The insoluble pancake

I am at the other side of the country, in the south. Marseille. A southern city. I won’t mention Milosz, his southern cities, except to say that his words return often to my mind …

I’m here for a few days, the usual no good reason, a conference, and actually quite a few people are here that I’ve known for a long time, friends from when I lived in Canada a decade and a half ago. I’m here in my sixth floor hotel room, a few streets back from Vieux port, it’s the evening, from my window I see the bone-white illuminated spires of the Panier, and although now it’s dark in the daytime I see red rooftops and a shard of water through the gaps between buildings. A few bars of accordion can be heard from time to time, drifting past, but it’s the end of the evening, the tourists have left, there’s no point playing much longer. Maybe there is the sound of water. And a few lost seagulls.

My relationship to the city is a complicated one. I came here in 1999 from a subterranean existence in England and lived here for two and half years. You must first imagine a sky deeper and bluer than any sky you have seen before. A deep, clear and perfect blue. Each morning in my apartment high on the hill near the Notre Dame de la Garde the very first thing which entered my consciousness in the morning was the blue of the sky. I opened my eyes and through my window my line of sight intersected a clear and faultless square of sky. On most days the breeze, the endless wind, clears the atmosphere of particles, renders everything luminous. I was very grateful indeed after the heavy skies of the north of England to find myself here. I remember a recurrent thought almost every morning for the first few months after I arrived – that I had left for good the place I had come from, and I did not need to return. I felt immensely relieved.

Once again today, crossing the Vieux Port at the middle of the day, I felt almost overpowered by the amount of light streaming down from the sky. No ghosts could hide here in this light. I felt nostalgic for the weak, diluted rays of Parisian sunshine, always coming from the sky at a long oblique angle and casting tall shadows in the street. That was always the first thing I noticed when made the trip between Paris and Bologna – the long shadows on the Parisian buildings.

But it does no good to keep one’s eyes too closely on the sky, as anyone who has ever visited Marseille will tell you. Back at ground level, the city is chaotic, disordered, and hazards may arrive from any direction. It’s best perhaps to fix one’s gaze at point somewhere in the middle distance and walk towards it as fast as you can.

Technorati Tags: Marseille, voyages

Mr. Kurt Vonnegut died around ten days ago. Last weekend, I spent a few hours in a nice cafe near my house to write this essay about Mr. Vonnegut and his brother, Bernard.

I was a great admirer of Mr. Vonnegut’s fiction from a very early age, and I had read almost all of his books by the time I left Ireland for university in England. Of course, I was a very impressionable young man. So you can imagine my astonishment when I arrived in Manchester, at UMIST, to discover that the scientists in the physics department actually knew Bernard Vonnegut, Kurt’s brother. Not so surprising of course – they were atmospheric physicists after all, and were working on the same research topics that Bernard was interested in. Bernard and Kurt had actually visited the department a few years before I arrived.

In my final year at UMIST I had a summer job in New Mexico, which in the end lasted six months because I had problems with my PhD grant and had no immediate reason to return to the UK (in the end I did a Masters’ program in Canada). I worked at New Mexico Tech, in Socorro. For the first three months I helped out with measuring radon transport in the desert (a lot of houses in New Mexico are built on granite and are a little too tightly insulated…) For the second half of my stay I was the sole inhabitant and operator of the Joint Observatory for Cometary Research (JOCR for short, ho ho). A very interesting experience which I should some day describe at length….

For the first few weeks I was on the mountain, the only other inhabitants for miles around were those at the Langmuir Labs, on the other peak, where they were doing their wacky experiments with thunder and lightning. This involved firing rockets up into clouds and seeing what would happen, that kind of thing. Observing, measuring. I visited there a few times, and I watched the experiments in progress. Bernard Vonnegut spent most of his summers at Langmuir Labs, but, of course, he was not there the one summer that I happened to be there.

And that is how I got to thinking about Kurt and Bernard. My favourite Vonnegut book, after Cat’s Cradle is probably Mother Night. Mr. Vonnegut informs us in his introduction that it is the only book of his which contains a moral: “Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be”. Indeed.

