Collection of Sand Read online

  Martin McLaughlin, 2013

  The translator would like to thank the following people for their expert help in solving a number of particular problems: Catherine McLaughlin, Graham Nelson, Michael Sheringham, Giuseppe Stellardi, Elisabetta Tarantino, David Watson.

  The Author’s Presentation of the Volume

  From Paris Italo Calvino periodically sends an article on an unusual exhibition to the newspaper he collaborates with [la Repubblica].* This allows him to tell a story through a series of objects: ancient maps or globes, wax manikins, clay tablets with cuneiform writing, the popular press, traces of tribal cultures and so on. Some traits of the author’s physiognomy come through in these ‘occasional’ pieces: an omnivorous, encyclopedic curiosity, and a desire to distance himself discreetly from any form of specialism; respect for journalism as a way of providing impersonal information and the pleasure of relegating his own opinions to marginal observations or hiding them between the lines; an obsessive meticulousness and dispassionate contemplation when it comes to the truth of the world. Along with ten of these accounts of walks through the rooms of Parisian galleries, Collection of Sand includes other essays on ‘things observed’, or essays which, even though they start out from the reading of a book, have as their subject the visible or the very act of seeing (including what the imagination sees). The volume is rounded off by three sections containing reflections penned during his travels to other civilizations: Iran, Mexico, Japan. These pieces start from ‘things observed’ and open out to offer glimpses of other dimensions of the mind.

  A Note on the Text

  The essays in parts I, II and III were all published in la Repubblica between 1980 and 1984, apart from the following: ‘Collection of Sand’ (Corriere della Sera, 25 June 1974); ‘How New the New World Was’ (a spoken commentary for broadcast by RAI-TV, December 1976); ‘The Encyclopedia of a Visionary’ (FMR, vol. I, March 1982).

  The fourth part, ‘The Shape of Time’, includes pieces on Japan and Mexico, from 1976, partly published in Corriere della Sera and partly unpublished, and passages on Iran that have never been published before, from notes made during a journey there in 1975.

  I

  EXHIBITIONS—EXPLORATIONS

  Collection of Sand

  There is a person who collects sand. This person travels the world and—on arrival at a sea-shore, the banks of a river or lake, or a desert, or wasteland—gathers a handful of sand and takes it away. On returning home, thousands of little jars are waiting, lined up on long shelves: inside them the fine grey sand of Lake Balaton, the brilliant white particles from the Gulf of Siam, the red shingle that the Gambia river deposits on its course down through Senegal, all display their not particularly vast array of nuanced colours, revealing a uniformity like the moon’s surface, despite the differences in granulosity and consistency, from the black and white sand of the Caspian Sea, which seems to be still bathed in salt water, to the tiniest pebbles from Maratea, which are also black and white, to the fine white powder speckled with purple shells from Turtle Bay, near Malindi in Kenya.

  In a recent Paris exhibition about bizarre collections—collections of cowbells, bingo games, bottle-tops, terracotta whistles, train-tickets, spinning-tops, toilet-paper packaging, collaborators’ badges during the German occupation, embalmed frogs—the case with the collection of sand was the least showy but also the most mysterious, the one that seemed to have most things to say, even through the opaque silence imprisoned behind the glass of the jars.

  Surveying this anthology of sands, the eye initially takes in only the samples that stand out most, the rust-coloured sand from a dry riverbed in Morocco, the carboniferous black and white grains from the Aran Islands, or the shifting kaleidoscope of reds, whites, blacks and greys that has on its label a name that is even more polychromatic: Parrot Island, Mexico. After this, the minimal differences between one kind of sand and another demand a level of attention that becomes more and more absorbing, so much so that one enters into another dimension, into a world that has no other horizons except these miniature dunes, where one beach of tiny pink pebbles is never the same as another beach of tiny pink pebbles (they are mixed with white grains in Sardinia and in the Grenadine Islands in the Caribbean, whereas they blend with grey grains in Solenzara on Corsica), and a sample of minuscule black shingle from Port Antonio in Jamaica is not the same as one from Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, nor as another that comes from Algeria, maybe from the middle of the desert.

