In memory of Severo Sarduy
I could never choose just one book. That’s unless all books were not just one book which has been heralded, recreated, corrected and extended, erased, interpreted, burnt and rewritten, throughout the course of history.
Photo of Severo Sarduy
If I had to decide on a book, it would, without doubt, be that which contains all others, although admittedly in the most complete disorder: the Dictionary.
By day I wander the surface of that concave mirror on which words provide a faithful, albeit miniaturized, idea of the universe. I consult it, I browse through its pages, I add to it, perhaps in excess, that which the Spanish call Cubanisms, although I don’t know why because for me they are nothing more than pure, normal language. I also—as is common in cases of excessive loves—ignore it, thwart it, and systematically write against what it tells me, in an Impertinence which incites and hones it year upon year, for no reason other than to wind it up.
Many people suppose that bilingualism is something that is perfect, that in its sane equilibrium, that double belonging eliminates and encompasses two opposing realities to the complete happiness of its possessor; perhaps something like bisexuality. There is a grain of truth in the supposition, although it is not without its counterpart: bilingualism is that wildcat trajectory in which the day is spent to-and-froing from one language to another, or rather, from one part to another of the well-thumbed dictionary. Because there are some words which, without any apparent motive, rear up in the other language, clinging to it like cats with sharpened claws. I’m sure that they also do this for no reason other than to wind me up—the buggers.
A few years ago, when writing Cobra and Colibí, I made use of the dictionary a great deal more. At that time, I had a thesaurus of synonyms and antonyms; this gave my prose a sheen, an exuberance, a slightly showy sense of luxury which recalled the inferior palaces of the nouveau riche, the dream of a butler come true. In Buenos Aires they called me “the millionaire of language”. But every coin is minted in the dictionary.
Alejo Carpentier used them even more than me. His books abound in pertinences and exactitudes in which the Voix de son Maître can be heard free from ambages. In the opportune parody Guillermo Cabrera Infante proposes of his prose, although not out of hatred, the meticulous diction of the Maître is transformed into an addiction.
Now though, I’m not sure if it’s just because I’m getting older, but I take refuge in the comforts of synonymy much less often. I’m not bothered if the same word is repeated; something which has endowed my writing with a certain severity; the terseness of an elected poverty.
Yet don’t think that my compulsion for lists stops at the dictionary. Not at all; I’m impassioned by all taxonomies, repertoires, indexes, albums, guides, catalogues and all sorts of lists. It’s as if those orderings revolved around something which sustains them, something which at once provides structure, whilst remaining concealed, forever erased, something that would be like a definition or image of God.
Let me then establish a catalogue of catalogues. Let me summarize three of these passions: as a child, I would diligently collect the tiny cards of the Álbum de Oro Zoológico in which beings as improbable as the Yeti would appear: the hummingbird, flying whilst stationary, the anteater, or the lyrebird. These bright, four-colour images, accompanied by the fresh, sickly smell of candy, were my first contact with fiction. With something which I continue to overwork to this very day: that which appears as an “effect” of the real.
Later, when I came to Europe, I took pleasure in reading the Guía Azul: the churches, museums, castles and cheeses which made up the vast museum that is the continent were not enough for me: I wanted more; I wanted their accompanying replicas, their analogue in sounds, their other truth.
Now though, night delivers me, punctual and indifferent, the bodies denied to me by day. Her messenger is a Dutch guide, Spartacus, where all that the planet tells of gayness is entrusted and described in a refined, internationalist style. To enter into those pages is already a “journey” in the sense of the word in the sixties: dream, take-off, flight, to be another. I submerge myself amongst those adolescent bodies then, both strapping and fragile, dancing naked amongst drugs and fresh flowers, in some “houseboat” in the suburbs of Hong Kong. Or amongst themselves—for the guide is summary to the description of the bodies—but converted into the full-body masseurs of some Art-Nouveau bathhouse in the suburbs of Manila; or still amongst themselves, but now they are the obese sumo wrestlers of a ritual gymnasium in Tokyo. Or they are the broad-shouldered blondes of Amsterdam, or Mexico, or Jakarta. Or Havana.
This is how I go to sleep.
