Ghost Cities

which could easily have been a book

“Morte… morte… Bruges-la-Morte… — the cadences of the last bells, weary and slow, little, worn-out old bells which seemed to be shedding petals — was it on the town? Was it on a grave?”
—Georges Rodenbach

What i seem to remember most: those times when i wandered lost in strange cities. As if everything else, as if that very knowing of where i was & what i was doing--were the dream that would fade upon waking.

“Place is layers of story. When we walk those pale chalk lines, we scuff up not only temporary dust phantoms, but a thousand tales of those who went before us. Whether wraith way or not, all our hodology is haunted.” —@hookland.bsky.social

There were necropoli before, there’s some in Syria from a thousand years ago that are even called that, but i am thinking primarily by their effect of being haunted by & of haunting certain writers. Any city you have a history in, needless to say, is more haunted than one you have just moved to. And there are mythic cities, such as (for me) Los Angeles, that don’t seem haunted at all—not even in Chinatown. Joyce’s Dublin is detailed as no other, but its dead are more living than many of our contemporaries…

Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte made me want to go there, though i never quite made it that far. Praha (“Prague”) i did, & immediately fell in love with a place so very unlike the Sunbelt megalopolis of my greentime. Many writers have memorialized it (Ripellino is a useful compilation), of course there’s Kafka (but would you recognize it from his descriptions?); & i found Daedalus has some dandy translations of Meyrink. Steppenwolf the movie is very little about Prague—& yet Prague is there. F. Marion Crawford, partly because it came to me in the form of an old book found in the house my family moved into, has this:

“And yet these same dusky streets are thronged with a moving multitude, are traversed ever by ceaseless streams of men and women, flowing onward, silently, swiftly, eagerly. The very beggars do not speak above a whisper, the very dogs are dumb. The stillness of all voices leaves nothing for the perception of the hearing save the dull tread of many thousand feet and the rough rattle of an occasional carriage. Rarely, the harsh tones of a peasant, or the clear voices of a knot of strangers, unused to such an oppressive silence, startle the ear, causing hundreds of eager, half-suspicious, half-wondering eyes to turn in the direction of the sound.” —The Witch of Prague

The Vienna of The Third Man, the Berlin of Isherwood & Auden (& so many more)…

“Such political consequences as it [the Congress of Vienna] achieved were in the main disastrous and brought much misery. But its glittering gaiety had one odd result. It gave Vienna—a fine but rather sombre city, with not a particularly happy history—a curious glamour, a touch of magic, determinedly exploited by writers and composers of operettas and the like, that refused to vanish until after the First World War, when even the ghost of the Congress stopped dancing.” —J B Priestley, The Prince of Pleasure (1969)

Venice is both legendary & extremely spooky (especially at night). Even Tanith Lee’s knockoff is weirdly effective. Don’t Look Now & Death in Venice are two of my touchstones. But that is a whole literature in itself… a haunting of hauntings.

“As far as my inquiries have extended, there is not a building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not sustained essential change in one or more of its most important features.” —Ruskin

I was haunted for years by a city glimpsed at the beginning of Exorcist 2, & i finally learned its name was Lalibela…& it was closed to the outside world for thirty years. Seven hundred miles from Rimbaud’s Harar. Judd’s installation in Marfa i passed by but will never see. Geomantic cities, like Kaesong. The geometry remains.

“The Babylonian cities were each modeled on a constellation: Niniveh on Ursa Major, Sippar on Cancer, Assur on Arcturus, Babylon on Cetus-Aries. The Han capital of Ch’ang-an was laid out in the pattern of the Big and Little Dippers combined… I dream of constellated cities.” —@schweben_weben

Empty cities. Chinese-built Nova Cidade de Kilamba in Angola. Brasilia in Plath’s poem. Detroit, Chernobyl, Peoria (which i have seen, so now i don’t need to visit Dickens’s London). Ruin tourism. Cities of water, of sand, of fog (Doyle’s London). An interminable winter of unemployment spent in Seattle, which i renamed Zubenelg, wrote syllabic skathons on (9-5-9-5-9), & palindromes in Middle Vorlin, & tried to conjure the Coast Salish deity Sxwaiwxe up from the bottom of Green Lake. Over pots of oolong & Lapsang Souchong, Café Medící with both lemon peel & lime.

