Sailing ‘Round the Tomb

Whenever I am forced to walk by the Grotesque Nameless Monument I tend to do so quickly. Its ghastly, demoralizing form provokes such a radiation of respectfulness and dolor that it is hardly tolerable to look at, even in the shade. Mostly I lower my eyes in embarrassment.

I had just that morning by coincidence found a painting of that spot before it had been built, totally blank and much the better too, it seemed.

As I passed by that afternoon I did so with my usual embarrassment, and stuck to the ground. Lucky I did, for if I had not had my eyes latched onto terra firma and instead gawped in rapt devotion as one is supposed to I might have missed a chance to go on a strange journey.

I first glimpsed the boat in the bottom half of a ripped up playing card. It was a painted scene, and stood out very clearly against the solemn concrete. I then spotted another nearby, and then a whole one after that. And more still. It seems I had been inadvertently taken aboard a little goose chase around the monument.

The scene depicted on the card was very banal, almost perfectly eerie in that metaphysical anti-presence. A nautical illustration so generic that it calls out to one. Interesting indeed how the whole needed to journey instead of just one of the boats. There was also a white bird, and its exact inversion, a white sail, in exactly the same hue. It was very difficult to tell in the cases where the card was ripped whether I was seeing a bird at first glance or a sail.

Obvious question: was this Rimbaud’s drunken boat?

A pink face scrawled in chalk winked at me.

As I said, I followed the cards, face up and down, in their strange and almost artful numerological prancing around the different hotspots around the Monument. Although they were not really hotspots at all, mostly negative space, crevices, side areas designed to simply move the eye along the grand sweep to the Unsightly Central Thing. Certainly they are not given direct attention except maybe by the disrespectful segment of society who loiter around for less than respectable purposes. Following the cards drew me to these non-zones. They led me through beds of planting mud, cracks in the concrete, staircases, and even the roots of an old tree.

I left and came back a little later happy to see that some of the pieces had been reconfigured.

Very beautifully, the wind would pick them
up and twirl them around.

I began to consider the layout of their loci, as possible cartographic features. These I have attempted to redraw as shores or islands. One ring of ice seemed very much like a beautiful ringed atoll.

A ripped 8 of spades nestled directly in the pit of the Unsightly Tomb.

After following them around, I stepped back and watched them at a distance, wondering who else might be willing to go on this strange ride.

A commissionaire on her security round to the monument glanced.

Many people didn’t give any indication that they had noticed them let alone stopped.

One longer haired bohemian type was ambling by, looking around verso slowly and head banging. He did visibly stop and stare at one of the cards very dramatically.

It seemed as if a french bulldog made a lunge for one but that could have been my imagination.

Went back the next day, the cards had completely vanished, every single one, all across the different areas, not a trace left…

March 22, 2021