CITY IN AN AIR
CITY IN AN AIR
These old cities grew up around superstition and panic. Probably, you could find a goat trail here if you knew how to look, but centuries back it would have been ritualized into a more formal geometry, the inspirational chase of the shepherd become a narrow flight of steps leading to the portico of a church. The outcome of the chase is also uncertain. Did the goat slip away and the shepherd sit down in tears? Did the goat lead him to a meadow? Was the church built out of happiness or grief? It is hard to know, or if it is presently being misused for marriages and should be left to funerals. The old churches, only a bit larger than a chapel; they have a few squinting windows and could be mistaken for bunkers. It looks as if whoever built them was expecting a rain of fire. What would there be to celebrate in a marriage made beneath that kind of heaven?
You wake up here every night, more or less, for better or worse. Look how you shape mystery here. What’s in a shape? Given this maze, destiny and a practical joke, for starters. Better pick a destination within the city, not that this assures you of finding it-the streets can lead the walker back to where he began, actually they are certain to, but it is hopeless to seek one outside. There would be nothing to stop you. That’s the joke. The gates have not existed for centuries; all that is left are grand archways. There are bridges over the river, some nearly as old as the walls and made of the same whitish stone quarried in the Caucasus. Within sight of them, sometimes ridiculously close, are more recent ones fabricated of iron and without exception so ugly the traveler suspects they were designed as a refutation of the theology of modernization, or then again, may have been imposed as a punishment for doubting it. The predictable congested traffic can be heard from inside the walls even at night, when the mind drifting towards sleep takes the privilege of disguising it as the flow of the river, which in fact, is too lazy and meandering to be heard at all. The heavy traffic, the provision of trestle, the assumption of an airport to explain the lack of prologue to my own arrival, these declare that departure is easy. If only once inside it was possible to conceive of leaving. Instead, hearing that endless current beyond the walls when walking at night or glimpsing the tiny cars and trucks slithering along a web thin bridge from the heights of Castle Hill near the city center, I am unable to disenchant distance from mirage. I remain in the illusion I am looking out from one universe at another one impenetrable from it because of contrary physics, revolving in opposite directions, like meshing gears. Whoever would plan a tryst where they abut-and considering the longing I feel looking out on that other world, a tryst it would have to be-would know to prepare a note for his lover, and in the moment their hands meet once again they are torn apart, and looking back as they spin away see the note fluttering down. In this I have been reinforced by the absence of any significant traffic within the walls heading either in or out, just a few lorries whose blocky cabs, long hoods and frog eyed headlights, seem vintage World War Two. They labor from block to block over the cobblestones on narrow tires, carrying on their wooden beds cargoes of a foot powered sewing machine or single sack of potatoes, either the rudimentary commerce of poverty or sentimentality, it is hard to tell which, and never with any urgency, perhaps from despair or maybe wisdom.
The train station reiterates this impression of estranged universes. It is grand and gloomy, filled with shadows and haunting echoes, with pigeons in the high lofts whose cooing can be heard during those mysterious caesuras of sound that fissure experience, and are able to disturb our sense of free will or tenancy in the moment. Trains arrive in clouds of steam and the platforms are filled with tragic mobs silhouetted in the white mists. These crowds are always changing and always the same, and so, as in all train stations, it could be the dead who are departing, and only the dead who can.
Not a design, but a spell, this city is built on the moment when passion fails.
I am able to speak the native tongue. It is a form of English obscured by circumstances, a few grandly historical, but most the results of squabbles and indifference, and the self-involvement inevitable in the claustrophobic warrens. The essential emotional content cannot be communicated. It is rife with double meanings, but they are not held in common and people mostly talk to themselves, although these private conversations are generally more cheerful than those between people. Conversations have the sadness of echoes; people have learned it is best to talk through third agents, leaving diaries to be found, looking sideways at each other in a theater. As for the written language, it is purposefully illegible. The impression on seeing a page is that it is out of focus, however, the motivation of the author comes across more precisely than it would if put it into a language that nobody trusts except when elided. The pages seem to hum, which is often the impression the natives give, hummers not mutters, grief stricken but too hopeless to be bitter.
It goes like this: I find myself in streets under streetlights thickly cottoned by fog. I recognize these streets have been forgotten, and this forward moving memory snuffing itself out summons the city. Rather than violent origins, exhaustion and resignation answer for imperative, spinning reveries whose fulfillment was already in the past.
