Creature of the Shade

9/11, 11/9

A major post on Berlin is in the works, but may not make it in time for the absurdly juxtaposed anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and Kristallnacht (1938), both November 9.  But that reminds me ...

I wonder how many Americans are aware that when they refer to "9/11," they are speaking with an American dialect, and that their friends in Britain and Australia and elsewhere are having to translate.  In most of the world, including Australia, dates are written "day/month," so "9/11" means today, November 9.

Americans are used to "9/11" as a kind of shorthand designed to reference a trauma without invoking it, rather like the word "holocaust."  But unlike "holocaust," 9/11 keeps rolling around in the calendar, so the shorthand use of "9/11" for the WTC attacks carries a slight whiff of linguistic imperialism that is clearly unintentional and yet can't be shaken off.  "9/11?  9th of November?  What about it?"  "Oh, you mean the American 9/11."

The London Underground bombings happened on July 7, and the Brits occasionally refer to the event as "7/7."  If the month and date hadn't been identical, they'd have had to take a stand for their way of writing dates against the American one.  As it happens, the terrorists chose a date singularly suited to Transatlantic harmony.  It shows they're not all that clever after all. 

paris: there will be no miracles here

For the first time in 18 years, I've been back to Paris, and have had a chance to review with the impressions that it made on me when I lived there as a student in 1986, and visited for the last time in 1991. 

Inevitably, however much I've followed the news -- immigrant riots in troubled surburbs, new metro lines, bike rental systems, EuroDisney, high-speed trains, new museums and libraries -- I still see through my impressions of the city I knew 23 years ago.  Those impressions can never be fully over-written because they formed the categories that organise my experience of the city, and categories, by their nature, lurk partly unseen in the life of the senses. 

For example, the very essence of a Parisian boulevard in my memory contains the burning acidic smell of car exhaust, because serious emissions control for European cars came only the 1990s.  I knew it would be different now, but I also knew that the new impression would never shake off one I formed first.  I will always notice the relatively pleasant air quality now, always be comparing it to that of the primal Paris of my memory. 

Because the first impression of a place -- regardless of the age at which it occurs -- is a childlike moment, and no life experience can change how we were formed as children.

As I wandered the city these three days, I noticed all the ways that Paris continues to thicken and enrich itself, things you might notice returning to almost any city after two decades' absence; the air is cleaner, pedestrians are safer, public transport is even more abundant, and of course there are new buildings and, in Paris in particular, new grands projets; every President since de Gaulle has had to add one or two cultural and architectural icons to the city.  For the capital of a country with so many profound social and cultural problems, Paris feels clean, strong, sure of itself, though of course it's always projected confidence even in darkest years. 

But here's what really matters:

 

1.

On a main street lined with local shops far out in the southeast, I come upon a man who seems to hold not just a paper cup but also a key to the city.  He rests on his elbows and knees, head down so we see only the short-cropped black hair, no face.  His lower arms fold forward from his elbows and his wrists fold again, twist upward with the anxiety of a screw, to hold the paper cup.  He seems, from what little I see, to be clean, well-groomed, not clearly young nor old.

He also seems carefully anonymous, showing no identifying features but the back of a head that could be that of a million French men.  So it seems possible to take a photo, to preserve and share what he's offering, without betraying or exploiting him.

His pose expresses natural anguish in way that's actually quite composed, sculptural.  The styrofoam pads he's improvised -- and notice how carefully placed they are -- suggest that he's ready, like a meditator, to hold this pose for some time; certainly he doesn't move a muscle in the three or so minutes I watch.  There must be some serenity inside his anguish.

He seems to quote a specific tradition of Parisian begging.  In the Paris of the 1980s I recall young men in striking kneeling positions, as though constructed by a choreographer, head always down though not as completely concealed as this man's is.  The practice then was to write on the pavement, with chalk, an explanation of the beggar's circumstances.  These ran to a paragraph or two, often so long that interacting with such beggars was like perusing a museum.  Look at the man briefly, form a slight interest.  Then, read the text next to him, which tells his story in terms of dates and mishaps and relationships and ideologies, like an earnest museum tag.  Then back to the folded man himself, notice his clothes, his hair, his stance, the combination of suffering and dignity he's conveying.  Perhaps glance down the line comparing him to others nearby (for they often appeared in groups, as though perceiving each other as colleagues, not competitors.)  Finally, make a decision, centimes or francs.

As with everything, things have sped up.  This man begging in 2009 lacks an expalantory text, but I still see the composition, the intention, the search for dignity on the very point of suffering.

