Limits of Language

 I look out my window at the recently renovated apartment building across the street and wonder what it would look like after shelling. I picture shredded window blinds behind shattered glass. Brick veneer flayed open. The intimate furnishings of private interiors exposed.

I walk past the lovely brick building on the corner that houses Our Lady Queen of the Americas. I think of the assembly room where our neighborhood meetings are held and I think—that’s where we would gather to plan our defense and organize food distribution. The building used to have one of those old fallout shelter signs on the door, and I picture us moving in with an overnight bag and cooler of food. (Google the phrase “fallout shelter”—the first dozen hits are for video games or apps. Did not expect that. Draw your own conclusions.)

I ride the long Q Street metro escalator to catch my train and I imagine the residents from blocks around who would fill its platforms with sleeping bags and pet carriers, bracing as the booms echo down the long concrete passage.

I watch CNN every evening and listen to the correspondents talk about the cities—who is holding them, which ones may fall--and I think of the Illiad. Unlike its epic cousin, the Odyssey, which is full of weird characters and magical adventures, the Illiad is just a relentless battle narrative, one ensanguinated page after another. 

I remember a quote I often share in the lectures I give about the origin of cities: “Any destruction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to chaos.”  That’s from The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion, Mircea Eliade’s illumination of the two ways of being human. Chaos, in this usage, isn’t mere mess, as in “my studio this semester is just chaos.” Chaos here is formlessness, the nightmare of a world without reason, without any consensual order, in this case one laid waste by one man’s mad ambition.

Since the war began a month ago, I’ve been trying to find language to help me unpack my thoughts and make something meaningful from them. New words are often born out of new situations, when the old ones are insufficient, but it seems as if we’re still excavating words from the past to digest this new horror because we can’t just keep repeating “WTF.” I learned a new word from the Washington Post that I previously had no need to know: irredentist, which is someone who wants to reclaim territory they insist was once theirs. It’s a young word, as words go, first used over a century ago in the territorial nationalism that led us into the first World War, so it’s doubly potent.

Even though our astonishing technological prowess allows us to hear from people thousands of miles away and watch live-streamed drone videos, the language we are using to describe what we see reaches back even further, to the Homeric, the Virgilian. The fall of Troy. The sack of Rome. The siege of…Mariupol.

Zoomnesia and the Craving for Place

 Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling all around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

--Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust

Did we talk about this before? Was that you, or someone else? I’m pretty sure I’ve talked to someone about this on Zoom—or was it Teams?—but I can’t remember whom.  

If you have been among the fortunate ones who have been able to ride out the pandemic by locking eyes with yourself and others on screen, then you know what I’m talking about.  As Joan Baez's aching lyrics remind us, memories depend on place and time. Zooming (how quickly it displaced the older verb, “to Skype”) severed the essential association of “when” and “where.” “When” leaked all over the old divide between home and work, and “where” condensed into a single relentless point at the same desk, in the same chair, in front of the same wall. The place/time continuum cracked; with no place to anchor our memories, they drift untethered to time. We have all developed zoomnesia, a particularly virulent variant of technology-induced amnesia.

I know that I did in fact do my job this past year and a half because there is ample evidence—students graduated, awards were given, pay received—but I struggle to staple any given activity or achievement to any given day without searching my calendar. Fall semester 2020 began and ended on screen, as did Spring semester 2021. But I do remember how the Spring semester of 2020 began...I walked my students down King Street on a bitterly cold day in January, bundled up and armed with sketchbooks and pens, cameras and phones that our numbed fingers couldn’t grasp. The smells of garlic, baked goods, and stale beer filled the cold air, a mix so vivid that one student produced a “smell map” of the block. We attracted the attention of shopkeepers and tourists, who wanted to know who we were, why we were milling about looking, photographing, and sketching in shivered lines. We were going to build something there—a parklet!

We spent the next month and a half analyzing, brainstorming, arguing, around a big wood table in what came to be known as our studio “war room.” The whiteboard still holds the notes and drawings from these gregarious sessions and still emits whiffs of sharpie when the temperature is just right; I can’t bring myself to erase them. Following our midterm reviews that notorious March, the students left for spring break expecting to return to spend the second half of the semester actually building as the weather warmed and the days lengthened. I remember their faces, the sound of their voices and laughter, but the memory is glazed with wistfulness, because it all ended so strangely and abruptly. On Friday the 13^th--of all things--the world changed and so did our memories. 

