We walk the wide, utilitarian streets of Genoa close to the port, under tunnels and along city bus thoroughfares, Stop Bombing Gaza, Decolonize Palestine, Ⓐ, Sfascia I Fasci, a.c.a.b. scrawled across the stone walls in sprawling spray-painted letters. Locating the ferry terminal is no assurance of finding our way onto the boat: the elevated catwalk dead ends; the unenclosed stair winds around a rusted elevator and opens onto an expanse of parking lot cordoned off for car lanes. Disconnected walking paths indicated by red and white diagonal striping direct us to a wide metal ramp and cavernous garage in the hull of the boat. Cars pack like sardines in tight lines, and we thread our way through them bemusedly, emerge from this uncanny wayfinding deferential to cars, and take the stairs up seven levels to open air.
The ferry deck blooms outward, enormous. Taking the boat to Corsica we leave mid-morning, our surroundings muted by white sunlight, but on the way back to the mainland it’s early. We watch the moon set over Bastia and the mountainous landscape beyond, enough of a red sun poking through the partly-clouded sky to throw vermillion and gold reflections off the city windows and rotating orange buoys in the harbor, scattered light spanning out in fans. The flat expanse of the ferry deck turns against terracotta, beige, rusted red, and turquoise rooftops and facades of the port town. The parallax quality of the boat deck turning steadily toward the sea — a flat plane, a fixed form, unyielding, reduces the outlines of the port town to a still image — an affixed strip motionless beyond that perspectival plane, gives me the dizzying sensation of being inside a zoetrope — a vertiginous cylindrical encounter.
We pass listless hours in the sun, sitting on the deck staring into space; sleeping, splayed out bodily on the sandy, salt-encrusted deck, arms spread-eagled, skin deepening into golden-brown hues, in full view and distinct proximity to strangers; watching the waters pass beyond the white-painted railings, light turquoise, aquamarine, and desaturated teal in the shallows of the harbor, indigo, celadon, prussian blue, and paynes grey stretching out to the wine-dark1 horizon; drawing, painting, reading, peering over top of our pages at the activities of people nearby, resting with their faces covered, or staring back at us; we stand up to lay our bodies against the strong winds kicking up from rough waves that the ferry cuts cleanly through, tracing a flat path.
Everyone seems to inhabit a simultaneously expanded and condensed time, here, doing whatever and not really doing anything, watching each other and existing easily. The migration across the water is an extended duration of enforced parallel play, rife with elongated interactions and ambient presences. I watch people throw their legs up against the railings and walls, lying flat on their backs. Two lovers sprawl across each other, scarves wrapped tight to protect their faces from the sun and wind. One man lies prone across a wooden bench, making half hearted attempts to read a book, which lies across his chest or face in turns, the spine creased open and pages fanned out; his friend pulls a hat brim down low over sunglasses, a surly L-shaped form concave against the bright line of the boat wall.
More than a year ago, BX loans me her copy of Henri Michaux’s 1981 Poteaux d’angle. À ce moment, je pense en français, and recall this passage on the stoppage of time, on time at a standstill,
« Les heures importantes sont les heures immobiles. Ces fractions du temps arrêtées, minutes quasi mortes sont ce que tu as de plus vrai, ce que tu es de plus vrai, ne les possédant pas, n’étant pas par elles possédé, sans attributs, et que tu ne pourrais « rendre », étendue horizontale par-dessus des puits sans fond. / The important hours are the motionless ones. Those stopped fractions of time, half-dead minutes, are the truest thing about you, the truest you — not owning them nor being owned by them, without attributes; you couldn’t « render » them, horizontal expanses over bottomless pits. »2
while we traverse the sea. Vraiment, ici, nous vivons à l'intérieur de cette étendue horizontale.
I practice drawing absences while thinking about the precarity of local inhabitants of island nations reliant on tourist economies; the variable attitudes toward immigrant populations from within anti-colonial nationalist movements autour du monde; whether or not there is a discernible difference between « travel » and « tourism » if loosely defined by a contradistinction between immersion and integration versus consumption and cooptation, and the implications of constructing such a binary with regard to socioeconomic class, privilege and access, the neocolonialism of Airbnb, and the conscious foregrounding of individuated subjectivity while abroad, recalling Alicia Kennedy’s 2020 essay3 because my astrological chart is also all water and air.
