8.29.2009

Conimbriga

From this:
The Forum

To this:
 
The "Wall of Desperation" 

I remember visiting Conimbriga as a child.  I was back as a young man with a bride.  Back again, much later, with a wife.

Conimbriga was a place, a symbol of the reach of empire, the power of a center basking under a broad hegemon, sprawling across a continent, secure in its position, its power, its future.  But for me, from my first sight of it as a young boy, it was as a symbol, striking and poignant, of that empire’s contraction, the collapse, the fall-back of end-game.

I’ve always had a profound sense of its existing at the margins, both in distance, almost as far as one could have been from Rome and seen oneself as Roman; but also in time.  The ruins of Conimbriga date from up to when the city was abandoned in the fifth century.  It was “frozen” in time then, the ruins of the broadest expanse of the city cut and scarred by a later defensive wall, built with great haste and immeasurable toil across the sunny outer borough, using stone taken from the wealthy villas that had flourished there in the previous centuries.  This moment was captured in the silt and sedimentation of the passing millennia, a slow Pompei

We don’t have fresh frescos, and casts of fallen bodies overcome by a fleeting disaster; but we do have mosaic floors, and the layouts of villas, houses, baths, and the Forum, along with the wall, and the aqueduct that fed water to the city.  In one of the inner villas, just inside the wall of desperation, there was said to have been found a skeleton and a sword during early, pre-archeological digs there.  Whether this was true or a necessary fantasy, is not so important.  Standing there at the side of the villa’s courtyard, gazing down into the grave-like hole of its central pool, it is easy to imagine bloodshed there.

There is a pall over the place, no matter how sunny the day, or how luxuriant the restored plantings.  This is not a monument to the grandeur of Rome, but to its dissolution.  There hangs over it yet, after 1500 years, a sense of the shock, the surprise, and disbelief that must have been so prevalent as the entire construct, not only of Rome, but of the whole Mediterranean Ancient World, came tumbling down on their heads.  At some point, the attitude there must have gone from “Things are bad, They’ll do something about it!”  To, “Things are awful!  How can we save ourselves!” 

The new wall built – I can imagine everyone pitching in, broken nails, torn togas, panting, sweating patricians side-by-side with slaves and tradesmen, men and women – all working to build up the last ditch defense, the narrower perimeter.  Then, a last defeat, the survivors leaving a burnt-out shell of their city, probably in bondage to the Suevians, Germanics come down from the north.

Life persisted for a time, the shattered city must have sheltered some, but relatively quickly life passed the ruined remains by.  Aeminium, a smaller Roman town, became the new city, Coimbra.  Life went on, and after a few hundred years Conimbriga was just a rough spot on the terrain, situated next to a gorge.  Later still, a village grew up next to it, a primitive place of stone huts and farmer’s fileds.  Fields and an orchard of olive trees spread over the rough ground on top of the ruins, blending them into the bucolic life of a much less grand age.

The lesson of Conimbriga is in the sacrifice of part of the city in that desperate last ditch effort to save it.  Defensive walls, built to protect a place and things will fail.  Within a generation the city was abandoned anyway.

Was Coimbra’s location better?  It had water communication along the Mondego, a good hill-top for defense, but also it did not have the baggage, both of the old elites themselves and of their precious stuff.

Conimbriga spoke to me, fifty years ago, I heard it.  The times have changed around it. The fascist dictatorship, still carrying on with a provincial, tepid version of Mussolini’s Pride in all that was Rome – somewhere between the deadly seriousness of Hitler, and the fuzzy nostalgia and lazy rationalizations of some mafia Don; has been long gone.  It faded into its irrelevance as its story no longer held thrall.  The ruins have been spruced up, a curious oxymoron, as EU e-currency was lavished on excavation, enlarging the museum and decorating the grounds with plantings, restored mosaics and metal roofs over the most spectacular villa carefully brought to light from its long exile outside the “new” wall.

None of the changes have quieted the old voices.  Try as they might to muffle them, in ways the Salazar's repression was unable to accomplish as well.  The somber tragedies of hunger and fear in Portugal fifty years ago made a more honest backdrop for what those ruins have to say.

