Books Do Furnish A Room

123 .. why am I doing this?

Have been prompted by both Cornflower and Harriet Devine to do this, though am not clear why!  What you have to do is:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. Open it to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.

I passed on the literally nearest book, as this was a volume of Doonesbury cartoons - brilliant, but not lending themselves to this exercise very well.  Next was a 99 pence purchase from Oxfam, George Moore's Esther Waters, which I haven't even started yet.  And the answer is:

5th sentence and the succeeding three:

Higher up, Esther saw a bedroom of soft hangings and bright porcelain.  Then another staircase, and the wail of a child caught on the ear, and Mrs Rivers said, "The poor little thing; it never ceases crying.  Take it Waters, take it. Esther sat down, and soon the little thing ceased crying.

Very intriguing - I'll let you know more when I read the book, in whose author I have a special reason for being interested. 

Crossing swords with Pound

Another piece of Ezra Pound, his uninspiringly titled but wonderful For EMcC, this week, after the translation from the Chinese in the letter from a River Merchant's Wife.  This is quite different, but has a translated quality about it too, perhaps because of the Spanish inscription: and it has a gentleness, an elegiac, mournful quality which contrasts beautifully with the energy they must have had as fencers, and the pleasure and warmth of the poet's love. 

For EMcC: That was my counter blade under Leonardo Terrene, Master of Fence

Gone while your tastes were keen to you,

Gone where the grey winds call to you,

By that high fencer, even Death,

Struck of the blade that no man parrieth;

Such is your fence, one saith,

One that hath known you.

Drew you your sword most gallantly

Made you your pass most valiantly

'Gainst that grey fencer, even Death.

Gone as a gust of breath

Faith! no man tarrieth,

“Se il cor ti manca”, but it failed thee not!

“Non ti fidar”, it is the sword that speaks

“In me”.

Thou trusted'st in thyself and met the blade

'Thout mask or gauntlet, and art laid

As memorable broken blades that be

Kept as bold trophies of old pageantry.

As old Toledos past their days of war

Are kept mnemonic of the strokes they bore,

So art thou with us, being good to keep

In our heart's sword-rack, though thy sword-arm sleep.

ENVOI

Struck of the blade that no man parrieth

Pierced of the point that toucheth lastly all,

'Gainst that grey fencer, even Death,

Behold the shield! He shall not take thee all.

Wood work

Writing recently about reading inspired by woodlands, I remembered this classic passage about a team getting a difficult log out of a wood; the tree is going down to Rye to make a keel for a fishing boat, but they can't get it out of the woods.  It's the beginning of Simple Simon in Rudyard Kipling's Rewards and Fairies, a story which goes on, wonderfully, to describe Drake's attack on the Armada.

CATTIWOW came down the steep lane with his five-horse timber-tug. He stopped by the wood-lump at the back gate to take off the brakes. His real name was Brabon, but the first time the children met him, years and years ago, he told them he was ‘carting wood,’ and it sounded so exactly like ‘cattiwow’ that they never called him anything else.

‘Hi!’ Una shouted from the top of the wood-lump, where they had been watching the lane. ‘What are you doing? Why weren’t we told?’

‘They’ve just sent for me,’ Cattiwow answered. ‘There’s a middlin’ big log stacked in the dirt at Rabbit Shaw, and’—he flicked his whip back along the line—‘so they’ve sent for us all.’

Dan and Una threw themselves off the wood-lump almost under black Sailor’s nose. Cattiwow never let them ride the big beam that makes the body of the timber-tug, but they hung on behind while their teeth thuttered.

The Wood road beyond the brook climbs at once into the woods, and you see all the horses’ backs rising, one above another, like moving stairs. Cattiwow strode ahead in his sackcloth woodman’s petticoat, belted at the waist with a leather strap; and when he turned and grinned, his red lips showed under his sackcloth-coloured beard. His cap was sackcloth too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his neck. He navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in their faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their legs, and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew whether it would give way in showers of rotten wood, or jar them back again.

