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

[Seb Thirlway]

GRGR23(1) – Oh..THAT Peenemunde

Which Peenemunde?

This Peenemunde is a coastline, a down, a landscape – trespassing
on your pages David, but this build-up matters -  Narrisch and
only Narrisch is the tour guide who can point out the charred
ruins hidden in this nature reserve, and conjure them up once
again as what they were, telling off the test-stands like
“stations of the cross”.  The other occupants of the boat see

coast, grass, birds, and a few concrete shapes.

B-but wait a minute, 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.  That City is just
a view, a painted backdrop that the artist could annotate (for
the slower-witted members of the audience) as “Money – Power –
Control – Function”, and the water and the ducks are real.  Or
maybe it’s the City that’s real – you could fly over the water,
walk into one of those buildings, find that it’s solid and
three-dimensional, and find “specific someones, with a name and a
penis” there – the City dwarfs the ducks rather than the other
way around, the ducks are an irrelevancy, since the only reality
THIS place has is, maybe, if it’s lucky, a potential reality: its
colour-code on a developer’s map, ducks, lockgate, weeds and all
are dissolved in a small pool of red or cross-hatching, and the
legend reads “potential for redevelopment”.

So which Peenemunde is the real one?  As Frau Gnahb cruises the
interface between sea and shore.  Is it the great Raketen-Stadt
that’s still in this reader’s mind, the Holy Centre that Slothrop
’s story has been propelling him towards, the place where at last
he’s going to unravel it all, or is it going to turn out to be
just this stretch of the Baltic coastline that we can see at this
point – beaches, downs, birds?  Does Slothrop care?  Narrisch can
still connect the two, but he’s beginning to look a bit
Rocket-fanatical, more like the Slothrop we knew than Slothrop is
now.





Seb Thirlway
seb at thirlway.demon.co.uk