I:
“Beauty Unforeseen” had the
following epigraph:
It is as though
beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve
as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its
most acute level. Through its beauty,
the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual
care: if we do not search it out, it
comes and finds us.
Elaine Scarry, One Beauty and Being Just, 81.
This
seemed appropriate for a series of photographs of back lanes that are really
rather beautiful.
Page
3: Back Lane 1: Unforeseen
(The earlier title of this poem was “Blue Beauties.”
(Ottawa
2012)
With the good, the
true, and the useful, man is merely in earnest; but with the beautiful, he plays.
Friedrich
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man
Page 7: Back Lane 2:
Quiet City
(Chicago 2010)
This 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.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 15
Page 15: Back Lane 4:
Wood door a la Rothko
Saskatoon
Untitled
(Purple, White, and Red), 1953
follows the characteristic format of Mark Rothko’s mature work, in which
stacked rectangles of color appear to float within the boundaries of the
canvas. By directly staining the canvas
with many thin washes of pigment and paying particular attention to the edges
where the fields interact, he achieved the effect of light radiating from the
image itself. This technique suited
Rothko’s metaphysical aims: to offer
painting as a doorway into purely spiritual realms, making it as immaterial and
evocative as music, and to directly communicate the most essential, raw forms
of human emotion.
Didactic panel, Chicago Institute
of Art
Page 19: Back Lane 5:
Maps
(Ottawa, behind
the Lord Elgin Hotel 2012)
A map to nowhere
is not a true or a false map; it is not a map at all, except perhaps for the
despairing.
Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 188
Just as, in
Heidegger’s famous formulation, language
speaks us, we should be careful to notice that maps read us rather than the other way around.
Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 192
Section II: “Questions in Our Pockets,” with a nod to the curiosity that lies behind the
poet’s recreation of the lives the photographer has captured here. The epigraph for the section came from Jane
Jacobs, who is one of the manuscript’s patron saints, along with Mark Kingwell:
In the field, many
fires are burning. They are of many
sizes, some great, others small; some far apart, others dotted closer together;
some are brightening, some are slowly going out. Each fire, large or small, extends its
radiance into the surrounding murk, and thus it carves out a space. But the space and the shape of that space
exist only to the extent that the light from the fire creates it.
The murk has no
shape or pattern except where it is carved into space by the light. Where the murk between the lights becomes
deep and undefinable and shapeless, the only way to give it form or structure
is to kindle new fires in the murk or sufficiently enlarge the nearest existing
fire.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
376-77
Page 39: De Chirico on Wall Street
(Broad Street and
Pearl in the NYC Financial District 2011)
Architectural beauty belongs to what
Arthur Danto calls the ‘third realm’ of beauty:
the realm of application, where beauty is neither natural (sunsets and
fields) nor purely artistic (the so-called fine arts)….In the third realm
beauty is always political because it always addresses, in some manner, how to
live.
Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 81
The corporate state knows only one
word: more.
Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, xii-xii
Page 47: Improvisation
Washington
Square, NYC, 2011
We may even begin
to find new forms of selfhood, new subject positions and nodes of identity, by
way of our being outside ourselves: the
dance of movement on the streets, the kinesthesis of walking, the artwork of
self-presentation.
Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 235
Intricacy is
related to the variety of reasons for which people come to neighborhood
parks. Even the same person comes for
different reasons at different times; sometimes to sit tiredly, sometimes to
play or to watch a game, sometimes to read or work, sometimes to show off, sometimes
to fall in love, sometimes to keep an appointment, sometimes to savor the
hustle of the city from a retreat, sometimes in the hope of finding
acquaintances, sometimes to get closer to a bit of nature, sometimes to keep a
child occupied, sometimes simply to see what offers, and almost always to be
entertained by the sight of other people. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 303
Page 51: Talking about the dogs
Chicago
2010 (E Delaware and Michigan Avenue)
There is no one
narrative of a city, but many narratives construct cities in different ways
highlighting some aspects and not others….There are many cities and many
stories to be told.
Gary Bridge and
Sophie Watson, “City Imaginaries.” Blackwell Companion to the City, 14, 17.
Page 59: Dare
Central
Park, NYC, 2011
Only play, with its roots in undirected and
nonutilitarian desire, its utopian overtones of refusing to assimilate or end
or be located, can free us from the stalls of self.
Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 230
Page 63: Ladders
Regina
about 2005
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but
even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its
reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams,
are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret,
their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals
something else.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 44; italics in
original
Section III: “What
Would Banksy Do?”—a
bit of graffiti I noticed on the TransCanada highway in Ernfold SK. Although all these poems deal with the ways a
city’s citizens leave their marks on cityspace, Banksy only comes into this
section in a minor way—though I still love the question.