Hannah Arendt writes in her 1953 work Ideology and Terror, « the one essential prerequisite of all freedom is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space. »4 Citing this passage in her 2011 book The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, which I read in one breathless fourteen-hour sitting, Maggie Nelson specifies « space is distinct from alienation. It is fundamentally about volume, rather than about distance. »5 Drawing absences, painting negative space, representing the occlusion of my view toward the water by boat infrastructure, I consider the observational intimacy of our durational cohabitation on the ferry. The spaciousness of volume rather than distance is legible to me, here, where rather than being alienated from one another, our paralleling experience of place in this standstill time is more concerned with atmospheric simultaneity.
« Yeah all the cars are in hell », BX laughs on our plane ride home, remarking on the physical situation of bodies and vehicles on the ferry when I mention throughlines between Eula Biss, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Walter Benjamin’s writings on motion, movement, transit, driving. Most of the ferry passengers board by car; us foot passengers are the minority. Sitting on the main square of the one-street town during our stay on the island, an espresso and a café au lait midday in a faintly misting late-summer rain, watching elderly men play pétanque, BX remarks irritably that Rachel Cusk’s essay « Driving as Metaphor » is presumptuous about the interiority of others, of the people about whom she makes suppositions and against whom she formulates her speculations,
« It might be said that there would have been social and economic consequences to not driving, but for most of the non-drivers I meet that doesn’t seem to have been the case. On the contrary, their lives often seem saner and more efficient than my own, more compact, lacking the formless sprawl in personal decisions and arrangements that driving encourages. They are not always, it must be said, above accepting scraps from the driving table, allowing others to ferry them here or there if the need arises. But in the cases that I know of, they have tended to take on fewer responsibilities, to scatter and divide themselves less, to consume and be answerable for a smaller portion of our shared resources. Increasingly I regard them as a kind of elect: they appear, essentially, free. How did they know not to do it? »6
I disagree heartily, having read Cusk’s declarative tone as a refutation not of the nuanced and unknowable interior lives of a multitude of drivers and non-drivers, but as a refutation of a commonly-held assumption — the car as a symbol of freedom. As if to justify my counter-point, the following morning I am sitting in the wide windowsill of our rented apartment looking out at the clouds hanging low over the mountains and ochre, clay, and burnt umber rooftops, partway through reading Annie Ernaux’s Les Années when I note this excerpt, seemingly in direct dialogue with BX’s from the previous afternoon,
« More than ever, people relied upon the acquisition of things to build better lives… the most enviable and expensive object was the automobile, synonymous with freedom, a total mastery of space and, in a certain way, the world. »7
which, conveniently, I use as evidence of this broader societal assumption against which Cusk has positioned her provocation. Relevant fact: arguably, a provocation in the opposing direction — the three of us have rented an enormous car for our five night stay on the island, a necessity if we are to go dérive’ing along the coast and rocky shores, exploring the little towns and wilder cliffside, mountainous, and chaparral-laden landscapes, visiting the sandy beaches and clear water — inarguably, our reason for coming here.
Still, our movement through cities, carless, provides more of the spontaneity and surprise that we characteristically seek. The couple sitting at a cafe table down the winding alleyway in Genoa calls out as we walk past, laughing to us in fragmented english that they’d seen us eating at the same restaurant in Nice the prior night; another couple and their dog, who we pass on the street the following afternoon, we recall from hours spent on the train; a subdued camaraderie emanates from metro passengers affronted on our behalf when we are harassed by police boarding the train to inspect fares, cops casual with idiotic bravado a universally deplorable language.
Speaking to the ethos of drafting curbside in its most original formation — to notetake while sitting curbside, on the street eating tacos while composing written drafts, or to draft [verb, noun] biking behind another cyclist to reduce wind resistance and increase speed, and later use these experiences to make architectural drawings, for which the technical term is drafting [verb, noun] — Eula Biss writes incisively about what I have experienced since my late teens as the sharpened consciousness resultant from biking rather than driving through cities, the adeptitude that I associate with this mechanism of movement:
« bicycles break the rules, riding through stop signs and red lights. Like the people who occupy neighborhoods that are overpoliced and underprotected, bicycles know what keeps them safe on the street is not the law, but their own vigilance, quickness, and wit…
[Cars] are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.
