Notes On A Writing Life 30
October 2021
A couple of weeks ago I stood among crowds at the Place de l’Etoile to see the wrapped shape of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. It was a misty evening at sunset and the soft blue-gray color of the material that had been wrapped and tied around the monument matched that of the autumn dusk. What was it like, and what did it remind me of? What is the difference between a wrapped object or building and a naked one?
Christo Javacheff and his partner in life and art Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, had been working on this design for decades, and it was in this year of Christo’s death that it was put in place. Hundreds of workers installed the wrap, and would take it down again. Meanwhile, it was mysterious, an object that no longer declared itself as a statement of military power and success in battle. It became a portal, a gate leading somewhere, an object of veneration. It had become completely other, fascinating in a way that it had never been. What was overt had been covered over – as the Pont Neuf had been years ago when similarly wrapped, transformed into a gold Christmas cracker to pull across a river.
Was that it? Do we long for the hidden, the transformed, the indecipherable? (Could we wrap statues, instead of simply pulling them down? Here stands – nobody in particular?)
Why is a wrapped and tied gift so inviting? A veil pulled over reality such an invitation to dream?
I admit to loving the mysterious, the ambiguous, the suggestion rather than the simple fact. Back in London I sat with an artist friend, Madeleine Strobel, on the floor of her house and looked through her recent work: little bound books, with hidden writing and the mysterious marks that were based on bare trees’ branches, half-shown footprints in snow and mud – the tracks of people walking during the pandemic, alone and in twos. I thought of poems, that show without telling. Of stories that hint at outcomes, rather than declaring them. Of the half-known, tentative ways forward that we are all asked to consider in this age of uncertainty. Clues in a twig, an animal print: the trackers’ knowledge. Of a society less superficially sure of itself, more instinctive. Of wrapping ourselves and our creations in a cloak of silence – no explanation needed.
Go well, go canny as the Scots say.
Affectionately, Ros