Art, Writing and Research
From How to Live – A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell:
“Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them… It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close.”
Distance
“Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.”
Threads
“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
Postcards
“Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow on from one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.”
Measurements
“The city does not consist of this but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past; the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some same was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock… As this wave of memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
Memory
“Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced… The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory.”
Contingency
“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites… Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment…”
Memory
“Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced… The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations ,parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory.”
It was – if my ‘facts’ are correct – either my great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather who worked in the Pantygasseg mine in South Wales and having Googled the place, I found the following on Wikipedia:
“Pantygasseg (Pant-y-gaseg) is the name given to a single row of houses on the mountain to the west of Pontypool in Torfaen county borough, South Wales. The name means ‘Hollow in the mare’s back’: mare’s (caseg>gaseg) hollow (pant). This is due to the shape of the mountain as it appears on the horizon.”
What interested me about this description was the meaning of the name, particularly as I’ve recently been working on photographs in which I’ve taken distant people and enlarged them so as to become the principal subjects of new versions of the images. Distance is a theme I wish to explore over the coming weeks and taking the description above, I could at once see its relevance, for the horizon is of course the horizon because its in the distance. Pantygasseg therefore gets its name through its being – in some respects – a part of (or identified with) the distance.
In his book, ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, Merleau-Ponty writes:
“I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself… the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished – since that distance is not one of its properties – if I were not there to scan it with my gaze.”
In this extract, Merleau-Ponty observes how a place cannot be distant in terms of its actual, physical properties; it can be big, small, rural, urban etc. but it cannot be distant; distance dependends on the location of the observer; without the observer distance would, as Merleau-Ponty states, be ‘abolished’. The fact that Pantygasseg is so named because of is being a part of the shape of the distance – a hollow in the horizon (shaped like a mare’s back) conjures up the image of an eternal stranger looking at it from far away; someone outside the village, who sees it, knows it well enough to know its name, but is not himself a part. I feel exactly like that stranger. Pantygasseg would have been a well known feature of the landscape of my great-great-great-grandfather’s life and those of his descendents including my grandmother (in her youth) and is therefore both part of my landscape (a landscape from which I have come) and at the same time utterly unknown, a metaphor for all those distant places I know, but of which I am not a part.
Thinking of the shape of the mountain I was reminded of a drawing I made in my diary whilst on holiday in Chania earlier this year.
It is a sketch of the mountains which dominate the horizon, and every day, as I looked at them and followed the contours with my eyes, I couldn’t help but think how those who lived in the city thousands of years ago would have seen that same shape, the same jagged line in the distance. There is something timeless about mountains which make one feel every bit the mortal we are. Pantygasseg as a place, at least through its name is a part of that timeless past and a part of my past, a line which my ancestors would have traced with their eyes and one which I realise I must also follow.
Returning again to the quote from Merleau-Ponty; he writes how his existence does not stem from his antecedents, or from his physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them. I was taken by this, as by going to Pantygasseg, I will be moving towards my antecedents, to sustain them in my memory.