San Lorenzo, A Story

Long after we had lived in Rome together, my old friend and colleague F. told me once, so strangely and erratically did he withhold and divulge his innermost thoughts, that as he walked through the streets of San Lorenzo, a beatnik student enclave to the East of Termini station, an area charged with the naïve honesty of the authentic anarchic movement that still pervades so much of Southern Europe but which has long since petered out in Britain into a discrete nostalgia reserved for the bad-old-good-old-days, he found that these muralled walls and ever-trickling street-fountains, cars on bricks and graffitied shutters, so totally overpainted in Marxist slogans and clumsy satires, peopled with knot-tops and punks with mongrel dogs on string, created such a sense of quasi-reality that he felt himself to be walking not through a Roman street but through an actual cartoon, as if pulled out of physical contact with his surroundings and dropped into the foreground of a hand-drawn comic strip. Even his gait would become an idiom of animated movement: jerky and lop-sided, his right arm pushing upwards unevenly and repetitively with each step, as if walking on the spot while a raggedly illustrated streetscene is reeled behind. This hyper-coloured reality was to him a stronger, more convincing one than what we take for the actual. As he stalked these sulphur-lit night streets he felt as if the world had been safely wrapped up, as if this life was just a youthful idealistic runthrough in which nothing could be broken forever and the stains and smudges of foolishness or fate could be erased and redrawn. Even motion itself was imbued with an inbuilt narrative direction: travelling horizontally, reassuringly from left to right, from beginning to end, granting him a security of meaning and purpose that real life withholds. He felt that the distance created by the depth of field between the protagonist and the background in the cartoons of his childhood, and now in the super-imposition of himself into this living comic, defines more clearly the remoteness between the experience of self and the experience of other than anything in what he was decreasingly inclined to refer to as mundane reality ever could. So safe he felt, he told me, walking through this animated life, in which he drew and redrew himself, that mundanity, if he allowed it to fog over again what he described as the clarity of the unreal, seemed to reveal our humdrum lives to be made up of little more than such acts as the endless folding and unfolding of tea-towels.

Corpus Domini, A Story

At the time that I took a spring in Italy, I was trying to escape a terrible time in my life. Whilst giving myself this sojourn in which to be alone, with total freedom and independence, I was simultaneously engaged by email in a crushing breakup, the causes of which had occurred so far in the past that the events themselves had lost their original meanings, revealing in retrospect not just that the protagonists had ceased to communicate or understand each other, but perhaps also the utterly solipsistic nature of all arguments, as if it is only through a long process of losing touch with objectivity that we can finally arrive at a truth that all reality is subjective and that the external world is nothing but a cloudy, indistinct projection of ourselves. And here in Italy in springtime, bodily facing outwards and with a self-experience of moving forward in time, I was engaged chasing arguments backwards, deeper and deeper, piercing not into the truth but only into my own heart, as if possessed by a determination to accumulate more and more suffering, an expression of human greed in its most self-destructive form. I felt stretched by two wild beasts lashed together, fixed so taut that I might eventually perish like an old rubber band.

With this unvoiced feeling lurking within me, in small Tuscan and Perugian towns not in the hills but on the fertile plains, towns suffused with knowing workadayness, I would await the change of trains by going in search of an internet café in order to do nothing but sit for a moment to check my inbox, as an injured man might pummel his own wounds as if he were convinced his body had a limited supply of pain which could be exhausted through a dedicated course of self-infliction, or as an addict might attempt to cure himself through blindly consuming his vice into oblivion.

