Voisin

 

It was a lively day in the city, the air rich with the smell of spices, and the constant bustle of hawkers and stallholders all around us. My friend was up ahead, and I pushed through the crowd to catch up with her. Momentarily I lost sight of her, and I pushed on through the crowd, placing my hand on a back here, nudging between some shoulders there. I saw a door that I had never noticed before closing and caught it before it had fully shut.

In truth the other side of the door was nothing remarkable, little different from the bustling market space that I had left. There was another open market space, with the usual stalls, and up ahead a narrowing in the pillars to create a seeming corridor that shaded into darkness. I could see her mane of bright red hair for a moment but then she vanished into the darkness. I resolved to take my time, I had not noticed these stalls before and it was still early in the day.

The first stall was surrounded by a frantic crowd but when I got through I found that it held only a strange array of broken clock parts. Similarly the next stall was thronged but merely displayed a selection of broken glass, that had seemingly been dug up, the dirt still sticking to it. The further I ventured from the door, that I had passed without thinking, the more I noticed that which was at odds with all that I was familiar with. It seemed that everyone was wearing clothes that they had made themselves, they carried jute sacking or canvas, with which to wrap anything they might buy. A hurdy gurdy played a tune I did not recognise, the hot foods were with dipped in a sauce that glittered and glowed, when I looked at the seller, I noticed that his buttons were improvised pieces, sewn onto his coat, each a different size and shape, pottery punched with holes, stubby twigs.

Beyond a row of pillars was an expanse of round tables, the crowds were less dense, and despite the intensity of those sitting round the tables, it seemed more relaxed than the market space. I sat at one table, slowly realising that those round the table were gambling, I could not recognise the game, it involved strange tokens and playing cards that I could not recognise, their heads were down, as they studied the cards and tokens intently. One head was raised momentarily, and I recognised Simon an attorney from an office near where I worked. His eyes flashed brightly, he nodded in recognition and signalled me to come over. As I knelt down beside him, he welcomed me to the city of Voisin. Although his smile was bright and friendly and his tone welcoming, I could tell from his eyes that he was anxious for me. In a whispered voice he told me that in Voisin it is not done to wear a hat or scarf, and I should discard them as soon as possible. I could tell from his tone and seriousness that it was important not to react to any of this, to treat our conversation as mere friendly words, some chit chat, or commonplace remarks. I nodded that I understood, when it was clear that I did not. I made to stand up, and he beckoned to me one last time, I bent my head closer to him, he mouthed some words to me. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets.

I nodded to let him know that I understood, when, in truth, I did not. I left the table and wandered on, with the rough idea that the unexpected door that I had come through lay somewhere behind me. Without looking at anyone I slipped off my scarf and hat, and a few paces later dropped them in the gap beneath an empty table which was draped with a pale cloth.

On looking around me, it was increasingly obvious to me that this was not the city that I had come from, although on first glance it looked the same. Things were made of painted cardboard, like the scenery at the theatre, canvas was stretched over straw, and crumpled paper filled gaps.

I resolved to …

Quipu

 

 

I have heard tell, from explorers and other travellers of the city of Quipu. It lies deep in the jungle, a thousand miles from civilisation. The jungle there is wet with constant rain, the trees are loud with colourful frogs calling, and tiny bright fish swim in the puddles caught perpetually in the folds of the trees. It is even said that the great river that flows down to Mahogany has its source in that region, though I do not know whether that is true.

The region is so endlessly moist, that no paper could possibly survive. There are no books in that place, nor so much as a single piece of paper. Explorers tell how their normal clothes rotted on their backs, any metal rusted and stained, their buttons reduced to green smudges on their shirts.

Any books and notes that travellers had carried with them rotted in the hot humid atmosphere, turning to mush, like a wasps’ nest that you find in late summer in some neglected spot. But the people of Quipu are undeterred by such things and do not recognise them as an inconvenience, instead of paper, or even impressions on clay, as I have seen employed elsewhere, they rely solely on knots tied in the string they make. There are numberless varieties of knots, and the distance between knots is equally telling, in conveying meaning and nuance. Their entire civilisation is recorded on these knotted twines, they organise their accounts in this manner. Their rulers convey orders to distant subjects, lovers share fond memories.

While their civilisation appears unconventional to our eyes, it is successful by all the usual metrics, excelling in such arts and trades as we might recognise, with one great lacuna. Without the lens of the blank paper, without the rectangle of an empty page before them, they have no architecture that we could recognise as such. They have no understanding of right angles, the perpendicular or the level. They do not recognise a straight line, or the angles that it can describe.

