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Thursday, 21 January 2010

"A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe."

- Le Corbusier, The Bettmann Archives
"The young man locked the door and turned to the girl. She was standing facing him in a defiant pose with insolent sensuality in her eyes. He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject--namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous. He hated her."

- Milan Kundera, Helmut Newton
"That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow."

- Raymond Carver, Charles W. Cushman

Monday, 28 December 2009

is it cold there?

If we are to write the history of ancient cities, we could approach the task starting at the end. The reason is this: if we are to say that these places once existed, we would first have to note that they no longer are. In our minds then, they exist twice-- once as they were built, conquered, rebuilt, and lost-- and once more after they are rediscovered. Barbalissos, Antioch, Pergamon. I think about these three ancient cities. I run their names in my head over and over. Over time, the repeated reimagination of these cities causes them to mix themselves together, to be mistaken for one another, to shuffle their citizens and belongings and mixed tongues from one to the next. They begin to take on different plans, different schemes and layouts. For instance, the rectilinear street grids of one turn into the curvilinear forms of another, villas turn into public baths, administrative forums into agoras filled with beggars, alchemists suddenly peddle phylacteries and baklava, traders instead barter vials of lapis lazuli from their moving caravans.
Dulled by time, we are unable to pinpoint the exact site where these cities once stood, confusing where they once were from where they are now in our minds. If I could make a composite image of all these arbitrary locations, I could say that they once physically stood somewhere in the lands of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Barbalissos, Antioch, Pergamon. Each distinct repetition of the names brings about different memories, conjures different locations. I was once on a moving train from New Haven when I thought about you, I was once having coffee in New York, I was once in a cigar shop in Shangri-La. Or if the perseveration of memory allows, I was once thinking about you elsewhere. But where are you now? Is it cold there? Who are you with? What have you been reading? I could turn these questions in my head over and over, repeating them like the names of ancient cities, coming up with different answers for each one. I could make my own method of storage and retrieval following this method, equating the death of cities with a memoirist who consults an atlas. A great battle was once fought at Barbalissos, statues and aqueducts stood during the heyday of Antioch, the entire city of Pergamon was handed over to the Roman empire, just as how a train leaves from New Haven, a coffee is purchased in New York, and a man smokes a cigar in Shangri-La.

Monday, 14 December 2009

seeing you

       A daydreaming bird in mid-flight diverges from its flock. Lost searching for a shortcut leading it back to course, it finds that has instead flown north for the winter. A species of antlion digs a trap in the sand and burrows in the center. The declivity of the small pit in the ground ingeniously matches the angle of repose of the sand. If I could take singular incidents like these and extrapolate them, I could also come up with the following:
       I've seen you before. I've never seen you before at all. There was a moment in time when I once saw you and now I am remembering. The fact that I may have never seen you at all also leads me to a few possibilities-- I've never seen you and I am remembering wrongly. I've seen you and I've simply forgotten.
       Or perhaps I've never seen anyone but you. I could leave you in a delicatessen in New Hampshire, swim across the Gulf of Mexico and find you at a newsstand in Panama. You may be secretly following the course of my life as much as five minutes ahead. Or the simple fact remains that you are everywhere, preserved with all your personal idiosyncrasies, calling me the same recognizable terms of endearment at every encounter. In fact, the act of differentiating you from everyone else has become impossible. If I could take all these immeasurable ways of seeing you and seeing you again, I could explore multiple probabilities. In a perfect picture therefore, I could say that it was both a pleasure meeting you, see you next time; and also, I'm sorry, I think you've mistaken me for someone else.