White Sands Page 15

  The wayward greatness of the towers—resolutely local and eccentrically universal—and the scale of Rodia’s achievement were attested to by admirers such as Buckminster Fuller and Jacob Bronowski (who in the course of describing a visit to the then unfenced towers in The Ascent of Man, declared them to be his ‘favourite monument’). Whether or not Rodia created a work of art is another question. Or at least the question ‘Is it a work of art?’ brings with it another: what kind of work of art might it be? There is the tacit belief here that ‘work of art’ is the ultimate proof of value and test of worth (more rigorous and demanding than the force exerted by the stress test), but one of the functions of the towers might be to resist or undermine this idea—to question the legitimacy of the question being posed. Maybe the towers are more than a work of art and the idea of art is not an adequate gauge by which to measure this kind of achievement.

  The towers are unique, but as a phenomenon of determined, self-sufficient creation on an epic scale they are neither unprecedented nor without equal. John Berger has written about one such endeavour: ‘a palace passing all imagination,’ as the postman Ferdinand Cheval termed his creation in Hauterives, in the Department of the Drôme in France. Cheval (1836–1924) worked for thirty-three years single-handedly building and sculpting his ideal palace. ‘This work is naked and without tradition,’ writes Berger, ‘because it is the work of a single “mad” peasant.’ Viewed from Watts, however, the existence of Cheval’s palace means that there might be a tradition after all, even if it’s a scattered and meagre one. That Rodia was unaware of such a possibility enables us to identify one of this tradition’s defining elements as a lack of consciousness of such a tradition. Another is that other instances or components of that tradition remain unknown and uncelebrated by the world at large, and therefore unpreserved (to say nothing of the large number of such projects that, in spite of their creator’s best intentions, were never completed). Cheval’s reasonable boast—‘I have carved my own monument’—might provide an epigraph for all such lonely enterprises but, by definition, those words have to be re-conceived, recarved and re-written every time an individual pledges himself to an undertaking of this kind. Quotation is impossible, even if the message is the same.

  Although our tour had started late it finished on time, in order to prevent a knock-on effect of delays. So our visit felt squeezed, hemmed in by time as well as by the security fence. We dragged our feet, took a last few sulky photographs before being marched back to the Visitors’ Center. Surprisingly, as we looked back at the towers, it was not the work of a kindred spirit such as Cheval that came to mind but one that was absolutely antithetical: a monument built by others at the command of a ruler who sought to impose his will on eternity itself. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ decrees Ozymandias in Shelley’s famous poem. Time destroys and makes nonsense of this vaulting ambition. All that remains of the ruler’s ambition are ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ and a ‘shattered visage’ amid the lone and level sands stretching far away. Rodia’s ambition was just ‘to do something big.’ It wasn’t even an ambition as usually understood. E. M. Cioran claims that the mole blindly burrowing his tunnel is ambitious, that ‘life is a state of ambition,’ but, as usually understood, ambition always has some goal beyond the satisfactions afforded by the task itself: acclaim, recognition, fame, money. Contra Adorno, building the towers would seem to have been Rodia’s hobby, something he did with his free time—albeit something he pursued with unswerving single-mindedness. That’s where Adorno is wrong about hobbies: a hobby can become the defining purpose of one’s life, the thing that gives it meaning even if—as in Rodia’s case—one is obliged to spend the bulk of the day doing something else to earn a living, to buy that time. He did all the work himself, he said, because it would have been too complicated—more trouble than it was worth—to explain to someone else what he was trying to do. Possibly he didn’t entirely know what he was doing. Even his claim that ‘You’ve got to do something, they’ve never got ’em in the world,’ came after the fact, after he was done. So maybe there was something akin to Garry Winogrand’s compulsive credo—‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed’—about the undertaking. He built the towers to find out what they would look like built.

  Another helpful comparison is with the temples designed by David Best at Burning Man in Nevada. They’re similarly big but, unlike Rodia’s towers or Ozymandias’ monument, instead of being built to last they’re built in order to be burned at the end of each year’s week-long festival. And whereas Rodia’s towers were built single-handedly, Best’s are the work of hundreds of volunteers, all working together. But both towers and temples are community-based, providing a focus for a neighbourhood (in the case of Rodia) or a city (admittedly a temporary one in Best’s case).

  So Rodia got on with it, went steadily about his work day after day, in spite of tiredness, periods of sickness and the never-to-be-underestimated urge to lie down on the sofa and do nothing. My uncle built his own house after working as a brick layer during the day—and said it nearly killed him (before he killed himself, many years later, in the garage of the completed house). Perhaps a cussedness was essential in enabling Rodia to stick at the task, in the way that some people are able to sustain grudges over several decades. He had something to do, and he did it until it was done. Even so, there must have been days when Rodia had to drag his aching legs to the towers and force his heavy arms to climb them, when it was only after working for several hours that the friction of dull drudgery gave way to the steady rhythm of ongoing accomplishment, that he no longer had to overcome the reluctance of his own body, did not have to force himself to keep going. Or perhaps, at some point, he was so habituated to working that it didn’t occur to him to do anything else. This was what he did to relax. Travailler, ça repose: the ideal of the artist’s life embodied by Rodin. Gathering materials, doggedly lugging things up the towers, day in, day out, not stopping.

