How to Disappear

by Duncan Fallowell

  My second encounter with Pompeii was on a breezy afternoon five years after my actual visit to the site, and it was indoors: the London exhibition to which I’ve already made reference. I love museums and therefore one of the regrettable cock-ups on my To Noto escapade was that I hadn’t realised in advance that Pompeii was actually the ghost of a ghost and all its artefacts had been transferred to Naples, to the National Archaeological Museum set up in the old Bourbon cavalry barracks. On my southwards plunge I was not going to make a U turn and go back to the objects in Naples. But now some of the objects came to me, two hundred of them, in an exhibition called ‘Rediscovering Pompeii’ which had stopped off at the Accademia Italiana in Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, on its journey round the world. These days not only people go travelling; treasures do too, cushioned and boxed and insured, curated and chaperoned, heralded by politicians, diplomats and princes. At one time the circus came to town to astound us with its marvels; now it is the travelling art show. This one comprised green glass jugs, bronze lamps, gold bracelets and earrings, cameo brooches, shapely clay pottery, sublime statuary, bowls and flasks, kitchen and medical implements, etc. There was even a pair of dice on display, most magical of objects (and invented by the Hindus incidentally). Why most magical? Because dice liquefy destiny and break the grip of the inevitable; when you gamble you sunder cause and effect.

  Objects are vulnerable and require protection. In return they glorify the possessor and are physical evidence of his custodial power. Do the Elgin Marbles look less in the British Museum than they would back on the Parthenon frieze? In fact they look more. More like sculpture, less like adornment, because we have done the Duchamp trick of taking them out of context and putting them in a gallery. Something similar had happened to the objects at the Pompeii exhibition in London, which were mostly not ornaments but functional objects which had been ornamented. When the objects were in context, they probably attained a sort of inertia, edited out of the attention by quotidian familiarity. Did the Dancing Lar (up on toes, bronze, olive-green patina, about twelve inches high) dance better in the old days back in Pompeii? I think not. Objects as beautifully preserved as this appear to exist outside time. Their whole purpose was to triumph over the ephemeral, the circumstantial.

  The eruption began on August 24th 79 AD (how do they work out these dates?) and took only two days to bury Pompeii-Herculaneum under fifteen feet of rubble. Talk about fire energy. The suddenness of the event means that for most of their existence these objects have not participated in life. They were instead transported through a conceptual hyperspace of collapsed time directly to us. They are young in the world. They are the flowers of catastrophe. Time has not been able to work its grinding, daily dose upon them.

  To view such things after a journey on the London Underground sitting opposite someone who unnerves you, or after a motorway traffic jam which had you juggling radio stations in desperation, is to mediate further their meaning or, let us say, their relevance. Even the most abstract painting or building can reach us only by passing through filters of the personal. A lamp which is used for light, be it ever so beautiful, will – seen day after day at home – be valued in the first place as a light source, while a lamp in a glass case will never be a light source even for a second. It can only be an object of contemplation. And so, because this lamp is also a beautiful object which once had a function, we fall into a mood of nostalgia, the poignant reverie on a way of life which has gone. This is the second method of giving context to an object: through dreaming. The first is through the study of its history.

  History is nostalgia with teeth. Nostalgia is one of the most powerful emotions of the civilised man, not so much in its reductive meaning of nostalgia for a golden age which has passed, but nostalgia as an enriching function of the soul, an activation of Platonic ideal states, a spreading of consciousness beyond the present moment. Many otherwise intelligent men forget that consciousness exists in time as well as space. Since material from the future is limited, this activation tends to employ past material which is plentiful, and so the more intensely one lives in the present, the more susceptible one is to nostalgia. This is what we receive from the object as relic. But the object also receives something from us. As a show-business star is rendered more charismatic by the adoration of audiences, so is an object in a museum or exhibition. The more it is venerated the more venerable it becomes.

  Objects, like show-business stars, can acquire such a powerful presence in the imagination that an actual physical encounter may be disappointing. As we have remarked, Venice may well have achieved this on a metropolitan scale. A more modest example would be the case of amplified music on a CD which can be played so cleanly and loudly that to hear the same, say, symphony in a concert hall involves a reduction in stimulus. One must adjust, one must retune, to the acoustic performance. Use of the imperative ‘must’ is intentional because the live encounter is always superior to the simulated one. Why? Because machines are dead and people are alive. The CD performance is exactly repeatable. The live performance is always unique.

  Are museum exhibits ‘live’ or ‘simulated’? The marble table on show at the Accademia exhibition, on griffon supports with outspread wings, is decidedly the ding an sich, but not the ding in situ. It has been singularised and immobilised, like the symphony on the CD. We are sometimes told these days that objectification is morally wrong. I can’t remember why. Something to do with alienation probably. But it can be extremely exciting and rewarding – not only in a museum but also in sex for example. Individuation is the empowerment of the self and this has to be predicated on a degree of reification of the other, as – to reverse the powerflow – an excess of consideration for the other will inevitably require self-abasement. Some might say that this marble table, like the sex object, degenerates into a component of private fantasy, becomes fodder for a predatory will. Who cares when the result is a revelation and brings forth new life?

