Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  These are small, perhaps trivial, rituals, but they do suggest that there is rather more than a merely vestigial magicality in the way we deal with the cities we live in. It is precisely because the city is too large and formless to be held in the mind as an imaginative whole that we make recourse to irrational short-cuts and simplifications. Magic may be a major alternative to rejection of the city as a bad unmanageable place; it offers a real way of surviving in an environment whose rationale has, like a dead language, become so obscure that only a handful of specialists (alas, they are all too frequently sociologists, urban economists and town planners) can remember or understand it. The rest of us make do with an improvised day-to-day magic which, like shamanism, works because we conspire that it shall work.

  Within the city at large there are multitudes of contracted, superstitious cities, sequestered places with clear boundaries, rituals and customs, whose outlines often correspond with those of the tribal castes and styles. There is, indeed, a strong case for interpreting the kinds of style I have described in earlier chapters as manifestations of magical cosmologies. But I am primarily interested here in magic as a technique of urban life, in superstition and ritual as methods of interpreting the city as nature, and not as tools for welding social organisations together. The distinction is flimsy – the functions are complicatedly intertwined – but it is convenient insofar as it reveals the individual alone with his city; and I want to examine that private city as it emerges from his personal symbols and taboos.

  In Notting Hill Gate in London, or it might be Greenwich Village in New York, the unreasonable city has come to the point where it cannot be ignored by even the civic authorities. The streets around Ladbroke Grove, with their architecture of white candy stucco, are warrens of eccentric privateness; they are occupied by people who have taken no part in the hypothetical consensus of urban life – the poor, the blacks, the more feckless young living on National Assistance or casual jobs on building sites or bedsitter industries like stringing beads or making candles. The district is notoriously difficult to police: it has a long, twenty-five-year-old record of race-riots, drug arrests, vicious disputes between slum landlords and their tenants, complaints about neighbours, and petty litigation. Like many impoverished areas in big cities, it is picturesque in the sun, and Americans walk the length of the street market in the Portobello Road snapping it with Kodaks; but on dull days one notices the litter, the scabby paint, the stretches of torn wire netting, and the faint smell of joss-sticks competing with the sickly sweet odour of rising damp and rotting plaster. Where the area shows signs of wealth, it is in the typically urban non-productive entrepreneurism of antiques shops and stalls. Various hard-up community action groups have left their marks: a locked shack with FREE SHOP spraygunned on it, and old shoes and sofas piled in heaps around it; a makeshift playground under the arches of the motorway with huge crayon faces drawn on the concrete pillars; slogans in whitewash, from SMASH THE PIGS to KEEP BRITAIN WHITE. The streets are crowded with evident isolates: a pair of nuns in starched habits, a Sikh in a grubby turban, a gang of West Indian youths, all teeth and jawbones, a man in a fedora, greasy Jesus Christs in shiny green suede coats with Red Indian fringes at their hems, limp girls in flaky Moroccan fleeces, macrobiotic devotees with transparent parchment faces, mongrel dogs, bejeaned delivery men, young mothers in cardigans with secondhand prams. These are the urban spacemen, floating alone in capsules of privacy, defying the gravity of the city.

  Here magic flourishes, and everywhere one sees evidence of a growing devout irrationalism. Little bookshops sell the I-Ching, packs of tarot cards and fat studies of the obscure mathematics of astrology. You can buy Sufi water-gongs to aid contemplation (‘It helps you get into yourself, like know who you are and who you’re going to be . . .’) and the macrobiotic foodshop on Portobello Road, Ceres, even turns the consumption of vegetables into a mystical religion. Buddhist splinter groups have turned scrubby basement flats into temples, painting the names of their swamis in erratic red letters on white front doors. The politics of racial warfare are magical too: their cabalistic symbols and slogans, as absolute and unlikely as mantras, seem to have largely replaced action with signs. The world of pigs versus people belongs to witchcraft; spells are cast with sprayguns, wax images replaced by ritual terms of abuse. For people without formal power who feel themselves to be on the ignored periphery of the social system, magical display may be their most effective course of action, at least therapeutic, at best miraculous. (In the Golborne district of Notting Hill, a neighbourhood policeman, Constable Jim Price, distributes chattily informative visiting cards to the mainly West Indian residents, and makes a point of helping everybody’s children across roads and acting as a one-man citizens’ advice bureau. As miracles go, Constable Price is rather a small one, but there is surely a direct relationship between the hopeless bloodthirstiness of the slogans on his beat and his studied friendliness and refusal to harass and arrest, in sharp contrast to generations of Notting Hill policemen.)