One is of the river which I thought only circled outside but which I could now see must flow through as well, because its citizens were skating on its frozen surface, and from the vantage of the river they looked up at their neighbors while the pedestrians were looking down on the divine democracy of weightless gliders over the rose glass. It was painfully sweet to see them this way, lovers with mittens removed so they might skate hand in hand, all of us removed from time, and the cold wind whipping our eyes to poetic refulgence and the girls' cheeks to an excited flush. So sweet and perfected was this memory that I thought whose ever it was must be dead or at the least outlived some promise made here.
I remember a blue headboard made from a gypsy wagon. I am as sure of it as of a prophecy, but no more certain.
A woman lay naked and asleep on the bed. Her head rested on one palm, her other hand rested in mine. The headboard had vanished, replaced by a window, blue as predicted by the painting of the night before. Light overflowed the sill. The woman glowed. She was like a planted bulb; a vine grew in her window, espaliered on the frame. The trumpets of its purple flowers read its name aloud off the cursive runners: Morning Glory.
And it ends with that, and afterwards the shadowy lanes that are less risky to the memory than waking will be. As long as I remain in the city where the avenues ravel backward she is still predicted. I knew her name but it is now unpronounceable. The city must be a distillation of echoing syllables. It will be impossible to memorize anything here, not a name or a poem or a street, the language speaks away from itself, the words dissolving as soon as they’re said, spilling over with silence. They finally arrive in your ear after no guessing how long bringing amnesia that returns desire to the stone.
If her name were Anna we met outside a theater. Actors are more agile in dreams than the rest of us, and with less dissonance can be folded into unlikely situations, for example falling in love at first sight with a middle aged vagrant, or falling into a state of immediate sympathy, even recognition, glimpsing him in the alleys at about four a.m.-was it because he did not belong there with such absolute certainty that it seemed he must always have been there, a spirit marooned by unused kindness?
She is leaving the theater in the wee hours. She hooks her arm in mine. I can feel her breast through the thick material of her coat.
I remember the light in Anna’s bedroom. It was changed. More light was possible; everything generated its own. They had awakened. Seeing it this way I realized I had thought of light as perfection blemished by detention in things. Now it seemed, instead, to be the surplus of feeling that longing requited in being would inspire. The insight had waited until, in league with all creation, my existence was re-woven from love and sleep.
In this city where there is no tongue save echoes, language might recover itself. Script could again shimmer between letter and pictograph, again only half-way refined so minutes and hours will spill out, and without the precise calculus in phonetic abbreviation to inscribe it, mystery is left in tact and the soul remains a crude description of eternity. Maybe this city is where the word first becomes flesh, a place where a fiction spying itself becomes inevitable.
If so, then Anna bent over the sink removing her make-up, a domestic chore, is confessing our existence. Nakedness is usually another style, another veil or consent, with even the flesh, at least as we can see it, hiding nakedness, and slipping into conformity, until a lucid night like this when the symmetry between soul and body merges into tautology.
That night I believe a word was created through us. I can see two figures, very small, me with Anna; they are falling rapidly away. I glimpse them on the edge of invisibility, just before they are recaptured by pure, formless immensity. At that distance they are the size of a glyph on a page, and could be nothing else, for the perfect unity they are forming is impossible for two bodies, and I know I am seeing them just before their perfection, when their bodies are losing themselves into the word. At the same time, I feel they are being expelled towards me, and if I could only watch long enough, I would see them reassembled as two distinct and possible bodies, but then I lose the memory, and can hardly bear the separation, because I can almost hear the word that has made this glyph. Almost a note reaches the edge of my ear, singing.
Which way do I turn to get back; will clockwise ravel or unravel, and when the last thread leaves the spool, would I be left with the song or its echo? If I were able to interrogate each person and object here, or if I thought even children had already spoken too much to give an answer and learning to play again or dreading nightmares again will not lead me back, and that the animals have diverse interests and can not be sounded piecemeal anymore for that first note, and so instead I find a cobblestone and wait until it cracks open into light, or I put salt into my palm and walk through these streets as carefully as if I cupped a candle waiting for it to again be tears, will disassembling this world re-build the one that expelled me, or just re-spin the recurring dream?
