, through the rain
I take in their fragrance
Mixed with flesh decomposed
Like the whiff of an island,
Cold, from the Caribbeans

Why I prefer London to Paris - Reason 1

I stop and watch big barges sail up the Thames from the estuary.
Their wake is brown with silt.
Seagulls follow them; they fly over the City.
I can hear them shriek.

The Book Sill - The City and the City 2

The City and The City however makes no attempt at hammering any truth. It is not a parable. If anything, it works as a metaphor of itself.

For Borlù, truth comes as a revelation, the removing of a veil: there is a before, there is an after. As Rousseau-like as this might sound, there is a fondamental difference between Mieville's novel and La Nouvelle Héloïse. For Rousseau, there are degrees in revelations. The first revelation denounces the subjectivity of mistakes. It shows the face of the statue behind the veil. But it does not propose anything to replace the illusion it destroys. The reality this first revelation highlights is nothing but another subjectivity. The face so suddenly exposed does not have more to do with some objectivity of the world. "Things", "objects", "facts", whichever word we might use to designate what is not us, are nothing more than a framework on which we base our vision. It does not matter which degree of lucidity we think we reach, this first degree revelation only peals another layer of an illusion which seems to have no core.

Mieville does not go further than this. To go further would be, like Rousseau did, to dive into the inner being, to open to this being, to enjoy its immediacy as a truth. The doxa of twenty-first century Europe, to which Mieville belongs, goes against the mysticism of a Rousseau. We fought -we are still fighting- to get rid off it. There is no truth. There cannot be any truth. There is just the Pealing -and then death.

From this basis, Mieville draws a fascinating picture. Since there is no truth, since there is only the endless pealing of illusion, then everything we know for certain is a mere understanding of the world (this is much more in line with the Zeitgeist). This understanding, in turn, shapes our perception. To us the world is like these pictures which can be seen two ways (a vase or two profiles looking at each other; a landscape or the face of an old man): it is almost impossible to see both at the same time. Our brain seems to allow one and block the other, as if there was a one-way switch to it. Here I am reminded of Pratchett's idea of belief and how most people cannot see what they do not accept: only a handful of "happy few" can see the Gods, or Death, all entities created by human faith and roaming around us. The rest of us is blind to anything we think unacceptable.

The story of The City and the City is this: a man, brought up to "unsee", learns to de-unsee. Some event in his life forces him to unveil the statue and look into its grinning face. But what is the meaning of this face? What is the meaning of the world suddenly jumping to Borlù's eyes? Mieville's story does not answer this. Its ultimate conclusion is that, once the veil has been lifted, once the light we shed on the world has changed, it is impossible for us to come back to what we were.

And this is where The City and the City works as a metaphor of itself: once you close the book after reading the last page (2), you start looking for what you usually unsee -what you have been taught to ignore, to believe to be impossible, non-existant, meaningless, albeit being in front of your eyes. It takes humility to undertake such a task. More importantly, it takes courage. For there is one thing to say about the kind of enlightenment Borlù goes through: it isolates and it hurts.

--------
(1) See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l'obstacle, Gallimard, Tel, Ch IV, 1971, p.92
(2) A friend recently told me that she had contracted the habit of not finishing the books she reads. "Nowadays I tend to stop reading a book ten or twenty pages from the end. I've always found the endings pointless anyway. What's really interesting is the build-up. After that it's always the same story".

Ah, why Eric, why...

I love Eric Chevillard (see L'Autofictif in the links on the right-hand side of this blog) (well, if you can't read French, I can't help it). His daily posts are like praline chocolates, the taste of which stays with you for an hour or two and makes the world a warmer place. Today, however, this delicate and funny writer committed the unforgivable.

"Il était rare que nous entendions le son de sa voix", says his post number 1554, thus failing to use the rarer and more proper imperfect subjunctive "Il était rare que nous entendissions [...]".

This, for you English readers, is nothing, is snobbery. This, for me, is the equivalent of walking on a quiet beach at dawn, spotting a green, thin, fragile, translucent little eggshell rested there on the sand, tiny miracle laid down by the mighty hands of the tide, and deciding to stamp on it.

Lucky you are, barbarians, to be blind to this treasure, and ignorant of its annihilation.