For the people of Quipu, all is curves and possibility, there is space or there is not space. Their whole city is heaped opportunistically where there is space to put it. When the mood, or the need takes them, they will make a rough wall, piling clay woven with threads, letting the wall fall where it will enclosing what it can. The overall effect is of something natural, like bird nests clustered close together in a tree, or coral slowly tumbling across the ocean floor.

Having never seen a straight line, they think that their way of life is perfectly natural, and for the people of Quipu they truly believe that they are lacking for nothing at all in their strange city in the jungle moistness.

Lux

 

The strangest thing that I ever saw, was when I was a child in the desert. We passed a camel, carrying a great curved slab of water. This was not cold like ice, but crystalline water. There was no container, merely ropes to fix it in place, I was told that some light wires were submerged in the mass, and there was a battery to provide a modest trickle charge forcing the water to retain its crystalline form. A few metres in height and breadth, it was curved coming to a peak, heavier at the base. The water seemed cloudy, translucent rather than particularly dark or clear. I was told that at the flick of a switch it would resume its natural form, a sudden deluge of warm water. In this way, the nomads would carry great chunks of water across the desert to their dwellings or for trade.

Once the camel had crossed our path, carrying the huge slab of water, it headed on, I know not where. I was a child and full of questions, and there were only a few answers available, the camel had come from the city of Lux, a desert city crafted entirely in this crystalline water. The natural shapes of water in this form had dictated the layout and architecture of the city, great stocky walls, coming to distant peaks. The city shone out in the harsh desert light, a welcome landmark for travellers.

Now I am much much older and no one can remember the city of Lux, the technology of crystalline water has been lost, like those of flexible glass or Greek fire. I asked myself what would be left of a city in the desert made of crystalline water?

I was curious so I spent years in the desert, following the desert ways, until at last I found a high place in the desert, a sea of broken rocks amidst the desert sands, a place too barren to linger. There was a tangle of crude copper wires and primitive old batteries. The materials looked so very old, as if they had been there for decades and had been rotten with age even a century ago. In dismay I looked at the wires and pottery batteries, crude mineral anodes and cathodes, nothing at all remarkable. There was nothing there to convince anyone of the story of crystalline water. I was ready to leave, when I caught a glimpse of the sun reflecting off something. In a cleft in the rock there was a single slab of crystalline water, I went to it and reached out to touch it, it was warm, as a rock in the desert and smooth too. The surface was worn and pitted, like the outcropping stones around us, I could glimpse the wires beneath the surface.

I was alone, I had walked for hundreds of miles in the deserts, but at last I had seen what I needed to see, it was real, it must have been the last piece of crystalline water in the world. A technology that was once a commonplace was now on the very brink of extinction. I could see it, I could handle it, but I could no more discern its secret than I could touch the moon. I went back into the desert, heading towards the coast. It was enough, simply, that I knew.

The Connected Cities - Chaintry and Agate

 

 

 

Perhaps the world’s greatest engineering achievement is the railway line between Chaintry and Agate. These cities lie hundreds of miles apart across a vast near empty desert. Though, of course, the only people who actually think that deserts are empty are those who have never visited them. All the deserts I ever saw were packed, children herding goats, botanists climbing joshua trees, lost pilgrims and festival goers.

Building a railway line is a combination of brute force and precision. There is brute force in arranging all the aggregate and hardcore, digging the cuttings, building up the embankments. There is precision in surveying, it is no easy thing to layout a railway line, you have to survey vast swathes of land, measuring spot height after spot height, plotting contours across the sway and ebb of the landscape. Once the surveyor has walked the land, the geologist comes with his hammer, and a navvy with a spade. They work out where there is heavy soil, like clay and where is light soil, like sand, they work out how close to the surface the bedrock lies and what it consists of.

With the surveyor’s theodolite and geologist’s hammer laid aside, it is the turn of the draughtsman to translate all those endless notebooks filled with columns of figures into charts, stretching out across the table, put flat into plan chest, or curled into tubes. And even then, someone else comes by, with a slide rule and tables of figures, working out whether it would cost more to curve around or to just cut through, whether to bridge a gap or skirt a lake.

But for the line between Chaintry and Agate there was little to consider. The desert offered few features, the route was as straight and as flat as the surveyors could hope for. And the straighter the route, the faster the trains could go. Engineers from across the known world worked on the project, there had never been a straighter or a flatter route. Trains were designed specifically for the route, long trains, that would shoot like pencils along the slot in a schoolchild’s desk. These were the sleekest, most beautiful trains that you ever saw, polished metal in a silvery yellow, trains that shone like a fresh star.

