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kylanrice · 7 years

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Day 4, 5, 6

I have been unable to find time to write for three days. I have written, but not in a diary. After seeing the National Gallery in London on the 19th, and after looking there at the anonymous Flemish painting “Cognoscenti in a Room Hung with Pictures,” I have been eager to work on a world that takes after that piece. I am compelled by the desire that has precipitated it, an epistemological thirst. It is a painting that wants to be several paintings; it tries to contain, index, profile. If each painting inside this painting is a logic and a world, this work worlds itself with these as its lineaments, acknowledging the work of art as more than subject matter: as matter itself. Art retro-architects reality. “Cognoscenti” is essentially a form of praise, too, showcasing the virtues of appreciation, abundance, knowledge, and the limits of knowledge. I want to write a series of embedded essays that work chiastically through world, into art, and back into world again, showing the ways in which transferences redeem the real. Mediation is reality—or rather, reality is always already mediated.

I will return to the National Gallery. I have to take this slowly. Monday the nineteenth begins at Abney Park, a cemetery in the Hackney borough in which I am residing. I am brought here by a book I’m reading called “Lights out for the Territory” by Iain Sinclair. My new unofficial handbook to the city. It perverts the figure of the flaneur into that of a stalker. My walks are like Sinclair’s in this: anxiety, hunger, and paranoia gyring into each other, a sense of non-belonging, voyeurism. I am here to observe, subvert, contain, vivisect. Sinclair’s walks through Hackney take him to Abney, where he notices a spray-painted pyramid-and-eye symbol scrawled in an unused non-denominational chapel at the heart of the park. I’m there before nine and it’s already broiling, one of the hottest days on record since the 70s. The inside of the cemetery is overwhelmingly green, dense, clotted with grave stones. Arborists and wood-cutters haul machinery through the overgrowth. What is overgrowth and what is undergrowth and what is a memorial to the dead is impossible to disentangle or set straight. Everything strays here. Death is no straightforward terminus. Indeed, one of my favorite aspects of Abney were the signposts scattered throughout identifying the various trees on site. The signs record the curious and mazy longevity of silver birches, common ashes, service trees of Fontainbleue, and horse chestnuts, among others, as though offering veiled metaphors for grief and earthbound afterlife: “SILVER BIRCH (Betula pendula, planted around 1930) / This tree appears to have been struck by lightning about 30 years go. It is not know exactly where this avenue of birch trees was planted, but birch rarely live more than 100 years. Lightning is the most likely cause of the long wound down the north side of the tree. You can see decayed wood inside, with fungi and beetle holes. Healthy wound wood has grown around the cavity but it is so big and deep the tree has been unable to seal the gap. The tree remains healthy and should live for another decade or two.” From the trees of Abney I learn that the material for our dearest metaphors are present already in the fabric of our lives.

Other things about Abney: the chapel is the oldest non-denominational church in Europe. The carved stone urns partly draped with veils. Extras of these piled beside a Simplyloo. The Egyptian style entry columns.

A long walk to the National Gallery, as the tube is unexpectedly expensive. I pass over canals, Kingsland graffiti, vertiginous mash-ups of architectural history and new construction. On Stoke Newington high-road, Arabic men drinking red coffee from tiny glass cups in front of bars and barbering establishments. Memorials displaced by bombs in the Barbican. Ornate underpasses. Smithfield wholesale market, whose sprawling industrial galleries are tastefully domed with glass and hinged with arcade glass. I have lunch at Fabrique. Ham sandwich on rye. Live flowers in glass milk jars on the tables. London Review of Books Cake Shop later on for afternoon refreshment. At last, two hours later, the National Gallery. A room full of still life floral arrangements, stray curves, diagonal axes. Closed peonies in shadow. I am an anachronist and miss in today’s world the understated ambition on display; again, the desire to contain all, the burgeoning thrust of the catalogue, the encyclopedia, the enlightenment era reach and grasp. The transparent wing of a dragonfly laid over a half-concealed leaf laid over a panted leaf on a vase. Palimpsest. My attention turns to the other museum visitors. A woman on a bench, having unconsciously adopted a Marian pose, arm over her backback, eye-shadow, Adidas, double rings on her wedding finger. Repose, in the gallery. Turner, Dido building Carthage: construction, development, empire, the empire of scope. The return again and again the judgement of Paris. This pairs well with my interest in Enlightenment era observational painting: anxiety regarding accuracy, discernment. Are these available to us? Is the illusion of possible accuracy even available anymore? I feel Cassandralike, intuiting a dark truth, completely bereft of a capacity to speak it or even explain it to myself. Agamemnon gets murdered off stage. What is mine is not knowledge but an inarticulate shriek in the shape of knowledge.