The Book Sill - The City and the City

Mieville's universes are mutilated. The Scar and Perdido Street Station are stories of a wounded world. The City and the City is the story of a town cut in two.


Mieville has also a taste for realism, or so it seems. His characters are all dealing with every day needs. Feed, drink, fuck, sleep. Bad days at work. Inner dilemmas, fear, cowardice. Confusion. Betrayal. Unrewarded heroism. Decisions made in a state of emergency, with incomplete information. Mistakes. Angers and frustrations. However strange, his eras are always our times, his places somehow our world.


Beyond this realism, Mieville writes cross genre novels. Perdido Street Station was a mixture of steampunk, fantastic and anticipation. The City and the City is a detective novel as well as a dystopia, set in alternative history. The detective novel of our times, some say, is like the knight romance of the 12th century: it embodies the quest for the truth. 900 years ago, to find it one could only follow the hidden path marked for him by God and overcome Its tests. Today one can only sets to solve a mystery for which there are too few clues.


In The City and the City Mieville's hero Borlù finds little truth. Together with him we learn that a young student got killed for seeking the truth. That the taboo organising life in the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma is carefully maintained by some hidden power calling itself Breach. That Breach is breaching everyday in order to keep the taboo safe and going. But how did this taboo come into existence, how it manages to survive the modern world with its open access to information, what real benefits are gained from this situation, all this is hardly developed.


The City and the City might be Mieville's shortest novel so far. It is also a novel of little content. The characters are overall quite forgettable. Borlù reminds me of Pepe Carvalho in that he seems to sink into hopelessness and depression as he progresses in his inquiry. His findings lead him nowhere: there is nothing he can do to bring the culprits to court. The plot is a known mix of solving crime, exposing social backgrounds and unveiling political conspiracies. The fictional geo-politico-strategical net built by Mieville could be inspired by many situations: today's Jerusalem, Berlin in the 70's, current Koreas or even any modern city where rich and poor populations seem to live side by side and ignore each other's presence.


In The City and the City, Mieville has little to say to us that we do not already know. Actually he has only one thing to say: we might be able to sew back together what was once mutilated, but that mending, that accession to a more complete life, will not restore any ancient order. It will set us apart, apart from the people we know, apart from our old self, our past. This however, Mieville says with such a force that the story stays in the mind like a parable; it changes the way we look at our own world.

The Priest Cat

"My Lord,
Every day, every minute of my life I have served You. I have never doubted. In all my life I have followed Your law. In return, You have answered my prayers.
Today I implore You, in Your kindness, to spare young Joe Abbott. His family is poor. He is their only consolation.
Of course his father Tim drinks a bit too much, a bit too often. He gets angry when he does so but that is only the addiction talking. He is a slave, my Lord, a slave of alcohol.
You always had a good ear for the slaves.
His mother Sophie believes in You. You know how few people truly believe in You. Sophie, like me, has never doubted. For her my Lord, for her, I implore You, spare the life of her young son. Spare the life of Joe Abbott".

The priest was kneeling in his bedroom. He should not have been praying here. He should have gone to the Lord's house, the adjacent church. But this was the core of winter, the church was freezing and dark. There was no money to pay for the heating. There was no money to pay for the light. There was not even enough money to replace the candles.

Where he was praying, he kept telling himself, did not really matter. He knew that if he prayed from the bottom of a pure heart, the Lord would hear him. Besides, his bedroom was a decent place. From the praying chair he looked around him.

With its walls painted in a uniform brown, its dark stone floor, its unique window, the bedroom was monastic. The only luxury was a small wooden bedside table, his share of their mother's inheritance. He had covered the fine marquetry with a long, pale green cotton cloth. On it was a boxwood sprig and a silver dish of holy water which surface was shivering softly.

The bedroom rested in complete silence, the sound of the main road muffled by the distance and the almost closed window. A mural lamp, its glass shade deafened with a dark cloth, provided a weak gleam, leaving most of the room in the dark.

This, he felt, was appropriate for prayer. This... bareness, this nakedness, this soft silence. There was nothing to distract him from his own thoughts, all turned towards the Lord. Sometimes, on nights like this, he could feel His breath entering the room.