I couldn’t stay. Debts to this day i haven’t paid.

The flooded New York City of Spielberg’s A. I. & the novels Drowning Towers (Turner) & Depth (ac Rosen), not to mention Ballard (in one of his four elemental apocalypses)—something that is imaginary now, but surely will oneday be. Others, from Calvino to Vermilion Sands, Miéville, Pheby & Ennes, all have their claims. Dhalgren that is never the same twice. But is the St Petersburg of Bely, Mandelshtam & Gippius, any less an imaginary city? (Or: Biely, Mandelstam, Hippius; Leningrad. Phantasmagoric ciphers.)

“Petersburg

I love you, Peter’s handiwork.

Your skeleton is straight, your outline
Harsh, your rough gray granite–gray.
And there’s a blunt betrayal trembling
At each dim crossroad on the way.

Your boiling cold is more horrendous
Than calms the deserts have withstood.
Your breath is death and putrefaction;
Your waters are bitter wormwood.

Black days. White nights. From public gardens
Drafts of cadaver-darkness fly…
The needle’s point across the river
Pierces into the glassy sky.

At times the movement stops, reverses:
The stream flows backward, rears and yanks…
The river will not wash off ever
The red spots from the solid banks.

Those spots, the rust ones, settled deeply.
One can’t forget or tramp them dim.
The firebrand one can’t extinguish
Burns, chars the body dark and grim.

Below, your bronze snake still is writhing;
Your bronze horse freezes–still the same.
And you will never be devoured
By a conquering, purifying flame.

No! You will drown in your black mire,
Vile city! And God’s foe–full-blown!
And soon swamp worms, worms ever stubborn
Will eat around your bones of stone.”

–Zinaida Gippius, in: Modern Russian Poetry (tr Markov & Sparks)

Back in the first heyday of blogs, when poetic heteronyms seemed the way to go, i invented a New Zealand L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet whose fondest dream was to live in that city of Russian Symbolists & be one of them. I looked up Google Street Views of the coffeehouse he would have haunted in Auckland. --In turn, he invented another imaginary poet—Jack Ruby Hummingbird.

“For although the great cities in which learning developed, such as Baghdad, Basra, and Kufa, have been ruined, God Almighty has compensated this loss with other mightier cities. Thus learning shifted eastward to Khorasan, in Persia, and Transoxiana, then westwards to Cairo...” —Ibn Khaldun, An Arab Philosopher of History (tr Charles Issawi, 1950)

Abandoned malls have become our equivalent of ancient ruins, but who has stories about them, except a few former shoppers? My Vikon Village, where i bought vintage army surplus (including a 40s coat & a 30s hat I still use). Valley View where i briefly worked as a ticket-taker in a theater (while i slaved over my one-man show of paintings [none sold, one stolen]; that white & black uniform i wore for years, & sort of became my trademark)—a wasteland of gravel & archaeological traces, today. I watched them bulldoze it from across the street, over a period of weeks or months:

I started with the thought that Dallas is a place without ghosts, shadows, or any history they care to remember (Libra takes care of the big myth, if Oliver Stone doesn’t), but it is in fact busily erasing itself, day by day; those who remember the old city feel like ghosts themselves. Shortly after i got my driver’s license, in the late 70s, they rerouted the way from Downtown Dallas to Deep Ellum, & now anytime i go that way I try to recall what the original road directions were, & it confuses me. And that’s happened in Oak Cliff (where i grew up), too. So much of my old places have become unrecognizable.

“A detective novel in which the killer is revealed to be a city.” —@MagicRealismBot

And the palindrome-named streets—Maham, Lenel, Renner—accidental palindromes waiting to be recognized. By some inner pilgrim (here the whole time). Who can posit an intention to represent Crowley Park as Aleister, Floyd Rd as if Pink. McCallum for David McCallum. Who can make this other city vanish, Tlön interloper, Tannu Tuva only for awhile (that is, you may find it in atlases published between 1921 & 1944)…

As if Pluto’s moon was named after Cioran.

“Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.” —Walter Benjamin, quoted in: Michel Makarius, Ruins (2004)