I am sitting under one of the mirrors writing this in the A6 Muji notebook, referring sometimes to the A5 notebook, and from time to time I look up from my writing. I take off my hat, and see the man in the mirror simultaneously take off his hat. I hold up the pen in my right hand, and the Other in the mirror holds up an identical pen in his left hand. I take a sip of whiskey, and the Other does likewise with the other hand, we are countless men, our images forever receding and approaching in an infinite recession and progression. I am writing this with a Japanese Sailor Professional Gear pen with a Fine nib which corresponds to a European Extra Fine, about 0.5mm, and I think Walter Benjamin would have liked the Sailor Extra Fine nib, which draws, I would guess, an 0.25mm line – Benjamin whose famously miniscule hand could fit some hundreds of words on to a single sheet of hotel notepaper – Benjamin to whom the finest available nib was too broad, whereupon he would turn the pen around and use the back of the nib instead. I think of his notebooks in different formats and dimensions, crammed with writing – describing, annotating, cataloguing, speculating. I think of a sheet of buff paper found in his archive, headed with the emblem of Acqua Pellegrino, a blue-grey bottle against a red five-pointed star, on which he has written, or rather, this is an English translation of what he wrote: ‘What is Aura? The experience of an aura rests on the transposition of a form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature to people. The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen (glances up) answers with a glance … When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is its dreaming … Aura is the appearance of a distance however close it may be. Words themselves have an aura … As much aura in the world as there is still dream in it.’
Above these words, to the right of the San Pellegrino star, Benjamin has written three lines at an upwards diagonal slant. In English, they make up eighteen syllables. A haiku, more or less? Knowing little German, unable in any case to decipher the tiny writing, I do not know if they are an accurate reflection of the original.
Eyes staring at one’s back
Meeting of glances
Glance up, answering a glance
L’aspirateur
Kilpatrick exited Passage des Panoramas into Rue Vivienne. Here, as in Passage des Panoramas, were stamp shops and coin shops, and he thought again of Walter Benjamin’s obsessive collecting – of stamps, picture postcards, books, children’s toys, among other things. Kilpatrick himself had been a stamp-collector – philatelist, rather – in his teens, and intended to devote a section of his Paris book to those many shops which catered for collectors of whatever hue. He had transcribed into his notebook a passage entitled ‘Stamp Shop’, from Benjamin’s One-Way Street, a text which Benjamin termed a notebook:
‘There are collectors who concern themselves only with postmarked stamps … The pursuer of postmarks must, like a detective, possess information on the most notorious post offices, like an archaeologist the art of reconstructing the torsos of the most foreign place-names, and like a cabbalist an inventory of dates for an entire century … Stamp albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motion of the planets depends on the harmony of the celestial numbers … Stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes. They are graphic cellular tissue.’
Kilpatrick walked along Rue Vivienne in a reverie, stopping here and there to look into a shop window. He saw himself at the age of fourteen or fifteen with a jeweller’s loupe screwed into his eye-socket, scrutinizing a stamp. He would compare its characteristics to the description in the philatelists’ bible, the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. He would mount it in his loose-leaf stamp album along with others of the set; underneath, in a calligraphic round-hand written with an Osmiroid italic pen, he would transcribe the relevant catalogue details. Like all collectors, he had begun with generalities, collecting everything and anything – the stamps of the world, in this instance. As he learned more he began to realise how much there was to learn. He bought books about stamps and borrowed books about stamps from the Belfast Central Library. He subscribed to philatelic journals. He learned to make ever finer discriminations, focusing on the stamps of the British Commonwealth, Great Britain and Ireland before specializing in those of Ireland and those of Victorian Britain.