Page 79: Buds of romance under University
Bridge
[Tombs or dolmens] mattered, in the
main, as interior spaces, houses of stone for the special dead in the ancient
embrace of the earth. Exposed, today,
they seem to have risen with awkward courage out of the soil and steadied
themselves ponderously. In their stark
abstraction, they remind us of the primary urge in all architecture, the
struggle to stand up against the pull of gravity.
Spiro
Kostof, A History of Architecture, 32
Page 83: Yarn Bombing Passage Du Grand Cerf
(Paris 2013)
Just as that remarkable covered
walkway had done for earlier generations, so today a few arcades still
preserve, in dazzling light and shadowy corners, a past become space. Antiquated trades survive within these inner
spaces, and the merchandise on display is unintelligible, or else has several
meanings….[A]lready they have about them something enigmatic. “Albert at No. 83” will in all likelihood be
a hairdresser, and “Theatrical Tights” will be silk tights; but these insistent
letterings want to say more.
Walter Benjamin Arcades Project, 871
Section IV: “Reflections in a Camera’s Eye”
Page 103: Restore
(ReStore: Habitat for Humanity, Regina)
Thinking happens in places,
and places for thinking are necessary to our narratives of self. The interior, domestic or mental, is too
often conceived as a place of comfort or security, a cozy escape or a private
fastness. That is a mistake, the latter
conceptual, the former political. An
interior is always far more than a retreat, a contested space, a philosophical
wrestling ring where insanity reflects on the mystery of being a self, a mind,
a consciousness, of being here at all.
Where the thresholds allow, indeed demand, movement in both directions. Where time and space themselves are up for
grabs. Where every crossing is a
venture, every return a challenge. Where
we take time, not for paradise exactly, but to acknowledge that we cannot
overcome the circumstances of thought through thought itself.
Mark Kingwell Concrete Reveries, 215
Page 111: Flea Market
Randall Street,
Chicago 2010
The market city,
based on individual adherence to the power of the market (I am what I consume),
provides little in the way of cosmic significance. Consumption- and wealth-display provide only
one layer of meaning and little by the way of spiritual depth and resistance to
the contingencies of human life and suffering.
The market gives us social positioning, not human understanding; social
ranking, not communal meaning. At its existentialist
bleakest the city becomes a setting for the meaningless passage of the
individual through a blind universe, bereft of meaning.
John Rennie Short,
“Three Urban Discourses,” 23
Page 115: Orchids in Grand Cerf Arcade
Paris
2013
□Light in the
Arcades □ Mirrors □ The arcade is the hallmark of the world Proust
depicts. Curious that, like this world,
it should be bound in its origin to the existence of plants. Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 158
Page 119: Rue St. Honoré
Paris,
2013
Richard Sennett
wrote “Plate Glass and the Soul” to mark the 100th anniversary of Mies
van der Rohe’s birth, noting that Mies was “the architect who more than anyone
else made plate glass the material through which our century defines the
relation between inner and outer: the
outside entirely visible from within, yet hermetically sealed off.”
Richard Sennett,
“Plate Glass and the Soul,” 14
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.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 11
Section V: “Grids"
Even the grid, a
seemingly secular form of urban design, contains a fantasy of turning chaos
into order, transforming topography into geometry. The very act of founding a city and planning
a city was connected to how the wider world worked; human involvement in and
responsibility for the world were embodied in city location, city form, and
city shape. The city was the cosmos, the
cosmos was embodied in the city. This
macrocosm-microcosm also extended from city to body.
John Rennie Short,
“Three Urban Discourses,” 22
Page 125: Daedalus at work
(Elgin
Street, Ottawa 2012)
Henceforth, as
Fourier had seen, the true framework for the life of the private citizen must
be sought increasingly in offices and commercial centers. The fictional framework for the individual’s
life is constituted in the private home….The attempt by the individual to vie
with technology by relying on his inner flights leads to his downfall: the architect Solness kills himself by
plunging from his tower.
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 20
From these office
windows will come to us the feeling of lookouts [vigies] dominating a world in order. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 154.
Page 129: Threshold
Montreal,
2012
Buildings
structure interiors within an exterior, and although they might be composed of
materials such as concrete, glass and steel, they are actually made of thresholds; they could not exist
but for the presumed crossing and recrossing of the boundaries they
embrace….What is involved here? That is,
what relationships of time and space, of consciousness and identity, of
necessity and freedom are created by the move from outside to in and back
again? ... What do we seek in this crossing over, this transgression. Is it comfort? Security?
Control? Or perhaps something deeper
and more challenging: the act of
thinking itself?
Mark
Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 89,
159. Emphasis in original
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