We used to have to remember things, complicated things, and be able to recite them. It was the task of poets. Then we invented writing, then printing, then recording, in a civilization-defining quest to off-load the task of remembering. We put the poets out of business. The apotheosis of that quest? You don't know anyone's phone number; you can’t do long division anymore; you can’t find your way to the beach or read a map. Congratulations, you’re free of the burden of remembering.  

In her fascinating and singular book on memory’s foundational relationship to place, The Art of Memory, Frances Yates recounts the story of the poet Simonides from one of Cicero’s orations. The poet, hired as the entertainment for a banquet, steps outside for a moment to meet with two callers, at which point the roof collapses, crushing everyone inside beyond recognition. Simonides, with his professional-caliber poet’s memory, remembered where each of the diners had been sitting and thus could identify the bodies. Imagine if this had been a zoom event, where no one stays still on screen and everyone is in a different place on different screens—Simonides would have to say “I think he was in the upper right; no for a time he was in the middle; someone turned off their camera and he moved to the lower left; someone arrive late and he slid to the second screen. Sorry…not sure at all where they were. I can’t remember. Oh wait, was that the banquet or the webinar?”

So, while I can remember vividly how that semester started, if you ask me to describe in the same detail how it ended, I will be at a loss. I know that it did end, on Zoom, with a final presentation. Our students by then were scattered across the globe--Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, New York, California, Florida—but how could anyone tell? We were alone together, backlit or overlit, slumped on a couch, hunched over a coffee table, intruding into each other’s most personal private places while trying to play the professional. My inner Simonides was no match for this one, but fortunately I have a screen shot. All that was solid melts into zoom.

Vibrations of History

 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

 

Gillian was frustrated. She had assembled a collection of historic and contemporary maps so she could layer the last hundred years of building and demolition into a single, time-collapsed site drawing. Unfortunately, these pasts and presents were not cooperating; the boundaries of buildings and streets were refusing to align into a clean site plan. She had scaled and measured, chosen consistent set points, overlaid and matched, and yet multiple lines that should have been describing the same edges would not snap into place. The outline of every street, building, and corner of her waterfront site slipped just off register, like a disorderly stack of papers.

During her year at the WAAC as a study-away student, Gillian had discovered the joys of Sanborn maps as she researched the waterfront site of her studio project, A Museum of Histories for the City of Alexandria. The plural in the project title—histories, not history—was a deliberate provocation by the Studio Clio faculty to nudge the students to question singular master narratives. With all the chaos of the preceding year, questioning everything seemed obligatory. With apologies to Marx, even if all that was solid hadn't entirely melted into air, all that seemed solid had at least been shaken off its foundations. The City of Alexandria, like many American cities, had already been cleaning the rosy tint from its glasses and was currently deep into the difficult process of seeing itself differently. Maybe a different kind of museum could help; maybe students could imagine such a thing.

Despite their disobedience, the collection of maps showed that the waterfront site had churned with construction and destruction as buildings and piers rose and fell, burned or demolished, and the shoreline crept eastward, built on the backs and ballast of old ships. Gillian wanted her museum to tell the full stories of the site and she hoped the Sanborn set would be a method to divine which parts of the site were accustomed to bearing buildings and which had spent their centuries unburdened. It was a productive strategy, if you were willing to tolerate such an an astigmatic drawing.

“It’s just a mess of a drawing,” she said in our zoom crit, laughing at the futility of the effort and the unpresentable result of her time-consuming research. But it wasn’t a mess. It was an epiphany, illuminating that the very pluralities we had hoped students would program into their buildings were actually latent, and still vibrating, in situ. This beautiful mess of a drawing invited creative misreadings and more questions than answers: What am I seeing? Are these lines of topography? Multiple layers of enclosure? Evidence of the multiverse? And what are we supposed to do with all the stuff histories leave for us if we can’t bring them into focus?

A beautiful mess of a drawing, by Gillian Wilhelm

 

We named our studio "Studio Clio" for the Muse of history. As daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Clio was blessed/cursed with a father who possessed more strength than judgement and a mother who never forgot anything. According to some, she was also the Muse of the stringed musical instrument, the lyre, because she is associated with celebrating achievements. Great moments of history have often been memorialized in song. That said, our modern minds don’t usually mix history with the arts of dance, music, and poetry, because we have come to think of history—singular master narrative-- as serious business. History is thick books and slow documentaries; it’s the recitation that this great man followed that great man followed another great man in umpteen-forty-nine; that this place invaded that place and burned it to the ground, so a new place takes the old place's place.

