The underground car park is not a metaphor for the fugue. Instead, the fugue is a telescope of square concrete pillars, painted floor lines, amplified footfalls, fluorescent suns, low roofs with tributaries of ducts and cables, very slight “pings” from invisible drops . . .and an “exit” light pointing to the portal between one world, beige and airless, and the next, blue, green and also untrue. To be kind, you might liken the former to a maze in a stately home, without the inset classical statues, where, instead of Ariadne´s thread, there are colors with numbers on them, enigma coded, which assign ranks to the four-in-hands stabled there. That done, the gentlemen, each with his sash, repair to the courtly chambers above.
As a presage of the infernal, the subways lack roots, their genealogy is a chronicle of obscure upstarts, bastards and barons married to milkmaids. Nor are the mechanical centipedes which climb to the arenas stairways to heaven. In the theology of boutiques, sports goods, jewelers and candy bars, they are ramps to the canopy of a tropical forest, an ecological niche for mixed, migratory flocks which feast on a snake or a pendulous flower, the nectar of which circulates through credit cards, all in the mind of the beholders on a pious peregrination from make-believe to paper bags stamped with this or that logos.
Is it any different for a writer who lavishes words on a narrative which circles round and round its themes, as the walkways cunningly designed for a mobile confusion do. No clocks either in this time motion machinery. Writer and shopper both must flow with the currents: as vanity is to purchase temptation is the point.
High above is the football tavern, innocent drinkers before giant screens which reflect back second-hand passions. For the more temperate, there are ice creams on spindly round tables, endlessly smeared and polished. Also, a book store of brash sellers which the writer peers into, jealously indignant at thrill-binders, corset-cutters and guides to help readers to help themselves to sound health, much wealth and suchlike illumination.
In this world of belied faith, the church is a flat in a film set, cobbled together with plywood and sweat from their brows. It projects mirages of a wetland where the most precious resource is sand for the cement for the semen of cash which fructifies the whole structure, a lamasery hell realm of mirrors, glass and a restless electronic signage of dakinis in bras racing through rainforests in sports cars.
If false, it is only in the sense that the Murui-Muinane of the swamps of the Amazon believe that the gods dwell in an underground Valhalla, impersonating spiders, cabybaras and howler monkeys. For them, the sky is a mere weather forecast, not unlike the multiplex coming attractions posters, nearby the unmemorable Euro Cup pub, of blown up pasteboard personages of Hollywood and cartoons which kids have their photos taken against, munching canisters of pop corn. The precinct is full of novelty FX´s in rectangles above the ticket counter whose colors touch the sleeping legs of movie-goers on an expedition to languid land.
The first thing which comes to the mind of the writer is the thing-in-itself, with all the ifs and buts and I-its and I -thous which have to be dismantled. It´s a funny business, writing. You put words into someone´s head, except they aren´t words anymore but phantoms and clogs, soft lotions for the hours lost at the keyboard, electronic transactions there is no accounting for, as 24/7, the exchanges spit nickels from a cosmic slot machine.
Strollers abound, some humankind, others metallic with sage babies in transparent tents who, lucky they, don´t have to distinguish degrees of strangeness, as the writer must. Overhead is a long tubular canopy like a boa constrictor of glass with ribs of wood. Climate control is the key the massed bands play in, trombones calling for succor to flutes, with ATM´s as the bass note, that lovely gurgle when the gears lock and the mouth of the steel teller regurgitates bank notes on the men and women in the glass cage, on trial for their solvency.
Christ Mass or not, there are always carols from loudspeakers of tin. Over and over again, so as to numb prudence:
Red and green, green for black,
Zurich gnomes in comic caps
Cryptic runs on walled-in banks
Facile money, yes, much thanks
But in less than a sanctuary than an aquarium. The atmosphere is a viscid medium of heavy water mixed with carbon credits. Looking down from the top tier, the pisces, weightless and happy, are gliding through an aquamarine mist, up, up, up, rounding the bannisters, then a plunge into the depths rich in the plankton of footwear, perfumes, toys, jerseys and other devourers of wherewithal. You´d never know that the economy is in a mess, that civil wars rage, rivers dry, forests fall and all the boring rest: petty concerns best left to accountants.
