A tale of multiple cities

In Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo returns from his voyages to regale Kublai Khan with stories of the many and varied places he visited in his travels. But as his narratives progress, the ruler begins to question the reliability of his young adventurer. It becomes clear that the numerous cities Polo claims to have visited are merely different facets of one city – Venice,  Polo’s home town. What to make of these ‘imagined’ cities once the truth is known? The book becomes not a travelogue, but a work of psychogeography, an imagining of many possible experiences within one urban centre, where buildings, people and ritual come together:

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls …

I remembered Calvino when visiting Julie Mehretu’s current exhibition at White Cube, Bermondsey. It was not my first encounter with Mehretu’s work, having seen her paintings first in Venice (making the connection to Calvino more overt), then in Kassel. Two very different urban experiences: I have written about both cities here on Invective, and it strikes me now that both Venice and Kassel are appropriate sites for Mehretu’s project. Venice represents the meeting of east and west, a strange confection of ornate palazzi but also brooding corners and dark dead-ends. Kassel is a palimpsest – a city that will never shake its complete destruction, even through its reconstruction.

Mehretu’s cityscapes, like Calvino’s, are unreliable. You cannot move freely through the streets or chart a route between two places. Through a layering of architectural drawings – showing features such as columns and porticos – and city planning documents, Mehretu builds a place of frenetic energy and multiple diversions. Over these layered architectural elements, she creates a series of smudges and lines – almost destroying her creations, in the same way the wrecking ball levels buildings everyday (slow to erect, fast to collapse) – and over that, she paints coloured acrylic flourishes, long arcs and stripes, like graffiti (the unofficial street art that she cites as one of her influences). She says of these ‘marks’:

I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.

She calls the finished canvases ‘story maps of no location’, every city and no city at once. The idea of stories, of narratives, of characters, brings us back to psychogeography, which is concerned with the emotional responses of the individual to a city. Recently in this blog I mentioned Rebecca Solnit’s alternative mapping of her home town, San Francisco, and her definition of places as ‘stable locations with unstable converging forces.’ Mehretu’s approach is similar; she says: 

I am interested in the potential of ‘psychogeographies’, which suggest that within an invisible and invented space, the individual can tap a resource of self-determination and resistance.

Her recent ‘Mogamma’ paintings contain overlaid images taken from 31 different squares which became centres for revolt and conflict during the Arab Spring. These are ‘charged places’ for Mehretu, and even post-revolution, they hold the turmoil of their association to these events in their very bricks. Mehretu herself fled a place of conflict – Addis Ababa during the Ethio-Somali war – when she was seven years old. In her work, she is placing herself back in the centre of conflict, asking the question: ‘how do I look at myself in this moment? How do I exist in a larger social and historical moment?’ The crisis, as a human being, globally, environmentally, politically, is always to consider how much power the artists’ mark has in our time.

I’ll end with a poem by Weldon Kees which seems to chime with Mehretu’s project:

To Build a Quiet City in His Mind

To build a quiet city in his mind:
A single overwhelming wish; to build,
Not hastily, for there is so much wind,
So many eager smilers to be killed,
Obstructions one might overlook in haste:
The ruined structures cluttering the past,

A little at a time and slow is best,
Crawling as though through endless corridors,
Remembering always there are many doors
That open to admit the captured guest
Once only.
                                Yet in spite of loss and guilt
And hurricanes of time, it might be built:

A refuge, permanent, with trees that shade
When all the other cities die and fade.

The poet in the tower

Every writer could use a good tower (or at the very least, a top-floor study). I think of Yeats’ Thoor Ballylee or Joyce’s Martello in Sandycove (the subject of a blog post over a year ago now). A tower gives you perspective, the ability to see the full landscape. This morning I looked out the window of my tower and found myself eye to eye with a gull (which was perched on the top of a telegraph pole). The gull was looking for breakfast, and I was looking for a poem; the gull flew off, but not before he’d made it into what I was writing.  