[Severo Sarduy / Translated by J.C. Kelly]
[1990/2010]
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When a slightly inebriated Oliver Payne tells us in a recent interview that his love for vandalism knows no bounds, he is revealing to us one side of a polemic which has grown to dominate and divide graffiti in recent years. For sure, the division has always been there: one between the bombers and the piecers; one which symbolizes the tension between the political imperative of defacing public property and the aesthetic imperative of style. Yet somehow the division has never been quite so pronounced, the problem never quite so severe. Whilst the key motivation of early pioneers such as Cornbread and Taki 183 might quite simply have been just getting up, the movement spawned by their actions quickly gathered momentum, with the emergence of a first generation of writers who actively embraced the aesthetic challenge of pushing, distorting and redefining the boundaries of vandalism.
Dondi - Children of the Grave Part 3
Perhaps one of the most notable of these early renegades was Dondi: working in the penumbra of sleeping train yards, cloaked in the diffuse mist of paint fumes and aerosol propellant, perhaps more than any other writer of his generation, Dondi strove so that his masterpieces would emerge fresh from the yards, dazzling and resplendent in the early morning sun, out into the slowly awakening city, and on to run throughout the day, ultimately going on to capture the imaginations of a worldwide audience of millions long after they had been buffed from the carriages of the MTA rolling stock.
Thirty years have passed since Dondi painted the third and final of his Children of the Grave series. Much has changed: graffiti and the subculture it represents have undergone a series of evolutions, culminating in the establishment of an international movement which has seen its practitioners—albeit some with varying degrees of cynicism—embrace the commercial industry which has sprung up around so-called street art, and with it, the new aesthetic challenges it presents. Yet there are also those who have rejected these challenges outright, in a calculated act of rebellion against style and the perceived threat of conformance in what has always been a thoroughly non-conformist and anti-establishment art form. As an example of this, Payne cites the London writer Tox, who has embarked upon a programme of stripping graffiti back to its bare bones, as a political act of sheer vandalism. Taking two writers from two different generations of London’s DDS crew, the effects of this shift become clear: from Zomby to Tox, we can see something of the progressive marginalization of the aesthetic, almost to the point of non-existence.
Tox tag
All this begs the question, what is to be made of this development, of this polarization of the aesthetic and the political? At first it would seem very much to be part of a larger aesthetic revolution in which a schism has opened up between art as an aesthetic mode of expression with no political function and art as a political mode of expression with no aesthetic function. In this sense, it would seem to be a reflection of the fragmented and schizophrenic manner of expression inherent to our own condition of late Western capitalism, one which seriously undermines the effectiveness of our modes of expression: whilst the street artists are marked by the absence of a political imperative which might allow them to engage a wider audience, the bombers suffer from the absence of an aesthetic imperative which might serve to legitimate their message and thus reach a wider audience.
From a sociological perspective however, the focus has been consistently drawn towards the effects of this latter group, since for society, the problem has never been one of graffiti artists painting ever more vibrant and colourful murals with increasing degrees of technical proficiency; instead, it is that of the emergence of generations of adolescents who display a total and nihilistic contempt towards the urban environment they inhabit. Payne’s eloquent avocation of vandalism goes some way to approximating the rationale and destructive urge through which such contempt is manifested.
What we are seeing then, is nothing other than a last ditch attempt of a marginal group of society to have its say, being forced to resort to increasingly desperate tactics to make their statement in a world in which the voices of mal pensant critics are swiftly drowned out by the torrents of vacuous rhetoric and cultural complacency which dominate. A final stand against the decadent consensus of late Western capitalism: this is the voice of the Other, emerging onto the streets after nightfall, bloody and bare knuckled, armed only with the brute force of sheer vandalism. And it is for precisely this reason I believe that Payne’s love of vandalism knows no bounds.
Reclaim the parks, reclaim the streets! After a long and cruel winter, we cannot help but be surprised by the first days of weekend sun. Appearing as if from nowhere, the sun reveals to us a resplendent parallel city which has remained hidden for months, cloaked in the cold, locked up inside forbidding grey stone tenements which, as if by magic, are no longer grey. Basking in the warmth of the sun, we are struck by the colours of their sandstone: golden yellows and ochre, earthy terracotta. No longer pockets of warmth in which to seek refuge from the elements and the harsh Scottish climate, buildings have become cool spaces to which to retreat at the end of the day, places to share a meal with friends, or quench your thirst with some cold beers, enjoying the dying embers of the day as a refreshing breeze enters through the window and circulates round the room.