At the top of Rabbit Shaw half-a-dozen men and a team of horses stood round a forty-foot oak log in a muddy hollow. The ground about was poached and stoached with sliding hoofmarks, and a wave of dirt was driven up in front of the butt.

‘What did you want to bury her for this way?’ said Cattiwow. He took his broad-axe and went up the log tapping it.

‘She’s sticked fast,’ said ‘Bunny’ Lewknor, who managed the other team.

Cattiwow unfastened the five wise horses from the tug. They cocked their ears forward, looked, and shook themselves.

‘I believe Sailor knows,’ Dan whispered to Una.

‘He do,’ said a man [Simon] behind them. He was dressed in flour sacks like the others, and he leaned on his broad-axe, but the children, who knew all the wood-gangs, knew he was a stranger. In his size and oily hairiness he might have been Bunny Lewknor’s brother, except that his brown eyes were as soft as a spaniel’s, and his rounded black beard, beginning close up under them, reminded Una of the walrus in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’

‘Don’t he justabout know?’ he said shyly, and shifted from one foot to the other.

‘Yes. “What Cattiwow can’t get out of the woods must have roots growing to her.”’ Dan had heard old Hobden say this a few days before.

.....

‘Oh, look! Look ye! That’s a knowing one,’ said the man.

Cattiwow had fastened his team to the thin end of the log, and was moving them about with his whip till they stood at right angles to it, heading downhill. Then he grunted. The horses took the strain, beginning with Sailor next the log, like a tug-of-war team, and dropped almost to their knees. The log shifted a nail’s breadth in the clinging dirt, with the noise of a giant’s kiss.

‘You’re getting her!’ Simon slapped his knee. ‘Hing on! Hing on, lads, or she’ll master ye! Ah!’

Sailor’s left hind hoof had slipped on a heather-tuft. One of the men whipped off his sack apron and spread it down. They saw Sailor feel for it, and recover. Still the log hung, and the team grunted in despair.

‘Hai!’ shouted Cattiwow .... The horse almost screamed as he pulled that extra last ounce which he did not know was in him. The thin end of the log left the dirt and rasped on dry gravel. The butt ground round like a buffalo in his wallow. Quick as an axe-cut, Lewknor snapped on his five horses, and sliding, trampling, jingling, and snorting, they had the whole thing out on the heather.

If you go down to the woods today

Coming up, a week in Dorset with Oliver Rackham, the great historian of English woods and the landscape.  I expect to walk a lot, and look at lots of trees, of course - my staff refer to it as my "tree-hugging" holiday - but there should also be lots of wonderful reading to think of, if not to do!  I've identified five things to read, but there may be more - my readers are rich in suggestions.  And here are some favourite tree poems from one of my earliest posts.

Of course, I shall take some Rackham books, probably his most recent book, Woodlands, though of course he has written many others, including The Last Forest (about Hatfield) and The History of the Countryside.  He writes clearly and well, and is a great destroyer of what I shall term rural myths, such as the proposition that the oak woods of England were chopped down to build the Navy.  I look forward to having my ignorance exposed! 

We will be deep in the heart of Hardy country, so I will take The Woodlanders.  It's a long time since I read Hardy, and I'm nervous, because I found it very frustrating. I felt, no doubt with adolescent impatience - and my adolescence last many years beyond the normal span, may not be over yet - that his prose was cloying and his plots creakily sentimental.  But I couldn't put him down, he was quite compulsive.  So I shall be intrigued to re-explore him; and apart from the appropriateness of the locale, I understand I will learn more about brorches and liggers.

Richard Mabey, a national journalist on landscapes and ecology, is always worth reading, though sometimes too keen on a slightly mystical or spiritual element for me.  But I shall, on the recommendation of more than one of you, take his Beechcombing with me.  Beech is a hugely important wood of modern British woodlands, though it didn't used to be so widespread.   I'm sure I shall enjoy his history and his understanding, and the many pictures of beeches he has culled from art galleries and antique books. 

Recently, I read Roger Deakin's Wildwood, and I shall probably take that with me as well, just to remind myself of some European and wider experience, today and yesterday.  It was an excellent book, and will be a pleasant browse again.

