The insoluble pancake

More time has passed – but I’ve not been completely idle. Here, in a spirit of shameless self-promotion, are two articles I’ve written in the last month:

My article in ‘Spiked’

– This one was inspired by things I’d heard during my stay in Hawaii during the summer.

My article for the ‘Battle of Ideas’ conference

– And this one was actually written during my two weeks in Waikiki, mostly from the terrace of my hotel room. Usually after a hard day’s working on data reductions….

In my next entry, normal service will be resumed.

While I was in Honolulu of course I went to the bookshop. No hanging around beaches and surfing all day for me! I picked up a load of light beach lit — Hanna Arendt, Samuel Beckett and Czelaw Milosz. Appropriate enough, actually, Milosz has written enough poems about beauty of beaches and nature….and really whether or not one would be better off staying inside and thinking some more. Amongst the Milosz books I bought I was very happy to find “Second space”, which is the last book of poems he wrote before his death in 2004. There are many fine poems within, a particularly wonderful one is “Apprentice” which milosz writes about his relative, Oscar Milosz. It contains the following heart-stopping lines, written about the death and burial of Josef Brodsky in Venice:

“So Venice sets sail like a great ship of death,
On its deck a swarming crowd of people changed into ghosts.
I said my farewell at San Michele by Joseph’s grave and Ezra Pound’s.
The city was ready, of course, to receive the crowds of the unborn
For whom we will be just an enigmatic legend.”

And mr Milosz, you great and good man, you would be already gone from us before your poem reached the shores of the English language….and me, I spent the next few days driving around Kauai with my copy of “Second Space” lodged in the windscreen of my rental car. Every so often, when I stopped a particularly remote location, I would open the book at those lines and read them, just to make sure that they were still there.

I’ve just returned to Paris after spending the last three weeks, almost, in Hawaii. The world’s most remote island archipelago, you know. Under the light of the Pacific sun. One of the most bizzare aspects of being so close to the equator is that there is no long, extended Irish twilight. The sun disappears beneath the horizon, and it is dark only a few minutes later, it seems. Instantaneous darkness. The light switches off.

There is the journey there, and the journey back. Getting there, one takes a flight from Paris to San Francisco, an eleven hour journey which passes over the snowy wastes of Greenland and the far north of Canada. Traveling west, following the rotation of the Earth, essentially static with respect to the sun. After almost a twenty four hours of traveling, it is still only nightfall. Twelve hours of time have disappeared. At the end of all of this, Honolulu airport, which is a tasteful composition in fake wood-veneer and browns and concrete greys. Palm trees can be seen swaying in the distance through the plate glass windows, and every ten meters in the ceiling there is a loudspeaker through which oozes, without pause, an unremitting stream of Ukulele plinks and plonks. Audible everywhere in the airport, no respite. Leaving the terminal building, and the air-conditioning, somewhere after eleven in the evening, one notices first of all the warm, heavy heat, the humid ocean air. From here, there is at least five thousand kilometers of ocean in all directions.

Honolulu itself is an extended sprawl of tower blocks and freeways like most other American cities. The buildings are set far apart from each other, and no useful distances can be covered on foot, for the most part. The downtown area of Honolulu is mostly silent at night, though there are a few cafes and bars to visit. No, the real place where everything happens and where all the people are is Waikiki. Archive photographs show a long sandy beach with the irregular mound of Diamond Head volcano crater in the distance. In the foreground, of course, a man smiles for the camera. He is holding a wooden surfboard. In the near distance, perhaps, a wooden hut can be seen. Is this where he lives? Then bam! A hundred years pass and the horizon is filled with tower blocks.

I lived for two weeks in a hotel in Waikiki, about ten minutes from the beach. Waikiki is a strange place. Imagine living and working in a place where most of the population are on vacation! Or are working for people who are on vacation. My own motives for visiting Hawaii had nothing to do with surf, but rather distant galaxies. The usual no-good reasons that I have for visiting most places. From my room on the 39th floor I had a fine view over Waikiki, Honolulu, and could see even a thin square of the blue waters of the Pacific ocean. Despite all the work I was supposed to do over there, I did manage at least to immerse myself in the waters of the Pacific each morning at around 7AM: I swam for around twenty minutes at Waikiki beach. Much further out from the shore, under the long rays of the morning sun, beyond the shadows of the tower-blocks each morning I could see a long line of surfers lying in wait for the waves. It was fine, for a few moments at least, to be separated from thought, to be in these warm waters, to be in this city free from implication and meaning. But I will write more about that, hopefully, in the next few days.

I’m interested in deep holes. Passages underground. Attentive readers will have realised as much from the last few months of entries. When I was in a certain north English town almost a decade ago now, there was a deep well in our back garden. It went, so they said, down to the level of the river. We were on a hill, the river was many metres below. One of my friends, an avid climber, descended into the hole, going down instead of up, towards the core. But at the bottom there was nothing, not even water. The hole was not deep enough. We carefully covered the well. Sitting outside on one of the few evening where one could sit outside, chairs above the void, nervous thoughts would pass through my mind about the mysterious dry not-so-deep well under my feet when I should have been enjoying my coffee and toast.

Here where I live all manner of strange things can be seen even at ‘God’s own noon’ as a friend would have said, if one looks at things in the right way. A few metres from where I am writing this, chalky footsteps cover the pavement, leading away from a small one-story building. What happens in there? This building is just a portal, a door. These people who crowd the pavements come from underground. It is the exit to Paris’ Catacombs, that fragment of the city’s immense subterranean network transformed into a charnel house sometime in the nineteenth century. It took one and half years of funerals to move the bones from the city’s most insalubrious locations, such as the Cimitere des Innocents at Les Halles. Ack! Today all this is a tourist attraction.

Last weekend I was in Heidelberg, visiting a friend, and we climbed the hills surrounding the town. At the top, a well. A very very deep well. Or was it really a well? The hole descended 80 metres, and there was no water at the bottom. The druids perhaps had dug this hole. A direct entrance to somewhere else, or more likely an exit, if you were unfortunate enough to be shoved in there on the night of a full moon. I thought of that other deep hole discovered in the foundations of Chartres, at the zero-point of the cathedral, the reason why the building is where it is. Was it that in both cases some weird “psycho-geographic” (as Iain Sinclair would say) confluence of forces had led people to believe that digging this deep hole was just exactly the thing they should do? But I suspect their constant hunger and abject fear of nature and natural events had probably more to do with it, I say from the viewpoint of the rational 21st century astronomer.

The point of all this? There is a parallel Universe, perhaps metres from our own. Of which we are normally completely unaware. There’s a world going on … underground! As Mr. Waits sung many years ago. But is that Universe really just a bunch of abandoned tunnels left behind by mediaeval Parisian stone masons ? Just deep dry wells dug by murderous undernourished druids? For reflection.