  One has the feeling that this set of samples from the universal Waste Land is on the point of revealing something important to us: a description of the world? The collector’s secret diary? An oracular response to myself as I scrutinize these motionless sand-clocks and reflect on the moment I have reached in my life? Maybe all of these things together. The collection of sands that have been selected chronicles what remains of the world from the long erosions that have taken place, and that sandy residue is both the ultimate substance of the world and the negation of its luxuriant and multiform appearance. All the scenarios of the collector’s life appear more alive here than if they were in a series of colour slides. In fact, one would think that this sounds like a life of eternal tourism (and that is just the way that life appears in any case in colour slides, and it is how posterity would reconstruct it if it were only slides that remained to document our times): basking on exotic beaches is alternated with more arduous explorations, in a geographic restlessness that betrays a sense of uncertainty, of anxiety. Such scenarios are evoked and at the same time cancelled out by what is the by now compulsive action of bending down to collect a little bit of sand and filling a little bag with it (or a plastic container? Or a Coca-Cola bottle?) and then turning round and leaving.

  Actually, just like every collection, this one is a diary as well: a diary of travels, of course, but also of feelings, states of mind, moods, even though we cannot be sure that there really is a correlation between on the one hand the cold, earth-coloured sand from Leningrad, or the very fine sand-coloured shingle from Copacabana, and on the other the feelings the sands arouse when we see them bottled and labelled here. Or perhaps it is only a record of that obscure mania which urges us as much to put together a collection as to keep a diary, in other words the need to transform the flow of one’s own existence into a series of objects saved from dispersal, or into a series of written lines abstracted and crystallized from the continuous flux of thought.

  The fascination of a collection lies just as much in what it reveals as in what it conceals of the secret urge that led to its creation. Amongst the weird collections in the exhibition, one of the most alarming was clearly the collection of gas-masks: out of its case stare green or greyish faces made of canvas or rubber, with round, blind staring eyes, and the snout-like nose like a tin or a supple tube. What spirit motivated this particular collector? A sense of irony but also, I believe, a feeling of terror regarding a humanity willing to adopt facial features somewhere between the animal and the mechanical. Or perhaps also a confidence in the resources of anthropomorphism, which invents new forms in the image and likeness of the human face, in order to equip itself to breathe in phosgene or mustard gas, and at the same time not without a hint of fun and caricature. And certainly also a sense of revenge against war, by showing in these masks the rapid obsolescence of this aspect of war, and thus rendering it more ridiculous than terrifying. But also the sense that amidst war’s shocking, foolish cruelty one can still make out our own true image.

  Certainly, if the collection of gas-masks managed somehow to transmit a mood that was in some way amusing and heartening, just a little further on a chilling, anguished effect was produced by a collector of Mickey Mouse products. Someone
has collected, clearly throughout a whole lifetime, dolls, boxes of toys, berets, masks, t-shirts, furniture, bibs, all of which reproduce the stereotypical features of Disney’s Mickey Mouse. From this packed display-case hundreds of round black ears, of white faces with a black spot for a nose, of long white gloves and skinny black arms reveal a childish obsession with that single reassuring image in the midst of a terrifying world, so that in the end this one mascot, in its countless mass-produced manifestations, itself becomes imbued with a feeling of terror.

  But where the collecting mania turns in on itself, revealing its own underbelly of self-obsession, is in a case full of plain cardboard covers, tied with ribbons, on each of which a female hand has written titles such as Men I Like; Men I Don’t Like; Women I Admire; My Jealousies; My Daily Shopping; My Fashion Tastes; My Childhood Drawings; My Castles; and even: Paper-Wrappers from the Oranges I Have Eaten.

  What these folders contain is not a mystery, because this is not someone who exhibits occasionally but a professional artist (Annette Messager, Collector: that is how she signs herself), who has staged various solo exhibitions in Paris and Milan, based on her series of newspaper cuttings, pages of notes and sketches. But what is interesting in this collection is precisely this expanse of closed, labelled covers and the mental procedure they imply. The author herself has clearly defined it: ‘I try to possess and appropriate life and the events I get to know of. Throughout the whole day I leaf through things, collecting, ordering, classifying, sifting, and reducing everything to the form of so many collectors’ albums. These collections then become my own life, illustrated.’

  Her own days, minute by minute, thought by thought, reduced to a collection: life ground down to a dust-cloud of tiny grains: sand, once more.