In the face of glamour, nothing else counts. The writer is no better, a pea in a pod in a shell of diction, items on a list of terms like baubles to be fondled and stored in a steamer trunk for a voyage to the far-off lands of invention. His is the mentality of the monopolist, a crotchety one who pinches and cadges the same lines which the greats he envies blow on an orgy. He aches with constipation but the canon keeps him bent over and uptight. There are gyms here for that, with Lycra ladies at torture machines, stretching and groaning at substitute sex. Though no celibate, the prefers an intercourse with his pen, which heaves with so many potentials in so many postures it leaves him breathless and spent. Fault of the lexicon, he supposes: there are too many ways to phrase the same thought, so flip, flip, flip through the mental catalogue for the mot juste, like the shoppers at the window displays which are like frozen biopics, for example, the Oscar-winner Armless Venus. How do they, the designers, pick and choose a nose, candle, bunny, rose bush, magnum, straitjacket, etc.? Why are they so artful when he can barely burp art?
That literature as an endangered species ain´t fair in the sense of the am not, are not, is not of his own characters, dice rolled on a quire, suggesting that randomness might be the recipe, a narrative on the obverse of what is actually happening. To wit: “On a cloudy autumn day in the year ____Iósip K. strolled into the Grand Central Mall in the city of __in the oblast of __.Composing himself, since the illumination of stores within was dazzling and the noise in the crowded forecourt overwhelming, he reached into the pocket of his vest to make sure his money was there, a few miserable kopeks to replace the overcoat that had been wrestled from him a few days before by ruffians” (to be continued).
All wrong, because there is no autumn in those latitudes and K. (a stand-in for all the anti-heroes we are tired of) invented the story of the robbery so that he would receive a discount from a pitying clerk. Yet correct in the sense that the actual one is designed to disorientate. Where does borrowing from others shade into copying them? In the mall in question, all is a tribute to the new. Since the past is erased with each purchase, it should be the same writing a story in and about this new geological epoch of the anthropocene, which has freed everyone of the tedious yoke of identity. So, in theory, the writer should write, as they say, from his heart, instead of the required reading list of High Modernist List 101, Professor Shelby presiding.
But he doesn´t have the heart for it, which sinks into his bowels and painfully pulses when he faces the monitor which, except for spelling checks, fails to monitor him. This is what they call free style, but he certainly doesn´t feel free to capitalize on it. There are inhibitions of upbringing, education and social climbing. He wants to be up on the heights with the Old Masters, sensing, however, that they will instantly shove any pretender off into the slop from whence he came. He can almost see them jeering at this pretentious, untalented pr__k. , without even the advantage of classical languages. Innovate, they urge them, knowing that everything that can be done has already been done . . . to death and whatever lies behind it. Better to stick to YouTube, they whisper in the whine of the power pack. Google your way out of the morass, if you dare, they grunt.
He rebuts that it is difficult to make a whole out of modern complexity. That they don´t even know what a mall is. The problem is that he doesn´t know either. You can reach for all the symbolism at your command and you´ll only be left with a blurry pastiche of a pilgrimage to an up to date shrine, pasteboard yet esoteric in the mysterious ways that laical gods move men. He, as the spokesman for the moved, is both puppet and master. His objectivity is that of the objects encountered there, humans not least, who are dumb but have an eloquent personality, as in the nonchalant manner in which they plead to be consumed, as they are gladly consumed by them, in turn.
You might say we are in a pre-dated cabinet of curiosities –a narwhal´s horn, fossil, cameo, inkpot, sea shell, porcupine´s quill, and, among other pieces, a fast-frozen pineapple which the Sun King found to be sour and discarded –to be tele-transported on time travel to a distant age when the Grand Station Mall, ruined, then restored by the UNESCO as a Tangible Heritage of Humanity – what´s left of it -- will be the prize display in the collections of a future billionaire cryto-currency connoisseur who was unable to discover exactly to whom Mozart´s father sold his also grand pianos.