Were his face not concealed, of course, I'd never have taken a picture -- nor left a few euros in his cup after doing so.  The concealed face superficially means shame, of course, and it also makes him everyman; he might look up and turn out to be someone we know, or even ourselves.  But beyond those obvious readings the concealed face asks us to see him in his entire body, as a dancer does.  The hackneyed word expression comes to mind, and I dismiss it.  All bodies express, especially without faces to distract us from them, but the outward energy of expression is almost the opposite of this man's condition. 

Is he taking the pride of a performer in how well he's constructed his shame?

No, that's not the most interesting question, becuase as with all great art I can say little about artistic intention.  Yes, the styrofoam pads look designed, and the sheer power of the effect suggests composition to me, but that's my cynical theatre-trained eye getting in the way.  Am I sure this man is a beggar at all, rather than a theatre student or performance artist?  No, but in Paris that doesn't quite matter.  Parisians simply do not police a hard border between pretense and authenticity, or for that matter between art and life.  Everything is both, all the time.

Whoever he is, I believe he's in pain, and that he's working.  Parisians have an especially visible way of doing that.  To people intent on avoiding pain, it looks like a sort of insult, a showing off.  The British in particular find it maddening.

2.

Though my walk largely avoids tourist centres, I do plunge into the Latin Quarter, where there's a shred of a medieval street pattern -- mazes of very narrow lanes.  It's all touristed to the teeth, always has been.  But I come back because I attach to streetnames as well as to streets, and at the heart of this maze is a tiny lane, less than two meters wide, called Rue du chat qui pêche ... the street of the fishing cat.  It's one of those rare names that cuts straight through all the posturing and egotism of typical street names to elicit a pure moment of life centures ago.  The street gives out onto a quay on the left bank of the Seine, and once, no doubt, it was just a muddy track through filth down to the river.  But someone noticed a cat, enjoyed watching it fish, built some lore around it, and hurled it toward eternity.  (Wikipedia advises that the street was named for a pub, but of course that doesn't erase the cat, just sets it at one remove.)

It's just an outdoor hallway, really.  In one direction the explosion of light at the end blinds all else -- a slice of a vast display on the walls of the Police headquarters across the Seine, 30-foot high images of happy police offiers in all their earnest diversity.

But the walls of the street itself are rich with artistic claims, some not even signed, like this clownish face claiming "La rue est à nous" -- the street is ours.  Unsure if this nous includes me, I can feel embraced and rejected in the same gesture, an consummate Parisian sensation. 

And there are signs of the usual energies of the theatre world, like this poster, which in every detail is something I might have encountered on this spot 23 years ago.

Almost any night in Paris, at least since the 1970s, it's been possible to find an evening of theatre in which attractive young performers get naked for some concept of social change.  Translated literally, the title sounds painfully banal:  "I buy!  Or the decadence of a consumer society." You just can't say that with a straight face in English; at least not in 2009.  But then in English you wouldn't end a business letter with "We pray you accept the assurance of our most distinguished sentiments," as I was taught to do in French.  For better or worse French is a language of excess, long defined by a kind of emotional arms race in which the most intense and overwrought word must be used for expressing the most desiccated quantum of feeling.  It is your right as a Parisian to be presumed to be feeling the most deep and refined emotions, even when buying toothpaste.

 

3. 

At one point in my wandering, I stumbled out of Saint Lazare railway station into the 9th arrondissement, a frankly rather tedious collection of Napoleonic facades and fast-moving streets full of rushing businessmen. 

But almost by chance -- though surely part of some planner's design -- I stumbled onto a gallery, one of those long, high spaces that runs right through a building, or even through several, lined with shops.  This particular gallery had the odd feeling, not uncommon in American shopping malls, that as I moved deeper into it the artifice was falling away, as though at any moment I might be among the rubbish bins.  Fashionable shops gave way to less fashionable ones, and unphotographically baroque embellishments to the architecture also fell back to something that looked unremodelled, dusty in an appealing way. 

Names applied to intersecting hallways, for example, spoke of a marketing mood that might have moved shoppers over a century ago.  But now, where the Galerie des Variétés met the Passage des Panoramas, a half-painted electrical cord dangled between them.

As the artifice declined so too did the value of things for sale, until I reached a kind of terminal economy in the darkest and mustiest section, where rubbish bins really were imminent.  Entire shops devoted to old postcards, for sale for a euro or two apiece.  And finally, topping even that, tray upon tray of tiny, abundant, but now useless things:  Coins from before the euro, still just a decade or two old so hardly collectible. Defunct cards that once commanded telephone calling plans.  And I thought: We have achieved a dictatorship of the proletariat.  Here are their millions of tiny disposable sceptres.