Of course, the ultimate description of a wild wood is in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows: 

It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering - even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.

Snow and sunshine

The garden, in a few days, went from an ephemeral but lovely blanket of snow to renewed flowering.  After the cherry and the clematis were over, I had some colour in the pond, and the fothergilla promising that spring is not defaulting on the promissory note of a few weeks ago.  Here are some pictures to show the contrast.

From the top - if the pix come out in order, they sometimes don't, they are:

my owl, snow capped and wise, presiding over all that goes on in the garden

camellia in the snow

fothergilla in the snow

.. and a week later in flower, complete with one of the common hover flies, probably Syrphus ribesii

and finally, two pond plants, water hawthorn, or Aponogeton distachyos, and water marigold, or Caltha palustris.

Walk in the woods no more

A different, more benign woodland in this week's poem, Kipling's The Way Through The Woods.  But it has the same sense as did the Meredith last week of the woods having a life of their own, taking over the road, and supporting magic of which the rest of the world is unaware.  Isn't the mood in the second stanza reminiscent of the de la Mare I posted a couple of months ago?

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

Wobegon(e)

For some reason I can't put my finger on, I picked up my much loved copy of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days recently.  Really, you shouldn't read Keillor, you should listen to him, on tape or radio, because he has a lovely voice and he holds you in the hollow of his hand: search for Prairie Home Companion.  But reading him is pretty good - he's a master of the gentle humour which exposes the foibles and the hypocrisies of his small town, Lake Wobegon. It's not spelled "Wobegone", by the way, because alternate town councils kept changing the name from Lake Woebegon to New Albion and back - but state law prevented more than four name changes, so after three changes, the incumbent council dropped the final "e" to prevent further changes.  Of course, the name  - however appropriate for a town in the quiet end of nowhere - does not mean what you think it does.  In fact, it is Ojibway for "the place where we waited all day in the rain".  Believe that if you dare!

But what is this place, Lake Wobegon, actually like?  Well, it's in Minnesota, and his opening line on radio is often

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

followed by a whole world of minor intrigue and reflection that makes you think and laugh together (and, boy, do you know all these people); and at the end, the inevitable sign off:

Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

And his cast of characters is awesome, from the Norwegian farmers who say nothing and wash their sheets once a year, to the duck hunters who haven't shot anything for twenty years, and all the decent, narrow minded but lovable folk in between.  And only the word genius will do for his pictures of children growing up, and of the distrust and envy that exists between Lutheran and Catholic - and who can better his encapsulation of a certain type of religion in the name of the Catholic church:  Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility !?

The stories he tells are nice, but it's really the mood and the understanding you fall in love with.  Three examples:

(Complaining about a new pastor, whose sermon was far too long) .. A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

And finally, in case Cornflower's still doing the dishes, Garrison (Gary) does them with his mother (or his sister, the story changes - after all, he admits he tells lies for a living) and they sing together over the soap suds (soppy or what?):

Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the skies are blue,
And I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the sky so blue,
Because God made you, that's why I love you.

And then, in an access of lost teenage confidence, he asks his mother "Am I good looking?", and receives the ultimate Lake Wobegon answer: "You're well enough looking" (or as Bruce Springsteen puts it, "You're no beauty, but hey, you're alright")!

That's the news from Lake Lindsay, where all the poems tell a story, all the stories rhyme, and all the adjectives are below average!

Chinese terracotta warriors

Late evening a week or so ago, to the British Museum, to see the Chinese warriors from the funerary complex of Qin, first Emperor of all China, at least in the sense we think of it today.  This extraordinary man used ruthlessness (soldiers were punished if their subordinates failed tests of skill), enormous organisational skill, and radical techniques of mass production (parts of crossbows were interchangeable, for example) to conquer his enemies and create an empire vastly larger and more homogeneous than the one he inherited.

