A few more notes on garbage that spilled out and didn't make it into the last black bin liner-ful... inevitably they rapidly focus on ruins, as ever.
1. A fortress of indestructible leftovers
Rob Annable reminds us about Leonia, in Calvino's Invisible Cities:
It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.
Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.
This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.
Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle. [Invisible Cities, 1972, 114-6, text nabbed from here.]
2. Rubbish had acquired the permanence and character of architecture
Geoff Dyer's The Search is very good: an updated, diffuse, 20th-century Invisible Cities, in which Marlowe (or perhaps Eco's Casaubon) meets Calvino's Marco Polo. Here we are, in Usfret, city of refuse:
Dogs and men nosed through sprawling mounds of rubbish. Strewn all around were rusted tins, bottles and rags. Rubbish had acquired the permanence and character of architecture. There was so much rubbish that the idea of litter meant nothing. The landscape was made of litter - not defiled by it - and the litter was defiled by a film of oil oozed over everything by convoys of buses. Even the mud underfoot seemed composed of oil which had been compacted hard and pressed into the ground by the passage of times and tyres, as if the process which formed it three million years ago were slowly beginning again. [Geoff Dyer, The Search, 1993, 61]
3. You are weary at last of this ancient world (Apollinaire, 'Zone', 1913)
In his excellent Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (2003), Dyer visits Leptis Magna, the Roman ruins in Libya.
The entrance to the ruins was indicated by the arch of Septimius Severus: scaffold-clad, in the process of some kind of renovation, and therefore disappointing. Reminding us that the past's survival is not due entirely to its own stored reserves of longevity, scaffolding is fatal to the spell of antiquity. It gets - mediates - between the clean lines of ancient stone and the framing timelessness of the sky. [Yoga, 184]
A few pages later, he returns to this theme, describing a diminishing-yet-distilled demarcation between stone and sky - something that seems to hint delicately at Duchamp's infra-thin:
The sky is brightest around the edge of antique columns. And no line is sharper than the one dividing a column from the sky that frames it. There is a simple, entirely irrational explanation for this: what separates the column from the sky has become worn down - has become thin and therefore sharp - over time. The sky is as close as can be while still remaining distinct. [Yoga, 193]
An aside on Libyan bureaucracy (and see Platt et al, Perfume of Garbage for more on rubbish-as-architectural-material):
Pity the archaeologists of the future who unearth a stash of millions of receipts and chits for the most humdrum of errands. Years of painstaking research will reveal - what? [...] What impression will they form of the societies that produced this volume of paper? Imagine the scale of the catastrophe necessary to impart to these receipts and invoices the magic of a fragment of poetry on a sheet of parchment. [Yoga, 173]
4. The largest artificial ruin in Britain
In 1825, the Bashaw of Tripoli gave Tripoli's British Consul consent to take whatever he could extract of Leptis Magna from the Saharan dunes. Two years later: 37 columns, 10 capitals, 25 pedestals, 10 cornices, five inscribed slabs, and other sculptural fragments were loaded onto a ship and sent off to England. The three tallest columns wouldn't fit on the ship, and were left on the beach at Leptis. This same ship also carried the granite head of what's now known as Rameses II. Previously it was thought to have been of Ozymandias [Christopher Woodward, In Ruins, 204]. From Shelley's Ozymandias:
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies
[...]
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The Leptis ruins were destined for the gardens of George IV in Virginia Water, in Surrey, where the king's architect, Jeffrey Wyattville improvised a seemingly-authentic ruin.
A ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator; as they strolled between the colonnades his visitors would recall the Roman Forum, Ephesus, or Palmyra, each completing a picture of their own. His solution is masterly, perhaps more imaginative than the design of Leptis Magna itself. [In Ruins, 139]
Compare that with Dyer on pictorial reconstructions of the pre-ruin:
The more meticulously they are done, however, the less convincing such reconstructions become: for me, antiquity is not what can be deduced but, exactly, what remains. Leptis, in other words, only really got going when it fell into ruin; its decline was its glory (and vice versa). That is part of the consolation of ruins. [...] Ruins do not make you wish that you had seen them earlier, before they were ruins, unless that is, they have become too ruined. [Yoga, 192]
Elsewhere, Dyer in Detroit: In Yoga, he also visits Detroit, photographing the ruined office developments in Camilo Vergara's footsteps. Related: Robert Polidori's photos of abandoned Chernobyl/Pripyat and tired Havana.
* * *
Also: Dyer's next book, The Ongoing Moment, looks interesting:
In his last book [Yoga], Geoff Dyer confessed that not only did he not take pictures in the course of his travels but that he did not own a camera. [...] The Ongoing Moment is an idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same things (benches, hats, hands, roads).
Other fragments:
- Fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of words
- The worlds are dust: Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay
- All the way was ruin: after London, Chernobyl, New York, civilisation
- The ruined control tower; a concrete labyrinth
- Eliot: I will show you fear in a handful of dust
- Mottled, warped, streaked and pockmarked silent archival footage
- Alone in his never-finished, already decaying pleasure palace
- Notes on garbage