They are patient, the stones have sat there for so long already.  They have no need for insistence, they don’t care if we heed them or not.  But still, their voices are chilling, and their message has not been so relevant – what a deflated term that is, its value sucked away by decades of hyperbole – so relevant as they are today.  Their mute warnings of the trajectory of a long skid from first unease, through panic and desperation to final realization and dissolution, like tire tracks ending at a torn railing, or blood turning black in the sand….

8.07.2009

Author, Authority

I keep returning to the questions surrounding these two terms. I’m a writer, and therefore aspire to Author, have in a limited sense been one with my book on Design, but here I’m talking about Author of Fiction, the capitals are semi-ironic, just as my thoughts on the subject are semi-muddled.

I spend a lot of my time trying to come to grips with the world’s gatekeepers. I am most concerned these days with the way elites are cratering all around us. The dynamics surrounding the accretion of authority, versus its holders capacity to use that authority well, has never been so wildly skewed to produce bad results as it is today. The tendency, in this situation, is to discount the very idea of authority, experts, elites of all kinds. If the current crop is so bad, then perhaps the whole concept is bankrupt as well.

I’ve spent most of my life thinking as a designer. The root of design is desegno, to draw. As a designer one is constantly drawing, but the physical act of drawing is only a manifestation of the conceptual act of making distinctions, drawing distinctions. Look at Genesis, the first act described there is the separation of the light from the dark, first by creating the light, and then by placing it in relationship with the dark, cleaving the void; there follows a list of finer distinctions; placing and relating each element into the greater whole.

This “First” story puts the act of desegno as the prime, the first, action in a first story. The identification of this action with God, whatever one believes on that subject, can be seen as placing this action, the ability to create and make distinctions, as the activity with the highest priority, the one without which the rest cannot find a place.

This may be seen as self-serving, I identify myself with a certain activity, and then find a rationale for claiming it as the highest calling. Particularly if we see design only in the light of the “profession,” or group of professions that have accrued around the concept in the last century. It smacks of a particularly pitiful delusion of grandeur to equate what we’ve come to know of as design, and designers, with something so exalted. Another instance when our disgust with an elite has colored our perceptions of a broader sphere of action, another that has been trivialized by its current practitioners. My purpose is to connect myself with an aspiration that I find central to life, and to broadcast my sense of its validity, why I've dedicated so much effort and time in that direction.

While these questions have loomed large for me, there have been many small stones strewn along my path. In this, as in any discussion, they have represent the repeated need to stop and define terms, to leave the paths of efficient communication, in which everyone is familiar with the terminology, with what the words mean; and stumble along, filling in “what I mean by that,” and “No, that’s not what the term really means….” This path is strewn with minor stumbles, and veers around medium obstacles, and runs along a dangerous precipice on one side, and a blank wall of indifference on the other. Might as well get comfortable with it….

This leads me back to the point, an author’s authority. Why do we give it? It is bestowed by readers, cannot be taken upon oneself. Certain voices have developed levels of interest and trust in their readers that create a sense of “authority.” This has been confused with the other usages, with power figures who can coerce and control; with “experts” – I cannot leave the quotes off that one – who accrue badges of authority, and have paths opened to them to influence the others, the controllers. The relationship of authority to power is central to the distinction. Authorial authority presupposes no direct connection to power, neither to those who wield it, or those who curry its favor. That is not to say that many have not traded on their authority to gain power or influence, but that such connections are made after the fact, and have – if any – a negative impact on their true authority.

This is moral authority in a way, but not the way we usually think of it – another pebble to stub our toes against. The same distinctions can be made between those who wield moral authority and those who have it. The same dynamic in relationship to power prevails here. We end up sidestepping, making little progress perhaps, by calling it simply moral authority.

I return to this issue again and again, because these questions are central to my tasks, as a writer, as a designer, as an individual attempting to find a place, and make a contribution in this world. I have found the greatest guidance from those to whom I’ve given this kind of authority over me, and as I mature, I find I have more and more of a desire, and a personal need, to establish such a position for myself as a means to create the kind of legacy I’d like to leave behind.

There, that was a loose patch of rocks, a stick, and a pool of mud on that last bit of the trail! Let’s see if we can regain our balance!… No, let’s just push ahead.