A beautiful painting by Meindert Hobbema called The Avenue at Middelharnis. Arbors, cranes in the backdrop, husbandry. Order (arrangement) and its derangement—that is, its warping. Hobbema excised two trees from the foreground of his painting to clear up the sky, giving it visual priority. You can see evidence of this on x-ray. Elsewhere: shipping scenes, ports, fleets. Trade and spectacle and confluence. Claude Lorrain, his lit backgrounds and shaded foregrounds: a curious sense of closure, lateness. Beautiful work by Beuckelaer: his four paintings make up a group illustrating the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The elements communicated by way of market scenes as frame narratives for Christological imagery. Densely layered. The main event or subject as peripheral (in both cases). The Ambassadors. Again, epistemological ambition. Measurement, efficiency, death. Despite wayfinding technology: memento mori, pushed into the periphery to see the skewed skull rightwise. In many of these paintings of Christ and martyrs, the body is there to suppurate, gush, anoint.

At the end of the day, a long walk through St. James park and alongside Buckingham palace. Dinner on the steps of Westminster Cathedral, a beautiful striped, squarely Venetian building across from the malls near Victoria Station. The apartment buildings nearby match this decorative scheme. I listen to the nearby sounds of the wind in the maple, a roundabout with mopeds and bikers at its foot. Westminster has exquisite marbling on the interior, like being inside a shell discovered on a beach, creamy and lit from the outside in.

The next morning I call an Uber to get to Victoria station at 5 in the morning. The stillness and quietude of his Prius. I navigate to Gatwick and onto my first Easyjet to Lyon. I admire the Saint Expury TGV station for the structural integrity of its concrete arches and lattices. Once in the city, I take lunch at Ludovic B.—a restaurant about halfway through my walk toward Parc de la Tete d’Or. They’re confused at first but ultimately amenable when all I want is bread and cheese: with sweet balsamic reduction a demi Saint Marcellin, which has a pungent, good, bitter, indoors (interior?) taste. Again the sound of maple leaves beside a primary school as I leave the restaurant—refreshed, amorous for this place—and make my way toward my AirBnB beside the Rhône. At the park, where I linger until 2 pm, check in scheduled for 2:30, I walk through a fin-de-siecle wrought-iron greenhouse. Superheated. Camellias, the emblematic flower of romanticism, immortalized by Alexandre Dumas in his novel the Lady of the Camellias. Polynomial and Riemann equations graffitied in the public bathrooms.

I chat (in French!) with my AirBnB landlord while he finishes cleaning the place. He teaches literature at a university in Paris. We talk about my upcoming entrance at North Carolina and he points out that the study of American literature is one without any intertexts, so young and new as a literary epoch. The apartment is perfect. Windows with a rotting balcony overlooking the massive, wide celadon Rhône river. Multiple rooms to myself. Fourth floor. I leave to explore in the afternoon: the excruciatingly steep and winding upward staircases, the two hills of the city, old stonework built into the mountainside, the narrow pastel-colored riverside buildings wedged into each other. Stone reclining chairs by the waterfront, where I read for a while. A girl next to me is paging through Levinas in paperback. Saupers pompiers practice their diving in scuba gear in this summer heat. I wander through galleries and ateliers, trying to get a feel for the city, feel through its shirt to its skin to its spine. I follow signs toward Parc des Hauteurs. Ascend endlessly in 90 degree humidity. Like a pilgrim to a temple. Continued on into my misdirection, upward, plateauing, discovering the ancient Gallo-Roman theater ruins. Labyrinthine stone passages. Boys playing in their corridors. Sprays of summer flowers, purples and whites where grass springs between the ancient stones. Torpid bumblebees. A magnificent view of the city, its white buildings. Musicians practicing for the evening entertainment below, the drifting sound of saxophone, piano. Old heat of a late afternoon. I sit and read Faulkner and think on the vista and realize I may be experiencing a perfect and golden moment. Sometimes my ambling pays off. I buy bread and butter and a viennoise on my way home, dine in.