You’re taking up the whole road, a woman in a large SUV once yelled out her window at John, who was riding his bike along the shoulder. Cars make you stupid, in the way wealth makes you stupid. In the way any sort of power makes you stupid, really. And it is this, my own stupidity, that I dislike most about driving. »8
In his 1928 compiled works Einbahnstraße, Walter Benjamin writes of walking in a similar manner, framed in contradistinction to traveling by plane. Under the section entitled « Chinese Curios », Benjamin writes,
« The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns… Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text… because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. »9
Benjamin is writing here about the Chinese practice of copying books and the preservation of literary culture, but the metaphor he draws out establishes a connection between slow movement and the integration of one’s impressions of previously-unknown texts or places. The insight resonates with how I think about movement both when my corporeal form is « abroad » and « at home ». My first nights back in LA, I’ve spent long days alone, biking up the river to the market in the morning for vegetables and fruits, leafy greens and herbs, biking the streets at night for a burrito vegetariano in the ambient company of neighborly faces that already call out my order as I approach, comfortable familiarity in our lack of shared language and the casual exchange of cómo estás.
The thresholds produced by fragmented language, throughout our transits across francophone locales, suggest to me that there is continually an active choice to be made in my attitude towards movement or travel, between volume and distance, between immersion and integration, or consumption and cooptation, between exchange and seeking shared intersections, or interaction and cursory, shallow tangencies. At a small italian grocery in one of the beachside towns, we have an aperitif during the onset of an island storm, rain falling down in sheets, and get into extended conversation about les personnes mélanges, la lutte pour l'indépendance, l’art de cuisiner, le nombre de mots dans la langue arabe par rapport à la langue anglaise, la préservation de la culture, la destruction des différences par le colonialisme, le ciel et les lacs du montana, « je ne les ai jamais vus mais j'espère -! »
Almost always, I’m drawing. The medium is an easy bridge between people, irrespective of language, age, culture, and other differences, and often a catalyst for conversation. For the most part, I’m painting rather than line drawing this time, for the indulgent pleasure of mixing color, for the convenience of traveling with a compact set of paints, for the relatively frictionless ease of a brush stroke compared to a pen or pencil. At a certain point, it strikes me as appropriate that these impressions are yielding — yielding to unintended marks and the uncontrolled movement of water, to the impressions and perspectives of others, to my preconceived notions of place, to the realities shared explicitly or implicitly by local inhabitants. I think of prose poem number 229 of her 2009 work Bluets, wherein Maggie Nelson writes, « I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water. »10
When I read the Benjamin passage a year ago, I spend most of june and july writing about the word belvedere, at its root italian for « beautiful view ». In my vernacular, psychogeographic belvedere refers to a sensation akin to déjà vu, wherein the unsettling strangeness produced by the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time is applied to ghostly experience of physical place, of tactile and specific environmental aspects. The psychogeographic belvedere is a framing device, a structural component that designates a way of looking, wherein visual indicators and physical cues trigger misplaced, overlapping memories, superimposed in real time. This year, finally reading Annie Ernaux, I am struck by the resonance with what she calls the palimpsest sensation:
« She feels herself in several different moments of her life that float on top of each other. Time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap, without bleeding into each other, and where, it seems, she flickers in and out of all the shapes of being she has been. It is a sensation she’s had before, from time to time. Perhaps drugs could bring it on, but she has never taken any, for she values pleasure and lucidity above all else. Now, in a state of expansion and deceleration, she takes hold of the sensation. She has given it a name, « the palimpsest sensation », though the word is not quite accurate if she relies on the dictionary meaning, « a manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for later writing ». She sees it as a potential instrument of knowledge that is not only for herself, but general, almost scientific, though a knowledge of what, she doesn’t know… she would like to begin with this sensation, no doubt influenced by Proust, out of a need to base her undertaking on a real experience. »11
Rather than overwriting memories, this superimposition integrates new experiences by situating them within a kaleidoscope of prior experiences. Integration of impressions, rather than mere consumption, privileging the volumetric expanse of experience rather than attempting to quantify distances traveled, these are the preoccupations of forms of movement wherein the psychogeographic belvedere and palimpsest sensation are discernible.
In the too-big rental car that exposes us as tourists, BX and I sing along to ML Buch out the front windows, wind whistling above the sea, on the winding mountain roads, « —with our temporary bodies… ». To displace myself from known context and familiar routine carves out occasion for naiveté, humility, ignorance, unconsciousness, a more distinctive texture of spontaneity and surprise than I typically afford myself in my everyday context, a different volumetric expanse of experience through movement, and through that fraught, fungible word « travel ».