This brings up another aspect of this question, one that constantly comes up. The question of trust in the other direction, from writer to reader. One of the few benefits of an earlier alignment between the forms of society and its activities, when it was possible to imagine that there was a “consensus” of what it meant to be an educated reader, the expectation a writer had that he – and he most often was a he – would find his audience, and they would understand him. That consensus is weakened today. I don’t mourn it in most respects, but I do fear that in the throes of creative destruction we have tended to go too far in allowing the positive, and perennial, yearning behind those withered forms to atrophy as well.

Another detour, or perhaps a turn in a maze. I keep coming back to a sense that whether in coming to grips with reality in all its broad aspects, and finely grained particulars; or in this one question regarding authority, that what I am always fighting for is the quality of looking and listening for quiet hints that provide us the earliest inklings of where things are heading, instead of falling for the tumult and dust of the broad and busy road. Established consensus, is always out of date. Whatever is broadly “known” is probably no longer true, just because of the time it’s taken to be disseminated widely, and the errors of transmission it’s accumulated along the way. Take the old experiment, say, “I’m cold, pass it along.” By the time this has reached the hundredth listener, I am no longer cold, and I would not recognize what they have been told on my behalf if I heard it.

What I trust in my own perceptions of the quiet hints that have not fallen into the mass maw of “understanding,” mirrors what I find valuable in the voices I find authorial, and what I hope to gain for my own voice. It is an ongoing tension between what is graspable, and an ultimate conviction that anything that matters is unknowable in the sense of one being able to hold onto it, to grasp it, and keep it safe. As with all of life, it can only be held loosely in the experience of it, we continue to “spend” it as we gain it, like the oxygen we inhale or the nourishment we take. We can no more grasp, and keep, our constructs than we can keep yesterday’s lunch, or our next breath.

Why I am writing here is tied directly to these questions. I continue to seek the vestiges of the older outlets, partly out of habit. These were the paths taken by those before me, finding a “publisher,” finding an editor, finding an “imprimatur.” There is strong precedent there, hundreds of years of tradition. But I don’t just think I continue to respect that path for those reasons alone, I also hold onto a sense that there has yet not been developed a new path that allows for the kind of concerted effort, the long and slow distillation of experience and expression that has been possible within that tradition. To say that what Cervantes started, and has been ongoing for all these centuries, is outmoded, smacks of too great a conceit. Especially when the most visible alternatives are so thin, and truly lacking in substance.

Current conversations, ranging from mere “pings,” to longer, but unmediated “posts” – like this one – don’t replace the long form. They increase my hunger for what they are unable to provide, just as they feed my curiosity over their effects on our society, and culture, going forward.

One thing I feel both paths share, when done well, is authenticity. Together they may provide the full range of what that can mean. It is authentic, up to a point, to ping “I’m here!” over and over, but is that enough? There is value in creating in a “garrett,” but if your creations don’t get out, that is surely not sufficient either.

At the start, I specified "Author of Fiction.” Why do I make that distinction, draw that line? This was my intended topic today, though it’s taken so long to get back to it! I’m afraid now to rush it, and give it short shrift. Still, let’s risk another stumble.

The second archetypal act that makes us human is the story. Picture a different Genesis tale, a troop of early hominids. Someone in authority has pointed in a particular direction, made a distinction, “We will go there, not there.” If they chose wisely, this was as much an affirmation of a consensus as an act of authority; alignment of that kind should be an attribute of leadership in a well functioning society. This path allowed a certain leeway for exploration and contingency. At the end of the day, someone, or more than one voice ,was raised in the telling of stories. This was the other fundamental act of a community’s expression. It kept their purpose, and their sense of destiny, in front of its members; it allowed that sense to evolve over time, at a pace with the changes in the surrounding conditions, without loosing sight of what had come before.

Just as design, desegno, is that first act; so is writing fiction the continuation of that second primal act. Both of these tasks have been modified over time, necessarily, though not always wisely. The second has evolved into the writing of fiction, its dissemination via publication as physical books to be read in a concerted act of purposeful “leisure.” This is the equivalent to the time spent around the fire, that time of repose, curiosity and introspection. The ongoing discussion these stories breed, can have many equivalents today, from the book club, and the occasional face to face discussion among readers, to the various online virtual gatherings, of which this one is a part.

There is, or will be, a way for these perennial needs to be met, although as with anything else, we cannot rely on “They” to do something to perpetuate it. It is up to us to discover what that synthesis will be, what are the various elements and their proportions, and how they can come together, and be vital, and robust moving forward.