Histories—plural narratives-- are more like the lyre itself than it might seem at first. As with all stringed instruments, there are many different ways to play the same chord, and even a single string voices more frequencies than its name suggests.  Clio, Muse of Histories, knows it's the vibrations that make the music.

Familiarity/Unfamiliarity

 “Coming home to a place he'd never been before”—John Denver, Rocky Mountain High  

 

If you can come home to a place you’ve never been before, can you come home to a place so changed that it seems like a place you’ve never been before? In my early years of teaching, I regularly asked my students to draw a map from memory of their “world at 13.” I wanted them to remember a time when they experienced the world naively, before their eyes became professionalized and fitted with architect’s lenses. I chose age 13 because that is about the time when we start to map our own worlds, on foot or bike, instead of being belted into passivity in the back seat. The assignment was directed toward understanding legibility, the elusive quality that makes certain places memorable. Make a drawing like that, from memory, and then you are ready to read Kevin Lynch and grasp how important our perception of place is.

Sometimes the exercise got a bit too close to psychoanalysis, unearthing forbidden destinations or locations of embarrassing incidents. But that was part of the lesson: perhaps it was the events themselves that made places memorable, rather than any move by a clever architect or urban designer. We hope that the places we design make memories but actions and events also make places; that we can’t take full credit should humble us as design professionals. There is an entire body of literature dedicated to the association of memory and place. (If you’re interested, start with The Art of Memory, by Frances Yates. I remember reading it, and I remember that main point, but I’ve forgotten more than I remember. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to where I was while reading…)

When I was 13 I inhabited a vividly legible town in North Jersey, which I could navigate on foot and bike and by doing so I engraved the paths, edges, markers, and nodes into my memory—from home to school, to friends’ houses, to piano lessons, to the library, on bluestone sidewalks, over and over...That kind of legibility depends on persistence--it’s what we are preserving when we protect historic districts—and my home town has changed relatively little in the past decades. Legibility also depends on resistance—to change. I remember one student in my class who came from a rapidly growing Sunbelt city. While sharing her World at 13 map she wistfully admitted that when she would travel home from school on holidays she often couldn’t find her way home because there was so much development. No persistence, no resistance. Her world at 13 was gone, victim of the cycle of creative destruction; she went home to a place she’d never been before.

(I stopped giving the assignment out soon after that, as MapQuest—remember that?—completely undermined the intention. Students couldn’t understand that the whole point was not to make the drawings objectively accurate, but rather subjectively, poetically, true.)

I’ve been thinking about this curious dance between place and memory, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. These days, the familiar has become strange, and the strange familiar, a phenomenon that Sigmund Freud described as the uncanny--which even he said was an odd subject for a psychoanalyst--in a 1919 essay by the same name. He defines the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”  I write much more about the uncanny in chapter seven of my book, How Drawings Work: a User Friendly Theory, but there I’m talking about the gap between the real and the imagined. Here, that space is between the real and the real. My book came out in 2019, so at the time I thought it interesting that the essay was a hundred years old. Now, though, 1919 means something else. Was he reflecting on his own experiences during the 1918 pandemic? When everything he thought he knew was thrown into doubt? He would lose his own daughter to the flu a year later in 1920.

In our pandemic year, everything takes place in the same place, so it’s no wonder that we struggle to keep track of what day it is. It’s uncanny. A grinding process of dislocation is shredding distinctions among work, home, and school. Enjoyable academic discussions about the benefits of a mixed-use city become uncomfortably personal: I didn’t really intend the “mix of uses” to be my own dining room/classroom, bedroom/office. Can we change scales please? We find ourselves at home in a place we’ve never been before. The familiar has become strange and the strange familiar, and as time passes, that familiarity starts to file off the burrs and blisters of the unfamiliar. Can you remember March 21, the first day of spring when the world was upside down? Do you remember where you were? Do you remember what those two blocks of 16^th Street NW looked like before they became Black Lives Matter Plaza? They’re the same city blocks, but not.