subliminal city

If I say Paris
Paris
even if you’ve never been there

say London
you’ve never seen it but
London

New York
everybody
New York

even Moscow
even if i say
Moscow

this is Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957
This is Frank Lloyd Wright:

“Now, at present, I happen to be doing a cultural center for the place where civilization was invented-that is Iraq. Before Iraq was destroyed it was a beautiful circular city built by Harun al Rashid but the Mongols came from the north and practically destroyed it. Now what is left of the city has struck oil and they have immense sums of money. They can bring back the city of Harun al Rashid today. They are not likely to do it because a lot of western architects are in there already building skyscrapers all over the place and they are going to meet the destruction that is barging in on all big western cities. So it seems to me vital over there to try and make them see how foolish it is to join that western procession.”

Unmapped in our imaginations
Baghdad baghdad
Silent smoking target

Built on a perfect circle

It has been called

Mother of the World
Abode of Beauty
Gift of the Gods,
Triumph of the Gods
Round City
“Umm Al-Basatin” (the mother of orchards)

And by its founder
Madinat Al Salaam: City of Peace

“The A-10s passed my bedroom window, so close I could see the cockpit perspex, with their trail of stars dripping from their wingtips, a magical, dangerous performance... But when they turned their DU shells -- intended for use against heavy armor-- against the already wrecked Iraqi Ministry for Planning, the effect was awesome. The A-10’s cannon-fire sounds like heavy wooden furniture being moved in an empty room...” [Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 2003]

empty room of our vision
lit by cameras
that see through everything
but war

of Ruskin’s seven lamps of architecture,
the first is the lamp of sacrifice
of which he says
it is

“most unreasoning
and enthusiastic
--perhaps best negatively defined:
the opposite of the prevalent feeling
of modern times
the desire
to produce the largest results
at the least cost”

the desire now
to produce the least results at the largest cost

Among the plans for Wright’s unrealized Baghdad,
a ziggurat
tower with spiral ascending descending ramp--
Think conical version of Gehry’s Guggenheim,
guts turned outward,
this after the design of a ruined ziggurat
2500 years ago: Samarra Iraq.

The ziggurat, staple of Babylonian architecture,
intended to suggest holy mountain,
sacred place at the center of the universe,
access to heaven,
the unfinished Tower of Babel
Jacob’s Ladder.

Wright proposed the form twice:

as a monument to
Harun al Rashid
and also as a plan for
a parking garage.

The second lamp of architecture:
the lamp of truth:

“there is a likeness between the virtue of man and
the enlightenment of the globe he inhabits--
the same diminishing gradation in vigor
?the same essential
separation from their contraries--
the same twilight at the meeting of the two:
a something wider belt than the line
where the world rolls into night...
that dusky debatable wherein
zeal becomes impatience,
temperance becomes severity
and justice becomes cruelty...”

July 2003
55,000 American troops occupy the City of Peace,
Raw sewage runs in the streets
water and electricty are sporadic,
but cranes are busy tearing down images and Saddam Hussein.

Exorcism
a strange
priority--
no infastructure, but no
glowering brow.

The third lamp of architecture:
the lamp of power:

“it often happens that we find a strange pre-eminence
and durability in many upon whose strength we had little
calculated, and that points of character
become developed under the waste of memory;
as veins of harder rock whose places could not
have been discovered by the eye are left
salient under the action of frost and streams.”

Decapitated dinosaur guards a museum courtyard,
Where looters left Hussein’s taxidermied white horse,
Untouched.
In its lifetime
intended to bear a ruler through the streets of Baghdad after a victory (over Iran)
it died before the parade
and stands now, stuffed,
in the latest rubble,

spectre of the desire,
always
attached
to white horses.

Whichever way I choose to approach the city, I must tread warily, for its streets are still littered with bodies, books and blood [Sinan Antoon, April 2003]

The 6th lamp is the lamp of memory.

In another dream it is

architecture.