A Visit to the Southbank, London

“Endless. The possibilities are endless.” I like it. In fact, I tell my wife. She claims she noticed it first. We’ll never agree. Our son, James, and his new partner, Moya, join in as well. Soon all the visitors on the fifth floor of Tate Modern are joining in. If you stare at an exhibit for long enough, other people think you’ve cracked it and have worked out the conundrum, and feel obliged to join in, to avoid looking stupid. For example, the one hundred and twenty house-bricks arranged two-deep five by twenty in a rectangle on the floor, with don’t-touch lines around them. But much more fun is to get everyone stooping and genuflecting at the four three-foot high cubes with mirrors on all the visible sides. If you stand in front of each cube and peer over the top into the one opposite, you can see the two cubes reflecting each other down what appears to be a tunnel, endlessly. Even more fascinating is the fact that, as you change from one cube to other, the curvature of each tunnel is different from the next. The fun doesn’t end there, because if you look sideways into the cubes rather than over the top, you get another set of reflected cubes, but this time they curve to the side, and don’t go down a tunnel.

Now there are so many visitors peering at the cubes that eventually we move away and stand back, admiring our handiwork. All the new visitors to this room are wondering what is going on and are approaching the cubes. The Indian attendant is jubilant, he has never seen so many people interested in this exhibit before. “You have made me very busy,” he says. “I am usually very bored, but now I am having to be very watchful to make sure people don’t cross the line.” It is my son he speaks to and I feel slighted, as I reckon I started the whole thing off. Not according to my wife.

One thing worries me - was this the artist’s intention? Someone will say it doesn’t matter. Modern art is modern art. Is the first creative bit what the artist does? Perhaps the next creative bit is what you make of it. Rather like the flattering captions on the wall which say more about the exhibit, you suspect, than the artist intended.

                                                    

                                                  ************

“All is not what it seems,” I almost remark to nobody in particular, as I run my finger along the backs of the second-hand books. Therefore, the manner in which I run my finger along the backs of the books will be interpreted in different ways by nobody in particular who happens to be looking in my direction or visualising the scene if reading this. Or it will go unremarked, like the thought that preceded the movement of the finger, or the brushstroke, the laying of the bricks, the simile.   

 

‘Confluence.’ Running my finger over the backs of the books, I have time to savour this word that comes from nowhere, now, like the theme of a story, under Waterloo Bridge, in the sunshine, before my wife returns with coffee from the National Film Theatre opposite; this word which insinuates its way into a narrative, bringing lives together like books on a stall, in all weathers and all seasons: the word itself relishing its own metaphorical magnificence as it mingles the merging waters before discharging them mercilessly into a mighty ocean of possibilities. 

        

Second hand books on a bookstall, mercilessly thrown together into a mass grave of writers’ inspiration. Do we care for the thought that precedes a simile or is it somehow a mere nuga compared with that which precedes the dab of a brush or the laying of one hundred and twenty bricks? Isn’t a Moby Dick worth a Fighting Temeraire or a Madame Bovary worth a Rodin’s Kiss? Yes, we all say in unison, but we’re glad these books are knowingly undersold. 

       

‘Strada’….la strada….strata....street….my life’s like a faraway street I can’t remember: I walk down it and afterwards I can’t remember what it was like, how the buildings were arranged, what the buildings looked liked, who passed me, anything that happened. My wife can remember everything. If I want to know, I ask her. She remembers. If I wanted to know what I ate at ‘Strada’, she would remember. Moya described growing up in Belfast during ‘The Troubles.’ That much I can remember of our visit to ‘Strada’, but not the shape of the tables, not the waiter’s face nor if he had beads of sweat on his nose; not the time it took to get the bill; if it was the same waiter who brought it or another; if the toilets were memorable in any way. These might be the sort of things you remember, but not me. 

 

It is the Spring Bank Holiday. It seems to bring them out: singletons secretly scribbling in notebooks. It is the ‘strada effect’ -  they mustn’t miss a thing; they mustn’t let their lives get away from them; they mustn’t forget a thing: the drama of the setting, the whole South Bank thing, the National Theatre, the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, the book stalls, the Thames. They all seem to be young. They are tucked away in corners, huddled behind walls, squatting on grass verges, cradled in the arms of statues, pretending to be out of sight; the writers of our great future, keeping diaries, making notes, getting it all down on paper. Hopefuls, carpediemists. How I envy them!

Perhaps these scribblers, too, will have their day and finally end up on the second hand bookstalls, where they will undoubtedly be content to settle for temporary immortality, it being better than none.          

 

The four of us have come to the end of a pleasant afternoon. Before parting, we pause again at the bookstalls, exchange words about books we have read or mean to. I am recommended an author whose name I immediately forget.

           

One last desultory glance at the books and I am astonished to come across a copy of ‘Elegies’ by Douglas Dunn, the poems he wrote following the death of his wife.

“What on earth is this doing here? How can people part with books like this? It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1985!”

“Probably a house clearance,” James remarks, “a job lot.”

The slender volume flicks open at ‘Reading Pascal in the Lowlands’. My eyes fall once again on the lines:

                    ‘It is discourteous to ask about

                    Accidents, or of the sick, the unfortunate.

                    I do not need to, for he says “Leukaemia”.

                    We look at the river, his son holding a rod,

                    The line going downstream in a cloud of flies.' 

        

Somewhere, a young doctor was making his way down a hospital corridor to speak to the parents of a child. His white coat was flapping as he walked. He was carrying a file with the results of a test. As he drew closer, he changed direction abruptly and came back a few minutes later, having got his face right. To give bad news.       

   

I snap out of my reverie and replace the book. Our day out has ended.  We say goodbye and return to our homes.