The insoluble pancake

Last night on the mountain. I am at Xinlong Observatory (or “Xinlong observing station” as it’s called in English around here), about two hundred kilometres to the north east of Beijing. I have been here for over a week now, teaching at a school of observational astronomy. The fact that there are around thirty or forty students here with myself and the other tutors, as well as an internet connection (no matter how slow or unreliable it is) makes one forget the remoteness of the location. But remote it is. Xinlong is the site of numerous small telescopes, as well as one much larger telescope constructed recently, LAMOST, an ambitious instrument designed to carry out large spectroscopic surveys of the nearby Universe. The nearest city to here, half an hour down the mountain, is Xinlong itself, a small village only ten years ago but now bursting with the concrete shells of immense half-completed sky-scrapers, full of brightly lit broad avenues (which is of course bad for the observatory).

My daily routine here this past week has consisted of getting up, pulling back the curtains and gazing out over the valley, a beautiful forested valley — and filling up my Bialetti “moka electrika” (the same one that I took on the train to Tibet in 2007) with water and Illy coffee. That way, once I come out of the shower, there is strong coffee ready. Each morning I scrutinise the contents of the coffee tin, but I am reasonably sure I have enough to last to me until I return to France on Wednesday morning. Lunch and Dinner are at the unusually early (for me) and highly precise times of 12:00 and 18:00. We arrive at the canteen to find small metal trays full of several different kinds of meat and vegetables, usually quite good but — arrive at 12.05 and it’s cold. One thing we have remarked is that windows and doors are left open everywhere, and there is no heating — and it’s almost winter. Warm clothing essential. Everyone eats rapidly, in less than half an hour, and it is always the French who are the last to leave. In between those times — helping the students, or trying to get some work done in my office.

My week here was interrupted by a trip given by one of our gracious hosts to the eastern Qing tombs, which lie perhaps fifty or so kilometres from here, but the trip was longer than this distance would suggest. We took a shortcut through the mountain, back roads which were in very bad condition– in some places nothing more than dirt tracks. The journey started well enough, a new paved road, but soon after that the going became progressively slower. Throughout the countryside there are many small mines, coal amongst other ores, and the constant passage of heavy lorries has destroyed the surfaces. On the way we passed through countless small villages. Around here it is rural and remote, and agricultural, and the roads were often laid out with crops left to dry in sun — posing a considerable hazard for the unwary driver. We passed many people shelling corn, the empty husks filling the streets. A thought flitted through my mind, I thought about passing within inches of people who live very different lives from mine, but then Ireland too has countryside and agriculture. The difference here is of course that everything is still heavily labour intensive and the industrial revolution is only just reaching the countryside.

The eastern Qing tombs themselves rest in the shadow of the misty green mountains, red temple roofs lie against a background of thickly forested hills. The grounds of the many tombs are enormous — one cannot simply walk from one to the next, a car is essential. One arrives along a long, broad avenue lined with many stone animals — this was the route that the funeral processions would make. Each tomb lies in a mouldy, underground cavern. The facades of many of the buildings — some of which are more than three hundred years old — were somewhat the worse for the passage of time. Out here in the depths of the countryside, hundreds of miles from Beijing, time has been allowed to take its course, and nothing has been restored, no new coats of paint had been given. Remember too that just on the other side of the mountains, once was the outer darkness, the invaders: the line of the Wall once snaked unbroken across those mountains over there.

The day of our visit was not just any day — it was in fact one hundred years to the day that the emperor was deposed and modern-day china began its slow and painful birth. But on the day of our visit, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. We noticed no western tourists other than ourselves — these eastern tombs are much further away from Beijing than the western ones, which, I understand from my guidebook, are usually on the circuit of tour-buses visiting the great wall. In any case, the emperors, although deposed, their palaces and tombs do not seem to have suffered too much from revolution revolution: living in France, where there is a long tradition of purifying fire, one expects perhaps otherwise.

Tomorrow: a descent from the mountain, and a return to the capital — and on the way, at last, a visit to the great wall, to one of the more remote, less travelled sections.

You have to imagine a tram, an orange tram sliding down a broad avenue
towards the sea, towards the blue waters of the pacific. Inside the
tram the seats are worn and faded and the floor has been eroded over
the years by the passage of thousands of feet. Wood and metal, no
plastic here. How could anything here be as old as this tram you ask
yourself, looking at the buildings around, all of which are new, all
of which have been built in the last decade or so it seems. This, as
they say, is all true. This is a tram which starts in Brera, Milan,
maybe somewhere near the Observatory and one that ends up a few
hundred metres from the Pacific. Arriving here a few years ago to
visit my Uncle (who had abandoned Ireland forty years ago and never
returned) I found these phantom trams gliding around the streets of
San Francisco. Strange to see them here. I was surprised. Commune di
Milano. Over there, they were something old, a witness to centuries of
neglect: buildings crumbling, the ancient worn streets; but in these
avenues at the edge of the continent somehow the ordinary became
extra-ordinary. To see these trams against the glittering water here,
where before they had been at best a thousand kilometers from the sea.
But how exactly does something commonplace become extra-ordinary?
Change the context. Change the time.