  The fierce heterogeneity of the district makes it ‘urban’ in the sense of that word as it is used by the city’s most powerful detractors. Here one feels the fragility of law, taut as a frayed guitar string; one can smell the foetid decomposition of the neighbourhood garbage, as if the human element, too, were being sucked into the cycle of decay; one can see and hear crackling hostilities between the people of the streets, always alert for enemies; and one shivers from the draught of loneliness, poverty and privation, where children have to play under the overhead thunder of the traffic, and elderly shiftless people sometimes go literally in rags with a glaze in their eyes as if they had already died. Yet here fashionable people buy little pastel-coloured terraced houses, and the bell-bottomed and caftaned crew of flat-dwellers talk about the place in affectionate diminutives. It is, simply, ‘The Gate’, as Ladbroke Grove is ‘The Grove’ – as if they were living in some model village in Wiltshire with retired brigadiers behind every elmed drive. Notting Hill Gate incorporates a central paradox of city life, in that its nature is as prolific and untameable as anywhere in London, yet for some at least of its inhabitants it has been accommodated to an order so benign as to be cosy.

  The messy prolixity of the place makes it a perfect territory for the exercise of natural magic. Its unpredictability, its violent transitions from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, its atmosphere of being crowded out with disconnected loners, its physical characteristics as a maze of narrow streets and irregular crescents, combine to force the individual into a superstitious, speculative relationship with his environment. He cannot, merely by studying the arrangements and amenities of the district, deduce from them who he is, for the answers he would get would be impossibly various. Society in Notting Hill Gate reveals no rationale, no comprehensible structure. The sets of values embodied in it are almost as diverse as the number of people on the streets. If untutored man were to be set down on a tropical island and told to construct a pattern of beliefs and morals from what he saw around him, he could hardly have more difficulty than a newcomer to Notting Hill Gate. It is a place where anything is possible, a nightmare – or paradise, perhaps, for some – of chance and choice.

  It is no wonder that here the I-Ching has become a cultic accessory to life in the city. It is, says a girl in a poncho with fair hair to her waist and a knobbly zodiacal ring, ‘quite . . . philosophical’. It preaches a doctrine of continuous change, of man’s life as a series of chances, taken or rejected, against a background of universal flux. Shall I go to the shops or the cinema, does the day promise to be good or evil, will the milkman go for another week unpaid? One may toss slender yarrow stalks, or flip a combination of three coins, to find the hexagram of the moment. How should this paragraph go? The coins produce the figure Chia Jen, the sign of the family: ‘what is most advantageous is that the wife be firm and correct.’ The commentary goes on: ‘The first line, undivided, shows its subject establishing restrictive regulations in his household. Occasion
for repentance will disappear . . .’ A book might, I suppose, be construed as a household, and the female element in writing is mythologically reputed to be style; but, even allowing for the most ingenious metaphors, this is not the most constructive criticism I have ever had. It does, however, indicate the way in which the I-Ching works; its oracular statements are wonderfully ambiguous, and, if you wish, you may see any specific question you choose reflected in them. It isolates events from the swirl, and the controlled chance of its operation satisfactorily excludes rational explanations and justifications. Its advice is personal, and pertains to the immediate moment; for someone who feels disconnected from society’s intricate net of causes and relations, for whom time has atomised into a spray of haphazard occasions the I-Ching presents a system of choice which corresponds perfectly with the contingency and privacy of his view of the world. The sixty-four hexagrams and their variants make up a model of something very like a city; diverse, random, unpredictable, yet finally possessed of an order, even though it is an order which is beyond the grasp of the individual imagination. The play and ritual which accompany its use endow each consultation with a uniqueness of occasion. Universal forces, so mysterious, so apparently impersonal, miraculously bend themselves to accommodate the needs of a single person at a particular moment. If Notting Hill is a scramble of contradictory messages, the cosmos is benign and – if tapped with the right mumbo-jumbo – it will make itself simply and clearly audible to the honest inquirer. Raymond Van Over, the editor of the most widely available edition of the I-Ching, says in his introduction: ‘form is a mere illusory manifestation of underlying causes.’ It is the same consoling message that the Situationists and the Hare Krishna people preach; believe it, and the city, with all its paradoxes, puzzles, and violent inequities, will float away before your eyes, a chimera to delude only the hopelessly, cynically earthbound. The computer dating agency and the horoscope render a similar service: science (especially mystical mathematics) and magic are closely allied – both promise to rip the veil from the troubling face of the world at one sweep.