 

4. 

As time ran down, I knew with increasing urgency that I had to get back to Parc des Buttes Chaumont, deep in the city's east, to close some loop with my memories.  When I lived there in the 80s, it was still easy to get mugged in the downscale eastern third of Paris, so there was always a certain frisson to trips to the Buttes.  Getting there also involved using a small out-of-the-way metro line, the "7bis," and emerging, ideally, out of one of Guimard's flowers at Botzaris station, as though I were a stamen.

Paris is mostly flat or gently sloping, but there are two isolated hills, big chunks of volcanic rock not yet digested by the slow work of river and wind.  One is Montmartre in the north, once an arts ghetto, now a tourist ghetto.  The other is Buttes Chaumont, which few tourists have found.  Here, the steep rock has been carved to create a lake with a very tall island -- really a pillar of rock perhaps 20 m high -- with a viewpoint on the top, linked to "mainland" by a high pedestrian bridge.  Paths wind along cliff-faces, sometimes crossing fast-falling streams.   It's a classic spectacle of sheer verticality, such as one expects in California or Switzerland or New Zealand but not in Paris.  Parisians love it, and fill it with all kinds of self-directed expression. 

So here, a cafe in a park makes no big deal of having a wonderful collection of old hanging lamps, all seeming to guard a sensuous but sickly-green blob rising through the counter -- poised right on the treshhold between plant and animal. 

And there's nothing remarkable about a block of scaffolding on a hillside announcing, in English, that there will be no miracles here.  (The yellow police tape is a nice  touch.)

There will be no miracles, so there must be art.  In Paris, art must be everywhere.  It's as essential to urban life as parking meters or fire hydrants.  It shows that we're working, and in pain.

netherlands: the welcoming square

What have I seen in the Netherlands? A nation bent on constructing an industrious and sensible serenity. Content that architecture be simple, square, firm, becuase the opposing impulses (sex, death) are already there in the rippling water of the endless urban canals.

Because water will always destroy right angles, whether in the shimmering instant of reflection or the grinding eternity of subsidence.

When architecture just to the south was exploding with riotous embellishment, the Protestant Dutch picked up a few pleasant curved lines just at the roof, nothing to take too seriously. While the endless filagrees and trumpeting heralds on a Hapsburg roofline announced the stability and glory of the imperial power, the Dutch could announce their power in sheer restraint. At home on tenuous land that is always sinking unevenly beneath them, the Dutch saw no higher sign of God's favor than a house that wasn't slowly leaning into the street, and whose windows were still square.

Even modernist architecture in Holland saw beauty in the right angle, where other modernisms saw only the barren chill of truth. I am a tough customer for modernism, but the Dutch do some of the world's best. Almost every modernist building shows some touch -- an color, a pattern, a too-perfect ratio -- that speaks of attention and caring.

In the postmodern age, of course, the Dutch know this about themselves. An eruptive organic form, such as this cetacean bus shelter in Hoofddorp, is the rule-proving exception. 

It's as though Dutch modernist architects are aspiring alchemists, certain that somewhere in mathematical space is a rectangular solid whose ratios will so please God that he will give it the breath of transcendence. They come close, over and over, as mortals do.

It's the right angle that creates the space of Holland's famous tolerance. The French say they're tolerant too, but Frenchness is such a curved and nuanced space that it's a life's work for the newcomer to fit it, to turn the key that will unlock the bounties of fraternité. In Holland the key is simple: the right angle, the rectangular space, the blank solid. It's the sort of simplicity that demands only meditation and work.  If it seems constraining, just look down, at its reflection in the water, and watch it dissolve.

confronting vegetation: Sambucus nigra

Late summer in Europe hasn't felt as botanically abundant as the same season in the Pacific Northwest, where I often am this time of year.  But one plant caught my eye at once, on my first day off the plane, and since then I've been photographing it all across the continent: 

It's Sambucus nigra, black elderberry, of the same genus as common red elderberry of North America, Sambucus recemosa.  But whereas red elderberry carries its berries in an upright spray, black elderberries are bigger and heavier, so they hang down, often form great cascades of these triangular berry clusters.  They don't taste much better than a red elderberry, but they certainly look like they taste better.

ich sprache franchement schrecklich deutsch, non?

Travelling in German-speaking lands for the first time in 25 years, I'm noticing interesting shapes in the way my German comes back, or doesn't.