Victorian stamps were ostensibly modest in appearance but bore a wealth of graphic detail. To the untrained eye, one Penny Red looked much like another, but they existed in hundreds of variations of ink colour, paper, perforations, die, plate numbers, type fonts, watermarks – shades of meaning that constituted a potentially vast field of study, not to speak of the abiding interest of postmarks, each recording a date, a place, the instant when a stamp became a used stamp. Some collectors specialized in stamps on covers, noting place of origin and destination in the context of the railway network of Victorian Britain. It was detective work, and, like Sherlock Holmes, these philatelists had frequent recourse to Bradshaw’s railway guide. Kilpatrick was pleased to learn that in 1820 George Bradshaw, originator of the guide, had set up an engraver’s shop in Crown Entry in Belfast, before moving to Manchester two years later.
Kilpatrick had visited Manchester in December 1968 at the invitation of Danny Fisher, an old school friend who now worked as a library assistant in the Manchester City Library. It was Kilpatrick’s first time away from Ireland, and Manchester struck him as a Belfast constructed on a larger scale, with massive brick-built office blocks, hotels, derelict warehouses and factories some six or eight stories high, cavernous streets and black canals running between the buildings. It was three o’clock when he arrived at the centre, and dusk was already falling. As he walked down a sombre street, huge flocks of starlings wheeled above the glittering slate roofs, thousands of birds twisting, turning, swooping in perfect unison as if orchestrated by telepathy, and Kilpatrick imagined himself conducting them as he would an aerial symphony, waving his arms to synchronize their movements. He was unsure of his whereabouts. Many of the houses in the street were boarded up, and he was glad to come to the yellow light of a shop window where he got directions. He still remembered Fisher’s address: 27 Bloom Street. He had not been in touch with him for years.
As Kilpatrick turned a corner he bumped into a passer-by. He muttered an apology and glanced up at the blue and white street sign: Rue Daguerre. He was far from Rue Vivienne. Lost in the past, he had no memory of how he had got there. He went into a bar café. It was still morning. The bar was empty. He ordered a coffee. The sound system was playing Kind of Blue. He lifted the cup to his lips. The track came to an end. There was a lull before the next track. He recognized it immediately: Glenn Gould’s playing of Contrapunctus XIV. As he listened, he became aware of a hum in the background. A woman was vacuuming, the sound growing louder as she approached his table, drowning out the music. As if oblivious to his presence, head lowered, intent on her task, she vacuumed around his feet before retreating into the darkness at the back of the bar. The music was still playing, and he recalled Glenn Gould’s anecdote of how, in his teens, he was learning Mozart’s Fugue in C Major when the housekeeper came in and began to vacuum round the piano; on purpose, according to Gould. Gould couldn’t quite hear himself, he said, but began to feel what he was doing, the tactile presence of the fugue as represented by finger positions, and also by the kind of sound you might hear if you stood in the shower and shook your head with water coming out of both ears. It was luminous, said Gould, the most glorious sound. It took off. He claimed that all of the things Mozart couldn’t quite do, he was doing for him. And he suddenly realized that the particular screen through which he was viewing this, which he had erected between Mozart and his fugue, was exactly what he needed. As he came to understand later, said Gould, a certain mechanical process needed to come between himself and the work of art he was involved with. It was o
ne of the great moments of his life.
The vacuum cleaner stopped. Gould’s playing was nearing its end. Kilpatrick had closed his eyes, bracing himself for the impact of that gunshot of explosive silence, when he heard a voice beside him. Wonderful thing, don’t you think, said the voice. Music of the spheres. Kilpatrick turned round. It was the man he had met in the Irish bar, the James Joyce. Same red face. Black Hugo Boss overcoat. Black briefcase. It was the same man all right. If I may, said the man. He sat down beside Kilpatrick, and placed the briefcase on the floor at his feet where a moment ago the housekeeper had been vacuuming. Vacuum cleaner, what was the word? L’aspirateur.
