by Rod Mengham
This poetic drawing together of the elements of the text, so that they face inwards, strengthening the relations involved in the experience of reading the page, especially when these are concerned with looking out, is even more actively pursued in John Berger’s remarkable text, ostensibly an essay, entitled ‘Field’:
Shelf of a field, green, within easy reach, the grass on it not yet high, papered with blue sky through which yellow has grown to make pure green, the surface colour of what the basin of the world contains, attendant field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of printed trees, friable at its edges, the corners of it rounded, answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure, field that I have always known, I am lying raised up on one elbow wondering whether in any direction I can see beyond where you stop. The wire around you is the horizon.
Remember what it was like to be sung to sleep. If you are fortunate, the memory will be more recent than childhood. The repeated lines of words and music are like paths. These paths are circular and the rings they make are linked together like those of a chain. You walk along these paths and are led by them in circles which lead from one to the other, further and further away. The field upon which you walk and upon which the chain is laid is the song.65
The first word of the first paragraph here introduces a collocation of vocabulary that we allocate in the first instance to the realm of metaphor: shelf, wallpaper, basin, curtain, wall, jar. Just grouping these words together is enough to make the metaphorical application seem tenuous, and by the time we have reached the end of the first paragraph, in our first reading of the text, we have reassigned all these words to a literal function. At some point in our reading we hesitate between the literal and the metaphorical alternatives, and it is that hesitation which tells the truth about our dependence on frames and perimeters, on the various limitations we feel the need to impose on our assimilation of the world outdoors, on that enormous context always ready to swallow up our significance, not just as individuals, but as entire species.
The concept of the field seems always to be there, ready and waiting – ‘attendant’ – to such an extent that it seems ‘I have always known it’, which is to say, we have all always known it; our dependence on it such that we cannot see, and can only barely conceive of, what lies beyond, even though the evidence of our senses apart from vision interferes with our choice of horizon.
The prose poem is modernity’s response not to an encroaching horizon but to our fear of the receding horizon, whose growing distance increases our share of the unknown. It is the circle we draw around our interactions with the world, in imitation of the literal wire that surrounds our fields, and the literal walls that compose our rooms: a circle drawn with the music of words; chains of words and concepts whose concentric rings repeat themselves in radiating out towards one text after another for at least the last one hundred and fifty years.
2016
The Eighth Hill of Rome
The Testaccio district in Rome is dominated by Monte Testaccio, a one-hundred-feet high, one-kilometre-square, pile of broken potsherds. This great mound of ceramic refuse, started in the first century BCE, was added to on a daily basis over the following four centuries. Co-existent with the Empire, it grew into a mass whose sheer bulk and consistency could not be reduced. Unlike the Empire, it did not fall. Pottery is an especially obdurate artefact, but every single piece of pottery in Monte Testaccio is of a particular sort – each fragment is a sherd of broken oil amphora.
Rome’s greatest invention, apart from the Empire, was concrete. Everything went into concrete: lime and volcanic ash, chunks of rock, brick rubble, and lots of broken pottery – everything, in fact, except oil amphorae. Lime mixed with olive oil produces a soapy substance, and the Romans took steps to avoid aqueducts full of washing-up suds, temples with slippery steps, city gates foaming at the mouth, bubble-bath colosseums. Like concrete, the Empire was an amalgam with ingredients gathered from many different sources and bonded together. Just as Roman concrete could be stronger than rock, so the combination of racial and cultural elements made the empire seem indestructible. And yet, not far from its centre there lay Monte Testaccio, the eighth hill, the one built by human hands, a monument to non-integration. The makers of the Empire kept all the broken bits of oil amphorae away from their recycling centres. Paradoxically, when the imperial bonding agent passed its sell-by date and fell apart, Monte Testaccio held together.
In March of this year, I tried to find a way up it. A modern flight of steps had been constructed on the north east corner, but this lay behind a locked gate with a ‘vietato accesso’ sign attached to it. In the 1930s the mound was dressed up as a park but it has been closed for much of the time since World War Two, partly to protect it but also because the refuse of ancient commerce began to acquire an extra crust of debris from the modern heroin trade. As I write, activists known as ‘Eighth Hill’ are using change.org to press the Italian government for open access.
Testaccio has its followers. Entry denied, the connoisseur of history’s leavings does not give up without a struggle. Eighth Hill addicts need their fix, and this is partly because the leavings in question hand down literally from ancient to modern fingertips the physical record of something still in daily use; something we know the feel of, the savour of – something whose density, rate of flow and soapiness are all thoroughly familiar. What’s more, we still import it, or much of it, direct from the same place that supplied the bulk of the oil inside the Testaccio amphorae: Andalucia, which the Romans called Baetica. We are still inside that circuit, yet left outside the Testaccio ring-fence.
