Figure 9.1 Gliding, Plongeoir, Granville. Photograph courtesy of Aliocha Photographie (2009).
In the text The Logic of Sense (1969), Gilles Deleuze notes a moment in which ‘dreams of accelerated gliding replace the painful nightmare of burial and absorption’.1 Deleuze finds this moment in literature. It can equally be found in music and in art. It is this moment that I find in architecture, and particularly that architecture which I refer to as bare architecture. This moment involves a liberation from selves, and in particular myself. This moment also involves a flight from death. Particularly your death. Bare architectures strike raw sensations and prompt rawer thoughts. These are architectures that strip one bare and allow one to be apportioned to others and outsides. These architectures fail to reconstitute subjects. Instead, we are set adrift like the clouds and the tides that these architectures make proximate. These architectures operate like diving towers encouraging us to breathe in deeply and then let go.
There is a diving tower, a plongeoir, that at high tide stands in Mont-Saint-Michel bay (Figure 9.1). Mont-Saint-Michel bay occupies an edge of the English Channel or ‘La Manche’, depending upon the shore upon which one stands. When one approaches from England it is definitely the English Channel and when one approaches from France this water becomes La Manche. The channel is the narrow arm or ‘sleeve’ of the Atlantic Ocean. At low tide this diving tower does not stand in Mont-Saint-Michel bay but, instead, stands on the beach of Granville, Normandy. Granville is on the Cotentin Peninsula on the north-west coast of France. But it wasn’t always so.
Like the channel, the town of Granville itself passes between England and France. The landscape here is an odd layering of rock and stone fortifications. The earth and the architecture are hard to discern. Both are attempts to secure that which surges. Most prominent are the fortifications built by the English in 1437. The walls didn’t stop the surge. Granville has been French since 1441. Although, there was one notable moment in 1793 when the monarchical impulse of the English and French almost coincided. As it was, this battle occurred within the walls of the town. The republicans were victorious.
Victorious, but not consistently so. In World War II a German raiding force momentarily occupied Granville. The coast guard still uses a German Gun Battery as a lookout tower. Defending territory often puts one in contact with the outside: the chaos of the sea and sky; as much as the other: the foreign and foreigner. What exactly was fortified and what was liberated in Granville is hard to say.
I came to Granville to see the rare editions of Jean Cocteau at the Musée d’Art Moderne Richard Anacréon. You can see the diving tower from the Musée. In lieu of the deep interiors of the Musée and the intensity of Cocteau, I head outside and move on to the steps that adjoin the park, the elevated promenade that adjoins the sea, and the diving tower that seems to be without adjacency. The tides are extreme here. The bay runs up to the walls of the promenade when the tide is high and at least 200 metres from the edge of the promenade when low. This is a place of strong currents and flows. Why the tide is so extreme here, I do not know.
This diving tower is as raw as such a structure might be: a single concrete column, a ladder, an inverted stainless steel cone that forms a platform, and a railing. The concrete column is approximately 6 metres high and has a diameter of about 800 millimetres. There is a small concrete annulus – a small circular platform – approximately halfway up the column that extends outward about 500 millimetres horizontally. The annulus corresponds to something like a medium-tide mark. Below the annulus there is one single circular section metal rung that you might have grabbed to hoist yourself from the water. The concrete cylinder is painted red from its base to approximately 1 metre below the annulus. It seems to signal danger and I imagine that when the tide is low and the red paint is exposed, that caution should be exercised. The more red, the greater the level of caution involved – though it’s not specific and the height of the first rung of the ladder itself means that when the tide is low the tower is impossible to climb. It was approaching high tide that Tuesday and the red paint was only just visible above the waterline. Above the annulus there is a ladder. A stainless steel ladder that is nevertheless slowly staining. The ladder is about 600 millimetres wide and about 10 rungs high. The ladder is fixed to the concrete column. The ladder rises and passes though the inverted stainless steel cone platform that sits atop the concrete column. There is a slot cut from one part of the cone; it’s a rectangular slot (in plan) and a triangular slot (in section). A ladder and bodies pass through this slot in order to access the platform. The circular top of the inverted cone is approximately 2 metres in diameter. Ten bodies might stand on this platform comfortably. Or as comfortable as one can be wet and half naked with 20 arms and legs. But that day, I was wet and half naked and very alone. A smaller column of stainless steel, approximately 150 millimetres in diameter and 1 metre high sits at the centre of the platform. This small column has small rungs that are useful in assisting bodies to move from the ladder to the platform. A stainless steel handrail runs around one-half of the circumference of the circular platform. You would have held it in order to steady yourself – to acclimatize to the height and to prepare for the leap you were about to make.
