Notes On: The Living City, Souvenir

Cities trapped in history and the memories we have of them. Poetry, prose, photographic collage.

Apr 25, 2024

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

How do we find you?
Sat here as you are;
As you have been,
Alive, 

All these years.

Petrified; In majesty,
Your painted streets,
Your printed squares,
Your hewn history,

This cathedral home
Heavy on the map
That holds you,
Here. 

Right here.  

The very one,
The real deal! 
Locked up,
In museum glass,

Pristine. Cellophane.

Do not touch,
Do not turn your pages, 
Do not feel your contours,
Your surface texture.

You are preserved,
For all of us. 
For everyone, 
All but your own.

You serve a purpose. 

Your people,
Who are they?
Encased within you,
Your monumental life.

Formaldehyde. 

We Medusas, 
Gaze upon your home;
48 megapixel 
Mummification.

How do we find you?
Still here.
As you were,
All those years ago.

Great to finally meet you.

And what does one take back with them? Beyond the glutinous images, the museum stubs and the novelty mugs - what does one remember of a place such as this?

What do I remember?

The pollen of the poplar trees; clumped in small white chutes, floating on the May wind through every street and square.

The cathedral sunk into the cityprint; ridged in terracotta whorls, that arch and loop the land that holds it.

The walk from station to hotel; longer than expected, that traced along its winding roads past every sight worth noting.

And they blur, these lines and shapes, these people and places, into an experience - a memento that I hold now. How I think it was then, petrified like the city itself into an impression only I can hold; turning it over in my mind, feeling its smoothed form, eroded by the time between then and now. To really know a place like this is futile. The memory has lapsed into a forgotten, indistinct form. A searching memory, that is tied up in the history and the knowledge of the city as a thing - but not the place itself.

Detail of *Florence* (2022) by David Donoghue

Not the place that is a home for people who live and die, and work, and smoke, and have bad days, and discuss the football, and fight with their neighbours, and sleep with the postman’s son in secret.

Not the place where the mundane commute skirts Brunelleschi’s dome, where Sunday mass is held under the depths of Giotto’s Trinity, where the elderly and locals meet by Donatello’s St. Mark to talk it all over; the politics, the state of the roads, the quality of the food, the rising costs, the beauty of the day, the football, their awful neighbours, the postman’s son.

The living city is not ours to take with us. And we drift past - this home, this culture - and it suffers our presence as we see only the statues, and the buildings, and the sheer magnificence of it all.

This culture strains against the ties of history that binds it to the past. A history that fills its streets with unfamiliar faces; arms outstretched, black holes in hand, sucking in the sights and sounds to be deposited into a harddrive somewhere and forgotten again.