Collection Study

Cyprien Gaillard, Pruitt Igoe Falls, 2009

Text by Brinda Bose
August 2021

I

'What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal'
—TS Eliot¹

¹ TS Eliot, 'The Waste Land', 1922.

Who am I?²

¹ André Breton, Najda, 1928. This is the opening line of the novel. I use it as a refrain here.

What am I? Where can I drift ⁠— in the split of a second, from home to homelessness, going up in smoke, rushing to drown in the waters that fall out of the inky swell of the skies? What is home, with lamplight glistening through the window, if it is here now as we speak, and gone the moment after, even as we speak? What love does each luminous square hold close, that will multiply soundlessly into smithereens and lose all light, all sight, drowning in the rainbow waterfall, our watery grave?

In 'The Waste Land', Eliot imagines the collapse of western civilization in the twentieth century in a terrifying image of 'falling towers' across cultural, historical, political metropoles of the world ⁠— from Jerusalem to Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London, all ‘Unreal’. Eliot’s lines embrace tightly a knotted world of realities and unrealities: cracks and reforms, violet air, falling towers, in cities of many cultures, many lives. And yet the final word of the section — ‘Unreal’ — forlorn, disconnected from the litany of city-names by falling off the edge into a new line, capitalised and left standing with no closure, no punctuation... performs the surreal. Unreal — the very word is like a bell, like the Keatsian ‘Forlorn!’ in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, to toll us back from the other to our own selves — for we are unable to connect with that which was once real, the towers of great cities we can see between the shadows of trees, falling, collapsing, disappearing

II

suddenly, startlingly,
into smoke.

What is it that bursts into flame and goes up in fearsome, fearless smoke? Not our ordinary lives, which creep like spiders along damp walls from day to day, but our extraordinary futures and our hoary pasts, ‘mixing memory and desire’, holding us back and catapulting us forward: our dreams and nightmares jostling and shoving: a word, a thought, an idea wrestling for a foothold. The grim high-rise, with its window-eyes wide shut, stands sullenly in the sun and the moon, day in and night out, until, in ghastly noiselessness, it begins, all of a sudden, to crumple like a rag. Folding over and over, falling in slow motion. Shrinking by every twitch of our mesmerized eyelids. Silently the once invincible tower with a hundred window-eyes that stood ramrod straight until a second ago starts crumbling into nothing, terrifying clouds of opaque smoke pouring out of its disappearing form. Billowing fog bulges and swells to fill the surrounding sky. Belching from a giant edifice that collapses like a house of cards, fire-smoke tarries for no boundaries, hungrily swallowing up the firmament without a crack emerging anywhere in its enveloping black.

III

Who am I?

‘Once when I saw the curves of fire, the rough scarf women dancing,
Dancing out of the flues and smoke-stacks—flying hair of fire, flying feet upside down;
Buckets and baskets of fire exploding and chortling, fire running wild out of the steady and fastened ovens;
Sparks cracking a harr-harr-huff from a solar-plexus of rock-ribs of the earth taking a laugh for themselves;
Ears and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud-pies, gold bird-wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermillion balloons;
I saw then the fires flash one by one: good-by: then smoke, smoke;
And in the screens the great sisters of night and cool stars, sitting women arranging their hair,
Waiting in the sky, waiting with slow easy eyes, waiting and half-murmuring:
“Since you know all
and I know nothing,
tell me what I dreamed last night.”
—Carl Sandburg³

³ Carl Sandburg, ‘Smoke and Steel’, 1920.

Is it not always you who knows all about me, while I know nothing, about me or about you? Is it not you who will tell me who I am, where I come from and where I am going? Is it not you who can chronicle my dreams and foretell my nightmares? Can you tell me then how I was carried through the viscous air by the fires that flashed one by one, borne by the smoke, smoke and smoke over the charcoal sky, to sit and wait, arranging my hair,
to sit with my great sisters of night and cool stars, waiting,

IV

waiting for your answer, waiting to know how the mystery of the raging fire that felled the tower of my home was tied by its umbilical cord to me, my dreams and nightmares, my inspirations and aspirations. And how I was carried by smoke into the sky painted in broad strokes of dirty white and dirty grey and darkest black, in which I can see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. I can only wait. Wait for explosions of colour and sound. Wait for words — and if not, for meanings, usually floating free all around us, free of words, free from words. How little we know of meanings, from words: how often we think that a string of words will clear the fog that spreads across our brain, though it is the very opposite: words suck the energies from our thinking, leaving a tabula rasa, a plain surface chiseled clean of its music, its flowers, its garbage. In our perilous search for meaning we sacrifice words, we look for images and noise — and if we cannot find them we conjure them up in rainbow hues, and in astral music of the spheres that is beyond the range of the human ear, soundless and endlessly lyrical, soaring

V

in the brightest hues of the palette
pouring like manna from heaven in manic jets of water falling
scarlet, green, blue, blue-green, and the radiant turquoise.
‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.’⁴

⁴ André Breton, Najda, 1928. This becomes something like a Surrealist maxim.

VI

Who am I? Where am I going?

‘dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.’
—Gerard Manley Hopkins⁵

⁵ Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’, 1889.

Dust to dust, water to water: the miles we traverse are nought and endless; teeming with meaning and feeling, hollow and empty. What have we done to destroy our futures so? Fuelling nature’s bonfire, feeding its angry mouth, careening towards destruction, drowning in the Unreal. Filling with rage, with dissatisfaction, with self-inflicted sorrow. Jettisoning love, and laughter. Unreal.
London, Vienna, Athens, Alexandria, Jerusalem.
Unreal.

VII

Granite, cement, plaster, paint.
Home, love.
Built of dreams.
Windows of illusion that light the night
like glowworms.
Standing steady like a rock in a heaving sea.

F
A
L
L
I
N
G

VIII

Fire
Smoke
Terror

IX

Tears
Death
Fire
Smoke
Ashes

‘ASHES denote that fire was;
Respect the grayest pile
For the departed creature’s sake
That hovered there awhile.’
—Emily Dickinson⁶

⁶ Emily Dickinson, ‘Part One: Life/CXIII’, 1924 (published posthumously).

X

Who am I? What colours leap out of the deadened sky?
Out of the midnight black and blue, greenlight flares briefly.
Metamorphosing pinks, reds, greens, turquoise.
The grave is also the seat of birth.
Water falls in glorious Technicolor, enfolding deaths and lives equally well.

Who am I?
Where am I headed?
Shall another life swell from its gushing streams?
Shall one more tower grow monstrous
against
the
evening sky
tomorrow?
Or tomorrow. Or tomorrow,
which creeps in this petty pace.⁷
Our dreams shall survive
our
inglorious deaths, always.
Who am I? Who shall I become?
The rainbow smoke flickers and dies
and flickers again.
‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.’
Towers will rise to fall, or not at all.
Smoke will fill the night sky with terror
Smoke will shape-shift
to transform into the foam of falling neon waters.
It will be convulsive.
Or will not be at all.

⁷ Echo of lines from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.’