In one such town, in a state of headiness from the dusty alien light and in a state of ritualised anxiety, I left the station and walked across the municipal square, towards the centre, following the age of the architecture backwards into the past. I came after a little while to the main church, out of which a procession was flowing like a human mudslide. This, I discovered, was the Sunday after Corpus Domini, and the devout came out of the cool darkness of the church brightly-coloured and unhesitatingly, reminding me unavoidably of colourful handkerchiefs pulled endlessly from a magician’s nose. Since the majority of the town’s adults seemed to be emerging from the church, the thin layer of onlookers must have been none but the wives and children of the participants. I watched in the shade of a triumphal pillar. After a while I found myself pulled in the wake of the marchers by their collective momentum. I was inclined to move with a marching band that emerged out of the church portal into the afternoon light, wishing, as I had once played in one, to examine the subtle differences which demarcate shared pursuits: the cadence of their footfall, the tightness of their turning steps, the presence or absence of little music stands welded onto their instruments, the colours of their straps, socks and gloves, the age and carriage of the players: their commitment or disinterest. So dragging my luggage behind me, an encumbered procession of one, I continued awkwardly alongside, tripping up and down the high pavement edges, with my wheeled bag clipping ungracefully lampposts and ungraciously the heels of onlookers, quite out of time to the music, the bombastic Fascist brass writing that seemed oddly not to have been wiped out in Italy as it had been in Germany since the war. Seeing a few blocks down that the marchers were looping around the town, and becoming fed up with the cumbersome bag I was dragging through the narrow crowd, I decided to cut down a sidestreet and rejoin the processioners nearer the station square. Seeing on this deserted road an internet sign, I ducked in, sensing the certainty of another crushing rebuff rising up in my gut.

The white-tiled floor was filthy, unforgiving strip lighting bathed a scatter of plastic garden chairs in a fuzzy institutional light, the chairs clustered into clumps rather than aligned with terminals, as if placed in order to be obstacles to a convenient entry or a hasty escape. The sound of the plastic legs being pushed around was heavy with moisture, perspiration seeping off the two-dozen or so Chinese teenagers, off their foreheads or through patches of their unbranded cotton tshirts, grey-lit by screens, standing around, or seated or betting at some game of cards, arguing. As I walked in those not involved in the card game looked up with contempt, those at their computer games remained in utter stillness, all controlling a figure, their lifesake, who runs endlessly on the spot as his landscape moves under him, a planet rolling round and round and from side to side, forever curving away beneath, the exact inverse of a mouse in a treadmill. The sweat-bright yet somehow poorly lit room, tiles grimy, accumulations of foot-swept dust and hair at each desk and in each corner, felt like some weirdly upgraded voluntary workhouse, and brought a sense that someone had flicked some switch in reality, as if the train that carries us on through life had been suddenly diverted to the wrong track by a group of delinquent teenagers throwing down the point. I sat at a screen. Everything was in Chinese. I could recognise all the symbols but I was unable to make anything work, as if the computer itself was some parochial bureaucrat pretending to speak only Chinese, innocently and stubbornly refusing to comply with my requests. I got up flustered and overheating, and left quickly without paying, knocking aside and dragging my bag waist-deep in the plastic garden chairs, giving a undefined gesture to the staring adolescents, signifying nothing but confusion and the acknowledgement that I had wandered into a place I didn’t belong.

Outside the pale orange dusty light of Tuscany hovered just above the stench of incense and the stench of patriotic music which housed the otherness of Catholicism, as the parade marched perpendicular across the end of the road. As I stepped from out of the room and in to the street, the contrast of these two evident realities was so great that I seemed to have made some deeper transition, as if stepping out of the inside of one person’s imagination into the imagination of another, as if these two tableaux were nothing but furnished rooms in the memories of people whose lives I would never hope to know or understand. I stood feeling a little high, a little dissolved, in this desert watching the shifting dune of the devout blowing down the street as if carried on by the winds of the certainty of salvation. It seemed to me on the other hand that the notion of certainty itself was an act of faith, and that I might dissolve into the fissure between the two opposing realties either side of me, realities of such incongruence as to defy the very possibility of a single self that could encounter both. Seeking to escape back into my own reality I headed directly to the train station to await my connection to Rome.

