Death

by

Mountain

Archive I

A land covered in darkness. A land grown over with swarths, swards, swads. Remnants of yellow rattle and foxglove beardtongue haunting the meadow, the leasow, the mædsplott, suppressed by tussocky matt. Thistle, nettle, ragwort. Half-buried a broke plough gone to moss and mildew. A ghost pasture. A farmland gone fallow decades prior. The family hung on longer than most. Mosaic ecologies becoming bramble, scrub and tree.

Rough stuff that wears down wildflowers.

On the long drive to the big empty house the hills rise in the distance, level out into the horizon, sink away beneath. Beech, birch and spruce canopy in the rear view replaced by bristly scrub. Scrubby lichen. Lichenous stone.

Eight hours rattling around inside a Castlewood Brown 1979 Volvo with Carlsbad Yellow trim when the landscape changes suddenly, but not ‘all of a sudden’, not ‘On a’ or ‘Of a’ sudden.

‘Swift Rivers are with sudden Ice constrain’d.’ (Virgil, c.29 BC).

When qualifying an adjective in the attributive position sudden is often hyphened to it,

‘Sudden-whelming storm’ (Newman, 1836).

The sudden-thinning forest

The sudden-

The sudden-sudden

My aching lower back.

I flip the sun visor and wind down the passenger side window. One elbow bent in the breeze and Algebra Suicide’s The Secret Like Crazy on the 6-CD changer. Pioneer CDX-M50. Fully loaded for many hours of the high-quality sound that only compact discs can give.

Even with every window cracked, dead Frederik Kruken’s secondhand upholstery smoke hangs in the air. A mildewed smell that I associate with split leather sofas, absorbant pub carpeting and old family cars. The 1995 Renault Laguna Estate we drove from Oil City to Caposele and back, pausing only occasionally for motorway espresso.

I drift in and out of sleep as the boxy white whale navigates the scenic Alps and the winding Avellino roads. The tiny mountain towns with their crumpled plazas and jagged piazzas and knuckled churches gnawed at by the hungry earth.

A rabid dog paces the car as it climbs incrementally up towards the family villa — a three floored slab of fleabane webbed stucco and terracotta — where, in the sun bleached mornings, my Grandmother sits on the street on her little folding chair with a matching table just round enough to hold a coffee and a glass of red wine, blessing the foreheads of the olive skinned schoolchildren prodded sharply to her door by zealous parents.

Strangers throwing open shutters to the shade of neighbouring houses whose balconies are only an outstretched arms distance away, shuffling down the thin stone streets with armfuls of packages, stuffing every nook of the Estate with heavy balls of cheese, cans of tomatoes, olives, oils, espresso machines, iron pots and pans and wood fire pizza spinners, two irate caged chickens.

I press my back into the Mediterranean humidity and gawk openly at the ritual lessening.

In my copy of Flights by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, I underline a passage in which she complains of her parents that,

’They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation. They returned to collect the letters and bills that stacked up on the chest of drawers. (…) Then they would lead a settled life for the next year, going back every morning to the same thing they had left in the evening, their clothes permeated by the scent of their own flat, their feet tirelessly wearing down a path in the carpet.

The narrator (I spend most of the novel trying to decide how much this narrator represents Tokarczuk herself) goes on to explain how she didn’t inherit her parent’s ‘vegetable capacity’ and simply cannot put down roots. But I find myself at odds with her theory that ‘a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest’.

Actually, I think there is great dignity in standing still. Roots be damned. But then I really fucking hate to travel.

Maybe that’s why I have, until fairly recently, lived my life in a dense and diverse city of thirteen million and more. A place where you can stand still and be always in a kind of motion. A constant flow of change.

At the age of 12 I’m afflicted with a few minutes of motion sickness at the outset of every car journey. More egregious still, the slightest dip in the road surface, or the briefest passage beneath a bridge or flyover, will induce an imbalance in my inner ear pressure. A condition exacerbated by nearby megalithic stones or any other roadside object constructed on a ley line.

The result is a temporary submerging of auditory sensation. How Kevin Shields once described My Bloody Valentine as a band you strain to hear muffled through a neighbours bedroom wall.

By 30 I’m a walking encyclopedia of ferry disasters. Burned or capsized or lost to catastrophic hull failure of unknown cause. Crowds of Summer tourists succumbing to hypothermic delirium in frigid waters. Happy couples drowning due to insufficient numbers of poorly maintained lifeboats. Negligent captains abandoning ship early, leaving their passengers to fend for themselves.

I read every extant account of the MS Estonia, fixated on the details of families trapped in air bubble cabins as they and their en suite facilities sink beneath the Baltic, never to be recovered. Escapees crawling over the upturned hull, haunted by the distressed faces pressed against portholes.

The unsolved murder of two backpackers on the same ship years prior.

‘This murky, loathsome death-trap, this slaughter-house.’ (Browning, 1835).

