Somewhat retrospective

9 August 2009
Gondola Prow

Somewhat retrospective, thanks to near-zero internet the last ten days.

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There are two theories about Venice. One is that the people you see on the gondolas are the dead, transported though the narrow streets on the dark green waters to take a last glimpse of life on earth. Lain back in each others arms they are gazing up at the buildings from their mobile sarcophogi, hoping to catch a last glimpse of some loved one on a sunlit bridge or to see some relative or friend disappearing down a shadowed alley. All day their boats are heading this way and that on this kind of idle farewell tour, steered in an out of the sun and circulated by those cheery but absent-eyed stripy-topped guys, angels of death, all day until the time is come and the gondolas head out en masse, out of the maze of the city and towards the islands of the dead, where they’ll give up their passengers to the darkness. Yesterday, as the sun began to sink I saw two gondolas full of dead Japanese guys, heading out of the canals towards the open water, in a strangely excited state, mutually photographing each other in all directions, cameras pointing from one boat to the other with much gesticulation, shouts, laughter and calls for attention, then turns and more gesticulations to photograph the inhabitants of their own boats, as if each, photographing the photographers whilst themselves being photographed, were somehow determined to catch the final moment of their departure.

The other theory is that those of us walking on the islands of Venice are the dead, and that the people in the gondolas are living, tourists in fact, come here for daytrips to see what our echo of a life is like. Up here on the land we are going about our business (which is not much), walking here and there, eating in the cafes, sweating, laughing, talking, going through what we might think of as an echo of our former lives, staged here in this this endless ruined filmset, with its endlessly interrupted and incomplete tangle of streets. All day the tourists gawp at us, staring up to see again and again how lifelike, and yet how strange we dead are. All day they drift past on the gondolas, going through the dark passages of the canals, taking photographs as best they can of the liminal space we inhabit, capturing at 8 or 9 or even 12 megapixels our  glorious decay and that of our dead city, and at night they retreat, heading off to safer places, the mainland, home.

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My copy of Nabakov meanwhile, used these days as much as a weapon as it as a reading book, accumulates mosquito blood.

In X’s apartment I develop a new way of killing the mosquitos that lurk each night on the ceiling, a method that involves launching the book, face upwards, in sudden vertical movement all the way to the ceiling. It’s a joy like lift off at Houston to see the book thundering directly upwards to smash into an insect on the white plaster high above with a satisfying thump. The upstairs neighbors must love this too, esp when I am dancing around in glee at my (too rare) latenight success. I imagine this would be a strange death though. Sensing nothing perhaps, or only feeling the terminal updraft, or else glimpsing a dark rectangle, ominous, mysterious, headed at high speed, perhaps turning mosquito head slightly to make out the looming words of the title Speak, Memory before sudden oblivion.