I studied German all through high-school and then for a year in college, and a few years after that, in 1982, I visited just the smallest corner of Germany, Aachen to be exact.  A few years after that I had my last occasion to pass a test in German, and since then the language has lain fallow, useless to me.  (I think I wrongly suspected that the Germans are so practical that they'd all learned English by now.  This of course is the old fallacy of judging a country by its overseas travellers -- always an unrepresentative sample.)

But in 1986 I studied French very fast, basically fulltime over one summer, and then spent a quarter in Paris.  At the end of that process I was pretty functional in French, though of course there were limits to how much of a conversation I could have with that level of study.

What I find now is that my French appears to have accumulated directly on top of my German, as though it's a more recent archaeological layer.  When I want a German word, my mind delivers the French word.  Then, if I pick up the French word and firmly put it to one side (always thanking it of course), I find that the German word is there, right under where the French word was.

Clearly, this sort of heavy-lifting can't be done at the pace of a conversation.  So what tends to happen is that I grab what German words are handy to convey my meaning, and end up saying, as I did to a nice man at the Leopold Museum store in Vienna:  "Gibt`s ein Buch sur Anton Koenig?" -- "Is there a book on Anton Koenig?" -- which is correct German except for sur, which is correct French.  There are only so many French words that one can dig up and set aside while talking in real time, so some of them slip through.

Now after a bit, I did progress to the point of saying things like "Dieses Hemd wird es eingehen?" -- which is all German words but in a distinctly French word order -- literally "This shirt will it shrink?" 

I worry that my mind seems to have only one place to store foreign languages, and is storing them there in a LIFO (last in, first out) queue -- which is exactly what archaeological strata are.  Indeed, the few Spanish words I know, mostly learned for a trip to Chile in 2004, are on top of the French words, and presumably the German is under that.  I hope these mixed-language sentences that I utter don't convey that I think all non-English languages are interchangeable, but there's no controlling what people with think.  All I can do is struggle on, digging up German while tripping on French, like a 1.5-legged man hobbling over rough terrain toward a rapidly setting sun.

vienna: the express treatment

Over the last 12 days I've had great times in Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, and now Berlin, where I'll be for the rest of this week.  Human Transit has taken the bulk of my blogging time, and even so it still hasn't gotten out of Vienna.  So I expect this blog will get briefer, sharper shards of impression, easily laid down in the minutes to spare.

So apart from the joy and kindness of Art Nouveau, Vienna might be reduced to this.  The disturbing uniformity of the average 19th century street, as though imperial and bourgeois impulses, on their opposite trajectories, can coexist only if we pretend to be a little boring:

The over-the-topness of the late 19th century Hapsburgs, explained by the usual narrative about greatest-decadence-just-before-the-fall, all of which is also, frankly, a little boring:

The particular Hapsburg habit of building things that are just too big for their site, as though the buildings had swelled in place and might soon explode and hurt someone.

The charming and harmless Friedenreich Hundertwasser cult, expressed not just in his wildly touristed house:

 

... but also in a piece of industrial architecture, part of the works a municipal utility, that tourists aren't told about, and only discover if they're curious about that tower that's not in the guidebook ...

The relief at encountering a living cultural space, something whose current life was more interesting than its inevitable original function as an expression of someone's power.  Here Vienna's crowning achievement is the Museum Quarter, an adaptation of what was once the royal stables, now a lively collection of eclectic small museums anchored by two major museums devoted to art since 1900.  Its large courtyard features simple but endearing yellow furnishings that draw people from all over the city for the sheer pleasure of lounging in them.  

It's the only space I've seen in Europe that seems to do what Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square or Melbourne's Federation Square do -- namely to feel like the whole city's livingroom, focused yet casual.

.

What else?  Well, some of the Hapsburg pageantry does contain human experience after all.  In the end, I identified most with these two characters, near the bottom of one of those grand Baroque cascades of (literally) petrified humanity.  

on art nouveau

I have little to add to my Human Transit post on Art Nouveau, except that ---

Except that I think it's the first period of design that's fundamentally kind. Compared to it, every older style seems to be so clearly about power -- the power of one dead man over others.

 

This isn't to say that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the painters of Baroque gold leaf weren't kind people, but still, those styles, indeed, all the styles I can think of before about 1890, were clearly meant to convey power, to put you in your place. They were about the power of God, or of the state, or in most cases both kinds of power in symbiosis. 

Why does Art Nouveau seem so unsuited to the eternal agenda of power? Is it because, for the first time, a style of design seemed to reflect the raw beauty of the organic, of life itself? 

