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 antitheticaclass="underline" 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 alclass="underline" 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.