  I retrace my steps, towards the case with the collection of sand. The real secret diary to decipher is here, amidst these samples from beaches and deserts now under glass. In this case too the collector is a woman (as I read in the exhibition catalogue). But just now I am not interested in giving her a face, or features; I see her as an abstract person, an ‘I’ that could be myself as well, a mental mechanism which I try to imagine at work.

  Here she is back from a journey, adding new containers to those already lined up, and suddenly she notices that without the indigo of the sea the sparkle of that beach of shattered shells has been lost; that none of the damp heat of the wadi has remained in the blobs of sand; that far from Mexico, the sand mixed with lava from the volcano Parícutin is just black powder that looks as if it has been swept down from a chimney. She tries to recall the sensations of that beach, that forest smell, that heat, but it is just like shaking that little bit of sand at the bottom of the labelled jar.

  At this point there is nothing left to do except to give up, walk away from the case, from this cemetery of landscapes reduced to a desert, this cemetery of deserts on which the wind no longer blows. And yet, the person who has had the persistence to continue this collection for years knew what she was doing, knew where she was trying to get to: perhaps this was her precise aim, to remove from herself the distorting, aggressive sensations, the confused wind of being, and to have at last for herself the sandy substance of all things, to touch the flinty structure of existence. That is why she does not take her eyes off those sands, her gaze penetrates one of the phials, she burrows into it, identifies with it, extracts the myriads of pieces of information that are packed into a little pile of sand. Each bit of grey, once it has been deconstructed into its light and dark, shiny and opaque, spherical, polyhedral and flat granules, is no longer seen as a grey or only at that point begins to let you understand the meaning of grey.

  So, deciphering the diary of the melancholic (or happy?) collector, I have finally come round to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that now seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and deserts of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.

  [1974]

  How New the New World Was

  Discovering the New World was a very difficult enterprise, as we have all been taught. But even more difficult, once the New World was discovered, was seeing it, understanding that it was new, entirely new, different from anything one had expected to find as new. And the question that spontaneously arises is: if a New World were discovered now, would we be able to see it? Would we know how to rid our minds of all the images we have become accustomed to associate with the expectation of a world different from our own (images from science fiction, for instance) in order to grasp the real difference that would be presented to our gaze?

  We can instantly reply that something has changed since the time of Columbus: in the last few centuries man has developed a capacity for objective observation, a scrupulousness about precision in establishing analogies and differences, a curiosity for everything that is unusual and unexpected, and these are all qualities that our predecessors in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages apparently did not possess. It is precisely from the discovery of America, we can say, that the relationship with what is new changes in human consciousness. And it is for that very reason that we usually say that the modern era began then.

  But will it really be like this? Just as the first explorers of America did not know at what point they would either be proved wrong or have their familiar preconceptions confirmed, so we too could walk past things never seen before without realizing it, for our eyes and minds are used to selecting and cataloguing only that which responds to tried and tested classifications. Perhaps a New World opens up every day and we don’t see it.

  These thoughts came to mind while visiting the exhibition America Seen by Europe, an exhibition that brings together more than 350 paintings, prints and objects at the Grand Palais in Paris. All of them represent European images of the New World, from the earliest reports that came back after the voyage of Columbus’s caravels to the gradual understanding that emerged from accounts of the exploration of the continent.

  These are the shores of Spain: it was from here that King Ferdinand of Castille gave orders for the caravels to set sail. And this stretch of sea is the Atlantic Ocean which Christopher Columbus crossed to reach the fabled islands of the Indies. Columbus leans out from the prow and what does he see? A procession of naked men and women coming out of their huts. Barely a year had passed since Columbus’s first voyage, and this was how a Florentine engraver represented the discovery of what at that time people did not know would become America. Nobody yet suspected that a new era in the history of the world had opened up, but the excitement aroused by this event had spread throughout Europe. On his return, Columbus’s report instantly inspired an epic in octaves in the style of a chivalric poem by the Florentine Giuliano Dati, and this engraving is in fact an illustration from that book.

  The characteristic of the inhabitants of the new lands that most struck Columbus and all the early explorers was their nakedness, and this was the first detail that worked on the illustrators’ imaginations. Men are portrayed as still having beards: the news that the Indians had smooth cheeks apparently had not yet spread. With Columbus’s second voyage and especially with the more detailed and colourful reports by Amerigo Vespucci, another feature as well as their nakedness fired the European imagination: cannibalism.