There was a scratching noise behind him. The cat was getting hungry. This spoiled the serenity of the moment. Why did the animal always have to be hungry at the wrong moment, right now, during his evening prayers? With the day over, his poor and sick all in bed, any preparation for the mass done, his mind was at peace, his soul rested and unhindered, this was the best moment. His prayers were always the purest and the strongest at night.

He had had the cat for many years. It used to belong to his sister. One day, just after leaving her husband, she had brought it to the priory. "This is only temporary", she had said. "I am between houses at the moment, I can't carry her around, the poor thing is stressed enough as it is. Can you keep her for a few weeks? I'll have her back as soon as I can."

She never came back. A few weeks later she had met a man from Rio, fallen in love, left her job and taken the first plane for Brazil where she had "started on a new life". "What new life?" he thought. "The Lord gives us one life. Only one. No matter how often it breaks, how often we mend it, it is always the same life."

He didn't approve of her sister. For what he knew of them, he didn't approve of Brazilians either. He didn't approve of divorces, or pets. They were nothing but self-indulgence and distraction.

He hadn't seen her in twelve years. The cat was getting old. So was he. Soon it would die.

The scratching noise came back, a bit louder, a bit longer. The priest sighed. Was it only him, or did all this scratching start a bit earlier every day too? The quicker he responded, the more he gave it, the greedier the animal became. It seemed insatiable.

"Perhaps I should just wait. Let it scratch. Feed it every day at exactly the same time and ignore its little theatre. Perhaps that would teach it discipline."

But he could not pray with the scratching noise. There was no way around it: for the sake of young Joe Abbott, he had to feed the beast.

The priest winced as he stood up. His joints were hurting. This was why he prayed from home these days. Poor empty churches were no good for arthritis. He started towards the kitchen, his walk heavy with age, his feet dragging a bit, the thick rubber sole of his black shoes snapping on the floor joints. He hoped he had a tin left of that chicken liver cat food the grocer gave him. If not, the cat and him would have to share his diner: two slices of cured ham, some beans and a salad. Neither of them could digest bread any more.

As he was opening the tin, the thought of Joe Abbott caught up with him. What a nice kid he was. It had pained the priest, tonight, to see his poor, ten-year-old body sink into sickness, his tanned, smooth skin getting pale and gritty, his thick slick black shiny hair becoming thin and dry like withered weed. Joe had not been able to get up. Tuberculosis was ripping his chest, fever was shaking his body and putting a constant wet brightness  in his black eyes. Young Joe was looking somewhere else already, seeing other things. He had become a ghost even for his mother. She looked so scared all the time, so vulnerable. She couldn't eat. She was so thin, as if about to snap.

The cat was rubbing madly against his leg: "Yeah yeah yeah, it's coming you old fool. Covering my trousers with your hair will never bring it quicker, you know. Don't you know that? Don't you learn anything?"

"Talking to it doesn't make any difference either", he thought, as he was walking back to his bedroom. "The cat doesn't understand me. Or does not believe me."

He played for a moment with this idea. "Maybe it knows, after all. Maybe rubbing itself against my leg makes it feel good. Maybe it knows how annoying I find it and does it for that precise reason."

They had been living with each other for all these years, and yet they could not possibly understand each other. "We are just living side my side", he thought, "each of us isolated in our own perception of the world."

Such was the way of life. Take young Abbot: he was watching him wither, fade from this world, step into the other. "I am a priest, I am supposed to know about all this, about death, the transition of death, life after death. Yet I cannot, not one single second, understand what he is going through."

There was no communicating, with anybody, but the Lord. There was only prayer. Prayer worked. He had seen evidence of it, repeatedly. How many times had he prayed for the sick and seen then rise again? Ten times maybe, maybe more?

When the telephone rang ten minutes later, the priest had returned to his duties. His body was arched against the kneeling chair, his heavy breathing covering any other noise in the bedroom. The ring startled him. He got up, walked around the bed, picked the receiver. He sat heavily on the bed, letting all his body go. He brought the receiver to his hear, knowing already.

Tim Abbott's voice was drowned in tears. He was calling to inform the priest that his son had passed away.

