HOW IS A CITY LIKE A ROOM?
I was taught to draw the space of the sky by comprehending it via the flight of birds. A rope flung around openness. Why a room — why not a house, or a town, a city, a universe? And why stop there (or anywhere?) Why not inwards — a cell, and its apparatus, each form in its turn composed of yet more forms, creating their spaces within us. A room, because I am searching for limits, always, this searching for limits. The possibility of being, or seeming full; the possibility of being able to say anything at all. You might call it taking a position. A room can be replete with itself, can malfunction with its own inadequacies (like a world, like a cell, like a thought, like a room). How is a city like a room? In that we all live in it. How is a room like a relationship? In that the space is drawn between us. How is a room like itself? Why, by its edges of course! A room is the opening of space from zero to one in a journey going onwards. That journey gets filled with space, and words, and time, and you get toppled by the thought of every single room in each tall city. Cities are a swell of breath, I thought, reeling on Cambie Bridge. The argument goes on, but lets get on with it.
"THE STREETS ARE LIKE PIPESINTO WHICH MEN ARE SUCKED UP"
Someone once said that the idea of the Internet made geographies nostalgic, but I’m not sure we needed the Internet for that. In this endless city, you can see yourself in a village if you put off the rest of it, like — think your street a town, and it becomes a town; think your building a city, it becomes a city; think your room a universe, well, you get the point. Loneliness does a lot for proportion. So does the Internet.
A FEW LINES COMPOSED AT WORK ON THE TENTH FLOOR OF THE SWITCH HOUSE
This city reaches behind tiredness. With eyes backed into their sockets, a toothpaste morning catches the lids like two open parachutes. From this height, I play a computer game spotting crevices to poke the mind through rd
(a Leisure Suit Larry affair on the 33 floor, or an adventure under the dinner table sitting so long and still you become forgotten). But none of that. The glass gathers too simply its surface. Here there is no porous metamorphosis. Jabbing the hand at a windowpane in the expectation of space, and tutting at bruised fingers for the sake of clutching. What is the hair between where the earth and ‘the heavens’ touch, where the skyline charms the sky down? The ground can’t claim the horizon. The tongue, feeling between its gum and teeth dribbles confusion. In the beginning, there was growth from one, to another, to a third (it was later said: let there be words for keeping track). The clean flatness of a silicone chip can maintain all the complications of a galaxy, and back at my window again, this great height makes diminutive the mighty. These right conditions. Take it as flat as when the light lies flat upon it. But where there is grand historic, where corporations and nations are standing, there is a further need for right conditions. Reasons are stifled, growing up with the buildings, but lets not pretend we previously agreed.
A paper foldout for a great steel sheet, stupidly complex. Taped up, rolled out or unfolded like a national geographic centrefold of a giant, giant redwood. Indecently proportioned, and similarly thick-skinned. Oh silly city.
THE GUILTY LOOK OF THE MOUNTAINS FROM THE CITY
The guilty look of the mountains in the cut glass of your eye. Your synthetic — caked in personal code our pretty landscape (it was your birthday, so I took no offence) but there is less space in hugeness than I once supposed. I’ve since learnt all about your enmity for what moves — including everything. I have come to terms with your versions and on mapped corridors and hillside paths I am yet moving. But you are not my subject. In this comparison, there is an extreme of fiction. One is always smothered by the other so that so artificial is grinded in our jarring apprehensions: my mountains, your city. And now I’ve learned to wander between two ranges, seeing, before the bend in the street or the valley: that is the city, making so much more of what is not the city. My own curt equation — a zero-sum or sort-of eventual peace. Touching the stone of a long dead forest, remembered on my bookshelf in London; late autumn. The musty pages rustle, for a joke of course.
THE SUPERMARKET
We looked exactly like that painting — a circuit of love and murder (her with that giant orange hair). Each night, we crept on all hours testing brightness forced on the dark, sourcing, under a bridge by the Kelvin, its nth degree. Between the supermarkets and the streets, it was hard to find the difference we were seeking. Hard to find a shadow in the all-hours Tesco, or more than a median in outside’s mock glow. Inside we panned the stacks for anything —variables in calories, improbable promises in variety, off-brand Lite-Brites presumed for a child or some children. Then (somehow) we were looking at fireworks. I’m afraid to say it was a lightbulb moment. We never talked about it, but instead worked to co-ordinate — each serving both ends of an incident. Outside there was an implosion of night to which a witness stated ah! (a word scoured from their kenning) — it was called in for questioning. I picked up stumps after us, often soggy in their damp homes — obviously, this was Glasgow.