006 ON COMPLEXITY of the human and of the urban
from "Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban" (segment 2)
In Lech Majewski’s movie The Garden of Earthly Delights (Ogród rozkoszy ziemskich, 2004), a terminally ill art expert, Claudine and her lover, Chris travel to in Venice. She needs to give a lecture on Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting there, but neither the immersion into that incredibly rich work of art nor beauty of the unforgettable city can provide more than a backdrop for yet another death in Venice. Majewski’s plot and swinging, hand-held camera masterfully blend the depths of one of the most amazing urbanities, the vortices of Bosch’s imagination and an imminent end of life, a life at its loving high. An air of irrevocable ending sets a melancholy undertone which tames all the excitements which an extraordinary place and the best that art and human feelings could offer.
During one of her emotional lows, caught in the bathroom, with sounds of the church bells in the background, Claudine contemplates materiality of her frail body. Chris goes to a grotesque extreme and sets up an elaborate mock-up of ingredients which make human body. An aquarium full of water: “There, this is exactly thirty eight liters of water, which makes up three quarters of your body”. A pile of white crystals: “Over here, I’ve got three kilos of ammonium nitrate, that was the only way to get hold of nitrogen. Then, we’ve got ten kilos of carbon; this is what your body uses for energy. Then here, this ordinary blackboard chalk is your calcium content, exactly. This is what makes up your bones. This is three grams of iron. And this, this rivet, is exactly one gram of zinc; this is to help your digestive process. And then, finally, this paper clip is exactly one fifth of a gram of copper. This colours your skin.” Gazing through the window as everydayness of Venice unfolds and moving her fingers over those materials, Claudine says to the engineer she loves: “So, this is my portrait”, only to make her lover turn his hand-held camera back, towards her: “No, here we have the real you, Claudia, in the flesh …”. She bends, kisses the camera lens, she coughs. The movie ends soon after. The limits and finality of human existence.
Claudia, in the flesh. The complexity of human being exceeds our capability to comprehend and represent its many realities, but that never stopped our efforts to seek and communicate its elusive essence. The complexity of a human being, of each and every human being is simply incomprehensible. While our bodies do consist of all those elements and materials, while we indeed are physical, we are at the same time so much more. At least, the Cartesian thinking bodies. Each of these bodies in the street, in the metro, comes with an incredible web of connotations, links and interconnections, entangled in various histories and memories, knowledges and feelings, faults and beauties, rhythms, rhymes, passions, secrets.
We are material, and – more. Always, much more.
Now, let’s imagine an effort to represent Venice, in a way equivalent to that in which the engineer, Chris, started responding to Claudine’s wish. I am absolutely sure that we are technically capable to calculate the exact volume of water in the Venetian Lagoon, at any moment in time. We must also be able to say exactly how much mud and who-knows-what-else makes the many islands of Venice, how many millions, billions of tons of various materials are embedded in all of the houses, bridges and squares which physically make that unique city … Possibly down to a kilo. (If not yet, then that is only a matter of time.) But, would that quantity be - Venice?! “So what?” is the most damning of questions confronting our immense power to quantify.
One of my favourite definitions of the urban, favourite as it is at the same beautifully useless and the most comprehensive definition of all, is Oswald Spengler’s declaration that the city is a settlement with soul. Those words resonate long after the overall relevance of Spengler’s overall opus has vanished. He, significantly, points out how “the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town. A mass soul of a wholly new kind … Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality. And the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and history. … It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is not size, but the presence of a soul” (Spengler, 1928).
That mass soul is the soul of culture, which I associate and, on occasions, equate, with – urbanity. But here, we are interested in introduction of totality, that elusive quality of identity-defining intensity which explains the key difference between the “village” and the “town”. Crucial difference is not in size, nor in any other easily identifiable and measurable aspect, but in the level of complexity. The miracle indeed is in the capacity of the urban, comparable to that of the human, to transgress the physical, and to reach an intangible, but all-important quality – identity. In Spenglerian terms - the soul.
Cities are factual, and – more. Always, much more.