_ _ _ regardless of how (un)intentionally flimsy it might sometimes seem, urbophilia@Substack does have its structure and flow; that is a structure that wants (which I want) to bear a book; at present, I let that structure respond to the winds and eddies of my placeless life, the currents which can ease but never cease; my 2024 begun in Bangkok, continued with an escape to Tokyo (where urbophilia.Substack was launched) and then another, much longer one to Europe – with various engagements in Ljubljana, Split, Zagreb, Beograd, Split (again), then Lecco, Milano, Bologna, some smaller places along the way and Split (yet again), Bol, Korčula ... at present Slovenia again, before another acceleration, towards the end of the year, ending where this year’s journeys have started; along that path, either in response to, or in an effort to escape from the places visited, I have posted a number of my urbophilia@Substack stories; the plan was to finish and this week to upload a brief ON hand post, an effort to capture the excitements of a just finished workshop on the pleasures of drawing (and other things that can make life interesting), and to discuss the importance, inevitability and advancements (in/of design) which only intuition of the thinking hand can stage; but – no!
_ _ _ this post, with admittedly rushed headline ON cities, came up tonight from nowhere, and it jumped the queue; this text took me by surprise, perhaps as a consequence of listening an interview with Zijah Sokolović, and him mentioning the bridges of his native Sarajevo; being that a trigger or not, in what follows here are the bits of that original intention to deal with a creative hand; again ala prima, what I have jotted down in my notebook is transcribed here, the thought as it flew from my pen onto the paper; as announced above – this is a premature digression from what is yet to come;
FAST NOTES FROM MY NOTEBOOK 133 (pp. 43-48; slightly edited)
_ _ _ (my) cities are the scars, in me
or, perhaps to put it in a bit softer way
_ _ _ (my) cities leave the traces, in me
(N.B. yes, that is an unrefined statement, yet that IS what my hand has written down, when I noticed that I was doodling)
_ _ _ a term urbophilia came (to me) from its diametrical opposite, urbophobia – the hatred of cities, which started shaping up the world around me in the late 1990’s, when the conflicts in Yugoslavia started to evolve into a full war against cities, the crimes against humanity, civility, against urbanities and everything urbane; my life, the lives of my ancestors and neighbours, and the society that we used to be were all gone; _ _ _ I have gone _ _ _ we have gone _ _ _ only the scars remain, the traces in me, in us all
_ _ _ every text has to start somewhere; my text, I as a text, the story of my life has started in Mostar, the city where I was born; to me Mostar became an ideal city, an endlessly idealised place; but, my strongest feeling towards Mostar are neither those of its undeniable beauty, nor the limitless freedom of a happy childhood, but that of the death of my city _ _ _ the city which has started shaping what I was to become was brutally murdered;
_ _ _ the cities are (to be understood as) living (social) beings, whose lives can be taken from them, thus from all of us who have once constituted them; _ _ _ in cities, citizens die; by losing our cities we also (partially) die;
_ _ _ as mentioned above, this text has started from a doodle ... from this doodle;
initially indecipherable (technique: espresso, wine, water soluble colour pencils, ink; perhaps a bit of despair, triggered by that YouTube interview), something like a bridge has emerged; why do I doodle that shape so often?
while sketches are intentional, doodles are thoughtless
_ _ _ do I doodle that arch when “thoughtless”?
_ _ _ where does that arch come from, if not from a thought?
intuitive, doodle precedes the sketch; being involuntary, doodle is faster than the sketch; it operates (almost) at the speed of thought
in doodle, there is a desire to become the sketch
in sketch, there is a desire to become a drawing, painting, sculpture, a building
_ _ _ doodles are thoughts which seek to leave a trace
_ _ _ doodles are traces of thought before it takes shape
as proto-thoughts, proto shapes, proto-sketches, they (innocently?) equally capture the past, the future and everything (that dense fabric of moments [as] lived) between them
_ _ _ doodles are haiku, of a kind, a haiku of Matsuo Basho’s famous, perfect definition, but – only in this case not what happens, when it happens; doodles are not (capturing) an event, but a thought when it flashes, as it flashes;
_ _ _ doodles are thoughts hoping not to vanish;
- the shape of this daring arch was, at first, a Hayrudin’s thought (even to him a scarily daring flash over the chasm), before becoming a stone-hard reality; that arch has transformed two sides of the Neretva river into a single spatial and then (an immensely complex, yet decidedly one) social reality; a bridge was its heart, yes, the heart of the city!
- then . . . at an ugly moment in history, that heart had to be ripped out, the values it stood for had to be annihilated; all other bridges of Mostar have been destroyed before this sacred structure has fallen; only Hayrudin’s bridge had the capacity to pull and to keep the ultimate complexity of the urban together, to create a mighty urbogenetic sparkle (paralleled by those fingers painted by Michelangelo in La Sistina); that MOST made MOSTar; in the times of madness, that was the reason to have it annihilated;
_ _ _ but, at the beginning, there must have been a Hayrudin’s doodle which captured his thought; a doodle which then became a sketch, a sketch which became a design, a design which evolved into a complex construction project and then – a bridge, that incredibly light, beautiful reality, a meeting place crafted in stone
_ _ _ an apparition; crossing it, we all believed that the Stari most actually existed;
_ _ _ an apparition; killed by suicidal murderer(s); primitivism facing the mirror; inat;
_ _ _ today, from the 2024 perspective, destruction of the Old bridge of Mostar on 9 November 1993 feels as an early announcement of the world of broken bridges, a world brutally “connected” only at imaginary levels of capital, arms, ruthless power, an Artificial Imaginary, in the world which has lost its Real;
_ _ _ CUT