As the priest hung up, the cat started scratching again. Its food bowl was empty. It was looking at the priest. There was expectation in its eyes.

The priest picked it in his arms, opened the back door and put it gently outside.

The cat jumped on the window sill and started waiting.

The Metro Crush

As a nation we are
Drinking 143 million fewer pints of beer
Smoking 51 million fewer cigarettes
Eating 75 million fewer takeaways 
Every month
One in 11 people is turning vegetarian to save on the weekly shop after meat prices rose by 5.7 per cent last year.

As a nation we are also
Dodging 25% of our rounds at the pub
Leaving 0% tips at restaurants

And giving up 100% of our donations to charity

The Law - aka Survival of the Fittest
Mother of Liberalism
Father of the Holy Crush
Mother of the Law

Hypnopompicture 6

Spring is out
He tells me
Big white bricks of sheet
And the sky
Almost as bright as light

Hypnopompicture 5 - Orbitor

Who sits here and sleeps
Who lies there and speaks
Your life is upside down between
The city and the city

Hypnopompicture 4

And so Spring begins
Cold fever on a feeble day
Saffron azure

Roaming

No pilot on these boats; no

Captain; no staff; everyone aboard

Is from somewhere else.

The shopkeeper is from Shropshire
The cockney cook has a West Ham tattoo
Under his shirt
And St Jack crosses on his cufflinks
The mechanics speak to each other in Polish
I once spoke Polish with Frédéric Chopin's great grand nephew in Narita airport
We were drinking jasmine tea thence
The cleaning ladies are from Antwerp
They smile at me as if
I was family
The young man who works the till, at the self service restaurant
Has a golden brace with his name on it
Robert
He tells me he lives in Dover.

From his bedroom window
He watches the boats cross the dark stones of the port jetties
He was born in a nearby hospital, eighteen years ago.
He has never travelled further than Calais
He has never been to Calais
From the deck, four times a day, he sees its yellow sanded beach
Then he turns around and goes home.
He is the closest the boat has to an owner.

The boat slips, on its invisible thread, across the channel

The owner hands me the bill

Five pounds eighty and a free coffee.

Hypnopompicture 3

The poles, all the spikes
Can't you see the sky?
The crispy crystalline crust of the sky
Can't you see it crack?


And through the riff 

All the waters pour

The blue waters that surround the world

Hypnopompicture 2

Fasts of winter
It is so cold
I can hardly move, as if
I was made of metal
Each movement is an attempt
To remodel myself

Catford - eros building

Lewisham is the only borough in London without a cinema. There used to be some. They have shaped the landscape: in Catford Broadway Theatre still dominates the main roundabout.

In Catford the Eros cinema opened in 1952 in a building known as the Hippodrome. Before the Eros Cinema, the Hippodrome was already a cinema, belonging to Paramount. The Eros Cinema was closed 7 years later and replaced by the Eros building.

The architect of the Eros building is called Rodney Gordon.  Rodney Gordon was one of the brains behind the brutalist phase.

Like most arts (writing, painting, sculpture) architecture offers a range of products from the popular to the elitist. The elitist can only be fully understood by learning the history of this art. The popular is easy to appreciate.

Unlike other arts, architecture is imposed onto us. It is not possible not to see it. Worse, it seems that the most audacious, hermetic attempts are destined to populations who have no background to appreciate it: these attempts systematically end up in poor neighbourhoods.

How come that the brutalist buildings are only residence to poor populations? How come, for instance, that none of them can be seen in Westminster, or Canary Wharf, or in the City?

Or when they do, like in Notting Hill gate, how come that none, NONE, of their flats end up on the list of the top sought-after locations? How come that, after fifty years, regardless of their location, their rents are always low-rents?

How can it sound a good idea to call a movement "brutalist" and force people to live in it?

And why call such a building "Eros"? Did the association of the name and the design sound like a funny irony to Rodney Gordon?

There is nothing erotic about the building. What is there to love? What relation does the building bear to the ancient god of love, apart from a vaguely phallic shape?

The Eros cinema was not even an erotic cinema. "Eros" was created by two brothers, Phil and Sydney Hyams. They entered the industry in 1912. After the Second World War, they created their own company. It was essentially a distribution outfit. They produced a few small films (The Man who watched trains go by, 1952, The Sea shall not have them, 1954). The company went into liquidation in 1961 (1).

