Causal Sequences
Hey sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.
Hey sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.
--Laurie Anderson, Sharkey’s Night
Berms, Vaults, Chains of Being
At the heart of this essay are words and images, the stories about how I encountered them, and hopefully, the many avenues for their significances. By way of a warning, I feel obligated to tell the reader that I am, by nature, an elliptical thinker, and this astronomical term really does capture my approach to writing about, say, a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or perhaps a building on an archaeological site on the Pacific Shore of Peru. And though this essay begins with a recollection from the summer of 1991, it is really just a starting off point as I take a perambulating path through my own interest in art, history, science, film, and architecture to orient you, the reader, to a brief inventory of moments taking place since that time. These moments, I should add, are significant not only because they are ones that I associate closely with various buildings and landscapes, but also because they are just that—moments—and my duty as a writer is to make some kind of connection between them with the hopes that in the end a reader can see the resulting cloud of dots instead of the myriad connections that I was at pains to make—the forest for the trees, as is often said.
So, 1991. I was then taking summer classes at Northwestern University and living in a shared suite in one of those old Collegiate Gothic quads on the north end of campus, not far from the engineering school, which was then called the Technological Institute. It was one of those typically hot and humid summers along Lake Michigan, one where I often found myself walking along the mile-long stretch of campus to visit used bookstores, or just sitting on the beach and staring at airplanes above, ascending and descending along their mysterious, predetermined flight paths to and from O’Hare Airport. This was the time during which I began to understand something of what a university education was supposed to be, or at least wanted it to be. I took classes in the History of Science as well as Art History, which now seems fortuitous if not prescient. Specifically, it was during my first survey in architectural history that I began to see a connection between these two realms, all mediated through a single word: vault.
It was a term that two professors of mine would use frequently. One was the late Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, who became one of the foremost experts on the life and work Sir Isaac Newton. And whether she was lecturing on, say, epicycles and eccentric orbits and introducing students to theories of planetary motion from antiquity to the early modern period, she almost always used “vault” to describe the night skies, which at the time I imagined as a glittering expanse suspended over our heads. Nothing seemed as impossible as the notion that the sky, an infinite-seeming thing that contained the air that we breathe as well as countless flying objects, from gossamer-winged insects to impossibly large, aluminum-skinned airliners, a realm whose cerulean fringes transformed into the deepest violet at the edge of vision, only to be shattered by a splintering photon beam from a dying star some 92 million miles away, a shard breaking the air apart into a vast field of light—this, apparently, was a thing. Strange, then, how my other professor, the architectural historian David Van Zanten, described both the ceiling of Chartres Cathedral and Michelangelo and Giacomo della Porta’s thin-shelled dome at St. Peter’s Basilica as “vaults.” There is a bit of cognitive dissonance here, a logic of transformation, one where the architectural understanding of “vault” changes state and becomes more metaphorical, which is to say that a kind of engineering innovation allowing buildings to resist lateral thrust while achieving awe-inspiring heights is transfigured. One wonders, then, if the ultimate goal of architecture is just that, to transcend its physical and natural confines, to defy memory and be transmitted from generation to generation with words.
