Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

(Axel Boer) #1

build hotels and churches on the dark lake of blood. All will end with the Castle. But this
is a fable: and that is the Castle of Babble with sleeping inhabitants. A single dead person
keeps watch still, like a candle lit in a match box at 22 Alchemists Road.
Everywhere cranes rise in an assault of the sky. No this is not yet a city, it’s an idea,
it’s a fury of interminable inconstruction. Nothing but Pelions and Ossases. The idea is at
the end to build the city one day on the summit of the heap.
I was in Prague for the first time and Prague was not there. She had just left, or else it
was he, the spirit of the City, the doctor K, the inhabitant of our ‘Right this minute’
house. We have heard about it this Odradek, this bobbin that is not a bobbin, that is not
only a bobbin, and that stands on two small sticks as on two legs. One could think that it
was useful once and that it is broken, but that is a mistake. It is something that was
described by Dr Franz Kafka standing on two small stick legs, it has all the appearance of
the thing that has lost its meaning, but one cannot speak without being mistaken, because
Odradek is extremely mobile, while I speak, he runs off and he is no longer here. One can
only look for him.
So where is he? Is he in the dictionary, in a museum? No, ‘he is now in the attic, now
in the stairwell, now in the halls and now in the entranceway’. He gets around a lot. He
has no lodgings, he is in all the parts of the house that do not lodge, that are not counted,
places where one only passes through or else disappears.
Or else was it I who was not there? When we are alive we do not know we are ghosts.
What are we in the promised cities? The contemporary dead of our descendants, the
future returning ghosts. It is Sunday today I pass in front of the ‘Right this moment’
house that K. left just now sixty years ago to go to his office. He went out the door and he
took off. A person who is not yet born will pass by here in forty years, and will wind the
cut string onto our bobbin.
Time is a square wheel. Running fast enough in the alleys I could perhaps catch him
who passed through here even before I was born before I was born.
For this it suffices that the centuries be well guarded inside the Castle.
Imaginary memories, imaginary life: I have already lived here we lived on the fourth
floor, by the window of the living room you could see the corner of the City Hall. No
more imaginary a life than my other ancient lives. The country of the past belongs to the
same continent as the imagined country. They meet and mingle their fields, their squares,
their sweet salt waters. At the back of the picture the streets of Oran intersect the streets
of Prague.
We dream of going to Prague. We do not know how to go. We fear. We go. Once
inside we do not find it. We wander for a long time in the Castle. If there had not been the
minuscule door 22 Zlata Ulicke, the minuscule door in Gold Street, to cast the anchor for
a minute, we would never even have landed at all.
Where is the Synagogue? Where is the door?
Happily, we never get there. It was too late. It had just closed. We would not have
succeeded in entering.
Blessed be the closed doors and the rusted portals. You wanted to enter?
Happily we failed.
Where is the Oldyoung Jewish cemetery enchanted with squirrels?—Here, here,
between the dark severe walls, just in front of your nose. Above our humiliated heads
powerful volleys of crows scream their brusque abrupt menaces. It is a harsh miracle,


Rethinking Architecture 290
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