I have a confession to make. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia.
At the moment, this is mostly to look up everything I have forgotten. Ideas tucked away in the pages of the increasing number of books on my 'to reread' list. I hope this time I read them my brain might remember more. As I aimlessly scroll from page to page, I recall ideas that clang about in my head as I go for walks along these Berlin streets that still live in that limbo place of familiarity and foreignness in which I have found myself trapped these last six months. Today my virtual wandering led me to the Wikipedia page for the so-called ‘Flaneur’ (there’s a hat on that a), which, as the page reads, is an ‘ambivalent figure of urban riches representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of society.’ The original Flaneur was an archetype stemming out of 19th century Paris, but Germany’s Walter Benjamin- art criticism's darling- dusted him off and gave him a 20th century cultural spin. Benjamin’s Flaneur represented the ‘modern urban spectator,’ whose lifestyle - and, most importantly, his ability to remain a detached observer of life, came under threat thanks to consumer capitalism and the coercive mass culture it brought. The female equivalent of the Flaneur, so I am told reading this page now, is ‘passante’, which means ‘walker’ and was coined by Marcel Proust to refer to elusive, female figures who’d wander and observe the streets. A separate Wikipedia page on the passante eludes us, there is just a note mentioning Proust's obsessiveness, and possessiveness, towards them. Further Googling reveals a more complex story in the history of a word. A Guardian article attributes the term ‘passante’ to a poem about probably a prostitute in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal - a collection of poems I threw out because they made me too gloomy. There’s an essay out there that explores this relationship between a mysterious woman who walks on the street, and street walkers. I.e. prostitutes. I couldn’t find the abstract. Then there’s the term ‘flaneuse’ cropping up here and there, alongside various essays and articles exploring what this archetype represents. One article recalls the first line in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway being ‘I love walking in London,’ noting that Woolf herself liked to use the streets as research. Again, more books for the re-read pile. How do computers get to retain so much, and minds so little? It’s not fair. Susan Sontag’s take on Flaneuring was a salty one. In her essays on photography, she defines the flaneur as a middle class observer who chooses to see what he wants to see, presenting a rose-tinted vision of the urban experience that glosses over less appealing corners of city life not applicable to their charmed existence. One article argues however that Flaneuring isn’t always as charming as it promises. Martha Gellhorn’s journalistic observations, that peeled the streets bare, presented all sorts of grim realities. Gellhorn herself described Flaneurie as ‘being as necessary as solitude, how the compost keeps growing in the mind.’ In any case, flaneurs or flaneuse walk the streets. They notice some things and not others. What it is their attention holds tells us a lot about what it is they care about. What they can’t or don’t notice might also be interesting. I’m sat here listening to the evening wind, bird song interspersed by the hum of our washing machine, and there’s an occasional church chime and sometimes an ambulance siren ringing out. I’ve bought myself flowers for my desk but they’ve wilted, and there’s a photograph that came with a book I bought recently. It’s propped up next to my pens, shows an empty beach that could be from anywhere, though in my head it’s of the North Sea. I have plans to cycle there, but am told that would take quite a long time. I probably need to invest in a tent. It’s peaceful here. I might make fish fingers for dinner if I can remove myself from this seat, and this endless factoid trawling that seemingly goes nowhere, or go for an evening walk, nowhere to nowhere and back. I like how I can read all the street signs, and even recognise some of the names. Of course, a lot of them are of dead German men. Today I was thinking of a Chinese painter called Qiu Deshu, an ink artist from Shanghai forced to paint Maoist propaganda during the Cultural Revolution. His post-Mao work involved crafting traditional landscapes broken up by jagged voids, using a fissuring technique that subtly innovated a tradition that had been banned. He tore up bits of rice paper, layered on top of each other, a gesture both paying homage and rejecting his traditions, each fissure representing a culture forced to break ties with its own history. The layering effect creates a lot of blank space. In ink art, with its deep Daoist roots, blank space is just as important as the busier parts of the work. Perhaps more so. Artists leave it there inviting their viewers to reflect and meditate. It smells like it’s raining outside. I’ve removed the fish fingers from the freezer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
August 2023
Categories
All
|