  The exhibition was sponsored by IBM. Which reminds us that objectification can lead to a pulverisation of experience into sense-data so extensive that only another computer can deal with it. A desiccated world, reconstituted mechanically, is a remarkable achievement in itself but when the external world becomes merely fuel for a contrived world, the facts of life by which we live and die may become increasingly unbearable to us. E.M. Forster wrote a disquieting story on this theme, The Machine Stops, a long time ago. This becomes the contemporary equivalent of the great nineteenth-century debate: rural Wordsworthian ‘let it be natural’ versus urban Baudelairean ‘let it be artificial’. The former is Darwinian but spiritual; the latter is religious but atheistic. Do you want the epic, pantheistic experience stumbling round Pompeii? Or the lyric, intellectual experience sniffing round glass cases? Let us have both. Our understanding will operate through reciprocity, a concept we cited in the first chapter.

  In the human sphere the most obvious reciprocity between the natural and the artificial is in the realm of sex. Pompeii is a very sexy place – gay, straight, everything between and beyond. Its citizens doubtless went through the emotional tangles we all go through and the ancient world has much to say on romantic love as well as on recreational sex. But they did not veil sexuality and are at home with it in a way that the Christian world never is, nor the Muslim or Jewish worlds. Sex in Pompeii was simply everywhere, openly displayed in pictures, household objects, public statues, graffiti, brothels and books, surviving testimony to the ruthlessness of sexual repression by the religions which came after. Though most of the explicit imagery has, for protection and not from censoriousness, been removed to the Naples museum, Pompeian sexuality still hits you with enormous force when you are there, those divine gifts of pleasure and beauty, anguish and excitement in human life which are sex. Something goaty and awe-inspiring trembles in the air and one cannot help feeling that in the arts of congress the Pompeian would find modern man a curiously worried child. Modern European psychology and art has largely been devoted to repairin
g this rupture from the elemental which was master-minded in private life by the Church and in public life by the industrial revolution.

  Sex, so crucial to the experience of Pompeii, was almost completely absent from this London exhibition, as though sex could have no place in the software of information technology. Sex is far too human – the programmer cringes, turns aside to measure the height of a vase in exact centimetres. Among the many oil lamps on display there was none of Pompeii’s most popular kind, the phallic type. Indeed there was only one phallus (i.e. the erect penis) to be seen here at all, an elegant stone abstraction which would have been wedged into the wall of a house to discourage malign influences. Of the countless decorative phalli found all over Pompeii and Herculaneum not one made it to Rutland Gate.

  The exhibition refused to be sexy. What it wanted to be was pretty – and it succeeded. Though the space was cramped and the objects bundled in, one was arrested by the grace of objects from the ancient world. The head of an athlete, for example, reminded one that such skill collapsed in the Dark Ages and modelling as unsubmissive and fine as this would not resurface until Donatello. So it was an enthralling prettiness, a Midsummer Night’s Dream, with nothing of the cute about it, more of the macabre, and I employ the word ‘pretty’ because of the smallness of scale. One is so accustomed in our cities to a setting all out of scale to ourselves that to find oneself in a world where man is the measure is like finding a world in miniature: human scale has come to mean small scale. But our artificial creation, the City, in outgrowing us, has taken on some attributes of Nature. Phrases like ‘the asphalt jungle’ (W. R. Burnett, 1949) or ‘the concrete jungle’ (Desmond Morris, 1969) remind us that the dichotomy between the two sensibilities, artificial and natural, has here been resolved in a way that is close to despair. The general view is that modern cityscapes are at their most appealing at night when they appear to melt into the starry cosmos.

  The computers at this exhibition were the offspring of the Neapolis Project, a large computer installation by IBM at the archaeological site itself which aims to record every possible piece of information about Pompeii and its treasures, recycling the accumulation into educational games. According to the publicity, ‘One insight identifies restaurants in different districts according to price…’ Restaurants in 79 AD or restaurants to-day? Couldn’t be sure. Another line of research has been to devise precautions against site-vulnerability in case of another volcanic eruption; Pompeii escaped once from the world and they’re determined it won’t happen again. Each of the exhibition rooms had a number of video screens incorporating the latest touchscreen techniques. This allowed you to enter and explore the programmes by touching different parts of the screen. Some of them didn’t work, or perhaps my fingers aren’t hot enough. One became lost in a labyrinth of bits. To add insult to injury, the brilliance of the onscreen images drained the real objects of colour and the vivacity of moving images made the static exhibits akin to wallflowers, party poopers refusing to dance. Thus the images became more real, that is, more vital to the senses, than the exhibits themselves. The computers were intended to serve Pompeii but the reverse was happening. Pompeii became the raw material which enabled the computers to dazzle us with their ingenuity.

  But the objects had the final say. Their very silence, their merciless motionlessness, was pregnant with tension, a challenge of hauteur thrown back at the process of digitalisation. These objects, wonderful in themselves, were made numinous by their successors in European art. We can trace the lines of stylistic procreation backwards to these potent originals. All these objects endure beyond the electronic moment and so prevail. It is the video image which rapidly fades out of the memory, whereas the object squats stubbornly in the imagination by virtue of occupying time and space, refusing to be pulverised.