The next day—today—Lyon was less forthright with me. I started the morning at the mall, a dead hive experience, looking for a cheap t-shirt to get me through the day. I hadn’t planned for Europe’s heat wave. I went west, away from old town, until noon, and found Lyon in commercial merchant squalor. I walked through an indoor market, the smells of fresh fish, bread, doggish smell of hard sausage. Swallows all day, urgent cries overhead. Delighted by the high-pollarded avenues of trees I see from time to time—like the stilt legs of Dali’s surreal elephants. Into and out of cathedrals on my way: these are spectacular to look at, and each different in its own way (its own light), but curiously similar and banal, too. You tire after a while of vaults and stained glass. Women everywhere with hand fans—quaint. Back toward the river near 11 am. Shallow pools, a biker dragging through slowly them in rings, a wood boardwalk, strange metal plaques drilled onto 450 meters of the wood pontoon ramp. Research reveals it is an art installation by Philippe Favier called “J’aimerais tant voir Syracuse.” The wood ramp reminded Favier of an infinite “table d’orientation”—a semi-circular table you might find at an overlook or panorama. He came up with a series of literary terms for fantastic or fabulist places, inscribed these in metal plaques, and drilled them into the surface of the wood. Others, on their own accord, have added their own. La piscine du Rhône nearby, 60s style, space-needle architecture. Took a street lined with Arabic food shops and stores where you can buy traditional Muslim dress. The pastry-shops feature glittering caverns of tiny gem-like confections, glazed and square as ornate snuff-boxes. Purchased a pear tart for lunch and ate it in the courtyard of the old ESSM (École du service de santé des armées de Lyon-Bron). There, you can find a museum on the resistance and deportation. I wasn’t originally planning to visit, but I felt compelled, as I usually do when visiting France, to understand the complex European relationship with the second world war. Especially enlightening to learn that Lyon was included in Vichy France. Old propagandistic images of Petain. Narratives of racism, exclusion, turmoil. As if the shroud of Turin, a fragment of the parachute used by Jean Moulin to drop secretly into Southern France, where he was tasked by de Gaulle with uniting the resistance. An exhibit on the extensive food rationing in Vichy France. The ration stamps called “tickettose d’angoisse”—or “anxiety tickets,” for fear of losing them. Petain encouraged his populace to grow their own food. Steep increase of home gardens during the war years in places like Lyon. The countryside encouraged to donate excess to the cities.

Above all, the important lesson from the museum and today is how crucial the medical industry has been in Lyon. I get the impression there has been some kind of mandate to this end, and near the Grange Blanche later in the day I discover an austere statue of a robed woman with a sword and sheaves of wheat standing on a plinth that reads: “À la gloire du service santé,” which translates: to the glory of health services. The plinth features a frieze of figures at work nursing and ministering to the sick. At the Musée des Confluences, I encounter a “fermenteur Frenkel,” a large vat with clamps and dials used in the process of vaccine production. By way of prelude, the accompanying plaque informs me that Lyon has been backed by a long tradition of health and veterinary institutions, which led to this flourishing of the health industry in the 19th century. During the war, the ESSM was dismantled of its military status by Germany, but continued educating young men in the medical arts. Grange Blanche, which is near the Lumiere institute (more on this in a moment), is a veritable etoile of specialized hospitals.

Another industry central to the development of Lyon is silk production. My plan is to dedicate today to learning more about Lyon’s canuts, or silk-weavers. At the Musée des Confluences, I see large taxidermy displays that catalogue the components of the industry: large white braids; fat, gold-translucent moths; cocoons in various stages of unraveling. Also at the Confluences, which is where I go after the Centre, I also see a fiberoptic wedding dress, fringed with light, woven using Brochier technologies, which have been adapted from the original Jacquard loom types. The dress making technique was designed for the Olivier Lapidus haute couture fashion show in 2000, and the present artifact was made in 2014 by Mongi Guibane. Jacquard loom technology was used to develop the punchcards that supported the development of the computer and film industry.

