My friends knew the by then venerable Logical Positivist Freddie Ayer, who had a house in the vicinity, and he much impressed me by his remorselessly rational impression of the world. When asked what single thing reminded him most of Paris, he thought for a while before answering: ‘A road sign, with “Paris” written on it.’ I savoured this remark, and in a way it was one of the seeds that eventually grew into the gnarled tree of my own psychogeographic preoccupations.
But eventually strolls in pine-scented woods and thyme-reeking maquis palled. There just wasn’t the impetus required for even one more game of table football in the local bar. We were young, we had a sports car, we demanded bright lights and glittering debauchery. We decided to drive to Milan. We took off along the péage at 120 mph, whipping past Toulon, Hyères, St Tropez and Nice, before slowing to a crawl for the border crossing at Menton. Here, only yards before reaching Italy, we picked up a hitchhiker, a guileless local lad who’d just gone out for a stroll. Whipped up by our on-the-road fervour he determined to accompany us and drove us insane across northern Italy playing his guitar and singing old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs.
On the way back the following night, pie-eyed by excess, we were pulled up before recrossing the border by one of those comic-operetta Italian policemen, all side-striped jodhpurs and a hat like a piece of shiny black leather origami. In those far-off pre-EU days papers were required, and, while we had ours, the poor strolling player had none, so without ceremony he was extracted from the jump seat and dragged away into custody. For some minutes we sat in the orange darkness and debated whether or not we should do something, but we were young and feckless and frightened, so we floored it and drove on. Besides, the whole trip had partaken of the dreamlike character of the Côte; and even now, more than twenty years later, I still find it hard to believe that the hitchhiker really existed at all.
Be Here Now
In Chicago the boy wants to go up the Sears Tower. Of course, it’s a mere 110 storeys high, and has long since been eclipsed by other vast edifices in the Near and Far East, but, still, it’s there, we’re there, he wants to make the ascent. I don’t know exactly where these bigger buildings are, any more than I know precisely how high the Sears Tower is. Nevertheless, I picture these loftier skyscrapers as being shaped like colossal bodkins and darning mushrooms; crudely forceful examples of how reinforced steel and glass can be shaped to form the most prosaic of objects, then writ large, stupidly gross.
The Riyadh Bodkin and the Kuala Lumpur Mushroom are positive Meccas for all kinds of daredevils — of this much I’m sure. Decadent Saudi princes pilot microlights through huge holes in their façades, while Malaysian spider men scale them using giant suckers in lieu of crampons. All these activities serve to demonstrate is that modernist megaliths have completely suborned the role of natural features in providing us with the essential and vertiginous perspective we require to comprehend accurately our ant-like status. Natch.
My brother, who’s an eminent architectural historian, often observes that the highest building to be erected during any given economic cycle is invariably a harbinger of recession. One thinks of Canary Wharf before the downturn in Britain of the 1990s, or the Twin Towers in New York before the shit hit the fan in the early 1970s. Come to think of it (and I am thinking of it a lot as we glide up Wells Avenue, the gale off Lake Michigan turning our socks into windsocks), the terrorist attacks of 9/11 may well doubly confirm this thesis by actually inducing a recession. Like so much in this brave new century, the economic edifice theory seems like an example of over-determination: ‘too-true, too-true’, a wise owl might coo.
Yes, I’m thinking about it a lot because it’s only forty days since the WTC imploded, and the boy and I are adrift like autumn leaves in a chastened, muted America. I admire the way his youthful enthusiasm segues with his lack of neurotic superstition. Sadly, the management of the Sears Tower don’t see it that way and have closed the observation deck. The security men stare at us as if we’d asked to get on top of them — not just their building. But nevertheless they’re happy enough to direct us the blowy mile back over the Chicago River and down Michigan Avenue to the John Hancock Center, which — while only a mere ninety-odd storeys — is still open for business.
I went up the WTC in 1993; I’ve been up the Empire State as well. The Eiffel Tower hosted me when I was eleven — the same age as the boy. Indeed, I’ve usually scaled the highest building in any city I’ve visited. In the States it’s de rigueur for your hosts to whip you up one soon after your arrival, so that the descent into the airport followed by the ascent by lift feel curiously like the two sides of a rollercoaster’s parabola. Nonetheless, it isn’t the 1,000-footers that I find the most intimidating. Hedged round with their ordinary mystique — people work here for chrissakes! — they are also quite simply too high to provoke vertigo. Peering down from such a peak perspective only ever reduces the world below to an intelligible version of itself: the microcircuitry of society.
Still, on this particular dark day, full as it is with harbingers of mortality, the obsidian bulk of the John Hancock Center looks altogether threatening, as does the clanking lift lobby. Some of the lifts are out of order and shrouds of plastic have been taped across the entrances to these steely tombs. On the long ride up we stand together with a bog-ordinary quartet of out-of-towners — regulation moustaches, baseball caps, cameras and avoirdupois — and I wonder at their sang-froid. Could these couples be disciples of Epicetus, who’ve undertaken this purgatorial sightseeing purely in order to cultivate stoic detachment? Or are they merely dumb hicks?
Up on the observation deck we can feel the whole mass of steel, concrete, stone, plastic, fibre-optic cable and nylon carpet heal beneath us, as if it were a tall ship about to tack off across the crumpled grey surface of the lake, which curves away to the horizon. Like Prometheus I’m bound to this rock while the eagles of anxiety gnaw at my liver. The boy has no such problem. He scoots about from info point to info point; for him it’s enough to be here now. There’s a place where you can go out on to an enclosed terrace and promenade in the screeching elements, so naturally I force him to do the walk. Now it’s his turn to feel fear — and mine to experience catharsis. It occurs to me that terrorism is Schadenfreude taken to the point of evil.
Spin City
In the winter of 2001, my friend John and I were in Konya, central Anatolia, to attend the Mevlevi Festival where the dervishes famously whirl. There had been much derision concerning the festival in the tourist literature we’d read. Apparently the ‘dervishes’ weren’t the real, impoverished, Sufi thing, but mere hirelings. It was true that the gig was held in a basketball stadium and appeared to be sponsored by a Turkish washing-machine company called Arçelik, but for all that the whirling quite spun us out. There was this, and there was the general austerity of cold-comfort Konya, a city of half a million-odd souls in the grip of Ramadan, as literally dry and dusty as it was metaphorically dry. John, having downed the sole can of beer provided in his minibar within an hour of arrival, tiptoed softly along the corridor to tap on my door and cop mine.