  Notting Hill Gate is a superstitious place because it seems to exceed rational prescriptions and explanations. On the Portobello Road, one feels oneself growing more insubstantial, less and less able to keep a sense of personal proportion in the crowd of people who all look so much poorer, or richer, or wilder, or more conventional than one is oneself. It is certainly hard to keep in touch with other people in the city; it may sometimes be almost as difficult to keep in touch with one’s own self – that diminishing pink blob which rolls and slides like a lost coin in a gutter. The people who float on the tide of metaphysical junk – freaks of all kinds . . . into macrobiotics, yoga, astrology, illiterate mysticism, acid, terrible poetry by Leonard Cohen and tiny novels by Richard Brautigan – have managed, at a price. The new folk magic of the streets promises to have some unhappy poetical consequences but as a way of responding to the city it does reflect a truth about the nature of the place which we had better learn to confront.

  The truth is one of an ultimate privacy, in which the self, cosseted and intensified, internalises the world outside, and sees the city as a shadow-show of its own impulses and movements. Privacy and reality are profoundly equated, so that what is most real is located in the deepest recesses of the self. The external world turns into an epic movie, supplying details on which to feed one’s fantasies; like Disney’s Fantasia, which, when shown in London three years ago, drew crowds of hippies who dosed themselves with acid at selected points in the film. Like Notting Hill Gate itself, it was perfect trip material, and Disney’s original intentions were as irrelevant as those of the civic architects who first laid out those streets and crescents.

  In this search for the disappearing self, the physical body becomes a central symbol; the stomach, intestines, and organs of reproduction are solemnly attended to, as vessels in which the precious self is contained. In Ceres, the macrobiotic shop on Portobello Road, I bought Macrobiotics: An Invitation to Health and Happiness by George Ohsawa:

  The kitchen is the studio where life is created . . . Knowing that no absolute rules exist, or can be followed forever, we start with principles that are as adaptable to the constantly changing world we inhabit as possible. Only you are the artist who draws the painting of your life . . . Strictly speaking, no one eats the same food and the same amount even from the same cooking pot. Such recognition of individuality leads us to the fact that we are living by ourselves and we are creating our life by ourselves.

  The girls who drift about the store, filling wire baskets with soya beans, miso and wakame seaweed have the dim inwardness of gaze of Elizabeth Siddall in Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’. In bedsitters in Ladbroke Grove, they create themselves over gas rings, feeding their immaculate insides on harmoniously balanced amounts of yin and yang foods. It is hard to tell whether their beatific expressions come from their convictions of inner virtue or from undernourishment. When they speak, their voices are misty, as if their words had to travel a long way from their inscrutable souls to the naughty outer world. Serious, narcissistic, terrifyingly provident, like all fanatics they brim with latent violence; when they exclude and condemn, they do so with a ringing stridency that smacks more of mothers in Romford and Hornchurch than of oriental sages preaching doctrines of universal gentleness. ‘Oh, man . . .’ withers its recipient as skilfully as any mean current of suburban disapproval. Their city is a pure and narrow one: they are miniaturists in their talented cultivation of themselves. In her scented room, Annette feeds herself on honey and grape juice and brown rice; she reads haiku by Basho. ‘I think that’s really beautiful,’ she said . . . a vague poem, with a horseman and some bulrushes in it, a long way from the things you see at the Gate. On her shelves, a meagre stretch of paperbacks: Trout Fishing in America, Steppenwolf, The Macrobiotic Way, The I-Ching, Louis MacNeice’s coffee table book on astrology (an awkward Christmas present from her father), poems by Rod McKuen, Lewis Carroll, Barry McSweeney, Blake and Leonard Cohen, Slaughterhouse-5, Alternative London, The Book of the Pony (a relic). Annette says Basho was really into himself, like . . . like Hesse, you know? Her simplesse is acutely constraining; any sentence not phrased in that mystical babytalk of ritual, contemplative assent is met by the slow disdainful fall of eyelids which are almost completely bare of lashes. Right, you say, picking up the correctly slurred, drugged intonation, right . . . right.

