Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I know that this statement hardly makes any sense, and, to be honest, I was as much surprised by it when I first read it as any reader would be. Still, I have to admit that it carries an eerie truth that one cannot shake off very easily – especially since the conditions of how I came across that statement may have reinforced the emotional charge encapsulated in it.

 

I was, in fact, taking a long, slow evening walk in the back streets of my neighbourhood, an activity which I used to practice regularly when I was younger. Now, I do it less often, since somehow, as life goes by, a regular activity becomes a burden. My walk took me from the Sioufi garden, up the hill to the region behind the Saint-Cœurs school, then from there to the Lazarus school, which I circled to get to Sassine Square, passing over the old Greek Orthodox cemetery of Mar Mitr. I once read somewhere that the cemetery and the church next to it were built on the site of the remains of an old Phoenician temple, and, almost dizzied by the strong scent of the cypress trees planted there, looking everywhere except ahead of me, I stumbled on an old black suitcase lying on the side of the road. In normal circumstances, I would have left the suitcase there and walked away, but I saw what looked like a small notebook sticking out of the case, and my curiosity led me to pick it up.

 

There is a reason, of course, for my long and boring digression – the small black notebook is precisely where I found the statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings. The notebook was practically filled from cover to cover with writings, notes and drawings made by someone who was definitely an architect, judging by the nature of the texts and drawings, which all revolved around the city – Beirut, to be exact – or, more accurately, around the physical experiences of the writer in that city. I started flipping through the pages with anticipation and a sense of insecurity, because I thought that its owner would be waiting for me around the next corner to reclaim his property. I couldn’t make a lot of sense of what was written, since it was dark and all I had for light was a dim, yellowish street lamp that hardly illuminated anything at all. However, I could tell from the state of the texts and images that the writer had been in a state of urgency, especially towards the end. When I got home and finally examined the notebook closely, my original feeling was confirmed: The texts and drawings of the first few pages are deliberate and ordered – almost rehearsed – but then, further towards the end, this sense of deliberation subsides, and we are left with an almost haphazard collection of unrelated thoughts and drawings. Also, and in addition to the fact that the author was obviously in a hurry towards the end, the last few pages were extremely dense, as if no corner on the paper, no matter how small, had been intended to be left white. In fact, what started out as writing was ultimately transformed into unfathomable graffiti, which was made even more unintelligible by the fact that the drawings were entwined into what was written, to the point that both had become indistinguishable.

 

That said, after careful examination, it became very clear that there was no unity in the notebook. Of course, notebooks are not meant to have unified contents, but that’s not what I mean: it seemed as if the notebook was made of fragments, and, despite the coherence of these fragments, their condition made it very difficult for this coherence to come through. An idea would start on page 6, for instance, and then would be continued on page 19, while the pages 6 to 19 were permeated with other ideas that would start there and end a few pages later. Each of these fragments, I thought, produced its own meaning, while the general meaning of the whole thing would only unfold itself in relation not to the writer (as in, say, a diary), but to the city he was living in, experiencing with all his force. The notebook was a metaphor for Beirut.

 

I write “was” because there was something extremely ominous about the form of the notebook, a feeling that was later supported by the content of the ‘work’. It seemed as if the architect, the author, knew that his life would end, or let’s say would be radically changed, when the last white spot on the last page was filled with his ideas. That would probably explain why the last few pages were filled up almost to the point of explosion – or, if I wanted to use the metaphor of an old city within its walls, I would say that the inhabitants of such a city were certain that only void and death lay beyond their city walls, so their buildings became denser the farther one went from the centre to the periphery of the city. Didn’t sailors in ancient times believe that their ships would fall off the horizon if they ventured into the open sea? The architect had been an urban sailor from these ancient times.

 

My suspicions were, as I mentioned above, confirmed by some of the scattered ideas that I read in the notebook. Beirut was his whole universe, and there was no indication whatsoever of anything that might have existed beyond it. Here is, for instance, one of those fragments I spoke of (I made the effort to re-arrange it, so that it regains its unity, and becomes easier to read):

 

These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

 

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

 

To be continued…

 

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Tony Chakar is an architect based in Beirut, and will be speaking at the Liverpool Biennial on June 2nd 2010.