Although this was certainly on my mind during that summer, I did not have the words to describe such sense of expansive wonder—at least not my own. I only had vistas and images, at first tempered through books. Of vistas and books, there is this, a memory that anchors my location to a specific time and place during that summer of 1991. It is a hot afternoon and I am on a grassy berm, rereading a book Professor Dobbs assigned for her seminar—Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being. It was a paperback reissue, Harvard University Press, with that now-iconic cover featuring the book’s title in Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde ITC typeface (although I would not recognize it as such until now this very moment, as I am remembering these instances from a younger time.) The book was written in 1936, and yet I detected something all-too-tangible about it, as if Lovejoy’s description of a universe was really a description of a building. In his own historical reckoning, so Lovejoy tells us, there is “the conception of the plan and the structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers, most men of science, and indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question—the conception of the universe as a ‘Great Chain of Being.’” Lovejoy continues with his architectural wanderings: “[T]he architecture of the Heavens was not a piece of Gothic design—which is not surprising as it was, in fact, a Grecian edifice. The world had a clear intelligibility of structure, and not only definite shape, but what was deemed at once the simplest and most perfect shape, as had all the bodies composing it. It had no loose ends, no irregularities of outline. The simplicity of its internal plan had, indeed, under the pressure of observed astronomical facts, come to be more and more recognized as less complete than one would wish.”[1] It seemed a rather radical thing to me at the time, to think of architecture, so stout, so solid, so lasting, as something that was elusive, fleeting, limning the air like a slowly-moving current. Indeed, and many years later, I experienced something similar on an unusually hot Sunday afternoon in September in Brighton Beach when I watched matter cycle through its various states in a matter of moments. The midday sun turned the Atlantic into a vast, grey sheet that dissolved into the superheated air, and I was there, transfixed, unable to keep my eyes away from this wondrous event, much less get my bearing.
As dizzying that one experience may have been, there was another from that summer of 1991 that left me reeling somewhat. It was another those afternoons on which I would find myself on some kind of lonely jaunt into Chicago. I wandered into one of those video stores that had—at least as it seemed at the time—ersatz and offbeat titles. There were, of course, VHS copies of independent films, promotional and industrial items, underground cinema, bootlegged trailers, and even art films. On a wall opposite the register, underneath a sign that read SCIENCE FICTION—NEW RELEASES, I spied a VHS cover showing a man in a flight suit walking in a curved hallway that seemed to be made of metal. The surfaces were not smooth, but rather burnished, even old looking. The walls contained panels, buttons, and displays. Tubes ran along the top, curving, giving the sense that all of the film’s action took place inside a great circular space, and given that this was in the part of the store for science fiction films, my guess was that it was a depiction of the interior of a space station. This was, of course, the cover to the Fox Lorber Video edition of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, which is popularly referred to as the Russian version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is not, and even the most intrepid cinephile would be stray away from such a pronouncement. Despite their similar mises en scène, the two films are universes apart. If Kubrick’s 2001 is a kind of purely cinematic experience, one that is really about the abstract power of images, then Tarkovsky’s Solaris moors its science fiction story to more tangible, physical concerns like buildings and landscapes.
Weeds, Landscapes, Movements, Etchings
I had no idea what to expect when I took my rented copy of Solaris back to my room and started watching. This was, after all, a film touted as being a “classic.” I also had a paperback copy of an English translation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, the novel that Tarkovsky adapted for the screen. The movie begins with titles against a black screen set against a choral prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach and then cuts to close-up shot of waterweeds fluttering in a moving stream. There is no music here, only the sounds of nature, and the languorous motion of the weeds, which now appear almost hand-like, waving as the camera tightens and moves, recall the personification of twilight in the Homeric epics as “rosy-fingered dawn.” Each instance is gestural, each a poetic evocations of waving hands. But whereas the rosy light of the Iliad signifies the passage of time, the verdant, underwater waving in Solaris is a reminder of how at the heart of all forms of science fiction literature is a pronounced inability to come to terms with the future, a conceit that moors this far-looking genre to the interminable present.[2] This is perhaps why a science fiction film like Solaris begins with these ravishing shots of nature—they are visual cues reminding us that even the most spectacular leaps of imagination are tethered not just to the unavoidable now, but also to our ineluctable environment. No wonder, then, that the opening scene of Solaris is in essence a montage of familiar things: water, weeds, a willow tree, flowers, a horse. Here we encounter Cosmonaut-psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatos Banionis) on his last day on Earth before departing on a mission to the planet Solaris. He collects a sample of dirt that we will take with him to Solaris before washing his hands in a stream of water. He stands in the middle of a grassy field as the sky in begins to rain. These are all part of ritual cleansing that signals his imminent departure to another space—and time.