For a while the beautiful trains were packed with visitors, their huge hats wrapped in silk scarves, laughing porters carrying on crates of exotic fruits, children crammed around the windows, watching the distant mountains shift imperceptibly and the nearby goatherds shoot by like rockets. Each station was decorated with colourful blimps hung with huge long silken banners in primary colours. Orchestras would greet each arriving train, photographers would crowd round each leaving one.

But after the engineering conference papers had been presented, after the councillors had all congratulated themselves, it no longer seemed quite so novel, or quite so amazing. It soon began to seem commonplace to zip across the salt flats and mesas, past cacti as the lizards flicked their tongues and watched. In truth there was very little reason for anyone to travel between the cities of Agate and Chaintry, they were much of a muchness, they had nothing to trade, there was nothing to see in the one, that was not in the other. The grocers of Agate might visit a solicitor in Chaintry, or a young bride in Chaintry might buy a wedding dress in Agate, but then again they might not.

And now, the train still runs, but not everyday, and not quite so fast, to run at super speeds you needed engineers checking the line each morning for any deviation or impediment, sweeping the line with a hair brush, pressing a head to the rail and with one eye closed, checking for miles of straightness.

I suppose that the people of Agate and Chaintry are a little embarrassed, they never asked for this marvel of engineering, they were happy enough without it, truth be told. And now the world looks askance at them. Engineers and politicians looks upon the citizens as unworthy of this great marvel, the miracle bestowed upon them. But the people of Agate and Chaintry never asked to live hundreds of years in the future, like all sensible people they were content enough to live in the present.

in an age of mechanical reproduction

We always just sort of assume that art forms are fixed in the forms that we now understand them to be, so a film is around an hour and a half of narrative entertainment, with a handful of main characters. A song is just over three minutes, in the verse chorus format. A piece of classical music is played on traditional instruments and often adopts a symphonic narrative or applies variations to an original theme. 

But much of this is just an accident of redundant technology, a vinyl single could hold around three minutes of music, an hour and a half was a reasonable period to sit in a cinema when people shifted to seeing just the one film, rather than a double bill. Many of the ‘fixed properties' are just repetition of what we are familiar with, there is no inherent ‘rightness’ to them. 

It is now possible to listen to music all the time, when Beethoven was composing you could only expect to hear a symphony a few times in your lifetime, unless you were a member of the orchestra. We are now totally smothered in art forms that were only ever envisaged to be available in a very limited context. Classical music is applied as a bland background or mood music, pop music is chopped down into tiny fragments to play in the background of tv programmes, so they can evoke a period,or even just their title in a knowing reference to the action. Pretty Flamingo plays while a flock of flamingos take flight. 

Art forms are resilient, we are not likely to stop listening to music any time soon, though we are listening to shorter pieces. If you listen to film music it is strong on mood and atmosphere, but it does not develop a musical theme across an hour of music. We are reading plenty of books, but it is probably no longer possible to write the great book that marks an era, would Catch 22, or Catcher in the Rye be possible now?

However my main concern when I started to write this blog posting, was with film. There is something naturally resilient about the format of an hour and a bit of narrative entertainment that just seems to stick. As with all these art forms, the format has become more, rather than less, fixed with time. Early film ranged from shorts to some very long films, Napoleon by Abel Gance or Greed by Erich von Stroheim are massive. Before television, the studios were rattling out films, some classics like Casablanca, and plenty more that are forgotten now. Today too, they seem to be making films like never before, every comic strip apart from Oor Wullie seems to have been the subject of at least one film. But as with tv, there is a real tendency to make films to fill a genre format.

Often it is the constraints that make for great art, at school I always preferred the challenge of writing a story under some onerous constraint, to writing about anything, it is the limitations that make for great architecture, not unlimited budgets. CGI has allowed people to put anything on screen, and once you can film anything, there is no spectacle, with no constraints, there is no challenge. 

Although film is far from dead as an art form, it is now like a adjunct of video games, it lacks the widespread social currency and meaning it once had. Everyone would see ET or Jaws, we knew what they were about, but now? We are losing that element of challenge and stretch for the viewer, seeing something they had not seem before, thinking something they had not thought before, not just novelty for the sake of novelty, but something compelling and memorable.

Personally, I don’t tend to seek out many conventional films to watch, I like documentaries, or art house films. A lot of conventional cinema is no less predictable than the sort of generic action thrillers churned out Steven Seagal, once you understand the conventions of the genre you have a good idea of what you will get. If there are only so many plots, then is it time to abandon the convention of a narrative, to just create a film as a long musical video or a compilation of clips, or reform it completely into something / anything that we are not so familiar with. Will the best selling films eventually become straight footage of rail journeys, or busy city streets, or wordless tours of baroque gardens, or will we all just end up gazing endlessly at webcam footage of other.