At the metaphysical Event Horizon

A review of Pure Reason (for David),
in
Pure Reason, Poems by Nikos Stangos

As a manifestation of both reason and passion, humanity blinds philosophers: it is the sun in to which we seem unable not to stare. Analysis is blunted by our contradictory compass: the self-evident truth that we are both proud, thinking, striving and yet wretched, fearing, loving things. Nikos’s poetry exists in that philosophic interjacency, humorous and connected, a membrane under which to dovetail the bifurcated strands of earnest Kantian dialectic with honesty, love and obsession. In Pure Reason (for David), Nikos, like many essentially unbelieving students of philosophy, will not expunge reality from the metaphysical mission. He must reconcile “year after year” the “whole culture of human reason”, with the erotic, cloudy humanity from which all our experiences, moreover all our lives, must be drawn.
The conflict is beautifully and dramatically portrayed by the twin “you”s to whom the poem is addressed: by turns our transcendent or our human foils. Kant is our metaphysical guide, scolding Nikos for “my impatience, my laziness, my lack of perseverance”, and being ribbed in return:

“‘Necessary’
you are. ‘Strictly universal’?”

The other “you”, love, life, returning inevitably, seeps sensually and luminously through the fabric of the text:

“The walls define your size, the pools of
light explain your colours, the rooms are tuned to your voice, our bed
admits to your weight.”

The dramatic and philosophical centrepiece of the work is the denouement and collapse of the metaphysical project. As “obscurities strain to become clarity” (a quotation from Falsetto by Eugenio Montale), like “the inaudible sounds [of] cats’ dreams”, we approach the limit of experience, the boundary between what is empirical and what exists beyond the reach of empiricism: pure a priori knowledge. Here my sensation is of being drawn into an experiential black hole. Physicists describe the brink of a black hole as an ‘event horizon’, where not only light and matter but their conceptual counterparts, speed and weight, are described, in an evocative piece of scientific baptism, as ‘smearing’ together.
At the event horizon of this Kantian black hole knowledge and experience are severed, reality and ideality are smeared together, “anarchic”, “turbid”,

“opposites, the antinomies, lose their prescribed
definition,… …sound has become silence,
silence sound, movement is now stasis, stasis movement, your
appearance is always certain when you are absent, the previously
invisible concepts are now most concretely visible”.

Kant could not have imagined his preciously constructed analogies of experience: permanence, co-existence and succession, the building blocks of what can be known to us, greased into one another, his architectonic dissolving helplessly into that which it was designed to prove.

To search for the harmless-sounding “knowledge a priori” conceals the mystery, the fear and emptiness of the unknown that might exist beyond the limits of our possible experience. What “general truths” could we find “independent of our experience”, and how could they be “clear and certain by themselves”, if to find them is to journey to the limit of reality and have our perceptions smeared along the metaphysical event horizon? Kant was flying into the sun, forcing the impossible to become necessary. If we come to the brink of this abyss, what could we see?

Recoiling, we fall back to Earth (“The seasons have lost their clarity.”), burnt out, dejected, surrounded by merely our own discrete purities: “We have failed. Each of us keeps to himself.” But a paradigm shift has taken place, a Copernican revolution: no longer analysis, but “you provide the focus.” We are in Nikos’s home, feeling and touching, meeting his cats and their naïve philosophical convictions; but also experiencing absences, the truly and only human uncertainties of safety and calm, of reciprocal need, of loss and isolation. It is these experiences which are prior. This colour, this life fills the gap, or replaces the fear, of the metaphysical black hole.

And closer, smaller, more simple and pure, is “you”: “you precede experience”. The humane “you”, left on earth, waiting, being, “the analogies of experience” as intended: a becoming moment by moment; a permanence even in absence; the inevitable immediacy of touch and taste—unspoiled, indissoluble, a wholeness available only to those, to us, who experience.
Purity is not to be gained from a rationalizing simplification, “a dangerous, a suspect / obsessive drive to ‘reduce’ things”, but from an

“inward necessity, simple and certain in itself:
to make this our categorical imperative.”

This revelation, “your pulse, the thumping heartbeat as I hold you closely”, is to be the fixed centre on which “we can build our solid edifice”. And this experience of love, of other, of life can spin the particle antinomies “resolving themselves as if by magic, and fabulous marriages will take place among them.”

Not the inaccessible high windows of a truth beyond experience, but “’a fluidity of colours, these in music’” are “this ultimate knowledge”: the only “pure reason” which we can both aspire to know and are granted to achieve.

January 19th, 2008