The house that we see in the middle of this scene belongs to Kelvin’s parents, and though this will not be his last homecoming during the film, the scene is a reminder of how architecture plays an essential role in depicting this inability to rectify the future with the present. Nothing, neither the house nor the interiors, reveals to the audience that the film is set in a far off future. The family home appears rather ordinary, its sturdy wood framing and hesitant polychromy reveal an lived interior, literally, for Kelvin himself peeks through a window to see all manners of vases, books, and other tchotchkes that will stand in stark contrast to the metallic and industrial interiors inside the space station orbiting around the Solaris. The lived spaces on Earth are real, and as for those aboard Solaris, they are the setting for a rumination of a completely different order.
Replicas, Landscapes, Juxtapositions
As viewers of the film will know already, the conceit behind Solaris is that the planet itself is a kind of titanic brain that is able to project the thoughts of the cosmonauts aboard the space station and make them into a tangible reality. There is a deeply-felt irony here, however, for such manifestations of thought, like a recording of a recording on a VHS deck, suffer a bit of generational loss, literally. That, or it is like looking at a reflection through a broken mirror, as if everything is a reflection of something else, but imperfectly so. One of the memories that the planet keeps projecting into Kelvin’s world and turns into a kind of imperfect reality aboard the space station is his dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk). Every one of her appearances is a painful reminder of her suicide ten years before, and for every instance that Kelvin tries to repress or eliminate the memory of her by physically jettisoning her body into outer space, she is resurrected and appears back on board the space station. Yet Hari appears changed with each successive reappearance, and each of these variations reveals something about her un-reality—subtly and profoundly. One of these is that she remembers her death, and yet cannot fathom why she is still “alive.” In another instance, she allows Kelvin to undo the laces on the back of her dress only to reveal that the grommets and cords have no function, an indication that her clothing is an imperfect copy of what would be found on Earth. She even understands her predicament and drinks a vial of liquid nitrogen, knowing that she will be back, albeit imperfectly so.
This is the setting for what is, at least in the eyes of this viewer, one of the most remarkable scenes in this movie. Or, to put it another way, it is remarkable because it seems, well, so unremarkable. It takes place after Kelvin has “accepted” Hari and has begun a kind of transitory existence with her on board Solaris. He has just finished arguing with the pragmatic Dr. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) about “annihilating” Hari when he encounters her inside a dining room. This is a space that is unlike any other in the film, for inside this futuristic space station is this room, with wood paneling, baize coverings, as well as crystal chandeliers and brass candelabra. This interior appears as if it were an architectonic emissary from the 18th or 19th century, grafted onto Tarvkovsky’s vision of a space-traveling future. It is, however, extraordinary because of just how different it is from the rest of the environment. The space station interior becomes a kind of temporal montage incorporating architectural and designed elements from bygone eras. It continues, however, because now we see Kevin and Hari sitting before a series of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569). The camera now takes over their own purview, and we begin to see one of Bruegel's paintings through their own eyes: The Hunters in the Snow (Winter) (1565). This work is notable too for its juxtapositions. Three hunters are returning to their village with little to show for their work. They are joined by their hunting dogs, whose hung heads and winnowed bodies are not different from that of the dead fox carried by one of the hunters. Their return, as humdrum and ordinary as it may seem, is but one indication that lean times are in store for the village. Yet there is a sense that everything is continuing as before. Sparks bloom as a blacksmith hammers on a forge. In the distance, we see skaters with hockey sticks and curling rocks. It is a scene of survival amidst desperation.