Odd Man Out
It has only just occurred to me that Ben, my watchmaker’s moniker for me, John Kilfeather, is of course short for Benjamin; and the Flower Pot Man name, with all its associations with Flower Power and pot or dope or blow, Mary Jane, the Fragrant Weed, suddenly assumes, like a mantle, the scholarly aura of Walter Benjamin; I see that photograph of him, the hair rising from the high brow in a shock of convoluted waves shot with grey, one lens of the wire-rimmed spectacles catching the gleam of a contemplative or saddened eye, the thoughtful brow supported by the fingertips of the right hand, the strong nose above the drooping moustache, the lips half-hidden, his eyes of an inward cast not meeting the camera but entering an inner room where Walter Benjamin relives the memories of the man he has been and wanders again the boulevards of a foreign yet familiar city, lost and at home, or looks into the future; I admire the style of the dark jacket, the floppy-collared shirt, the dark tie with a thin diagonal stripe; and I see myself and John Harland looking at the photograph, which Harland had culled from a literary journal and pinned to a cork board together with a host of other images. It was Harland who had introduced me to Benjamin’s writing.
He also who introduced me to the work of J.S. Bach, of whom I knew nothing, but presumed he wrote symphonies. Symphonies? said Harland. Never wrote a symphony in his life. Preludes, toccatas, choral preludes, fugues, Masses, oratorios, yes, but symphonies? Never, said Harland. I remember the first time I heard Glenn Gould’s playing of Contrapunctus XIV, except I didn’t know what it was then, I am still finding out, this opening statement followed by a recapitulation or development of what it bears in mind, a hesitant yet luminous exploring of the theme, which turns itself into itself by way of ever-branching variation, wistful sometimes, sometimes forceful, plangent, yearning. Harland had it on the Dansette record player in Exchange Place. All this time Harland was painting, jabbing or dragging or quavering his brush across the canvas in time to the music, leading the notes from the air to become the paint of the painting. As his body swayed to the music, I watched Harland become the conductor of things from one world to the other, I watched him become Hermes who negotiates the Underworld, Hermes the god of the crossroads, Hermes the god of chance, the angel who guides you to the page in the book you did not know you were looking for until you opened it, and looked into it.
Of course I didn’t know then how the piece ended, and when it did, with that shock that still goes through me when I hear Contrapunctus XIV, Harland held his brush aloft in a final conductor’s flourish, then threw it at the canvas. The hinges of form come about by chance, he said. Francis Bacon. He went over and perused the splatter the brush had made on the image. Interesting dendrites, he said. Nice axons. You know, the brain. I knew the terms vaguely. Clusters, branches, strings of nerve cells interconnected in some kind of fractal pattern, collecting and disseminating streams of information in the blink of an eye. I looked at Harland’s splatter anew, seeing things in it I hadn’t seen until then. But where exactly they were going, I couldn’t say.
I looked up from my writing in the Adelphi bar, and found Paddy Ireland looking at me. Paddy was the barman. He was often ribbed about his name, but bore it with pride. He conducted his métier with professional grace and efficiency, and I see him now, Parisian-style in his black waistcoat and long white apron, brilliantined grey hair parted in the centre, silver armbands glinting in the crooks of his white shirtsleeves. Another one? he said. He knew me of old. He would know Harland of old. I nodded. We had just watched Scene Around Six together. The viable anti-personnel device planted by dissident republicans in a white Volkswagen people-carrier parked at the Antrim Road Plaza shops was being monitored by the security forces. Police were as yet unable to say when those residents who had been asked to leave their homes for their own safety could return to them. I sighed. Dissident republicans my arse, said Paddy. They’re nothing but scum. Paddy was a republican of the old school of the forties and fifties. Dissident, I said, doesn’t mean what it meant in East Germany, that’s for sure. He set me up the drink and poured himself one under the counter. He raised it briefly to mine. To old comrades, said Paddy. Old comrades, said I.