Between the promenade and the diving tower, when I wade into the cool water, there is a moment in which the gentle breeze and the clouds and the rhythmic and surging chaos of the shoreline spasms. It is a moment when I feel the force of the Earth directly and when the intensity of the outside pulses over every surface. This moment occurs when the stainless steel platform becomes triangular; when the concrete annulus becomes a thick line and when the line between concrete and red paint which runs around the column sits as a perfectly horizontal tangent to the gentle arc of the horizon beyond. At this moment the three-dimensionality of the object collapses into two dimensions. The architecture becomes a datum line. As the architecture collapses into two dimensions the Earth surges. It feels as if the water is suspended in the sky. It’s not flat and laid out horizontally but rather flat and vertical. The horizon line, composed of water to the left and to the right of the diving platform, bends to the curvature of the Earth itself. The cirri in the distance become more intense, more poignant, as if painted by Turner. It is moments like this that allow me to feel completely aligned with that which is beyond me. As if the sensation wades with me. Everything drifts like a school of fish in the wake and wave of Virginia Woolf. It is a surface effect, an exteriority, but a deeply affecting one. It is moments like this that place bodies in proximity to ‘an unthinkable or unthought deeper than any internal world’, as Deleuze prompts.2 These are moments when the complexity of existence spills into a singularity. The singularity of being here. Only here. And now. Only now.
This singular sensation is intense. An extensive intensity. It is a spatial unfolding of a kind, a spasm of depth into intense surface. It is also a spasm of self and selves. I’m not aware of myself at these moments. And for a moment I forget you too. I always feel guilt when this happens. No, I always feel guilt after this happens. At the time, in these moments, I’m joyously lost, lost as a ‘mysterious “he”, this “he” that is of no person anymore’, as Deleuze writes of Maurice Blanchot.3 I am lost as you are lost. It is an arbitrary plane of departure but a departure no less. Such moments carry me far and they implicate everything. This diving tower is like a pin-pointing. A singular leg. A singular athleticism. A syringe in the outstretched arm or sleeve of the Atlantic Ocean through which I might pass, transformed. This is a moment where ‘dreams of accelerated gliding replace the painful nightmare of burial and absorption’.4 It is a passing moment. A ‘gliding atmosphere’.5 It passes too quickly because I cannot help but think again. Sensation may always precede sense but this sensation, this ‘something’, says Deleuze, ‘forces us to think’.6 I pull myself from the water and ascend the diving tower. Alone. Alone and not quite whole and thinking of you.
I flew when you died. All of my flights have become this flight. I wasn’t home that world night. I was at a symposium giving a paper. The paper was focused on Cocteau, the Room of Les Enfants Terribles and the intensities of interiors. And I had to fly home knowing you were dead. Or at least part of me flew home. I always felt that when you died; when your heart stopped warm on my side of our bed; I always felt, I was altered. And it wasn’t superficial. The rhetoric of that time, provided by 100 Hallmark cards and clichés attached to bouquets of flowers, was that: you will live on in my memories. It would seem that we have to descend into rhetoric and cliché in order to deal with such intensities. ‘She will live on in your memories’. She. Whilst there may be a truth to such sentiments, it’s a trifling truth. You may live on in my memories but the bigger sense I had, I have, is that when you died so did part of me. I don’t know which organ it is, or which portion of every organ; but part of me is dead. And there are times when I am joyous about this. I’m joyous because in that organ and in this portion: There you are. That part of me that is dead was yours. Will always be yours. It was the part of me that moved with you. On my side of the bed and yours and indiscernibly between.
My thinking on this platform, on this diving tower, has nothing to do with the oppositional construction of absence or presence. So little these days falls into an either this or that logic. To have been touched intensely is always to have been touched. To have lost you that night is to wake afresh each day to absence. The profundity of absence. The presence of absence; in every memory and instant – and thus it is not a distinguishing or distinct feature. I am left operating between absence and presence. Between a thanatopolitics and creative choasmosis. This is what schizoanalysis is. A constant constructing in that which tears me apart.
I took to the air when you died. Orpheus took a tunnel. Cocteau a Room. Roland Barthes a street. Deleuze took a window. Blanchot would take a long corridor. Some take texture, some text. When Henrietta Moraes died she was searching for a quote from Oscar Wilde. It was: ‘This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do’. It was her. Cirrhosis of the liver. Woolf took to a pen before taking to a river with pockets full of stones. She wrote a letter, by hand, to Leonard Woolf. It was the third suicide letter she’d written. ‘I can’t read’, she wrote. ‘If anybody could have saved me it would have been you’.7 The letter is just headed ‘Tuesday’. It could be any Tuesday. Words run the gap between the self as lost and the self as found. Between the desire cast afar and the object of passage. The text of the world often occupies that between just as bodies do. Just as bare architecture does. When I’m here at the edge of this platform, on this diving tower, above this sea, in this air; and you’re not – there is always a part of me that’s also not here. I am, as Blanchot writes, ‘in constant contact with two shores’.8
I took to the air as you took to the earth. It wasn’t that I loved less but that I loved more. I hoped the plane would crash. But I also knew it wouldn’t. I knew there was a job to be done. Children to raise. Our four. Erasing myself wouldn’t have raised them. Or so I told myself and whispered to you. I remain terrified that this was the conceit of a second Orpheus, unable to collapse the difference between life and death by taking one’s own life. Thereafter to be punished by the gods. And torn to shreds by Titans.
It is best to dream of accelerated gliding. When literature sweeps me away. When music sweeps me away. When architecture sweeps me away; and I lose myself in the here and now; I get closer to you. I get closer to you because I get closer to the Earth and to the Real. To feel the beating heart of the planet and to be held by all clouds. A diving tower, a plongeoir, is never about a plummet. It’s about flight. And each time I dive I imagine an arc cast into the air – a hyperbolic arc – that might sweep us away.