The insoluble pancake

Back in Ireland once more. The evening before I last I stepped onto the tarmac at Belfast International Airport. The cold, damp night air smelled slightly of manure. Clouds lurked only a few meters above my head, and the tarmac gleamed with rainwater. So now I have time to write about whatever I care to write about.

This time, I choose Constantine’s accusing finger. This is one of the first things one sees on entering the Musei Capitolini in Rome, on the Palatine Hill. It was a Wednesday in November, cold and unusually wet. The museum was almost empty. Entering one passes directly into a small courtyard filled with fragments of statues most of which are more than a thousand years old, arranged around the courtyard, mounted on the walls. Amongst them is an enormous head, the head of Emperor Constantine, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire — and his hand, an accusing index figure pointing skywards. This is all that remains. Echoes of Ozymandias, but no “trunkless legs of stone” here.

The museum is a wonderful collection of artifacts spanning thousands of years of the city of Rome. One of the first public museums in the world, we are told. Before I went there, I knew almost nothing about the collections and so I was constantly amazed when each right turn or left turn took me back through another few hundred years of history. Even back into pre-history. After carefully examining room after room of sculptures and bronzes, a sudden turn took me before the foundations of the temple of Zeus, one of the very first structures constructed in Rome. Here were the foundation stones. Another turn, and there was a vast atrium with an ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aureilius on horseback. In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had placed this statue at the centre of the square on Palatine hill, on a plinth he had designed himself. Now the plinth holds a copy, and the original is here, in this beautiful glass atrium.

A tunnel, descending deep into the hill, connects the old museum building to the new one, and the dimly lit walls are lined with Roman funerary inscription for slaves, freemen and senators. But before ascending to recent centuries, a left turn leads to another ancient temple, more foundation stones and statues. Another turn, follow the corridor here, and we leave the museum behind, we are in the Tabularium, which once housed the archives of the Roman state. A long hall with tall windows looks out across the ruins of the Roman city, the Foro Romano. Another level of history.

Climbing back up the tunnel and ancient Rome fades away, and we are back in the Renaissance. There are many wonders to be seen here. One small room is completely filled with busts of famous philosophers, many of which are Roman copies of Greek sculptures. Serried ranks of great thinkers. Nearby, in a small alcove, there is a beautiful statue of a woman. What most struck me about this was the incidental detail that the statue had been found buried near one of the walls of the city. The owners had presumably hidden it there for safe keeping during one of the many invasions which had swept over Rome. They never returned to collect it.

Technorati Tags: Rome, Voyages

Another trip, this time back to Bavaria again. Southern Germany has become a centre for astrophysical research you know. I spent ten days in Garching, Munich. Where once there were fields there are now hundreds of astronomers. Miles outside the city, far from the beer-halls and car factories. Out there, around the nucleus of the Garching nuclear reactor, a city is growing, populated by students of the physical sciences. A recent important event: recently, after twenty years of waiting, line six of the Munich U-bahn has finally reached Garching-Forschungzentrum, and the walls of the station there are covered with diagrams details the discoveries of generations of (mostly German) scientists specializing in this the most profound of all physical sciences. And of course, out here in the countryside, the laws of nature are just the same as in the centre of Paris.

Of course I made frequent trips into town to see what there was to see. My first week there was with fog and snow and the city became a distinct, unreal thing. Heavy snow fell one day after I arrived. On the Saturday, through the mist and feeble winter light, I was just about able to find my way to that great Munich institution, the Volksbad, and after about half an hour of wandering around inside I found my cabinet and thence to the pool. From the outside, the Volksbad looks more like a church than a swimming pool, it has a clock tower, a nave…when I first saw it I thought: that’s really a swimming pool?….A week without swimming my lengths and I felt stiff and my thoughts were sluggish, no matter how much coffee I drank from my moka.

And on the Sunday afternoon I went with a friend to see a temporary exhibition of the works of Max Beckmann at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The same morning, I went to the Alte Pinakothek to see once more some of Durer’s paintings that I had not seen since the last time I was there, almost fifteen years previously. I stared at Mr. Durer’s self-portrait and he stared back at me across the five centuries which separated us. Meanwhile, from the windows, I could see three enormous Max Beckmann reproductions hanging from the walls of the Pinakothek der Moderne…

Almost all of Beckmann’s works presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne were paintings he made in exile. Hitler’s Germany was particularly unpleasant place for him: his works were featured in the Nazis “Degenerate art” exhibition, and Beckmann left for Amsterdam on the exhibition’s opening day. Five hundred of his paintings were confiscated. At a time when a many European painters had abandoned figuration for the snowy wastes of abstraction, Beckman’s paintings were filled with meaning and allegory which mirrored directly the chaotic and violent world which surrounded him. Walking through the gallery my mind returned again to Pierre Bonnard, who, at the same time, Europe in flames, was meticulously searching for the ideal painting of his wife lying in the bath…One of my favourite Beckmann is “Dream of Monte-Carlo” (“Traum von Monte-Carlo”). Croupiers with swords place cards on a green baize table whilst they are shadowed by hooded men carrying fizzing bombs…Beckmann also re-invented the triptych (and that morning I had seen one of Durer’s famous ones) which had laid dormant since the middle ages. He filled large canvases with themes of exile and departure…
Technorati Tags: Beckmann, Munich, Voyages

Rain falls outside. It is mid-november, I am in Rome, the original eternal city. I’m here, once again, for the usual no-good reason, a meeting, but of course on either side of this meeting I was sure to include a day or two when I could wander the streets of Rome and visit the many galleries and churches I have yet to visit. Despite having lived in Italy for two years I have only been here twice, and only for perhaps three days in total. There are many things I have not seen, many streets I have not walked down.

