These pages are not for the person who said
Sometimes I have more complete, formal, panoramic dreams
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Sometimes I have more complete, formal, panoramic dreamsof cities. Mexico City until my recent visit was the purest fiction; it was in fact a dream flight; with that certitude of dreams I just knew that this was “Mexico City”. I was, as usual, apparently suspended in the air, moving slowly above a city of mighty coruscating brown structures rearing into the sky, cowls, giant chimneys, towers, Flash Gordon-type edifices and improbably baroque industrial plants against a hazy sky. (Nor was my dream so wrong; it just turned out, on my trip to Japan, that my “Mexico City” was Osaka.) My Maghreb mediterranean city dream (because I ‘knew’ where it was) involved an intense high speed car chase, barrelling through dark streets shiny with rain with that special scrolling effect of the video game, until suddenly we slewed left and there were the docks, as innocent and stylised as an illustration from Babar the Elephant, and a fanciful little crescent moon above the latticed gantries. I dreamed of Vancouver before I went there. ‘Vancouver’ was to be a city almost in the Arctic circle, fronting the most hyperborean reaches of the Pacific, the white pinnacles of the skyscrapers glittering in reply to the snowy peaks encircling them. In the embrace of these mountains a twenty kilometre grid of wide streets flanked by glossy buildings would rise, massive ziggurats white and clean in the near Arctic air. In the streets would process whole tranches of global demographies, the black, the white, the asian, the oriental, in a state of integration far, far beyond the pedantries of positive discrimination. I needed to feel that there could be a city that was sage and rational and yet magnificent, fashionable, hip, cosmopolitan. If anywhere could manage it would have to be Canada; for surely Canada, for so cruelly longviewed as dull, its turn had come. Just as Belgium, so long the butt of Europe awoke inthe nineties tofind itself feted asa hip nation. I wanted to find a city that gave me anintimation of the twenty-first century, a great white icy city perched out onthe north of the Pacific Rim.So much for the dream. Another form of popular ‘topography’, (a topographical act, one could say), is simply that of climbing a tower. Like the topographical Panorama, the tower gives us the whole city. Too much, in fact; too much information! Too much for me because I find the contemplation of so much city overwhelming to the point that it is hard to look at all. Prosaically you can say “ah, there’s the x…there’s the y… there’s my hotel.” That is fine, especially if it is your own city. But presented with a mass of information I see from the summit of Tange’s City Hall in Shinjuku, Tokyo is truly perturbing; what is one to make of this astonishing expanse of data, this micro-mosaic of detail spreading to each horizon? It is for me not just a matter of how to cope with all this optically but also emotionally. A huge city spread out below me is almost painful. Each glance makes me sick with longing, for what I don’t know. What I see is too big, the implications too huge, too moving. It is enough to me that I have been there. There is no need to look more than once; but having ascended 60 storeys then I feel I should wait longer; I find myself dutifully returning to each point of the compass wondering if it would be negligent if I took the next lift down. From the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago I watch a helicopter rattle past below. For an hour (such is the frequency of its lifts) from the top of the Cairo tower I ponder the great brown city at dusk, like a huge quarry in its delapidation, the tiny pyramids as neat as the little wedges on a pack of Camels, the suburbs creeping towards them. (And this for me carries no threat; thrilling it would be for the city to lap around the Great Pyramid, tenament blocks backed up against its vast brown flanks!) But not all cities are epic from a tower. Sydney is prosaic. Impressive, yes, but not sublime; the concentration of downtown, grandly tacky as it is, gives way rather too suddenly to the suburban: a whole swathe of Ramsay Streets compromising the properly metropolitan texture at my feet. It need not always be a vertiginous vantage point; there is the modest Monument (two hundred feet) in London; not modest in the eighteenth century, however; Boswell writes “It was horrid to find myself so monstrous a way up in the air.” This seems to be the right type of height to be above London, to be close to its dank buildings, its turbid river, its sinister locked-in feel; close enough to hear the churning and seething of London below you, primitive enough very easily to imagine maid servants hauling their petticoats over the (then) low railings, falling into Fish Street Hill to their death (for the Monument was a popular suicide venue.) And then of course there is the alternative to the tower; the view from the plane. Sydney is better at 2,000 feet; into my plane window pops the tiniest model of Sydney as neat as a netsuke: the cute little bridge, the Opera House delicate as a snail-shell, the tiny Dufy-esque sailing ships flitting around the bay. Tinier still, so tiny it was shocking, my glimpse (en route from Jakarta to Bangkok) of a tiny Singapore…its great towers the minutest of crystals seen through a microscope! Taking off at night and passing low over Buenos Aires I feel almost sick at the beauty of the quadrilateral streets glittering to the horizon; or wafting into London above the vast reticulations of light twinkling in a filigree net of gold glittering in every direction. I know the ugly truths that lie beneath but I love that too, the grey city of the day and the velvet and gold city of night, both huge. Any Heathrow user knows that by and large the best bet for a landing view of London (though we are too cool to actually admit it) is the right hand window seat, since the most common flightpath is the one that passes over south London; over Camberwell, Clapham etc. going west into Heathrow. But usually it is all over too soon. In my most recent flight, a routine 50 minutes from Schiphol I had been bumped up to executive. Lucky because this was the one day I needed absolute access to my window, a day when London was glittering with a preternatural clarity, a day when we were held (for air traffic control reasons) twenty minutes in a tight low circle above the capital. Again and again, our plane purred the length of the Thames, almost slowly, as if making love to the city glittering like toytown below. 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