During my first visit to Milan I barely glimpsed the city from the
window of the taxi, just a flash of the ornate baroque glory of the
cathedral, night-time, illuminated, I remember my first meal, an
espresso, I was happy to have arrived. The centre of the city, the old
heart of the city. Brera, where the trams came from? Cobbled streets
worn smooth with time, the buildings black with soot, Bar Brera, the
press of people, and after that the ancient bulk of the museum. Where
was the observatory? The observatory was in fact inside the museum. I
had to walk across a broad courtyard, past a statue of Napoleon,
through the corridors full of students, half-glimpsed studios, walls
grimy with centuries of dust, until – there was the sign, it was here.
Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera. Climb the stairs.

There was a telescope here once, there still is, and back then maybe
the city was dark, there was not all this light and people. Giovanni
Schiaparelli turned his telescope towards a red dot in the sky which
was actually a planet, and he drew what he could see. Dark lines and
light lines, crisscrossing the planet, obviously someone had made
them. Here are the notebooks in the library, all is perfectly
explained, these were canals, of course, this was water obviously. He
drew until his eyesight failed, like Borges surrounded by his books.
Schiaparelli had perhaps visited Amsterdam, the low countries of
northern Europe. An ordinary thing like a canal in an extra-ordinary
location? There were really shining blue waters on this arid planet
that had never seen running water for a million years.

It’s new years’ day, 2011, and I realise with not a small amount of horror that I only managed one blog post in the whole of 2010. You would have thought that something catastrophic and life-changing occurred, but in fact all the catastrophic and life-altering stuff actually happened in the previous year, 2009. 2010 was relatively straight sailing, but I probably devoted perhaps too much of my energies to work I think… and it’s not to say that nothing of note happened in 2010, which is not the case.

I’ll pick out one event, more or less at random: Don DeLillo’s visit to Paris last autumn. I was amazed to discover that DeLillo was coming to Paris to promote his latest book, Point Omega, and that he would be appearing at the L’abre a lettre in Bastille. I have been reading the man’s books for at least twenty years. I have read every single novel he has written (except one I think) and what I really wanted was just to hear a few words of his books read in his own voice. He almost never makes a public appearance and so I didn’t really want to pass up the chance of seeing the man at a bookshop less than 30 minutes away from here by metro.

I left work early. I was certain that the bookshop would be bursting to the seams, but in fact as far as I could tell, there were only one or two other people who had arrived before me, idly browsing the shelves. They looked normal. I made my way to the back, the store is very long and narrow, with almost no space for seating. At the very back of the shop there was a small skylight through which some weak, end-of the day winter light filtered through. About fifteen minutes before he was scheduled to arrive, one of the staff asked us somewhat apologetically if we could please keep our distance from Mr DeLillo, don’t get too close to the table where he would be sitting, and if we did that then everyone would be happy. I don’t know, who was expecting scores of screaming fans yelling at the man for his autograph, pushing and shoving their way to the front? Oh, and one other thing, DeLillo was a slightly delayed. One of his radio appearances had taken a bit too long.

We waited. People continued to arrive, until almost suddenly it seemed to me, the shop was almost full and I was standing at the very front of a crowd of maybe a hundred or so people. We were informed that DeLillo had stepped into the taxi and would be arriving soon. We continued to wait. After almost an hour or so after he was scheduled to appear, DeLillo appeared at the back of the room and made his way to the front.

DeLillo is no longer a young man, but I still think of the pictures of him I saw on the back covers of books I bought twenty years ago. I was suprised to see how he looks today. Time passes. I could hear the conversion between DeLillo and the bookshop staff. Would he be reading from his book? You know, I’m sorry, I really can’t, my voice is shot from talking all day, he says in his Brox rasp, and I feel the man’s age, I feel the strain of those long distance airplane flights and interminable waiting in aeroports, where we ‘grow old’ as DeLillo says in one of his books.

The bookshop staff move into “damage limitation” mode. Someone will read from DeLillo’s book, from the French translation I suppose. DeLillo will sign books. We are asked to form orderly queues. The staff know well DeLillo’s preferences, we are told it’s okay to take photographs…’from the back’ as DeLillo says, but not with the author. You know, some people like to have their picture taken with the author, we are told. I didn’t imagine having my picture taken with this particular author. DeLillo puts on a black baseball cap which shades his eyes and makes them invisible. He looks out across the crowd to the back of the room.