How happy it makes us to see our parks and streets awash with colour, to smell the appetising aroma of smoke wafting from barbeques hidden behind garden walls. After so many months, you’d think we’d have forgotten, that we’d be a little rusty, but being in the sun is something which comes naturally to us, although perhaps sometimes a little too much so. Carried away by a sense of urgency—for days like this are so precious and so few, we are inevitably filled with a sense of urgency to make the most of them—we are amazed to see so much raw flesh, pale and milky, hungry for the sun. And who cannot help but raise a wry smile when they return to work on Monday morning to find out that at least one of their colleagues has overdone it; that their face has turned shiny, bright red—the office lobster.
The sun reveals to us a different Scotland, one which in the winter months we are perhaps wont to forget. Sitting on a traffic-clogged motorway, we notice once again that the vegetation has begun to thrive. Looking out over the Firth of Forth, we can see the azure waters of our own riviera, and as we stop to eat fish and chips down by the harbour, we savour the taste of our own fruits de mer. Dipping our feet into the icy water, we feel alive once again and find a piece of mind we thought we had lost, a newfound optimism, a feeling that things aren’t so bad after all. And for the first time in some months, we smile: warm, nourished, expectant, ready for the summer to begin.
The Sound of the Railway
The sound of the railway reaches us from afar: the distant rumble of goods carriages transporting freight between depots, the electric hum of a high-speed passenger train shuttling journey makers along the stretches of track which link up cities and towns, the occasional sound of a horn-blast, muffled as it enters into the stagnant air of a tunnel, the twitch of warping tracks, the growl of a diesel engine labouring under its load. And almost always, these sounds pass us by unnoticed, blending almost imperceptibly into the urban milieu. Seldom do we pause to reflect upon their existence, and rarely do our minds stray over the barbed-wire fences into the domain from which they emanate.
Occasionally however, these sounds can lead us elsewhere, taking us on a journey of the imagination, conjuring up a sort of urban mythology which shrouds the no-man’s-land that is the railway. The scene is familiar: it is dark, late at night. Shadowy figures lurk beneath an stone bridge. The smell of diesel oil lingers in the air. The streets are deserted, the light murky. Something is afoot, yet what it is we do not know. A briefcase changes hands. The barrel of a gun glistens in the night. Cold steel. A sudden movement, a flash. A low blow sends one of the figures buckling to the ground. The camera cuts back, just in time to reveal the lights of successive train carriages passing rapidly over the bridge. The victim’s cries are lost amidst the din as his body slumps to the ground, his assailants stealing off into the night, briefcase in hand, leaving the echo of the train playing out behind them. Sinister figures, dark city.
Yet were we to reflect further, it might also become clear that—excepting the cases of workies and certain deviant elements of society, such as graffiti writers—the railway is not a place for being. Indeed, it is fair to say that it is only ever experienced as part of a journey: we are always coming from somewhere, always going to somewhere. Think of the suited businessman on the way to his morning meeting, looking out bleary-eyed over sun-dappled fields, the face of Willy Loman dreaming of that big sale; or the expectant lover, counting the minutes until he will see his betrothed, a box of chocolates wrapped neatly in a brown paper bag and a dog-eared copy of War and Peace gripped tightly in his hands; a family setting out on their on their holidays; rowdy football fans returning from the game; an artist lost in his meditations, as he stares vacantly out the window, eyeballs flitting from side to side.
Here it would seem, lies something of the railway’s power, because as we hear the train passing by, we catch a glimpse of that frail travelling coincidence which so fascinated Philip Larkin, of a microcosmos in which people are revealed to us not as points but as vectors in space and time. Perhaps then, in that briefest of moments, a truth is revealed to us: perhaps the solitude of a space in which people exist as nothing more than transient particles causes us to recognize something of the fragility of our own worlds; or perhaps it serves to reaffirm our sense of presence, since for while they may be nowhere, we at least, are here, solid and sturdy, our feet planted firmly on the ground.
Yet perhaps the real power of those distant rumblings is that every once in a while, they cause us to break from the routine of our daily lives, allowing us to discover the momentary excitement of an exotic whiff of a world beyond our own, at once tempered by the bittersweet solace of sounds that come from a space which ultimately serves to compound the anonymity and isolation of the modern-day metropolis.
Illustration © The Guilty Gun Studio 2010. All rights reserved.
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