  Pompeii and Herculaneum are of course beyond the capacity of any computer and the archaeological site continues its story in the living world. For example the restorers long inserted reinforced concrete into the fabric, but this turned out to be a disaster, expanding in the heat and causing structures to split, and there has been a return to the original materials from which the Roman towns were built. The attempt to find the perfect weed-killer continues in the battle with resurgent verdure – volcanic soil is so maddeningly fertile. Vesuvius was covered in rich vineyards and was known as the Hill of Bacchus. As a reminder of that, as well as of the inhabitants’ physical freedom, there were two marble statues in the London show, naked males leaning backwards and flaunting their slack genitals, one a satyr pouring wine, the other a drunken Heracles peeing. Sex? Nah, just a piss-up…

  A third of the archaeological site remains to be dug out and every year fresh controversies burst around new discoveries. Endless numbers of penises keep popping up. The region is geologically unstable. An earthquake in 1980 damaged in some way two-thirds of the excavations. And of course Vesuvius, according to the historical record, is long overdue for another eruption. Most exciting of all is the ancient library unearthed at the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum. The first Getty Museum at Malibu in

  California is a reproduction of this villa but the original is only now being systematically investigated. New techniques in unravelling scrolls sealed by fire may give us lost or hitherto unknown masterpieces from the dawn of civilised humanity. How great a benefit this would be, were it to trigger another Classical renaissance in Europe, allowing us drink anew from the wisdom of the Greeks and the statecraft of the Romans.

  But what I loved quite as much as the exhibits from that site was their location at this site: a large, gentle, creamy London house. The Accademia Italiana’s premises at 24 Rutland Gate were built in 1841 for a man called John Sheepshanks, a bachelor and cloth manufacturer from Leeds who became an art collector. Henry Cole took Turner to the house in 1851 – The Survey of London is telling me these things. In 1899 the house was purchased by Baron Frederic d’Erlanger who enlarged it and refined the interiors in Parisian taste. He was a member of a European banking family, international plutocrats along the lines of the Camondos, Rothschilds, Bischoffsheims and Sassoons. Frederic’s father was German, his mother American, and he was born in Paris, a Proustian figure who became a naturalised British citizen, combining his career as banker with that of composer – several of his operas were performed at Covent Garden, and there was a ballet, Le cent baisers, which made it onto record in the early days of HMV. Heedless of the bombs, the Baron died in London in 1943. As for the Accademia Italiana, it has vanished from these premises. Maybe the organisation is defunct or conducts its activities more reclusively elsewhere.

  Yesterday I drove to Rutland Gate to look again at number 24. It was a dispiriting experience. Who owns the house now? Everything delicate or mellow about the place has been eliminated and its soul eviscerated – there’s nothing like an excess of barbarian wealth to destroy a building. Where the garden should be, there was a car park with three glossy new motors. The house itself was lit up inside but empty, decorated in a shrill hotel style, sealed by metal grilles. It is both occupied and unoccupied.

  At Kildonan Farm the rumour-machine is in full swing. While I’ve been absorbed in the book on Pompeii, Luca has been downstairs gossiping and he comes up to the bedroom, excitedly pulling on a cigarette. ‘He’s coming to-morrow, we heard Maruma’s coming to-morrow!’ he informs me.

  ‘When?’

  ‘On the boat.’

  ‘Which boat?’

  ‘There’s only one boat. The mid-day boat.’

  ‘I thought there were other boats.’

  ‘No, no, no, there’s only one boat…or are there other boats?’ Luca looks concerned and dashes off in search of Colin Carr.

  That evening we have a dinner of homemade vegetable soup, roast pork, and a blackberry & apple tart with cream. The Carr’s son, Donny, waits on us and clears away the table and I ask him if the house is haunted.

  He stops, a plate in each hand, and his reddish complexion colours more deeply. ‘Yes.’
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br />   ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well…The stair-carpet rolled upstairs.’

  ‘All by itself?’

  ‘Yes. All by itself. And with all the nails taken out and left on the side.’

  ‘What do you mean, left on the side?’

  ‘The carpet nails were left on the stairs but very neatly and the carpet was in a roll at the top. It happened twice.’

  Donny is at Gordonstoun. After the age of eleven there is no schooling on the island and all the children have to go to boarding school but the local authority helps with the cost. I wonder if they teach carpet-laying at Gordonstoun.

  By the next day the warm weather has returned and the views are exhilarating. Clouds and islands, hills and mountains and water mix up silver and green, blue and purple and gold in combinations which are unpaintable because they are always in slow motion. Seabirds go up and down, up and down on promontories of rock. Everyone troops along in their wellington boots to the jetty to await Maruma and the midday boat, and I am disconcerted to discover that a number of them are walking unsteadily and slurring their words. I am far from being a prude but I don’t think our livers were invented for morning booze. I point to a burnt-out vehicle by the jetty. ‘That was Shellenberg’s,’ says one of the drunks.