We wonder, then, why exactly this is the painting that Tarkovsky chooses to depict Kelvin’s and Hari’s reunion. Perhaps it has something to do with what the camera is actually seeing—and hearing—as it moves over parts of the painting. Again, note the recursive, juxtaposed temporalities and technologies here. A man rejoins his once-dead wife, resurrected for a second time. They are in a space station orbiting a faraway planet, in a room filled with designed objects from the 18th and 19th centuries, looking at a painting from the late 16th century. This study in contrasts continues. Whereas the scenes that take place on Earth are all variations on choral and organ preludes by Bach, here, Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score is mixed with sounds from nature. Chirping birds and rustling streams are mixed with the spectral polyphonies of Artemyev’s ANS Synthesizer, a machine invented in the late 1930s by the Soviet electronics pioneer Yevgeny Murzin (1914-1970).[3] As a musical instrument, the ANS Synthesizer used photo-optical techniques from cinema to create sounds, but in a different way. Recall that the so-called “optical track” of a film is in reality a method of recording and storing the sounds recorded as the film was being made. The ANS used the same process albeit in a reverse fashion: it converted hand drawn lines etched on glass plates into sounds. The effect was one in which cinematic sound was effectively divorced from its optical source, and as viewers, we too are experiencing something similar as the sounds heard at the very beginning of Solaris are here removed from their original context and superimposed over what is, in essence, a tracking shot of Pieter Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow (Winter).
Moreover, the significance of landscape here should be considered more closely. This extended, languorous shot of The Hunters in the Snow (Winter) is really a way for Kelvin to revisit his home back on Earth. The houses appearing on the edges of Bruegel’s painting mimic those from Kelvin’s memory, causing us to pause and wonder whether this is really a scene about Kelvin reimagining his own visit home. When we first encounter Kelvin, he too is like the hunters returning home. Though we may not be sure as to “which” version of home is visiting, the fact that Kelvin peers inside his childhood home through a window that has basically the same dimensions as a movie projection is certainly telling. The cinematic image becomes a means for framing, or rather, experiencing the landscape. It is a vehicle that enables telepresence by allowing one person to be in two places at the same time, which is to say, in the space of the viewing as well as in the viewed space. For Kelvin, then, looking at the inside of the house through a window is akin to looking at a Bruegel painting hung on a wall. And in Solaris, it amounts to translation in several senses of the word, of converting something into something else. There is, of course, temporal translation, as elements from the past, from interior decorations to Hari herself, appear as disturbances in the present. Kelvin’s entrance into this room from the space station is also a kind of spatial dislocation, of translating from one space to another. Artemyev’s score literally translates light into sound, cinema into music. But perhaps the most significant translation is one that takes by dint of the ANS Synthesizer itself. When looking at the actual optical plates, riven with hand drawn crags and fissures, their resemblance to a landscape is notable. Here, the etched glass bears marks of human activity much like a landscape, a patch of earth, furrowed and scarred, or perhaps even an abstracted aerial view of mountains and rivers, one where idealized versions of vertical peaks are combined with a riverine system expanding horizontally in space.
Readers, Eyes, Falling, Distraction, Maps, Writing
There are other things to note when watching Bruegel through Tarkovsky’s eye. One is how different closeups of The Hunters in the Snow (Winter) are either superimposed or fade into one another. The effect is similar to how one takes in the landscape in fragments, which is really a good approximation of our own apperception. A viewer in a landscape is not like the anthropomorphic, gangly-legged camera seen on the Sternberg Brothers’ iconic poster for Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1929). The viewer is not a bedeviling “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” as described by Charles Baudelaire (and celebrated by Walter Benjamin.) Nor is the viewer the eyeball-headed museum-goer, confronted by a panoply of surfaces and planes in Herbert Bayer’s Extended Field of Vision diagram from 1935. In each of this, the viewer appears passive, an optical medium, channeling a deluge of visual information as it enters the eye into a memory, a recollection, or perhaps a play of light of shadow onto an emulsion on a plate or a spool rotating at 24 frames per second. These viewers may have eyes (or in some instances, eyelashes), but their mode of vision should not be equated with the actual act of seeing. This is because a viewer in landscape pauses and blinks while taking in the vista in a piecemeal fashion. A viewer in the landscape is self-conscious, alert and responsive. This is to say that more than anything, the viewer in the landscape is a reader, scanning the surrounding expanse, contemplating, understanding.