« What’s that paint job called? It’s like watercolor. » BX asks. « I think it’s weather erosion -? » I say. « Entropy! » SZ adjoins. We’re standing at the foot of a small tower up above the town of Nonza, looking down on the church and the quiet square, autumnal weather conspicuous in the swirling amber leaves pushing down the highway and flickering into little pockets of space in front of the coffeeshop window and tabac and covered cafe patio. Staircases climb toward residential buildings built along the cliff face, and the black sand beach far down below shows off iridescent turquoise waters glowing in the shallow bay, contrasting sharply against the shocking immediacy of the wine-dark sea underlining the foamy surf. The church facade is a pale mauve, streaked in white, unclear whether from intentional paint, or from months and years of wind and rain tearing across its pink walls.
« You can’t manufacture patina », I say, thinking of my first year architecture students and the popularity of « ruin porn » imagery, wherein layers of wear and decay, indicators of years and histories, are fetishized by young designers as an aesthetic. Winding back down the stairs into town, we follow makeshift signs for a « galerie d'art et de photographie » in what appears to be a small home studio. The artist, Florence, showcases sculptural paintings of the sea in cement and sand, coated with resin; fabric drawings rendered in delicate lineweight through embroidery, bold contrast in the use of dense colorful felt and single lines of thin black thread; stones arranged as human forms, bodies in varying relationship to one another, annotated with aphorisms like « attentisme »; carefully curated photographs of quotidian objects and laundry out on the line to dry, traces of everyday living documented as precious fragments, many of them represented in overlaid double exposure — intersecting lines to indicate time passing, patina, a psychogeographic belvedere, the palimpsest feeling; felted wool pebbles, soft stones, « galets laine feietrée ».
Looking close at the textural details and contrast in color and material, dense sculptural paintings hanging from the wall, delicate painterly mobiles hanging from the ceiling, wool details under black and white photographs stitched together with embroidery floss, rocks chosen for their shape, scale, and color arranged in lines and circles and planes, I’m struck most of all by the soft stones, thinking immediately of the art practices of J and MH, sculptural multimedia artists and textile workers invested in tactile form. That the work is a collage of collages, representative of place, indicative of a feeling, resonates deeply with how BX and I enact our multidisciplinary visual, literary, and auditory practices, et cela je l’explique à Florence dans un français fragmenté mais déterminé.
Still, I am thinking about the violence of art, of language, of representation broadly, in the documentation of place or feeling — the inevitable calcification, the fixity of form. Maggie Nelson’s portrayal of an ongoing argument with lover Harry Dodge at the opening of The Argonauts, posits that « words are not good enough. Not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow… Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it… »12 In my work as a compulsive documentarian — notetaking, drawing, perceiving, interpreting, painting, drafting, I wonder constantly about more yielding representational modes.
On our way out of the gallery, she pauses us, handing us each a paper papillon constructed from a single stapled, folded, glossy black and white photograph. Days later, after the long drive up and around Cape Corse, another sunny morning on the terrace, another time-suspending ferry ride, off the island with its tempestuous storms and turquoise waters glimmering, perfectly clear straight through to the white sand below, contrasting with afternoons spent beachcombing and hopping between tidepools in wintry weather on the northern shores, I remain astonished at the seeming-impossibility of having encountered this woman and her work, in such a small town, in another language, in this lifetime. « Yeah, » BX says of Florence, « we are hewn from the same stone. »
« oînops póntos » Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey. 8th century B.C.
Henri Michaux, and Lynn Hoggard. Tent Posts. Green Integer Books. Kobenhavn, 1997. Poteaux d’angle 1981.
Alicia Kennedy. « On Going: The first in a two-part inquiry into the meaning of movement. » https://www.aliciakennedy.news/p/on-wanderlust. 31 August 2020.
Hannah Arendt. Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, The Review of Politics. 1 July 1953.
Maggie Nelson. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. W.W. Norton & Co. New York, 2011.
Rachel Cusk. Coventry: Essays. Picador Paperback Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, 2019.
Annie Ernaux, and Alison L. Strayer. The Years. Seven Stories Press, 2017. Les Années 2008.
Eula Biss. Having and Being Had. Riverhead Books. New York, 1 September 2020.
Walter Benjamin, and Edmund Jephcott. One-Way Street. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2016.
Maggie Nelson. Bluets. Wave Books. Seattle, 2009.
Annie Ernaux, and Alison L. Strayer. The Years. Seven Stories Press, 2017. Les Années 2008.
Maggie Nelson. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2015.