The famous figures, 7000 terracotta soldiers found so far, are justly impressive.  But also, fine small artefacts on display, and - my favourites - a number of bronze birds such as cranes, geese and ducks, which adorned rivers and pools of mercury.  The impact is inevitably limited with a mere score or so of figures, but they - and the horses and chariots - were well arranged and undeniably effective.  I wish I'd had more time to read about them before I saw the exhibition, but a trip to see them in situ has now joined the long list of future holidays!

Welcome home, Harriet

A subversive image of a young girl reading, by Theodore Roussel, for Harriet Devine to add to her collection of reading pictures.

Walk in the woods

Later this month, I am spending some time on another passion of mine - trees - sitting at the feet (or more realistically, following in the wellington boot marks) of the great Oliver Rackham.  There will be posts about my reading for that, posts about the trees themselves, and a couple of poems.  One of the great features of woods in literature is their otherness, the sense of the woods having a life of their own.  Here are the first two sections of George Meredith's The Woods of Westermain, a very long and quite dense poem which you can find here in its entirety.  Meredith (1828-1909) is rather out of favour now, and not as well known as Hardy, say, or other Victorians.  And if you struggle through the whole thing, I think you'll see why - but the language and mood in this extract is wonderful.  The bewitched tree in the photograph, by the way, comes from my nocturnal visit to Kew a couple of weeks back! Dare, with me, to enter these enchanted woods ('yaffles' are green woodpeckers, onamatapaeically named after their call):

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

Here the snake across your path
Stretches in his golden bath:
Mossy-footed squirrels leap
Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep:
Yaffles on a chuckle skim
Low to laugh from branches dim:
Up the pine, where sits the star,
Rattles deep the moth-winged jar.
Each has business of his own;
But should you distrust a tone,
Then beware.
Shudder all the haunted roods,
All the eyeballs under hoods
Shroud you in their glare.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

Flamingo feather

99 pence in Oxfam bought me a Laurens van der Post novel, Flamingo Feather.  This is a distinctly odd book - conceived as a novel, it's more a thriller in the heroic John Buchan mould (especially Prester John), except that van der Post has a strong liberal agenda, and a deep love of Africa and the Africans.  But this gets in the way, as does his philosophising and mysticism, and his detailed lists of African birds, animals and trees, lists which he believes describe the jungle, though in fact they only anatomise it.

Also irritating is van der Post's confidence in his understanding - there's a real whiff of "I, God, see you" towards the Africans, which is patronising and irritating.  But, there's still a thriller there, and it's very much a period piece, written in 1955.  Africa (he starts in South Africa, but the action is mainly set further north, perhaps in modern Mozambique) is threatened by a vast international Communist conspiracy, which is run from Moscow, but uses a primitive African reawakening as the instrument of revolution and destabilisation.  The fears may have been real in 1955, but they look awfully dated now.  But if you see it on a cheap shelf, you might find it fun for a quick gallop through!

La Guillem

On Friday last week, to see some wonderful modern ballet at the Coliseum.  The treat was Sylvie Guillem dancing a number of short pieces and her famous pas de deux, Push, with Russell Maliphant (picture below).  The short pieces included Solo and Two (most of which you can see using the link, though it's naturally a rather different view to that the audience has in a theatre).  Do look at it, you are in for a remarkable five minutes!

Sylvie Guillem is a dancer extraordinaire - she had a great classical career, dancing slightly more dangerously than utter classicism would encourage, but was absolutely wonderful in classical, romantic and modern roles.  I remember her best in erotically charged masterpieces like Bejart's Rite of Spring and Bolero, many of which can be glimpsed on YouTube.

Now she has taken up modern dance, and is still wonderful at - for a dancer - quite an advanced age; she is still wonderfully precise, flexible, sinous, and strong.  And in this ballets, she has achieved something quite magical, some of the classiest modern dance you will ever see, anywhere.

Serenissima reading, part the second

Thank you to all the readers who suggested other works about Venice, following my recent post.  Some I already knew (Merchant of Venice), some I heartily dislike (The Lying Tongue), and some I have taken against quite unreasonably (Jan Morris)!  There were several suggestions, however, that didn't fall into any of these categories, and I am particularly attracted by the idea of reading Regis Debray's Against Venice (Richard Swann tells me it's "a bracing alternative"!)and the plays of Carlo Goldoni (thanks to Glo), and if I ever do, I will report further.