Until then, the only beauty that design had noticed -- apart from landscape as captured in painting -- was that of the human body. Art Nouveau took its inspiration from the calmer beauty of plants, a beauty that's really unsuited to power agendas of any kind.  The artist, of course, is appearing as a power center for the first time in these years. Art Nouveau could serve the cult of the artist, of course, but it doesn't transfer well to any larger power, whether of state or church.

Even Impressionism in painting -- barely a decade older than Art Nouveau -- is always very much about how nature strikes human eyes. It's about the psychology of human perception. And while there's no avoiding that topic when discussing any art, Art Nouveau seemed aware of an organic essence of all things, and that this essence would would go on without us, and that it could be beautiful. 

vienna: the view from my window

So after stumbling out of the long flight from Taipei and finding my way to the hotel, I found I had this view (click to enlarge).

Spires ranging from gothic to baroque.  A constant building height across the city, with me just a hair above it, signifying an intensely controlled urban form.  And there in the middle, on that black tower immediately to the left of the crane, something that looked like a billboard, but much larger.  It said, in English, in plain block letters

SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT).

This eruption seemed so out of place in this very self-satisfied city that I could only take it as expressing another kind of self-satisfaction, that of the avant-garde, as though it were there to ensure that I'd remember Vienna as "edgy" if I needed to check that box.  In fact, with this photo, all the boxes seemed checked, so I smiled, fell into bed, and slept.

earth, clouds, movie

Quick hello from Taipei airport, where I'm en route from Sydney to Vienna for five weeks of semi-deductible flaneurie, mostly in Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, and a bit of France.

Flying north over the Philippines.  Not in a window seat; instead I have in front of me a screen showing an image from a camera looking straight down from the plane.  The effect is pretty much like Google Earth, but with clouds.  You could say it’s just like looking out of the window, but without the plane in the way.  But of course, that would be looking at the real earth, while this is an artificial image, a real-time television show.  I sometimes think I’ll be the last human to whom that distinction matters.  

At this height, shapes of the land are only vague hints.  Was that long thin curving white band a river, or just a trick of the cloud?  And what was that hard round thing, a white dot, edged in black, with three smaller black dots around it, just touching it?  I leaned forward, watched intently as it slid past, but with no context at all, nothing but clouds on all sides, I finally had to accept the first impression, that it must be an apparition of Mickey Mouse.   I could take it as a miracle, a sign that I should quit my job and devote myself to founding a new Disney World here in the Philippines.  If only I knew which Philippine this is.

(We are not in the Philippines of course, because it's an international flight.  Yet a domestic flight, at exactly these coordinates and altitude, would be.  Where are we, exactly?)

To my left and right, the same movie is playing on two screens, but at different points in the film.  On my left is development, on the right climax.  The same characters doing different things to each other, at the same time.

There was something among the clouds, just now:  A thin line across the screen, curving but very solid.  A coastline, surely, but I couldn’t say which side was land and which sea.  It looked more like a membrane, a boundary between two fluids.

I like the contrast between the view of the earth in front of me and the two parts of the same movie blasting away on both sides.  On my screen the clouds, vague landforms, and miraculous apparitions all flow past an even pace, just as they do on Google Earth when you give the mouse a little nudge.  Compared to this, the emotional and visual turbulence of the movies looks like its own kind of tedium.  To my left the lead couple in the film are having a quiet romantic moment over dinner, while to my right they're about to kill each other.  And straight ahead, just the earth rolling past.  Or maybe I have to say, a picture of it.

like a cheetah

Last night, on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a bit of a National Geographic Special on the maglev train that connects Shanghai's airport with its city center.  Most of it was about the engineering challenges of the project, and the many small dramas of solving them. At the end of the piece, we viewed the train from above as it rushed away on its elevated guideway, while the narrator said something like:  "But the future of the maglev train is very much in doubt."

And I thought:  "Like a cheetah."

That explained the déja vu I was feeling.  At some point long ago I'd heard those words -- "its future is very much in doubt" -- in that same firm and resonant baritone, as I watched a cheetah -- the world's fastest land mammal -- running into the distance from exactly this camera angle.  

And finally I saw what the show was about.  We are meant to care for the maglev exactly as we'd care for a charismatic endangered species.  We're to feel a specific motivating awe for the maglev because it's sleek, fast, muscular, intense and yet, for all that, endangered, just like the cheetah.  We're to believe that because this fast-moving yet inanimate object is the product of human engineers, the sentience of those engineers is there in the endangered thing itself, vulnerable to our judgment, just like the cheetah.

And I don't believe that.  I don't care about powerful-but-vulerable transit technologies in the way I care about cheetahs.  What's wrong with me?

Cross posted from Human Transit.  Photo: Primrose Girl