When I say ‘my tower’, I mean the South Lookout on the beach in Aldeburgh, which is on loan to me for the weekend. The tower is owned by the gallerist Caroline Wiseman, who invites writers and artists to use the space as a creative stimulus. The only proviso is that you must sleep here for at least one night. The ground floor area (which is a gallery space when not occupied by those creating the art) is rustic and spartan, as it should be, with a folding camp bed that I have placed near the open fire (there is electricity, and I’ve used one of the sockets for the bar fire, and the other three to charge my computer, Blackberry and iPad respectively – so much for ink and quill). There is no plumbing in the tower, but Caroline’s house is a few feet away (I remember hearing that Thoreau’s modest shack at Walden Pond was less than two miles from the family seat – writers do need creature comforts, even in the attempt to be closer to nature). Caroline’s instinct is right: there is something about waking up to the sound of the sea and the wind, knowing you are right on the beach, in the middle of the elements, that sets you off in a way that could not happen in one’s own bed.

I rolled up on Thursday to glorious early evening sunshine, but woke on Friday to bleak rain-soaked skies. Although the sun that greeted me on my arrival was lovely, the grey, leached East Anglian landscape (of Crabbe and Sebald) is the one I’ve grown to know. I started Friday at the very top of the tower, which is accessed from the outside of the building, up a narrow spiral staircase. The view, even rain-soaked, was fabulous, and I wrote my first poem of the day (after the meeting with the gull). But then the skies closed in, and the eerie became cold and oppressive (no heating up there!) so I moved to the middle level, which has just been officially christened the Laurens van der Post Room (opened by his daughter, Lucia) where the writer came to work every day for 30 years. That was my spot for most of the day, and where I wrote a further three poems.

This kind of concentrated experience has proven to be the sort of stimulus I would not have elsewhere. It normally takes me months to do what I’ve done in one day, just by being quiet and isolated in a little space with no distractions or disruptions, apart from watching for any activity on the beach, and charting the  constant movements of the sea.
On Saturday, I will put my poems up on the wall, along with some photos of the beach, and invite people to come into the Lookout to see what I’ve been up to. And Saturday evening, I’ve invited some fellow Suffolk poets along to read poems about the sea. It should be a wonderful evening, even if it rains.

http://www.aldeburghbeachlookout.com/

Beauty and its double

During this week in Venice I have been trying to work out why I (and countless writers, painters and composers) love the place so much. Well, there is water of course. I have a thing for cities on water (Stockholm being another favourite city), perhaps because movement invariably slows. Brodsky said  that there is something ‘primordial about traveling on water’. In London we look at the river – some of my favourite aspects of the city are from the Thames – we cross it back and forth over bridges constantly, but we are seldom on it. Although the underground is a necessary means for navigating London, it removes us from the city by taking us below it, and so we miss the engagement with the street and what is happening there in real time (which is why I favour the bus, when I’m not in a hurry!).   

To get back to Brodsky, a long-time resident of Venice, he talks about the way that water unsettles the principle of horizontality, especially at night, when its surface resembles pavement. No matter how solid its substitute – the deck – under your feet, on water you are somewhat more alert than ashore, your faculties are more poised. On water, for instance, you never get absent-minded the way you do in the street: your legs keep you and your wits in constant check, as if you were some kind of compass. Well, perhaps what sharpens your wits while traveling on water is indeed a distant, roundabout echo of the good old chordates. At any rate, your sense of the other on water gets keener, as though heightened by a common as well as a mutual danger. The loss of direction is a psychological category as much as it is a navigational one.

This idea of being unsettled and alert is perhaps another reason I keep returning here. Nowhere else in the world feels so unreal (partly because of the efforts of tourists and those who cater to them to turn the place into Disneyworld); Venice has not been allowed to come into the modern age. Apart from the odd modern Scarpa-designed building, it remains firmly in its past (which is why so many poets have compared it to a graceful dowager). Its past is its glory.

Despite that, so much has been created here in the last hundred-odd years. James’s late novels, Wagner’s Tristan, and poems by Byron and Shelly, Browning, Brodsky, Merrill and Hecht, and of course, Pound’s Cantos. This city attracts those from other places who arrive, often in exile from where they started. It feels a final destination. Peter Ackroyd wrote ‘the perpetual sound of bells is a rehearsal for death’, especially when you think of those who have come here to die (fictional as well as actual).