Since my arrival the day before yesterday at midday I’ve made a quick circuit of all the principal sites, just to remind myself that everything is still there. Each time I have visited Rome I have always found the occasion to spend an hour or two in Fori Imperiali , a vast archaeological site in the centre of the city. It is one of the most amazing places I have ever visited in any corner of the world. There, in the centre of Rome, you will find the ruins of the ancient city, half destroyed temples, houses reduced to a skeleton of stones. Solitary doric columns standing amidst a terrain vague of enormous marble blocks in long grass. When I was there a cold, persistent rain was falling and the site was almost empty. More than two millenia have passed since these buildings were built, two millenia those ruins have stood out there in the elements. Of course one naturally thinks, today, shouldn’t all this stuff be taken inside? But how can you put a whole city inside a museum?

Not all of ancient Rome is in ruins, of course. There is the pantheon, a vast domed structure of ancient brick and stone with a gaping hole in the centre, an eye on the heavens, built around two thousand years ago and still standing. The building survived the collapse of the Roman Empire perhaps because it had been fortuitously consecrated as a church. The vast dome is completely unsupported; exact details of it’s construction have been lost down through the centuries. It would be a one and half millennia until anyone would build anything to surpass it. Walking in the narrow streets nearby, one is filled with a strange feeling, glimpsing here or there an edge of the coupole at the end of a narrow side-street. A glimpse that telescopes back down the centuries, arriving here, in a Rome before everything in the world we know today existed.

Technorati Tags: Rome, Voyages

Rewind. It’s 1989 and I am in Deansgate, Manchester and I’m standing in the street looking up at the ancient bulk of the John Rylands Library. Grey clouds pass overhead in a grey sky. This library seemed to be the oldest building I had ever seen in my life, although it was only constructed at the end of the 19th century. It just looked very old; all ancient brickwork and tiny bottle-green windows buried in thick sandstone walls. Half church and half library. On my walkman (remember this is 1989) I am listening to a cassette tape of Joy Division’s “Decades”, the last song on their last album. Those long echoey notes reverberating off to infinity and Mr. Curtis mournful voice intoning over and over again “here are the young men … but where have they been, where have they been?”. Hm!

If there was a every a music which is so strongly linked to a time and place for me it would have had to be Joy Division (leading purveyor of what a music journalist once called “undertaker rock”) and Manchester. It was years after I left Manchester (where I lived for three years) before I could listen to any of that music again. In Canada in the soft blue-green light of the not-too distant pacific ocean, or in Marseille with its hard Mediterranean light, lead singer Ian Curtis’ words could not survive, drowned out by the light. I could not imagine this kind of music ever originating in these kinds of places and even to listen to it there seemed wrong.

But I am back in northern latitudes now, although still far from the grey of Manchester. Far enough north to be interested to see photographer Anton Corbijn’s film about Curtis and Joy Division, “Control”, which has just been released here in France. The film follows Curtis from his childhood years in Macclesfield to his suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. The film is shot in a beautiful, slightly saturated silvery black and white, a masterstroke, and each scene is carefully framed with a careful photographers eye: many scenes are almost Antonioninen in their simplicity and cadrage. Cast members actually play their respective instruments during the film (they all learned the songs during months of practice beforehand) and Sam Riley bears and incredible, uncanny resemblance to Curtis.

The film recounts faithfully the story of Curtis’ rapid ascent to fame and his subsequent inability to cope with all the commitments and responsibilities which that entailed. Having married at a very early age, he found himself locked into a relationship he couldn’t escape whilst at the same time he was already seeing another woman, a belgian journalist he’d met at a concert. He saw no way to resolve all this other than by exiting, stage left.

Of course fans know this story in infinite detail. And it is hard to listen to the music without applying the filter of what is to come. It seems in the film that the end comes almost too quickly (as it did in real life I suppose): we only gain a partial insight into Mr. Curtis and his personality and motivation. Some explanations seem straightforward enough; a string of errors leading into an inescapable dead-end. But I felt that somehow early in the film there is only a small hint of what is to come; Curtis doesn’t seem to be nearly the mass of contradictions one would need to be in order to lead one to suicide. In the end the film of his life could never be as suffocating and bleak as the music he helped create, I think (which is probably a good thing), even though the music plays a very important part in the film.

Technorati Tags: Anton Corbijn, Control, Ian Curtis