I have none of his books with me. I have no desire to have a signed copy of the French translation of his latest book. I have no desire to hear his latest book read to me in French. I feel the man’s age, and I feel that I shouldn’t be here. What would I say? It’s all in the books anyway, if you have a question, right? Less than five minutes after his arrival, I leave the room and take the metro back to my apartment. Peace, Mr. DeLillo, as that other great american man of letters, Kurt Vonnegut, might have said.

A lot of things have happened in the last twelve months; stuff that I haven’t been able or willing to write about here. Maybe I will, eventually, but for now I will leave most of the consequences of that single unexpected, shocking event of 8th of February 2009 unwritten. But there is one thing I can say: the house where I spent seven or so years of my life, the house where I lived with my parents and my sister until I left Tyrone in the autumn of 1988 for Manchester is no longer our house; my sister handed over the keys to a local man, a neighbour, a few days ago.

The last time I spent a night in that house was there was at the tail-end of last year, in November. I returned to help my sister with all the things one must do if one sells a house; going through all the papers and reports, emptying the cupboards, looking through the drawers. I didn’t do much in the house itself, other than reading twenty-five year old school reports which commented on my need to work harder in Physics and French. No, the task really reserved for me was to clear out my father’s shed, the shed where had worked for many years as a stone mason, making headstones and monuments, chiseling names into granite slabs and polishing kerbs and crosses for later assembly in the cemetery.

I spent almost an entire Saturday filling trailer-loads of stuff, all kinds of odds and ends which came from not only my father’s entire working life but also his father’s working life. Each trailer-load I towed with my parents’ old car through narrow country lanes to the Coalisland municipal dump, a few miles away across fields misty with winter rain. For whatever reason (in the overall scheme of things I mean) on that particular day at times it rained very heavily indeed and I hurled one item after another into the steel bins of the dump under a constant downpour submerged in the very weak blue-grey light of winter. At that exact moment, bizzarely, I knew that my cousin and aunt might have been strolling down the broad boulevards of Paris under brilliant autumn sunshine, because, as it so turned out, that was the exact weekend they decided to visit Paris.

In the shed there were heavy power-tools which had rusted from years of neglect, grinders and drills and polishers, heavy machines whose function was unclear to me. All kinds of compressors and mixers blasters and drills, dense lumps of steel and metal with dangerous-looking wheels and levels and pistons. Although most of them had rested inert for the best part of a decade, I still felt vaguely worried that they would unexpectedly spring to life when I approached.

The rain drummed on the shed roof while I piled high the trailer. In the rafters I found the wooden fence from the yard of the house in Cookstown where I’d lived as a child more than twenty years previously. The wood was covered with a very thick layer of dust and almost came apart before I could load it onto the trailer. As a small child, that fence marked the limits of the narrow area in our back yard my sister and I played in. My father had kept this fence here all those years.

I thought of my father’s hands, hard and callused from a lifetime of hard manual labour. He hardly ever wore gloves. I remember as a child sitting on his lap and putting my tiny fingers inside his enormous hands, and I imagined that all people when they grew up would have hands like my fathers’. I remember the faint shock I felt the day I looked at the hands of my physics teacher and saw they were soft and slender, so unlike the my father’s giant digits.

There were so many tools in that shed. There were axes and mallets and hammers and spades and shovels, rakes and hoes. There were chisels and drill-bits and countless drawers and cupboards filled with screws and nails. There was a small folding crane and out back there was a mixer and a wheelbarrow with a petrol engine. I thought of what the physical legacy of my own life-time’s work would be: nothing at all. A few invisible bits flipped on hard-drives scattered across continents, if hard-drives were still around and were not replaced by something else even more incomprehensible to common sense. Nothing created. “You have to know how to work with your hands,” which is what my father always insisted. I thought of Richard Powers’ meditation that almost everything people do today consists of symbol manipulation, changing one set of characters into another, something computers are supremely suited to do.

Then there were the many rulers and tapes and spirit levels. One worn and scratched folding white plastic ruler I saved and took with me back to Paris. That ruler was an essential tool; one needed to know exactly where to drill the holes, to cut the kerbs, to lay the dowels. I remember my father using this ruler when I was with him during those long days at the cemetery. Although there were other rulers there in the shed which seemed even older, this was the one I took.

At the end of the day, after help from a friendly neighbour, everything was gone, the shed emptied. My hair was thick with dust, my clothes damp from the constant drizzle. Leaving the shed I put my hands in my pocket and found the plastic ruler. It was the only object I chose to save.