But on my recent visit, I did read Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, both very fine and both well worth reading, whether you are in Venice or not.  They are completely different - Passion (1986) is set in Napoleonic times, and Death (1912) in, I presume, the last years of the previous century.  And although Death spends more of its brief life in Venice itself, whereas Passion is also extensively set in Boulogne and on the retreat from Moscow, Passion is more of Venice.  It is essential that it's in Venice, with its ambiguous character, its duplicity, its uncertainty, whereas the Mann, wonderful though it is, could have been set in a dozen other watering places or resorts for the nineteenth century well off.  They are both, curiously, tales of homosexual passions, though quite different and quite differently treated.

Winterson's The Passion introduces two characters, Henri and Villanelle.  They are both poor and make their own way in the world through luck and guile.  Henri is French, and ends up working in Bonaparte's kitchens;  Villanelle is Venetian, and is a boatman's daughter but makes her living from gambling, fortune telling, and less reputable indulgences.  The great passion of the book is Villanelle's for a mysterious woman who approaches her one night in Venice in a gamesome, playful, erotically charged few minutes of gambling - but it is a relationship not fated to run its full course.  Henri and Villanelle meet on the retreat from Moscow, and Henri falls in love with her - and although they sleep together and indeed have a child, he can never replace the mysterious woman lover she had before she left Venice.  And nor, when he runs foul of the law, can she save him, though for a surprising reason.  As an account of Venice, it is wonderfully atmospheric and fevered; as a love story, or a historical novel, it is extremely readable and would make an excellent book for Cornflower to set for her book club - short (165 pages), exciting, well written and challenging all at once.

Mann's Death in Venice (or Der Tod in Venedig) is a different matter.  By a much greater writer than Winterson, it is much less accessible and I found it to fall well below the standard of his masterworks such as Doctor Faustus and Buddenbrooks, although I remember enjoying it greatly when I read it in 1988.  Now it seems portentous and slow, and although it's a lovely conception and beautifully written, I kept finding that I wanted to skip or hurry through over long philosophical or aesthetic discursions - though at a mere 77 pages, there should be no need.  The main figure, von Aschenbach, is a great literary man who takes a restful holiday in Venice, and there falls in love with a perfect young boy.  He never speaks to him, but is increasingly obsessed by him - and all this is brilliantly told.  The story ends with death and with the love unfulfilled, but there is no tragedy.  His conception of Venice is a more modern, more romantic one than Winterson's:

When one wanted to arrive overnight at the incomparable, the fabulous, the like-nothing-else-in the world, where was it one went?  Why, obviously ... [Venice]

And he offers this insight into the mind of the lone traveller, the lone reader, the man who does and sees everything by himself:

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

This time, the pictures of Venice are my own, taken last week.

Venice: sic transit gloria mundi

I have just returned from my first visit to Venice, so this poem is a bit obvious, but nonetheless irresistible.  It is William Wordsworth's On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, and was written about Napoleon's military conquest of Venice in 1797 and the republic's formal abolition the following year.  But now it seems to stand as well - perhaps even more so - for the physical decay of Venice, its long loving struggle with the sea, which one feels, it must surely lose one day.

         

ONCE did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;
And was the safeguard of the West: the worth
Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
She was a maiden City, bright and free;
No guile seduced, no force could violate;
And, when she took unto herself a mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea.
And what if she had seen those glories fade,
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reach'd its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

Invisible city

Do you know the Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities?  It's a remarkable book, a short collection of descriptions of cities, only a page or two long.  They are told by Marco Polo to Kubla Khan, and they are all mythical, and they are all Venice.  To give the mood through short quotations, or through any description of mine, seems too hard, so I have picked two longer pieces.  The cities, or the essays, are arranged in different sections and vary a great deal, but they all have an elegiac, longing quality which is wholly charming.  The first extract is from Cities and Eyes, and describes Olinda.  After the photograph is Moriana from Hidden Cities.

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the centre, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.