The Politics of Washing (24 page)

‘You say that, but who are the Venetians anyway? Those boys speeding in their motorboats? The carabinieri who play Formula One drivers across the Lagoon? The landlords who drive the residents out with their tourist rents? Or close down the corner shop to let their premises at twice the rate to some guy selling glass made in China to the tourists? They’re not Venetians, because they don’t give a damn about Venice. They’ll suck every last drop of blood out of this city. The real Venetians are the people who live here and help put new life into the community and love this place.’ He pauses, then looks straight at me. ‘You’re a Venetian,’ he says.

M
OVING ABOUT OUR
planet in aeroplanes, we get confused into thinking things like this: ‘Nowhere on earth is further than twenty-four hours away’, which might be a useful way of seeing the world, if time and distance were really so easily measurable; but what about the date you never lived flying to Australia, or the day you lived through twice, coming back in the other direction? What about the split second in your life when something was said or done or thought that changed you forever?

Daily life in Bangladesh or Tahiti or Botswana or New Guinea is going on at this moment, just as your daily life is, and mine, but we are separated by more than space. I have threaded my way along an Old Delhi street, beating a path among hawkers and merchants, pickpockets and mendicants and fat, wealthy women dressed in silk, and thought ‘this place is medieval’, which was, in fact, from where I stood, no metaphor. The silver bullet of an aeroplane that crosses seas and continents conveys us not only through space but also through time. Through a wall of something finer and more elastic than a spider’s web and less comprehensible than the narratives of time or space we think we understand. Our uncertain place in space makes all of us into ghosts. Accidents of birth mean that each one of us is a fugitive in history, lucky or unlucky in the lottery of geography and circumstance.

I grew up loving the stories of C.S. Lewis. They are full of movement between different places and times; a wardrobe that opens into
elsewhere takes you from inside to outside, from summer to winter, from childhood to adulthood and back again. In
The Magician’s Nephew
Lewis invented ‘the Wood between the Worlds’ where you find yourself outside time and between places, in a land without history. The trees soar majestic and artificial like the nave of a gothic cathedral and are rooted in a flawless, mossy carpet scattered with countless, identical pools. There are no signposts and no clues: each pool is a looking-glass portal into another world. You hold your breath, you jump and you might emerge … anywhere.

It is with thoughts such as these in mind that I travel. Wherever you are on earth, imagination and attention can reveal what was there – literally – all the time. In any ancient city, in any part of the world, you might pass an unremarkable door set into a wall, glance through it and find a hidden universe unfolding, like an Escher drawing, into arcades, cloisters, gardens. Stepping into a church or a temple or a synagogue, we will come across archaic ceremonies, gorgeously enacted for – as often as not – practically no one. These are ritual routes of access to the past that will bring us into contact with other realities which do not exist in time-frames we can easily understand.

One winter evening in Venice, as I walked past a university library, I looked through the windows at students bent over desks, reading in the glowing pools of light cast by their lamps. It occurred to me, in that unremarkable moment, that I was witnessing human habits and values of scholarship going back in an unbroken line to Alexandria, to ancient Athens, to Babylon and Mesopotamia. Then, two academics hurried by. They were deep in conversation, and as they passed I heard one say urgently to the other: ‘What you must take into consideration are the hermeneutics of Byzantium.’

Those scholars could have been ghosts from another Venice, unwinding its life alongside the Venice in which I found myself, though they were dressed in grey suits, not black robes. There is nothing mysterious here: type and tradition, curiosity and endeavour have longer historical trajectories than the few decades of an individual life.

For several centuries now, human beings, in different parts of the world and at different times, have become obsessed with narratives
of modernization: the great spring cleaning of civilization. In the twentieth century, the dream of a utopian future mutated into a nightmarish totalitarian present. The idea of progress will always limit human development if it is not leavened with a sense of time’s peculiarities – its
timebends
– as Arthur Miller called them – its movement backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out, everything, in fact, that makes up its grand, woven tapestry.

When I became part of real daily life in Venice, I learnt to relish the relationship between the antique fabric of the city and the modern lives unfolding in it. I began to imagine a new manifesto that is, predictably enough, as old as the hills. Might the traditions and ancient narratives of humanity offer us silk routes into the future – or pools – or
wardrobes
– or whichever metaphor you prefer? Human conventions and customs, manners and behaviour, artefacts and artistry and buildings are all portals we can find in our daily life that reveal, if we stop to look and listen hard enough, our once and future world.

Taking the lived-in, day-to-day Venice as a model might it be possible to refigure the way our culture thinks both about the trajectories of individual lives and of society as a whole? If life and society were seen as something more than a mere banal jog forwards through time, towards extinction, would we be more mindful of who we are and what really matters? And might Venice be allowed to free itself from fantasy and become again, if not exactly ordinary, at least real?