Over 10 days in Tokyo, Alexander, Silvia, Carlos and I got into the city, its history, its tastes, its metabolism. It was a joy to work with two architects and a curator. Here is what we learned.
Alexander Novikov
Carlos Medellin
Silvia Franceschini
Adeola Enigbokan
Special Thanks to Juan Pablo Gomez for your patience and expertise in editing!
Here is Pradeep Jeganathan’s proposal for a giant model, dedicated to remembering all who died in Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Imagine what it would be have a model like this made for your own city. It is an amazing idea:
Let us layout a large map made of concrete or granite somewhere in the country. It must be to scale with all its mountains and valleys, rivers and reservoirs, forests and cites. Let it be, say, 500 metres in length or more. Let us mark on this map the place of every violent event that took place within its shores from the April 5, 1971 to the May 19, 2009. It cannot be comprehensive of course, but it can be representative, no ‘sides,’ but in the sense of a random statistical sample. Identify survivors of these selected events. Record what they remember, not about politics, not about violence, nor about who did what to whom, but about their loved ones died in that place. That’s all, a narrative of their love and attachment, which will also be a narrative of loss, pain and grief. Let us take these recordings made in the language the survivor chooses, and translate them also in to the other two languages of our country.
The idea is to place these recordings on the map of our country so that any one, especially, our children can listen to them. This map then will be filled with markers, of stone also, simple and yet distinct from the terrain it represents of death.Violent death
Let us walk on this map– it is a large map, remember, and we can walk on it; respectfully of course — as we walk our country, and we can visit and revisit, in some small way, at each place someone died.
As we walk this map, then, with simple portable playback device with pre-recorded disk, yes, like a iPod, and a pair of supplied head phones, which we obtain from the administrator of the site as one does in some museums now, we should be able to listen at each place that is marked, by selecting number, like k324 on the device to a narrative of a survivor that pertains to that place.
Listen, take it in, and perhaps move on to another spot. It will take hours, of course, perhaps days, to traverse this map.I do not offer panaceas; nor can I foretell the future. But I do think this may be a better way for us Sri Lankans to reconcile ourselves to our violent past.
Then a miracle occurred. One of the last angels lingered, turned, and quietly approached me. I caught sight of his cavernous, staring, diamond eyes under the imposing arches of his brows. On the ribs of his outspread wings glistened what seemed like frost. The wings themselves were gray, an ineffable tint of gray, and each feather ended in a silvery sickle. His visage, the faintly smiling outline of his lips, and his straight clear forehead reminded me of features I had seen on earth. The curves, the gleaming, the charm of all the faces I had ever loved—the features of people who had long since departed from me—seemed to merge into one wondrous countenance. All the familiar sounds that came separately into contact with my hearing now seemed to blend into a single, perfect melody.
He came up to me. He smiled. I could not look at him. But, glancing at his legs, I noticed a network of azure veins on his feet and one pale birthmark. From these veins, from that little spot, I understood that he had not yet totally abandoned earth, that he might understand my prayer.
–Vladimir Nabokov, “The Word,” trans. by Dmitri Nabokov
Walking in the hilly maze of streets between Istiklal Cadessi and Cihangir in Istanbul in July 2009, Itai and I came across a small shop crammed full of boxes of old photographs, and assorted personal objects, like jewelry, used perfume bottles, souvenirs from trips to other places. It was as if the contents of innumerable Istanbul lives had been dumped into his shop. An old man sat outside of the shop, entirely uninterested in us as we poked around and intruded into the forgotten memories of unknown others. I bought a few photographs from the old man for one lira.
I remembered the walk today when, as I took a book of photographs of the Istanbul bus terminal off the shelf, these photos fell out onto the floor. Picking them up, I felt the bustle and beauty of Istanbul again, its distinguished decay, its fullness and color, its melancholy elegance.
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I am not an Istanbullu, and may never be, but I love this city more than I have a right to. In the moment of seeing these black and white photographs I was seized by a longing to return, to know the people in the images, to walk in those places. Despite only visiting once, and for a short time, Istanbul entered my dreams. I search for friends in its hills at night, and always find them, in doorways and courtyards, old friends, good friends. In this way I have never left. What is this longing that infects me, prompting such dreams? Is it for particular people and places? How can these images of strangers and unknown places be as magnetic as friendship?
Orhan Pamuk warns of the dangers of exaggerating his city’s beauty:
Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of Istanbul’s dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A good many writers of earlier generations fell into this habit when writing about Istanbul: Even as a they extol the city’s beauty, entrancing me with their stories, I am reminded they no longer live the place they describe, preferring the modern comforts of western cities. From these predecessors I learned that the right to heap immoderate lyrical praise on Istanbul’s beauties belongs to those who no longer live there, and not without some guilt: for the writer who talks of the city’s ruins and melancholy is never unaware of the ghostly light that shines down on his life. To be caught in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorus is to be reminded of the difference between one’s own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past.
– Istanbul: Memories and the City, p.56-57
Cities (I)
The official acropolis beggars the most colossal conceptions of modern barbarity. Impossible to express the dull light produced by the perpetually gray sky, the imperial glint of the barracklike buildings, the eternal snow on the ground. With a singular taste for enormity, they have reproduced all the classical marvels of architecture. I attend art exhibitions in spaces twenty times vaster than Hampton Court. And what paintings! A Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar commissioned the staircases of the ministries; even the flunkies that I was able to glimpse are more haughty than Brahmas and I shuddered at the colossal aspect of the caretakers and construction officials. Thanks to the ordering of buildings into squares, courtyards and enclosed terraces, cabdrivers have been kept out. The parks represent primitive nature detailed with superb technical mastery. The upper zone has inexplicable parts: an arm of the sea, with no boats, unrolls its layer of blue sleet between quays weighted with giant candelabra. A short bridge leads to a vaulted passage directly beneath the dome of the Sainte-Chapelle. This dome is an armature of artistically wrought steel, approximately fifteen thousand feet in diameter.At several points on the copper foot bridges, the platforms, the stairways that wind around covered markets and pillars, I thought I could judge the depth of the city! It’s the wonder of it that I was unable to seize: what are the relative levels of the other districts above or below the acropolis? For today’s tourist, orientation is impossible. The business district is a circus built in a uniform style, with arcaded galleries. No shops to be seen. But the snow on the pavement is trampled; a few nabobs as rare as Sunday morning strollers in London are making their way toward a diamond-studded stagecoach. A few red velvet divans: they serve arctic beverages whose price varies from eight hundred to eight thousand rupees. To the notion of seeking out a theater in this circus, I would reply that the shops must contain dramas that are sordid enough. I think there is a police force, but the laws must be so strange that I give up trying to imagine what the rogues here must be like.
The suburb as elegant as any fine street of Paris has the advantage of air that is like light. The democratic element is made up of some hundred souls. Here too the houses don’t follow one another; the suburb loses itself bizzarely in the countryside, the “county” that fills up the eternal west of forests and prodigious plantations where savage gentlefolk hunt down their gossip columns by artificial light.
–Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations (poem above translated by John Ashbery)
Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something stronger than myself, that demands that I must write as I write.
