The insoluble pancake

In Ireland I finished Orhan Pamuk’s epic novel of Istambul, “The Black Book”. It’s long and dense book, and it required a great deal of concentration. The wilds of Ireland is really an ideal place to read it. It had taken me almost two months of Parisian time to reach the half-way mark: in a week in Ireland I finished it.

I’d bought on a recent trip to New York because I realised that most novels I’m reading these days seem to be by authors I’ve already read. Not too experimental, that! Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel prize for literature, seemed to be an interesting writer, so I thought I would give his book a spin.

There is only really one theme in the book, identity, which I understand is a typically Turkish concern. I can understand that, living on the frontier between East and West, Asia and Europe. (Istambul/Constantinopole/Byzantium has always fascinated me, in fact I made several fruitless attempts to memorize W. B. Yeats’ wonderful and incomprehensible poem about that city, and I have always been interested to visit there, but I haven’t had the chance so far). In Pamuk’s book, everyone is trying to be someone else, is switching identity and place. The principal character spends the entire book searching for his friend and his wife, who aren’t there, who are absent, who never show up, and before the end of the book he actually assumes his friend’s identity and begins to write his famous newspaper column for him.

The book is full of similar stories of blurring of identities. The real scale of the book are stories of a few pages in length, and there seem to be hundreds, some more fantastic than others. Of an enormous underground city beneath the streets of Istanbul filled with mannequins which are flawless copies of real people. Of an old journalist who, confined to his flat, finally convinces himself that he is Marcel Proust and he is living inside his novels of Proust, and is forever waiting for his sweetheart to return. Of the prince who wants to write only that which is “real” and “true” and which speaks from his inner self; to do this he destroys his library so that these books might not possibly influence him, he strips to furnishings from his house so that his thoughts might be uninterrupted by such distractions. Isolates himself. Returns to zero. Speaks to no-one.

The book’s ending is cruel and shocking. I understood, too, why Mr. Pamuk is sometimes less than popular with the Turkish authorities. There is a perhaps a little too much X-ray vision in his picture of Turkish society….
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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.

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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…
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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.

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