Which brings me to death, decay, ruin. Venice is frail, crumbling. Water degrades its marble and stone, there is a delicate patina of rust and algae over its surface. James said ‘Venice is the most beautiful sepulchre in the world.’ And so it is. You are nowhere more reminded of demise anywhere else.

So I am here, with a group of poets (some visiting for the first time), exploring and thinking and writing. Trying to find something new to say about this place which has been written about thousands of times. I’ll end on something which has been said before, but for me captures the feeling of coming back, and the mixed sensations of this place – the first stanza of Amy Clampitt’s ‘Venice Revisited’:

Guise and disguise, the mirrorings and masquerades,
brocaded wallowings, ascensions, levitations:
glimmering interiors, beaked motley; the hide-
and-seek of Tintoretto and Carpaccio. From within
walled gardens’ green enclave, a blackbird’s warble —
gypsy non sequitur out of root-cumbered
terra firma, a mainland stepped from
to this shored-up barge, this Bucintoro
of mirage, of artifice. Outside the noon-dim
dining room, the all-these-years-uninterrupted
sloshing of canals; bagged refuse, ungathered
filth; the unfed cats, still waiting.

Poets After Dark

Apologies to followers of Invective for the radio silence. It’s been a busy time. Here is a link to a piece on the Poetry School blog: a discussion between myself and Julia Bird on the recent Poets After Dark performances at the Hayward Gallery

http://www.poetryschool.com/news/poets-after-dark.php

Back from the dead

To Matt’s Gallery to see the new Susan Hiller installation, Channels. I have always been a fan of Hiller’s work, for its curiosity, its humanity, its obsessive cataloguing of objects associated with the activity of living. At her Tate Britain retrospective several years ago, I became fascinated by her Homage to Joseph Beuys, a collection of bottles of holy water which Hiller patiently sourced from locations around the country, labelled and placed in a cabinet – like a medicine cabinet, but the ‘medicine’ contained in it was more about faith than pharmaceuticals. Hiller said of this piece: 

When I collect water from a holy well or sacred spring, I’m in the process of trying to turn banal tourism into a quest or pilgrimage. The waters supposedly produce powerful effects for believers, but what I treasure is the special mental space created by searching for them and thinking about them. These little bottles of waters are more than just souvenirs; they are containers of an idea about the potentials hidden in ordinary things and experiences. 

 

Yes. Isn’t that what a poem is too, a container for an idea that finds its source in ordinary things and events? I found myself imaging Hiller on her journey, carefully bottling those precious wells, in turn thinking about the people who come to them for solace.    

Hiller’s new piece is also about faith, or at least an examination of what happens to the human spirit when it faces the unknown. In a darkened room, a bank of analogue televisions form a tall wall. They are all tuned to nothing, and hiss their white noise into the silent gallery. From their flickering screens, a series of waving lines emerge, then disembodied voices that speak at once. One voice takes over, and begins a story of a near-death experience, the televisions registering the voice as a single green line that pulses with speech. Each voice introduces itself, and begins another tale. These experiences are remarkably similar – at the moment of death, the speakers would often hover over their dying bodies, or find themselves inexplicably in the company of strangers or long-dead family members, who are there to tell them it isn’t their time yet, before they regain consciousness. The voices tell their stories without emotion, but we find the emotion in ourselves, the listeners. Hiller’s act is to record them.

  

In my previous post, I talked about James Merrill’s epic poem, ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’. Merrill was the great chronicler of the other world, sensitive to our brief time here, our longer time beyond. I was put in mind of the other voices he ‘channelled’ sitting with the Susan Hiller piece, not just channels we watch, but also channels we follow – directions, paths, divergences.  

I will end with Merrill’s poem, ‘Lorelei’:

The stones of kin and friend
Stretch off into a trembling, sweatlike haze.

They many not after all be stepping-stones
But you have followed them. Each strands you, then

Does not. Not yet. Not here.
Is it a crossing? Is there no way back?

Soft gleams lap the base of the one behind you
On which a black girl sings and combs her hair.

It’s she who some day (when your stone is in place)
Will see that much further into the golden vagueness

Forever about to clear. Love with his chisel
Deepens the lines begun upon your face.