Tarkovsky’s eye is a reader’s eye. This much is clear in the sequence with Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (Winter). Note how much of the camera movements are horizontal pans, a necessary conceit in that it suggests Kelvin and Hari are entering the painting by just looking at it closely. For a moment, the camera allows us to substitute our own vision for theirs, and like them, we do see many details up close during these moments. There are also some instances where the panning animates the paintings, as in the case of the close up of the bird. Unlike, say, Étienne-Jules Marey’s camera gun, which captures a bird on the wing and kills it in the middle of its flight by dint of the photographic image, Tarkovsky's camera does the opposite. It focuses on the bird and pans left, bringing life a centuries-old bird through the illusion, momentary as it may seem, that it is flying forward. And is not this constant panning, this literal translation and displacing of images from right to left, also reminiscent of the ways we turn pages on a book?
In the same baize-covered chamber, next to The Hunters in the Snow (Winter) is another Bruegel painting, the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, also from 1565. The vantage point here is very similar to the one in The Hunters in the Snow (Winter). In the foreground, a ploughman maintains to his crop and a shepherd seems momentarily distracted, looking at something in the air above. Presumably, and as indicated by the painting’s title, it is Daedalus and Icarus. The scene is lifted directly from Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
An angler with his quivering rod,
A lonely shepherd propped upon his crook,
A ploughman leaning on his plough, looked up
And gazed in awe, and thought they must be gods
That they could fly.[4]
In an image filled with distractions, theirs is only a momentary one. But you too, as viewer, are distracted. Consider, for example, the ploughman and shepherd from Ovid’s verse. In Bruegel’s painting, they appear in Flemish dress whereas the sun, whose transit is lost to a glaucous aura hovering in the sweltering air, gives the water an almost emerald-like hue, as if this is a scene that is occurring somewhere in the Mediterranean coast. And the understanding of this part of the world comes from Icarus himself, surveying the world below, its islands, making a map of it before he too is distracted:
Delos and Palos lay
Behind them now; Samos, great Juno’s isle,
Was on the left, Lebinthos on the right
And honey-rich Calymne, when the boy
Began to enjoy his thrilling flight and left
His guide to roam the ranges of the heavens,
And soared too high. The scorching sun so close
Softened the fragrant wax that bound his wings;
The wax melted; his waving arms were bare;
Unfledged, they had no purchase on the air![5]
This is, of course, the definitive account of the Icarian myth, perhaps the original cautionary tale. But more must be said about this business of flying and making maps. As Thomas Pynchon wrote in Mason & Dixon (1996), mapmaking is more than just flight; it is its crucial prerequisite. Before flying, surveyors “had to learn about Maps, for Maps are the Aides-mémoires of flight.”[6] As for the fall of Icarus, it bears no witnesses and goes by unnoticed. It is, however, committed to memory, a testamentary device, as Icarus’s flight has transformed from forgotten flight to cartographical fact:
And calling to his father as he fell,
The boy was swallowed in the blue sea’s swell,
The blue sea that for ever bears his name.
His wretched father, now no father, cried
‘Oh Icarus, where are you? Icarus
Where shall I look, where find you?’ On the waves
He saw the feathers. Then he cursed his skill,
And buried the boy’s body in a grave,
And still that island keeps the name he gave.[7]
Mapmaking has become a form of historical recollection. And this means that, in a very general sense, it is a form of writing. A very recent case in point is art historian Alexander Nemerov, who makes what is perhaps the most evocative link between the two. In Wartime Kiss (2013), he muses on a set of photographs, moments from the American home front during World War II. He writes as an airminded, aeriformed soul, which is to say, aloft. And his own thoughts about writing about such are also buoyant and fleeting. “Gravity is usually thought to be the historian’s element,” writes Nemerov, “but butterfly-wing atmospherics slow-drawn in air are another form of historical recollection. [..] When it is truly carried away, historical writing is a kind of flying.”[8] Flight is that most contradictory and illogical of enterprises. It requires control of a machine and complete surrender to the air. This, then, is a way to understand the very final moments from the sequence in Solaris when Kelvin and Hari are looking at Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow (Winter). They embrace each other and begin to levitate as if they too are surrendering their own selves—and in turn, their agency—to Tarkovsky’s own vision. Our two levitators, in thrall to their loving embrace, are also readers.
