And ghosts walk in the shadows of an obsolete scene

[sovay]

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, accompanying an article by John le Carré, is a black-and-white photograph of the author, taken "in Hamburg, in the early nineteen-sixties": I write, "a man in his early thirties with a face just a little too downpulled to be boyish, a trilby hat, a knit vest, and his hands in his pockets, glancing back from a lighted shop window into darkened rain-wet streets; he looks unglamorously like one of his own characters," but the image is not available online; what if he only looks like that to me? My mother wonders out loud if maybe now he looks like George Smiley, when everyone knows that George Smiley looks like Alec Guinness. Now I'm staring at the photograph until it grains, wondering what else I should mention—the sett-paved street, remarkably clean, the glassed-in posters too oblique to read, the car and the two or three blurred figures further up the block, dissolving into streetlight? Am I just confusing the issue? The more I describe, the more someone else will pick up this article and not recognize whatever I saw in it. The litter in the gutter is very little, some cigarettes and screwed-up paper. Now it sounds significant. I am writing a nonexistent city, in this novella I keep saying has eaten my brain, as though it is something consumptive, not creative; it is full of geographical details, which makes me notice how much I trust them in other writers. I take it on faith that there is a Charlton Street in Manhattan, a Deansgate in Manchester. Does the commuter rail run through Stoughton? Only a few weeks ago, I noticed the Elfland-and-Poughkeepsie in Kipling's "An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay." I start to wonder how many unreal or inaccurate or transposed place-names I could drop into conversation before anyone noticed. I didn't drive her to the station; she told me she could walk from Carnery, the five-way intersection where the lights are always slow to change, so I could pull over in front of the used record store and not get rear-ended by impatient audiophiles or the 58 bus turning mechanically off Goswell. The sunset lines right up with Commonwealth, twice a year.

Comments

[sovay]

It got me thinking, though, of a more surreal, warped map, that puts in the roads to other worlds and the otherworldly locales, that not only smooshes the distance from here to St. Petersburg, say, but draws golden lines between here and centers of power, that includes un-present harbors in empty, dangerous ocean inlets, and so on.

I approve of that kind of map. It should be different every time you look at it.

I'm not drawing any maps for the city I'm writing. I don't think I should be. I keep finding out more of its layout simply because it happens to be there in the next sentence.

Does the sunset really line up with Commonwealth?

To the best of my knowledge, not at all. It runs east-west, but not as rigorously as the grid in Manhattan. But if I say it with conviction . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's an awesome photograph of the sun between the towers.

Your city's unfolding as you write it.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link about Manhattanhenge. I'd never heard of that before.

I once had an assignment at college that involved looking at campus as a ritual landscape. It was sort of scary how well the interpretation worked.

But if I say it with conviction . . .

Folk might start believing in it. Perhaps, if you said it with sufficient conviction, it might even become true. Which is a little bit too Borgesian for comfort, I suppose.