  For every Cheval or Rodia there must have been hundreds of eccentrics who conceived the idea of devoting their energies to doing ‘something big’ before running out of time, resources, energy or will. Some got bored, fed up. Having committed themselves to doing whatever it is that keeps them off the sauce, the lure of the bottle at the end of a day—or a week or a year—of thirsty work proves irresistible and, on reflection, adequately rewarding. It doesn’t even need to be ‘something big.’ The most modest ambitions go unfulfilled: a loft conversion, a planned extension to a house, fixing a wonky front door that doesn’t close properly. The knowledge that there are things to do, tasks to be completed, is enough to keep postponing them, to give life a sense of projected purpose and improvement. Having made the long-postponed decision to go into the office just three days a week so that he can have more time to devote to his frustrated urge to play the saxophone, a solicitor discovers, in the two extra days at his disposal, that the main purpose of the musical dream was to blind him to the truth of his existence and identity: that he is a solicitor through and through. (Maybe men like Rodia have to exist in a state of something like sustained desperation, to be devoid of other options, even the most common one of all: the support of a marriage, happy or otherwise. ‘Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it,’ writes David Mamet. ‘They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently.’) Or think of the person who believes he has a book in him, only to discover that the imagined book is destined to stay in him, that it will not be written, will never be completed, let alone published. Such disillusion or resignation is not the preserve of those who dream of writing a book. Writers are dogged constantly by the fear of not being able to do it anymore. The suspicion that each book might be their last is often what fuels their continuing productivity. Fear of future inability proves to be a powerful and immediate incentive. Along the way, however, they become conscious of the books they
won’t or can’t write. At some point many writers will contemplate doing their own version of George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books—though for most it will take its place among their unwritten books. Under that title there are perhaps two categories of book: those that are unstarted and those that are unfinished.

  For several years I have wanted to write a book called The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison. It would be about Coltrane’s bassist, the way he stayed with Trane after Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner had left, after the classic quartet first expanded to a sextet (with Rashied Ali and Pharoah) and then shrank back to a quintet (with Alice Coltrane taking over from Tyner on piano). It would also, necessarily, be about Ornette Coleman (with whom Garrison and Elvin recorded Love Call and New York Is Now), about the meeting of Coleman and Haden in L.A., and about Pharoah and Albert Ayler. I loved the title of this projected book even though I knew it was never going to be a book-length project, would at best be the title piece in a volume whose subtitle—And Other Essays—would be an admission of failure and abandonment; a failure which turned out to be more thorough-going even than that.

  In 2013, Jessica and I spent four months in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Whenever there was any excuse—a meeting on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, an exhibition at PS1—I took the East River Ferry, one of those rare and wonderful services that combine sightseeing for tourists with functionality for commuters.

  Albert Ayler’s body was found in the East River on 25 November 1970. When Don Cherry first met this man ‘with sparkling eyes and a happy smile’ in Copenhagen he felt himself to be in ‘the presence of someone that was carrying the gift and the voice and reflection of god.’ Ayler played at Coltrane’s funeral service on 21 July 1967 (as did Ornette and Haden). He believed that Coltrane was the Father, Pharoah the Son, and he himself the Holy Ghost. He ended up dead in the East River. There were rumours, conspiracies, but the accepted explanation is that it was suicide.

  By jazz standards Ayler was not a prolific composer, but the best of his songs are amazing concentrations of jazz history: from New Orleans marching bands to music that pointed beyond what he called ‘the cosmic bebop’ of Coltrane. It’s easy to see—to hear—what Cherry meant when he said that Ayler’s best-known composition, ‘Ghosts,’ ‘should be our national anthem’ even if it’s an anthem that turns the idea of nationhood—and of anthems—inside out before tearing them to shreds and, eventually, bringing them back from the dead.

  I listened to the ecstatic despair of ‘Ghosts,’ to ‘Universal Indians’ and ‘Omega’ on repeated trips on the East River Ferry, from Williamsburg to Thirty-fourth Street or down to the Brooklyn Bridge. The few notes I made amounted to nothing except the knowledge that it was too late, that I should have written about Ayler in 1989, that there would be no more to The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison than the title.