Mind you, it had an outlet in Liverpool, not far from Crosby Beach. Liverpool town centre too was shaped by the cinema industry. But there, the buildings have remained.


http://brockleyjackfilmclub.co.uk/lewishams-lost-cinemas/

http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lewisham/assets/galleries/catford/eros-cinema

http://www.overthefootlights.co.uk/12.pdf

http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/misc/articles/cinema_history.php

(1)  (source British Cinema of the 50s - a celebration, Ian Duncan MacKilltop and Neil Sinyard, Manchester University Press, 2003, 236pm p.178)

Hypnopompicture 1

From Waterloo East footbridge
Facing West
Was it the worst day to start anything?
The morning sticks to my body, wet and cold
Lack of sleep
I am walking through town like
A bag on auto motion
Pressed, jostled
My conscience no more than a smoke
Outside dissolved in the smell of the sea

The Book Sill - Orbitor

Orbitor, by Mircea Cartarescu, has been asleep on my shelf for almost five years. [1]

On the third page of the books I bought I used to write the purchase date. I wish I had kept this habit. I, as I said in a previous post, am a slow man. I learn slowly, I read slowly. Decisions take either seconds or years. I never read books just after buying them: I look at them, read a few random lines, smell the ink and the glue, stroke the cover -is it dull and smooth or shiny and sticky?-, rub the pages between my fingers. Then I drop them wherever I am and go on with life. After a few days I pick them up again and put them on a shelf, any shelf. By then my home is their home and they can come and go as they wish. I do not keep them in any specific order.

Years later, I pick them again. Very, very rarely do I find them at the place where I had left them. Some of my friends object that this is mainly due to my habit of moving house every year. I prefer to think that the books travel at will. They visit each other, talk about themselves, engage in frantic page-flipping orgies. A very high number of them end up on the window sills - and wouldn't you pick that precise spot too if you were confined to the same room day and night?

Some of them run away. I recently found Dhalgren on a shelf at a friend's who swore he didn't know he had it -"I didn't even read it, for fuck's sake !"-. Like Orbitor, Dhalgren is a strange one, written in high style by a mind subject to hallucinations, and a pet book of mine.

I first thought that Orbitor would be another dystopian universe. The opening chapters show Bucarest in its misery: neon lights flashing restlessly, concrete walls, small rooms, reclusion. But as I progressed into the book, this initial set-up proves to work only as the most striking contrast for what comes next: dreams, day or night dreams of the weirdest kind. The narrator's imagination paints the grim environment with unnatural colours, populates well-known streets with unexplainable creatures, carries the body it inhabits through ghostly errands.

After a few chapters, just as I was starting to make sense of the story's background, Cartarescu sends us somewhere completely different. Without any warning, from one page to another, it is another space and time. Is this second universe related to the first one? Are we still in the same story? In the same novel? For a long time I had no idea. And just as I reached another turn, where this new story gets a chance to settle down, Cartarescu shuffles the cards again. The story is sent to yet a different level, where it finds common ground with the first one.

All this sounds confusing? As I am going through the final pages of the book, confusion still dominates. The writing is of a master, even in its French translation. Written in the nineties, it is reminiscent of Proust ("Past is everything, future is nothing, time has no other sense"); it carries visions from the Transcendental movement; it has the strength, the extraordinary energy, of Henry Miller; at times it makes as much sense as William Burroughs.

Cartarescu confesses a lot of influences. Among the recent writers, he declares his debt to the South American novel and its magic realism: Garcia Marques, surely, but  mostly Sabato. “We Romanians” he says in a recent interview to the French radio France Culture “we see ourselves as a South American country that would have drifted and beached somewhere in Europe”. He also declares his debt to Bruno Schultz. Funnily enough, the next book on my reading list is Miéville’s The City and the City, in which opening credit I found the name of Bruno Schultz!

Schultz’s Street of Crocodiles will soon join the merry-go-round in my book room. Orbitor’s sequels too, for this is a book of one kind and a true masterpiece unknown outside Romania.

---

[1] Books sleep standing, like horses, with which they share precious little else.