I’m writing this in my hotel room. The Albert Clock has just chimed twelve, the way it does in Odd Man Out, and I think of the fugitive Johnny McQueen staggering, wounded, through the dark Belfast streets, puddles shimmering under gaslight. I’ve just smoked a little Black Rose. I blew the smoke out the dormer window. If you look into a flower head of Black Rose with a jeweller’s loupe, you will see dendrites and axons of the glittering crystals that contain the active cannaboid ingredient, sea-salt white against the purple black of petal and sepal. I taste it on my lips and on my tongue. I had a sachet of Black Rose in my fob pocket. Lucky I didn’t think of it when confronted by the policeman. It might have showed on my face, or maybe he wouldn’t have noticed. He seemed fully focused on the current assignment. As it is, the room seems warm and hospitable in the dim light of the bedside lamp. I am writing the first thing that comes into my head into the notebook, and I think of Coleridge on laudanum, a few drops of the Kendal Black Drop taken in wine or brandy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, STC or Ecstasy, as he liked to style himself, writing by candlelight in the dark cave of his library, discovering that words are coming to the page before he has conceived of them, his pen scarcely able to keep pace with their train of thought as they flicker forward like black candle-flame on the white page glowing in the candlelight, and I remember countless other times when I have written ecstatically in notebook after notebook, whether under an awning in the pouring rain or on the sunlit terrace of a café, scribbling for months, for years, circling round a theme that only gradually discloses itself, pages covered in words, arrows leading back to other words, words crossed out, addenda, corrigenda, pages flickering behind this page I write in now. I turn to Walter Benjamin. From the A5 notebook:
‘He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside – that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.’ I place pen and notebook on the bedside table. I turn off the light. I go to bed. To sleep. Perchance to dream.
La Charade
Freddy Gabriel, said the man. John Kilmore, I presume? Kilpatrick nodded. Another coffee? said Gabriel. Kilpatrick felt trapped but there was something in Gabriel’s manner that made him think he would not take no for an answer. Gabriel gestured to the waiter. Deux cafés, s’il vous plaît, Marcel, said Gabriel. Ah, Monsieur Freddy, said the waiter, and they embarked on some small talk about the weather. Gabriel’s accent was impressive and the waiter laughed when Gabriel made a joke. Kilpatrick felt an urge to come clean. He had not had any kind of conversation with anyone for many days and he felt the need to talk like a normal human being. Actually, you know, he said, when we met the other day, I told you a bit of a fib. And he told Gabriel of how when you were abroad you felt you could be anyone, he knew it was silly, but he had momentarily succumbed to that urge to be someone else. His real name was not John Kilmore, it was John Kilpatrick.
Gabriel
nodded understandingly. Of course, of course, old man, he said. Done the same thing myself. You’re staying in a nice hotel somewhere, let’s say Bratislava, ever been to Bratislava? Fascinating place. All go since the Soviet break-up. You’re in this nice hotel in Bratislava, Hotel Arcadia, but no company, you’re sitting at the bar late at night staring at yourself in the bar mirror, you’ve drunk a few glasses of the local schnapps, and there’s a young woman sitting two stools away from you, attractive, well-dressed, you buy her a drink and you start talking, she’s got fluent English, educated, you talk about music and art, this and that. That piece we heard just now, Glenn Gould? Art of the Fugue? You think she might be on the game, but she knows Glenn Gould, and you think, she can’t be on the game, she’s too intelligent for that, but then after a while there’s something in her body language, and you know what? she is on the game, and one thing leads to another, though you have a great conversation before you get down to business, of course you don’t tell her your real name, not that she expects you to, and you give her this story that you’re a writer, you’re thinking of setting a thriller in Eastern Europe, you know, it was half-true, I wanted to be a writer when I was younger, I wanted to be the next John Le Carré, I used to write awful pastiches of him when I was at Balliol, and we got into a pretty interesting conversation about the politics of the place, fascinating as you can imagine, and of course for all I know she doesn’t believe a bit of what I’m telling her, but she goes along with the charade, and here are the both of you acting out your parts, and no one’s the worse off for it. Kilpatrick nodded. He had been there himself, though all he wanted to do was talk, and he ended up paying for two hours’ conversation.
Exchange Place Page 5