Flight
This is to say that reading is also a kind of flight. At least this is what Italo Calvino tells us in If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979). In one passage, he describes reading as more than just an entertainment that mollifies our agitations and ennuis during long flights:
How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)[9]
Calvino’s question at the end of this passage is, at first glance, coy and perhaps a bit smart-alecky. There is a whiff of the (very) capable postmodern writer writing a novel in the guise of a metanovel whose very goal is to blur the distinction between reality and fiction, and perhaps reading and writing. Reading and flying are, of course, two separate endeavors, each with their own mores, customs, and equipment. However, there is something so beguiling about the passage, and it is not just because Calvino threatens to undo his very logic. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that reading is a form of surrender, of forgetting one’s self.
But when it comes to issues of landscape, Calvino’s own quote can be problematic because it suggests that there a world outside our own reading of it. It all begs the question: Is there anything that attaches us to something greater than ourselves than a landscape? If this is the case, then reading takes on a special kind of importance, one with a kind of physicality that requires some attention. What is the relation between reading and landscape? Going back to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, I was implying that if the painting was, in a sense, a visual evocation of the Icarian myth as presented in Metamorphoses, then to see Bruegel was to read Ovid. The medium that connected the two was landscape, a figurative and literal terrain that is more than a space captured by images and reworked into things. There are words, and those words are on a page, and that page is in a book.
Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus makes another appearance in film. There is a scene in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1975) when Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) senses that Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) is actually an alien. In his home office, Bryce opens a book called Masterpieces in Paint and Poetry to a spread featuring Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and the last stanza of W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938). Already is there is an equivalence of image and text. Not it only is the book’s title making a connection between these two forms of art, but the appearance of Bruegel and Auden on the same spread is certainly apposite. To continue the bit of logic introduced earlier, if to see Bruegel was to read Ovid, then in Roeg’s film, the opposite is true: to read Bruegel is to see Auden. This is established by a sequence of shots. We begin with a medium shot of the spread, which focuses on Bruegel’s painting, which then hovers Auden’s poem on the opposite page, before focusing on details from Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The camera movement here replicates those of the reader’s eyes, going back from recto to verso, from verso to recto. As it is already established that the painting in printed in a book, we nevertheless confront Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in its original state, as an image, as something to be seen. Yet the next shot reveals only part of Auden’s poem. We do not experience it as poetry as such. We know nothing about the text, but as the camera lingers, we stop reading and notice the stanza as a grouping of words, arranged somewhat orthogonally, and the implication are that these words are connected to the image. They serve a purpose other than the wall text we see in a museum, and this poem excerpt, cropped and skewed, is now understood as related to Bruegel’s painting. Nothing about the text tells us this, and it is the use of montage that makes the connection between, as the book’s title suggests, between “paint” and “poetry”: they are both images.
To Pachacamac
It begins with a book on your table. It is night, late night, in fact, but there is a part of you that wants to pick up that book, to stay up and not go to bed. This is how you reclaim all those hours lost to your day job. To your commute. To your three cups of afternoon coffee. To finding time to recharge your phone. To an impossibly crowded subway or persistent traffic jam. So here, on this night, just as you feel the all those things that otherwise mark your day to day existence weigh your eyelids down, you do this: you open the book, crack the spine, take a dip in the ocean of words and surrender to their undertow. At some point, your head starts to nod, you come back to a momentary state of lucidity. You may find feel slightly lightheaded. You may feel like you are levitating, but maybe you are just imagining that you are levitating. The book you are trying to read is still there. In this liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, the book becomes a landscape. Vistas reveal words. Words form textures, razzle-dazzles of figure-ground silhouettes nestled in a vast terrain of white space, parts of which you can still see beyond and behind the blackletter ascenders, descenders, loops, ligatures, bowls, and finials. And if the book is still open on your lap or balancing on your stomach, you may notice how the pages bunch up the closer they get to the gutter, forming a valley of sorts.