  Waste blows on the pavements of Ladbroke Grove like tumble-weed in a Western, but Annette is clean as a whistle, inside and out. The scatter of coins by the door is a money spell, she says; her vegetable knife is kept carefully wiped to make sure no yang is infected with yin on its travels. At weekends she visits her parents at the far end of the Metropolitan Line, carrying her own food with her in a knitted Mexican bag . . . ‘Daddy’s heavily into meat and roast potatoes, he’s very Leo.’ She used to work as a primary school teacher, but she got all apart, and now lives on National Assistance. (‘You meet some really freaky people down there, really strange. They all have a story to tell.’) Her friends carry the same woollen satchels, and talk in the same half-American half-childish idiom. Some play penny whistles and chant mantras. Their parents are lower middle-class clerks and tradesmen, or skilled working-class labourers: ‘straights’ who, in their children’s version of them, live in a state of amazingly ingenuous incomprehension.

  The political world, the domain of reason and social organisation, is as vague and distant as a period of history in a schoolbook; Ulster, Vietnam, the British economy, belong to ‘freaks’ who are ‘on’ some bad foreign substance. The vogue for Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-5 is of relevance here, for it might seem curious that a book based on the experiences of an American prisoner of war during the days leading up to the Dresden bombing should make any impact at all on a group of readers so notably indifferent to history and to politics, for whom the previous literary craze had been Tolkien’s pixie-gothic saga, The Lord of the Rings. But Vonnegut succeeded
in making history available by putting it inside the head of his hero: the novel presents the war as an hallucinogenic trip, a reel of internalised sensations and fantasies, in which Billy Pilgrim moves, suspiciously easily, from the actual landscape of Germany to delusions of intergalactic travel and lonely extraterrestrial wisdom. In the novel, the real is clouded and discredited; a POW camp, saturation bombing, exhaustion and suffering are, we are led to believe, no more or less than anyone might go through on a bad trip. We are told that Billy Pilgrim is haunted by what happened to him in the war, but it is a war which, the book implies, can be repeated for anyone, any time, for its bombs explode as much inside the head as on the ground. Vonnegut enforces a pernicious democracy in which there is hardly any discrimination between fantasy and reality – a democracy in which Annette gains and real survivors of real wars lose (Dresden a bad scene, like a trip on inferior acid). Annette, who in real life has grazed experience as lightly as a butterfly, is as wise as the ages in her head: she knows wars, revolutions, strikes, gross inflations of the mental economy, and beside them Belfast is a dim shadow, too far out in the external world to be real.

  Where the world outside shrivels and fades, the private world of the self grows correspondingly more solid and detailed. If the social language of Annette and her friends is detached and rudimentary, their vocabulary for describing the contents of their heads is exact. ‘Hang-up . . . spaced-out . . . mind-fuck . . . together . . . freak-out . . . mind-blow . . . buzz . . . high . . .’ – the words, drawn from black slang, psychoanalysis and communications-technology, domesticate the mind; they turn it into a familiar usable instrument like a wireless set. Just as the body is perceived as a vessel that must be kept clean with yoga exercises and elaborate diets, so the head is the ultimate casket of the self. The pursuit of satori, of ‘inmost happiness’, is an epic journey into self-hood; and the illusion, at least, of this inward drift is made dramatically real in the acid trip and the contemplative smoking of marijuana.