According to Pliny the Elder (Historia Naturalis, 17), the olive was the largest tree species in Baetica – so olives were big in every sense. Historians of the Roman economy have estimated olive oil consumption during the period of the Empire as twenty litres per person per year. In a city of one million, that certainly makes for a lot of empty oil containers, but it also makes clear the centrality of olive oil to Roman existence. As D.J. Mattingly puts it, in a review of studies of ancient oil production and distribution, ‘the olive was (and is) fundamental in shaping the landscape, the way of life, the economy and the mentality of the Mediterranean’ (Journal of Roman Archaeology 1 (1988) p.161). That parenthetical ‘is’ now stretches beyond the Mediterranean, since even the present-day inhabitants of Ultima Thule are now within the same – dare I say it – common market. Diet equals mentality. In our own case, you might say that olive oil lubricates a set of connections that have been in motion since literate culture began in Europe.
The inaugural European text, The Odyssey, is nothing if not Mediterranean, island-hopping, constantly embarking from one coastline to another, propelled by exile into a series of voyages across the Middle Sea. Britain’s island status brings it closer and makes it more susceptible to this experience than the mainland culture of much of Europe. And surely the number of translations, adaptations and updated versions of The Odyssey is greater in English than in any other language.
The thesis of Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean (2001) is that Neolithic and Bronze Age civilisations crested the sealanes and that coastal communities were key in the relay of artefacts and ideas. Nowadays, the same routes have been reawakened, forming escape-corridors for those desperate to flee barbarism. The seas bring peril, great risks, but also hope. The land is ring-fenced, unyielding, unmoved.
The ring-fence around Testaccio is no stand-in for the European laager, even though it runs close to that cordon sanitaire of symbols, the wall of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Testaccio, housed in an old slaughterhouse. The Eighth Hill also looks down on the Protestant Cemetery, where the remains of Keats and Shelley lie buried. The latter had written ‘it might make one in love with death, to be buried in so sweet a place’, although this was half a century before Testaccio morphed into the Roman Smithfield, lapped
by the sounds and smells of industrial butchery.
The Testaccio you can visit now is all about the contemporary: presentness, living for the day – or rather, for the night. The hill is surrounded by bars and nightclubs – with names like Alibi, Radio Londra, Jungle Club, Orpheus, On the Rocks – cheek-by-jowl with butchers (still) and copy-shops. Thomas Hardy thought up a poem nearby, one of several written in Rome during 1887, on the shape-shifting nature of time and the collapsing of the present and past into one. Despite the perdurability of its ruins, nothing in Rome really lasts compared to the ‘matchless singing’ of the poets. Hardy had in mind Keats and Shelley. He did not have in mind the unmatched volume of Testaccio’s nightclub music when darkness falls. This racket seems to threaten another kind of collapse altogether. It fills the air like a sonic pile-driver – one can sense it pumping noise pollutants into all the voids and cavities formed by thousands of layers of smashed amphorae, so that every part of the hill vibrates.
The ancient disposal teams showed a predilection for order in the very act of destruction. All around the perimeter of the hill, the amphora shards are stacked neatly in a series of terraces. Even rubbish was an engineering project. On the surface at least. The interior of the heap was a morass, into which an unending landslip of ceramic trash was released. Like the built structure of the Empire, the spectacle of order was a repeat performance, a fundamental routine, but everything behind this facade was subject to continuous structural change. At a certain point, the most recent arrivals proved in some way anomalous, refractory, inimical, to a degree that threatened the integrity of the whole, and the aggregates of Empire and Testaccio both stopped growing. The Empire went into panic reverse mode, recalling the troops and abandoning the edgelands, those provinces that had never looked at home in the invader’s team strip. Britannia went its own way in 410; Spain finally in 472.
I left Rome on 24 March 2017, the day before the Consilium, the ancient-sounding meeting of EU leaders on the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This birthday for the launching of the EU was something of a shipwreck. The twenty-seven Heads of State pronounced that ‘our union is undivided and indivisible’. Not so indivisible, apparently, that it did not also call for ‘even greater unity and solidarity amongst us’. While they fiddled, Rome flared up all over the place. The protests in the streets were so violent that a buffer zone was set up around the Capitoline Hill while the anniversary talks were underway. Apart from the five ‘authorised’ demonstrations, there were also flashpoints involving trade unionists and anarchists on the left, and groups such as Forza Nuova (‘Give Rome back to the Romans’) and Fratelli d’Italia on the right. There were running battles up and down streets where, earlier on, I had idled among the parked-up Lambrettas, cutlery shops, gutter-cats, potted olive trees and jaded ruins of the ancients.
Two days later, on the 27 March 2017, the Italian police announced the finding of an enormous illegal toxic waste dump filling a quarry in Aprilia, a few miles south of Rome. Which made me wonder, whether a Monte Aprilia would say as much about our own economy and culture as Monte Testaccio had done for the Imperium Romanum. The one would be no less international than the other; and if, statistically speaking, there was to be a British section, it would consist of chemicals, fertilisers, nitrogen compounds, plastics, pharmaceuticals, synthetic rubber, petrol, gas and cars – because these are the UK’s main exports to Italy. Much more toxic would be the non-degradable excess of Brexit propaganda, the one-hundred-feet-high, one-kilometre-square, mound of broken promises. And, sitting on top, would be a still-quivering set of great yellow donkey teeth that once belonged to some forgotten demagogue. Let’s imagine that analysis of root and enamel from these teeth to determine the levels of oxygen and strontium isotopes would not give a clear indication of geographical origin, owing to European-wide patterns of trade and consumption. Our diet now does not have a passport. You are what you eat.
