GRGR23(1) - Oh, THAT Peenemunde...

[Mark Wright AIA]

--- Seb Thirlway <seb at thirlway.demon.co.uk> wrote: snipy snip snip
> ...that Peenemunde seems to be a non-place.
> There were still some of these in northeast London a few a years
> ago.  The places aren’t marked on any map, no-one will ever be
> directed there; all you find there is
> 
> A still canal (the Grand Union), a body of water with no real use
> now, but it’s kind of nice.
> water spilling out of a leaky lock gate
> a duck or two
> weeds, flowers and sometimes entire saplings growing not just out
> of abandoned concrete aprons and the floors of gutted workshops,
> but even somehow out of the upper windowsills.
> 
> while just 400 yards and 10 degrees of an eyeball’s arc away are
> the great towers, smooth stone of the City of London, the
> gleaming Geld-Stadt dwarfing the Bank of England at its centre;
> the view of it is so good that it approaches the aerial
> Raketen-Stadt prospect the TV channels used to project behind the
> evening newsreaders as a “window”, lights twinkling.  If you walk
> along the canal you’ll find the odd pseudopod here and there that
> the City (which is not so much a city as a practice, of maximum
> use of land, clear marking and delimitation of each address to
> give it reality – the city stretches way beyond the City into
> Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Islington) has thrust out: a
> redeveloped warehouse, a gold doorplate and a car park surrounded
> by steel fencing and razor-wire.
> 
> It’s all very confusing here at the Interface....

Lovely...  How do ancient placenames overlay on the present reality of
London?  It sounds as though you are talking about the near-east-end. 
Spitalfields?  Whitechapel?  Or zones between where the names don't
quite apply?  London is layered in time to almost the same depth as
Rome, isn't it. 

Mark's First Corollary to Mondaugen's Law: Cultural density is directly
proportional to temporal bandwidth.

Hawksmoor's sublime and awe-full churches stand in some of these
places, objects of such intensity that beauty and ugliness come full
circle and suffuse one another. ("Yin and yang.  Yin and yang.") How is
a building, or any work of art, made to carry such an extreme charge?
Why, and how, is Hawksmoor's Mary Woolnoth so much finer than Wren's
Stephen Walbrook a few blocks away?  Do you know Christ Church
Spitalfields?  It is worth a long, long look.

And what does this have to do with Pynchon? Damned if I know.  Oh yeah.
 Placenames. They remain as facts-on-the-ground, stubbornly persistent.
 Their pronunciation and spelling drift with the people that drift upon
and across them. Do a population of "DP's" feel a collective tingle in
their scrofulous scalps as they cross boundaries from one named ancient
place to another?  Do they come to rest in the interfaces between
"places"? Are the golden men (and silver women) of the City aware of
these places between as they transpose daily from Knightsbridge and
Chorley Wood? 

Does the canal you speak of, 400 yards from the City, exist in the
place of names or the space between names?  Are you a DP?

Mark

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