  It is so difficult to know whether you are giving up on a book because it really is unwriteable or if you are just being lazy, if you have rationalised the idea of its being unwriteable because you lack the stamina to stick at it, to keep grinding it out. Even if you have been writing for a long time—especially if you have been writing for a long time—it is almost impossible to work through the layers of subterfuge, the self-deceptions and self-exonerations that lead you to abandon a book and to forgive yourself for having done so. Once you have made the decision to abandon ship, it requires a certain amount of will-power to persist with the abandonment, not to lapse back into sneaked looks at the manuscript, to learn to ignore the little glimmers of hope, not to gnaw away at it until the ‘it’ becomes that which has been abandoned, that which is still in the process of being abandoned and that which is in the exhausted process of being revived. At some point complete withdrawal is the only solution. After which, it is possible that some parts of what was abandoned and discarded can be used in an entirely different way, in the creation of something new.

  There are other scenarios too. You can run out of time long before you run out of ideas or sanity. Some unwritten books are the result of unfinished lives, of premature deaths. Albert Camus had the manuscript of the novel he was working on, The First Man, in the car with him when he was killed at the age of forty-six. Camus had popularised the mythic figure of Sisyphus, whom, he said, we should imagine happy as he rolled his rock up the hill each day. But for anyone engaged in some kind of personal labour, Rodia is a far better model, for two related reasons. His labours were, like Camus’s, the opposite of futile—and they rendered the question of happiness futile, irrelevant. (Is the word ‘happy’ ever part of the vocabulary of the cussed?) Each day, instead of starting from scratch, from where he had begun the previous morning, he made progress. The protagonist of Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North thinks of Sisyphus as an example of ‘the Greeks’ idea of punishment which was to constantly fail at what you most desire.’ Two of these three terms (‘failure’ and ‘desire’) play no part in Rodia’s work—but the task he had set himself was nothing if not punishing. The punishment was all but indistinguishable from the satisfaction and success of his endeavours. With every passing day, either the towers grew or the materials for their continued growth increased. Setbacks, false turns and dead-ends became the precondition for keeping on, for making something. Mingus recalls that Rodia was ‘always changing his ideas while he worked and tearing down what he wasn’t satisfied with and starting over again, so pinnacles tall as a two-storey building would rise up and disappear and rise again.’ But every day some small improvement was made, because mistakes, too, are essential tools.

  In a famous passage about forgiveness in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes: ‘Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain agents, only by the constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.’ Was there something deeply unforgiving about Rodia—unforgiving, that is, towards himself—something punishing (that word again) about his labours? He would see the error of his ways, change his mind, start over and continue with the same old thing. Always the same thing, the one thing.

  Progress was made—but so incrementally as to have been imperceptible—as each day he climbed what he had built in order to build the as yet unmade. Every day (the contrast with Sisyphus is crucial) it took a little more effort to ascend to the point where he could start work. So his purpose was perhaps similar to that of people who climb mountains. Maybe the only answer to the question of why Rodia built his monument is a negative version of Hillary’s famous response about why he had climbed Everest: because it wasn’t there.

  9

  The ancient Egyptians spent much of their lives obsessing about the afterlife. They were always embalming or being embalmed, seeking to preserve themselves, but the afterlife, it turns out, is not the one for which they were so scrupulously and painstakingly prepared—the one they imagined beginning soon after their physical death. The real afterlife would occur from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, when they were excavated from their tombs of sand. Or, better, their wombs of sand, for they were not buried by the sand so much as formed in it, like models in a mould. From the moment of their discovery they were effectively reborn in monumental, idealised form, surrounded by tourists, photographed and worshipped like gods in some perpetual present.

  That’s how it seems at first. But lurking beneath this is the suspicion—not unjustified considering their obsession with what would become of them after death—that the ancient Egyptians devoted themselves to leaving tantalising clues as to the nature of their civilization. To do this they must have had more than an inkling—extraordinary for a people who had not read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for whom history in the modern sense still lay in the distant future—that this civilization of theirs, so replete with images of permanence, was not going to last. With astonishing accuracy, they calculated what would be likely to survive and how, from that, we would be able to extrapolate backwards to their own time
. (Ozymandias, in this light, was smarter than Shelley, took the longer view and had the last laugh. The sculptor designed his monument with the lone and level sands in mind, relied on them to play their part.) The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was anything but accidental: its purpose was to be preserved, found and deciphered. This also helps to explain why, despite their immense age, all of the sculptures, headdresses, art and carvings look futuristic. Just as the crew of a space ship on a journey to a planet in the distant reaches of the solar system are kept in a state of suspended animation, the ancient Egyptians knew they would have to out-wait everything the sands could throw at them: that’s why they’re sitting. The smiles on the faces of the sculpted pharaohs are the product of this long wager having paid off. They seem to look, simultaneously, as if they are waiting to be discovered and as if—to their eternal delight—they have just been discovered.

  Beginning