2017
16 I have made this painting sound anonymous, but it wasn’t. In the time between assembling my notes and writing this account, one of my notebook pages went astray, the very one that recorded the artist and title of the work in question. Several attempts to retrieve the missing information – attempts made by Kate Fagan and others as well as by me – have proved unsuccessful, which means that I must take the unwanted responsibility for appearing not to take seriously the Aboriginal artistry that has been sidelined for much of Australian cultural history. My intention was to place it centre stage, but perhaps there is something inevitable about this parapraxis, about this slippage in a revisionist account that has not quite acknowledged its proximity to the intellectual habits of a colonial culture, habits that I might have assumed I could undo at will.
17 If I had known better, I would not have taken the guide book at face value, and would have been less jittery. As John Kinsella has pointed out, to represent the emu as vicious is a travesty. The drought conditions of 1932 meant that large numbers of emus were searching for water in farm land that they would normally keep away from. Anxious farmers jumped the gun – literally – and called in the army. Their excessive use of firepower was condemned at the time as absurd.
18 Edgar Wind, Giorgione’s ‘Tempesta’: with comments on Giorgione’s poetic allegories (Oxford, 1969), p.3.
19 Maurizio Calvesi, ‘La Tempesta di Giorgione’, in Giorgione e la cultura Veneta tra ’400 e ’500: mito, allegoria, analisi iconologica (Roma: De Lucca, 1981), p.54.
20 Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: the painter of poetic brevity (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), p.168.
21 Pietro Zampetti, ‘La quiete dopo La Tempesta’, in Giorgione e l’umanesimo Veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Firenze: Olschki, 1981), p.292.
22 Ibid, pp.291–2.
23 Pietro Bembo, Historia Veneta (1551), Liber Septimus, p.62.
24 Ibid, VII, p.32.
25 ‘Essay for Witkacy’, in Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski (New York: Fromm, 1990), p.113.
26 Bruno Schulz, The Complete Fiction (New York: Walker and Company, 1989), p.74.
27 Ibid, p.84.
28 See, for example, ‘Joseph and Dr Gotard’, The Drawings of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski (Evanstown: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p.191.
29 Ibid, p.230.
30 Ibid, p.227.
31 Ibid, p.208.
32 Ibid, p.209.
33 Ibid, p.233.
34 Letters, p.112.
35 Drawings, p.237.
36 Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1984), p.120.
37 Published in Tygodnik Ilustrowany, no.29, 1936, and included in translation in Letters, pp.217–23.
38 Letter of 24 July, 1932, Letters, p.36.
39 Letter of 2 December, 1934, Ibid, p.56.
40 Ibid, p.55.
41 ‘Essay for S.I. Witkiewicz’, Letters, p.110.
42 ‘Essay for S.I. Witkiewicz’, Letters, p.111.
43 ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’, Complete Fiction, pp.254–6.
44 Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro, translated by Barbara Wright (London:Penguin Books, 2000), p.154.
45 Ibid, pp.152–3.
46 Ibid, pp.154–5.
47 See for example, Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanal for the use of sewers by the Polish resistance movement.
48 Gregor Dallas, Metrostop Paris (2008) p.26.
49 Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’, in Documents, Vol.1, no.7. (December, 1929), translated by Dominic Faccini, in October, Vol.60 (Spring, 1992), p.27.
50 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 94.
51 Franz Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’, in Collected Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp.104–6.
52 Reinar Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, p.429.
53 Ibid, p.415.
54 Hart Crane, ‘To Liberty’, in Complete Poems (Ne
wcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1984), p.162.
55 Hart Crane, ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ in Complete Poems, ibid, p. 63.
56 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), pp.331–2.
57 Thomas de Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and other Writings (Oxford: The World’s Classics, 1985), pp.84–5.
58 Ruth apRoberts, ‘Old Testament Poetry: the Translatable Structure’, PMLA 92 (1977), pp.987–1004.
59 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Twofold Room’ in Poems in Prose, and La Fanfarlo, translated by Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), pp.37–9.
60 Nikki Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p.185.
61 Henry Mayhew and John Binny, ‘The Criminal Prisons of London’, Illustrated London News, 18 September, 1852.
62 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage Books, 1997), p.115.
63 Ivan Turgenev, Poems in Prose (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1945), p.vi.
64 Tim Dee, Four Fields (London: Vintage Books, 2014), pp.2–3.
65 John Berger, ‘Field’, in Why Look at Animals (London: Penguin Books, 2009).
Acknowledgements
Extracts from an early version of the first section of Grimspound were published under the title ‘from Grimspound’’ in Contour Lines: New Responses to Landscape in Word and Image, ed. Neil Wenborn and M.E.J.Hughes (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2009), pp.78–85.