The gutter is not the middle of a valley, but a shoreline. Or a line on a map that acts as a demarcator between land and sea. The right hand part of the spread, the recto, is the western part of Peru. On the other side, the verso, there is the South Pacific Ocean. You run a finger from the top of this meridian. Lima District is there, near the top. Below it is an inventory of names—La Punta, Miraflores, Costa Verde, La Herradura, Punta Hermosa—neighborhoods and beaches, places that mark transitions from sea to land. The valley of the book on your lap, with its spine nestled between your crossed legs, has its own topography. The recto slopes upwards like the land itself, rippling up towards the first ridges of the Andes Mountains. Somewhere in the middle of the page is Pachacamac District, and a closer look reveals ruins. There are walls and streets, windows, stairs. There are remains of buildings with square and rectangular footprints. A city is summoned miraculously from its earthen grave.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges summoned cities from earthen graves in his 1953 short fiction “The South.” He did it with mirrors. “Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms,” he wrote.[10] It is a way of saying that everything is a reflection of something else, but imperfectly so. A mirror may have a bump or spot that distorts the reflection. Everything looks familiar, but then there is a flaring of light, a fluttering in the reflective fabric—this imperfection is like a hole in a gauzy fabric, gives you a privileged peek into another place, another time. That book on your lap: it reminds you of another book, a map, or even a map in a book. You notice that something is different. In “The South,” Borges uses an architectural metaphor to describe this kind action of action. Reading a book, crossing a street—each is a secret passage into “a more ancient and sterner world,” and like the narrator, you too search in vain for “the new buildings, the iron grill window, the brass knocker, the arched door, the entrance way, the intimate patio”—evidence of a modernity left behind.[11] This is what it is like to be far away in time and space from a building, to see its last traces dissolving into a forgotten realm.
To summon a building you almost have to avoid it. You avoid the walls, the foundations, the windows. You avoid the forms, the textures, the materials. Instead, you weave around the building. Stories, images, descriptions, histories: these are your threads, these are the warp and weft of building. But these are not the building, which is to say that to write about a building, you have to see it differently—maybe not see it at all. The building is not form, but is formed. Like the cyclonic winds that give a hurricane’s eye its center, you write to create a defined void.
You write from above, from below, from outer space, from the Southern Cross, and finally to an underwater current that originates in the South Polar regions. This current moves upwards in a roughly counter-clockwise arc, a gyre that mixes the dense, cold waters with the warmer waters of the South Pacific Ocean as they join those whirling near the equator. It is the Humboldt Current, named after Alexander von Humboldt, who visited Peru in 1803, and it runs in a graceful arc along the coastline, traversing isotherms and merging with the prevailing western winds, churning the waters while bringing the dense, cold stream near to the surface. As the water evaporates, a movement in the upper atmosphere draws moisture away from the coast. This disturbance in the air is a mirror image of the Humboldt Current. Both move in the same direction, dual circuits of air and water in concert, gyrating towards and away from the coast. The current supplies the outlying islands with a supply of deep water fish. On its return West, it draws orphaned seed pods and sweet potato into the ocean. The upper level disturbance—a Walker circulation—sweeps the air away revealing a landscape scarred with ripples and fissures, imperfections that mark the last of these emanations, as if the waters receded and left behind a desert plain. The air is indeed dry here, and in Pachacamac, it appears to be the same air that once was here, circulated and recirculated again as it has been for centuries.
Brooklyn, New York / Vancouver, British Columbia / San Antonio, Texas
[1] Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1933), 59, 101.
[2] Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso Books, 2005), 289.
[3] The ANS synthesizer was named after the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), who incorporated elements of synaesthesia into his orchestral works. The most well-known synaestheste is Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote about his experiences with “colored hearing” in his literary autobiography, Speak, Memory (1966)
[4] Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII 218-21, trans. E.J. Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 178.
[5] Ibid, VIII 221-30.
[6] Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 504.
[7] Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII 232-40, trans. E.J. Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 178.
[8] Alexander Nemerov, Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3-4.
[9] Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, William Weaver, trans. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 210.
[10] Jorge Luis Borges, “The South,” in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962 [1956]), 169.
[11] Ibid.