A LETTER TO TAMDAGHT
nancy hoffmann
Dear Mariëlle,
Last night you arrived in Tamdaght, Morocco, to begin your leap into darkness: a blinded residency. I am curious about your first impressions; the smells you experienced, the sounds of the night… Did you taste differently now that your eyes don’t get the chance to overwhelm your thoughts? What are the rules exactly? Do you wear your blinding glasses everywhere? Also in shops and restaurants? Or just on the streets?
I have always been fascinated by blindness, as you know. Not just because of the fact that I encounter the world with one blinded eye, but mostly because I am curious of what we are missing while seeing. I know that I often see things differently as a result of my disabled eyes. The world is flat as far as I can see. Only by touching things, or walking around them, I get a sense of their thee-dimensionality. But in general I think our blind spots might be larger than we realize at times; sight blinds us from so many other experiences that could help us encompass the world. I wonder if this mission will help you develop your other senses, and maybe even alternate your experiences forever, now that you are subjecting yourself to the test of temporarily disconnecting your visual abilities to capture a city, a country in connection to its people. You have decided to mainly talk to the women of Tamdaght to learn more about their lives and inner world. Am I right?
While thinking of public space, in this case, it’s unavoidable for me not to think of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The book describes the young Venetian explorer Marco Polo, periodically reporting to Kublai Kahn –the great emperor of the tartars, mighty leader of the Mongol Empire– describing to him the cities he visited while traveling throughout the territory the Great Kahn had conquered. “Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions (…) In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.” (p. 5) I can imagine the Great Kahn had several objections against travelling through his own empire: fear and arrogance.
I will learn about Tamdaght, not through your eyes, but through your other senses, which excites me but also makes me long to be there to compare my visual experiences to your smells, sounds and sense of touch. I could turn to the Internet to look at images of where you are, possibly even follow your pace through Google Maps, but even if I had a Drone at my disposal to follow you every step of the way it wouldn’t be the same. Now I have to believe and imagine. Fortunately I don’t have to face the objections and boundaries of an emperor.
I am leaving you with Marco Polo’s description of a city called Zaira. Zaira most probably never existed, but this is unimportant. Although you might want to know that Zaira is known as a female name, meaning ‘Princess’ in Hebrew and ‘rose’ in Arabic. Hopefully you enjoy the dreamlike stories as much as I do and it contributes to you entering a third level of experience: to the poetic, psychoanalytical and phenomenological levels of life. Then I will tell you about Gaston Bachelard tomorrow. Blinded by the purifying light of a candle, in his Psychanalyse du Feu…
Yours truly,
Nancy
The Hague, February 24th, 2014
Cities and Memory 3
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the Story of the gun boat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the Bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities, 1972, (English Translation: 1974, Harcourt Brace & Company, US), p. 10-11.