Technorati Tags: Kurt Vonnegut

Last Tuesday, the 27th of March, is a date which has a certain significance for me — I won’t say any more than that, because I am a modest lad. Nevertheless, I always try to be somewhere interesting on the 27th of March. One year ago, I was in Venice, for a conference. A year before that, I was in the tunnels beneath the streets of Paris. In my bag I had a saucisson, which I sliced on the lid of a subterranean well, and bottle of wine, which I duly opened. And this year? Well, I decided to go to the theatre with some friends to see a new production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘Adam and Eve’, which is currently playing at Theatre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis.

I had read Bulgakov’s excellent The Master and Margarita which is certainly one of my favourite books of all time, and was curious to see what “Adam and Eve” would be like. The propos of the story is interesting enough: Leningrad is destroyed by a chemical gas attack, and only a few people survive. Quite different people, really archetypes — the scientist, the soldier, the writer, the bureaucrat – and Eve.

The opening scene of the play was perhaps the most powerful, most lucid. Our characters are in a Leningrad apartment, and it is only a few minutes before it is clear that one should be very careful what one thinks and does. A totalitarian state. We are introduced to Efrossimov, a scientist, whose inventions are of great interest to Adam and Daragan, two citizens close to the heart of the Party. The actors performances are stylized, exaggerated, and I found myself listening very closely to every word spoken, especially by Professor Efrossimov, the scientist, who certainly gave the aura of having a line on essential truths which evaded the rest of the characters.

But Efrossimov turns out to be wrong about one essential fact: that there would be no war with the enemies of the state. A cloud of gas suddenly descends on the city, and every person who has not been exposed to the rays of Efrossimov’s ‘camera’ dies almost instantly. Footsteps echo across the stage, debris falls from the rafters, a thick cloud descends, and we are in the second scene, a wrecked supermarket, corpses frozen in the aisles in their last act of lifting a pack of biscuits (or whatever). The play moves into its post-apocalyptic phase.

The discussions and conjectures which follow were interesting, but somehow lacked the focus and intensity of the first scene. Everything was beautifully realised, lighting and staging were full of atmosphere and meaning. Certainly the themes were interesting enough: the responsibility of the scientist, the absurd nature of totalitarian dictatorships (which are rendered even more ridiculous when all that is left of the state is (perhaps) five people deep in a forest, four of which want no part of this state at all). So I certainly enjoyed myself, but I felt that the play didn’t quite live up to the promise of the opening scene.

Then it was ten pm, and time to return to Paris – we had travelled to St. Denis, a few RER stops out there in the ‘outer darkness’ beyond the limits of Paris. St. Denis, of course, is where the famous cathedral is, the last resting place of the kings of France, where Abbot Suger invented gothic architecture. Now unfortunately it is better known for being a potentially volatile suburb of Paris. We felt a bit like tourists wandering back to the RER station along the tram lines. But certainly it seemed much more lively than Paris…

Or so we thought. We had to change trains at the Gare du Nord to reach Bastille where one could easily find restaurants open late at night. I was aware that something was amiss at first when I saw piles of earth on the station floors. Piles of earth? I imagined people changed into dirt by a sinister variant of Professor Efrossimov’s camera-rays. Well actually these were broken flower-pots. There were many, many of them. We had arrived from the far end of the station, and as we approached the metro interchange we saw that none of the escalators were working. What? There was a lot of debris scattered around: we were inside the Leningrad supermarket once again.

In one corner, a dense knot of people are pressed against the wall, surrounded by the bright lights of television cameras, dozens of people leaning anxiously forward to see — what? We could hear people chanting, and a violent, unstable atmosphere pervaded the station — as well as more than just a whiff of tear gas. Or something more sinister? A dark cloud descends on the city. To take the metro, we had to pass through a cordon of RATP agents wielding canisters of tear gas, facing crowds of disaffected youths, preventing them from taking trains back to Paris to eat their magrets and drink glasses of wine, as we were most certainly planning to do. Our metro arrived, and in a few minutes we had arrived in the ancient heart of the city, the Marais, more than a little bit relieved. The next day, the news broadcasts revealed what had really happened — or maybe they did.

Technorati Tags: Bulgakov, Gare du Nord, Paris, Theatre