In all, the Musée des Confluences is astonishing, and often painful to look at. Its exhibits are dizzyingly ambitious in scope. Permanent exhibitions include: “Origins, stories of the world,” “Species, the web of life,” “Societies, the human theatre,” and “Eternities, visions of the beyond.” The attempt here is to track a story of the world—a dubious aspiration, given the rigid warping porosity of historiography. The methodology here for engendering an epistemic experience is completely indiscriminate, much like the old-fashioned, original museums or curiosity cabinets. Indeed, there is a temporary exhibit at Confluences regarding the acquisitive spirit—a display of cabinets, carnets, colonization, observation, exploration. The latter exhibit teaches me that museums of natural history in France were often the outgrowth of imperial activity in colony nations—a strategy for understanding, and thus subverting, containing local populations and epistemes. I am overwhelmed here. Nothing is stable. I can’t concentrate on anything I see. A vast display of varieties of microscopes, magnifying glasses. Equally vast the glassed-in case of beetles, butterflies, shells of all kinds. I am desperate to concentrate, to core down to the heart of one of these objects. My mind does not operate on the basis of this kind of expansivity. I am wrecked by the curatorial attempt here to encompass all the world and all of human understanding—a cross-sample that asks its visitors to ask themselves: is there a duty to remember? A good question. I remember thinking on my walk today back to the conversation I had with my landlord, Thierry. We assume that literature is intended to amuse, entertain, or educate. But I think we forget the preservationist function of the medium, too. To safeguard in language language itself, the means of transmission of human learning and love. I can think of no holier obligation. This doesn’t mean just writing—this means writing in a tradition. I am sick and tired of literary peers who have no regard for the acquisition of or immersion in tradition, since this is the most important task for any artist. What you have to make or say is only possible as it relates to a long history of expressive force.

At the end of one of its permanent exhibits, a plaque declares: “The objects and specimens preserved in the museum’s stores and show in this exhibition constitute our common heritage. They are inalienable—they cannot be assigned or sold.”

Objects of note at the Musée: a Volva volva shell—a false cowry—unwrapping like a lily bulb, or a twist of angelic candy; a simple microscope designed by Dutch astronomer and physicist Christian Huygens, high performance, easy to use, made and engraved by Jean de Pouilly for wealthy clients. The privatization of accuracy for amusement’s sake.

The museum was designed to look like a crystal and a cloud by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Austrian studio known for deconstrutivist architecture.

After the museum I walk out to the point of confluences, where the Rhone and Saone flow into. It was originally a trafficked port area. The point hosts a submerged rail track for offload. Concrete pillars indicate incoming ships to pass “Gauche” and “Droite” (left and right). Now the area is under heavy construction, a rebuilding phase intended to urbanize the area. The regional governmental seat is nearby. Construction of apartments and other highrises. A mall.

I do a crash course in public transit and leave for the Lumiere Institute, which I learned about in a temporary exhibit at the Confluences on the Lumiere brothers, pioneers of the cinema and film industry, and lifelong locals of Lyon. Developers of a special dry plate for making photographs in the late 19th century. The institute used to house a factory for manufacturing these, and the brothers created their first film by recording end-of-day closing-time at the factory doors, the workers squeezing out, back into the world of their lives. The brothers, as the museum points out, were dyed-in-the-wool industrialists. There is something tautological about the development of this new medium: their first film (and so the first cinema experience) is an outcome of photographic plate development at the Lumiere factory. Later this factory would be converted into a studio production space. Here, the subject of film is film’s production; then the film eventually colonizes and magnifies the industrial context that produced it. No wonder the Best Picture Oscar goes every year to a film about film.

Watching early Lumiere films, I get the sense that what the brothers sought was movement, sheer motion. Their narratives were simply frameworks or pretexts for acrobatics, destruction, rising dust, consequence.

I eat a raw ham sandwich with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes in a little margin of grass near Grange Blanche. Delicious and sweet. On my way home, I stop at Place Bellecour (featured in a Lumiere film, as well as the Centre on resistance and deportation), then walk home from the Hotel de Ville. Music in the streets. Solstice is always la Fete de la Musique in France. For the last three years, every 21st of June I have been in France, where the streets at night fill with discos and trumpeters and opera soloists.

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