Nine unfinished drawings from 15 years ago; a text titled Phobos, which later appears in print; a story by Emilio Gadda and a brief encounter with agoraphobes; Denis Hollier’s work on Bataille’s aversion to monuments; Michel Serres’ Rome: The Book of Foundations; Aldo Rossi’s fabricca; Michel Foucault’s panopticism; Borges’ fear of mirrors; 50 years of sporadic visits to Rome – and the drive to continue building the unfinished. And here, in momentary reflection, the chilling encounter with the future and its many ‘forking paths’ [1]; one of them when there will be no monuments facing piazzas – when we will all live in diaspora.
He walks into his future, I into my recent past. A mise-en-scène– the three phobics, a row of poplars, a sack of lies, La Lupa, Acephalos, a crowd of tourists, two agoraphobes in their sledge, a horse and buggy … and the temple. The piazza has been cleared to reveal the millions of footfallslong forgotten by those who still walk it, but not by the piazza. In the back, a storm is brewing, prefigured by the hand that drew, not yet known by the mind behind.Stepping out into the piazza, still in the shadow of the temple. A disturbing suspension, both in and out of Pantheon’s gravitas – the rub between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Or is it simply forgotten or repressed, sublimated by the trigger-happy amateur photographer? Or does it sit in some waiting room in the amygdala, ready to exercise its fight or flight functions? What are they doing? Boarding, as it were, the sled? Rowing away from space?Blinded in the ancient darkness of the wall-stairs, I crawl out on to the dome that caps the temple. Here, on the naked materiality of its surface stripped bare by the Pantheon’s marble-stealing scavengers, shaking and perspiring, I again find a momentary respite. I scale the huge steps that form a series of belts securing the base of the dome, and after a precarious crawl, like lice on the pate of Hadrian’s skull, I am almost at the central hole. Here, at the edge of the inner universe but just before its dizzying depth, like Atlas I carry the heavens on my shoulders while imagining the sphere below. Reluctantly looking down, for a brief second I see my own shadow in the mote – the moon invading the sun. Turmoil seizes me while my gaze is sucked into its insinuating concavity—where for a moment I am Freud’s patient.When the rash is bad, I dream of a bed, liquefied by some wetness that, like the ocean, helps the fools in the Narrenschiff, bestowing upon the afflicted an occasional relief.All of us defy autonomy’s solicitations by engaging in its opposite. Endless talk. Endless explanation. Endless interpretation. Endless stories. All of this is minor speech, but there are those who break the chatter by excavating or, better, by constructing a parallel stage, not quite as physical as the fabbrica – the urban facts (fatti urbani) as characterised by their own facticity or permanenza – but written edifices that are virtually permanent. I am thinking here of Bataille’s urban phobia and Foucault’s panopticism. Theirs are states of rapture that are unthinkable without the physical presence of architecture. These alternative stages take architecture out of the realm of meaning to bring us up against its harrowing blankness. All the language we normally attach to architecture hides this chilling fact. What is architecture when we don’t force meaning upon it?When we break open this ordered theatre, exposing its props, columns, cylinder wall, dome, and torpor, its denizens (and their repeated behaviours, including the rite of being photographed with the Roman cartoon-soldier, the same smiles directed to the same photographic orifice) appear as puppets in a play orchestrated by non-humans. If only it were possible to hear again the cries and whispers of the past, to see its molecular residue suddenly exposed in both human and stone alike.Portico bound, sheltered, yet suddenly I am just outside the midstream current in another turbulence. The piazza is suddenly empty, the crowds are gone. The space is vast and cold, and I can hear the Tiber rising. Ancient culprits, the devil and his ministers, are confused and reconfigured – Bataille’s agoraphobia tinged with hate and architecture’s own menaces. Claustrophobia and acrophobia are all held in circulation by hysterical vertigo under the threatening buco in the dome. Slipping through the portico, its columns a sentimental gesture to the aboriginal forest, brings momentary solace. But I am soon encircled and ensnared by the rotunda and cupola above. I move up along the three pochées, literally in the pockets of the wall, one on top of the other, until I reach the upper, just under the base of the dome. There, defying the interior blind windows, is a tiny opening, a final relief. I have entered the prison house of construction, and the broken shards mixed with concrete scrape my knees, elbows, and face. Acephalos has lost his head. The agoraphobe, head dished, fumbles, stumbles, kicks.Every Catholic church near and far from the Pantheon has them – small houses within the big house. Standing in front of one, the father, although facing you, is hidden behind doors or heavy drapery. In profile the pentiente is kneeling, while whispering sins into the ear of the confessore, separated only by a perforated screen. Two human figures tightly joined – one seat, one bench, one screen, one house, mouth-to-ear. The whispers. A Pandora’s box, packed with first-person narration, a thousand years of murmurs, surrounding each confessional apparatus. Sacks upon sacks of sins. The human version of the songs of Puerto Rican coquis or Andalusian cicadas. The minimal expression of an intimacy of a very particular kind – confession, absolution and penitence. Exploding, they return to the columns.In his poem ‘Mirrors’, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: I see them as infinite, elemental Executors of an ancient pact To multiply the world like the act Of begetting. Sleepless. Bringing doom. [2]
And for those of us who live in diaspora, far away from piazzas and monuments, far from rooms with giant mirrors, aren’t we still doomed by our bathroom mirrors? In this ancient temple, mirrors are always shared.
Notes
‘This is the logic of production: ever since the 18th century, it has engendered its own discursive and practical space, on the basis of concentration – the office, the factory, the city [the temple]. It rejects the relevance of places it does not create.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 200.
Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Moreland (New York: W.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1964), 60.
Lars Lerup is an emeritus professor at the Architecture schools of the University of California, Berkeley, and Rice University, Houston. Aside from books on design and urbanism, his design work includes drawings, paintings and furniture. His work is included in collections at the Menil Foundation, Houston; the Canadian Centre of Architecture, Montreal; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and at Drawing Matter.
The article is included in the third issue of DMJournal, Storytelling.
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