I hope to die fast in a plane crash so as to avoid any lingering cessation of life, although statistically speaking I’m more likely to be killed in a train derailing somewhere in Germany. Which may be why I spend as much of my train travel as possible in the buffet cart drinking single serving glasses of wine.

I roll my jaw as R████ shifts gears and the Volvo bumps shallow potholes and gutters.

We both wince at the grind of small sharp stones against undercarriage and paintwork.

I curl my thumb and middle finger and launch an imaginary cigarette towards a non-existent treeline, watching as twisted junipers claw their way across a mean and beautiful landscape of craggy acid soils claimed by spiky purple heather.

Note: the following section is sketched out pending heavy rewrites.

An unassuming Tuesday morning. Two years on the mountain. I’m sitting in the attic under the eaves, my writing desk tucked between collar beam and window. I feed an off-white sheet into my Olivetti Roma, manufactured in the 1980s by Olivetti Do Brasil. A travel typewriter with smooth keys, 13pt macro elite typeface, gunmetal case with eye-catching red trim. A detail that recalls the best known works by the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

In a cafe across the North and Baltic seas a chronically ill poet reading from a collection of body horrors offers the advice: “Write what you know”.

I’m over the Atlantic Ocean standing in the elevated MASP exhibition hall. I’m pressed against the glass and concrete ribs and looking down along Avenida Paulista, trying to catch a glimpse of the obelisk black projection of Edifício da FIESP. A building whose design, like MASP’s, unsettles conventional verticality, with an enormous pyramid volume raised on a structural transition with street level space beneath. Where FIESP diverges from MASP is in the plasticity of its void. Although FIESP’s architects intended the building to generate public space on its ground level, this ambition has been constrained by a primarily corporate — rather than public — programming. While FIESP succeeds in bringing the street level circulation into the building, MASP’s floating superstructure manages to give its ground level space back to the city.

My left cheek is currently smooshed against MASP’s wraparound fenestration as part of (what I’m telling myself is my critical) research into ‘vacancy aesthetics’, with an essay and exhibition deadline looming back in London.

And I’m hopelessly drawn to the dialogue between these two buildings.

In the anthology Stones Against Diamonds (Architectural Association Publications, 2013) Lina Bo Bardi details MASP as standing 70m in length and 29m deep, with a 5m cantilever on either side of its two prestressed longitudinal beams. The building is raised 8m and supported by four columns at the end. All of its installations, air-conditioning included, are exposed to view. The finishing is kept as simple as possible: exposed concrete, whitewash, granite flagstones, tempered glass.

On Avenida Paulista, everything is about verticality. As one of its defining landmarks, my first encounter with MASP (streaked red looming in the distance) is monumental, but as Bo Bardi goes on to explain,

‘Monumentality does not depend on ‘dimensions’, as such. The Parthenon is monumental, despite its reduced scale. Fascist constructions are not monumental but elephantine, in all their bloated arrogance, their defiance of logic. What I call monumental has nothing to do with size or ‘pomp’ but relates to a sense of collectivity, that is, a collective consciousness. Anything that goes beyond the ‘particular’, reaching out to the collective, can (and perhaps should) be monumental. This idea might be derided in countries that stake their political lives and futures on a false notion of individualism, the falsely democratic individualism of the ‘consumer society’.

This philosophy reveals itself on closer inspection, and especially when viewing MASP in the context of its surroundings. Instead of superimposing itself on its site, MASP’s design intentionally preserves the ground around and beneath it in a state of collective permeability. Here, Paulista’s signature vertical expansion is used to free up street level public realm, regenerating the demolished Trianon centre as an outlook onto the ‘Brazilian woodland’ of Siqueira Campos Park,

‘I tried to recreate the ‘atmosphere’ of the Trianon. I would like to see people going there to attend open-air exhibitions, take part in debates, listen to music, watch films. I would like to see children play there in the morning and afternoon sun. And to be fair-minded about it, there should even be space for outdoor gigs and everyday bad taste. (…) Deep down, I see architecture as a collective enterprise, like poetry’

Door to door, the move from our South East London borough to Sofie’s Mountain takes one full day in a rental van across seven countries with no room to pick up the friendly anarchist hitchhiker at the Netherlands services.

We eat dry cinnamon buns and uninspired sandwiches and marvel at the monotony of Western & Northern European motorways, repeating the same Fugazi and Lungfish albums, crossing the one long bridge so long that in the fog you cannot see the land behind or ahead of you. Just one lonely van packed with all our belongings suspended in the empty space above a windy straight.

After one-thousand-five-hundred kilometres of leg cramping idling — momentum without movement — we pull the car onto an old road emptied of traffic. Norwegian spruce flanks interrupted by farmsteads with bell crowned barns, painted falu red with white frames. Gotland sheep pastures penned by zigzag roundpole fences, built from saplings, tied with peels of bark tightening as they dry. Buzzards perching atop the tallest posts.

…to be continued…

last update: 25.09.26