The Other City
by John Phipps
If you have another city I can say this much about it: you’ve been there before, not as a tourist but as something closer to a visiting resident. When you went, you found its squares flooded with optimism, its people sunny and welcoming, its streets laid out in the form of a passionate promise. It’s somewhere you remember being irrecoverably happy, and where you are very slightly nervous to go again, in case while you were away it turned back into being just any other city.
In the summer of 2019, I was living — but actually no, I object: there’s a sort of bored exhalation of breath at this point in the piece, as the writer begins the biographical passage. ‘In the summer of 2019, I was living in ____’ — normally followed by the constipated admission of a relationship and an affectless, threadbare explanation of whatever personal crisis or exchange programme the author was contending with. It’s a little sigh of defeat and reduction that marks the headrush of memory being forced through the capillaries of speech. ‘In the summer of 2019’ — no thanks. Not good enough. For now, all I can usefully say is that I also have another city.
For Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Italy is ‘a land in which a love of the beautiful might be comforted by endless knowledge.’ That’s pretty good: a vocational, answered love with a blush of eternity at the edges. A ravishing mutuality of desire and promise — though as it happens, Isabelle is precisely wrong. It was the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy who wrote what I think of as the two definitive poems on the subject, and he writes about it by refusing to lend its form even a millimetre of reality beyond the platonic. This is the first stanza of ‘The City’:
You said “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart — like something dead — lies buried.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.
It’s writing that uses the quantum of real-world detail. Cavafy tends to foreground what can’t be accessed, or rather, to stress that inaccessibility as a concrete property. In his spare, hieratic poems we feel the hard outlines of the things that are present, but unobtainable, to memory. ‘It’s like him,’ says the speaker in ‘On Board Ship’, looking at a pencil sketch of a former lover. ‘But I remember him as better looking [. . .] He appears to me better looking / now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.’ The love poem ‘Long Ago’ ends:
A skin as though of jasmine
That August evening — was it August?
I can still just recall the eyes: blue I think they were. . .
Ah yes, blue: a sapphire blue.
Some poets give you jewelled plums from their inside pockets. Cavafy just points, a writer who always says ‘that’, and never ‘this’. E. M. Forster described him as ‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’, and we follow his line of sight more than we ever meet his eyes. In his erotic poems, which have titles like ‘Days of 1901’ and ‘Days of 1896’, the object of desire is almost always in the past, quite possibly is the past. The thing he sets down, over and over, is the negative outline of its unregainable quiddity.
I would like to set that down about my city — my other city — as well, and about the time I spent there. The reason I am writing about it is the same as the reason I can’t (or won’t) write about it, which is that I can’t put those things into words without betraying both.
Is it possible that the other city is a sort of delusion — a thing I made up after I left? Maybe. The idea chimes with my intuition that I do not want to live elsewhere so much as I wish to be otherwise: a less agitated talker, a more disciplined writer, a better and more popular friend. Any kind of dancer at all. I want to be furnished, suddenly, with the self I desire, and my guess is that this would be possible there, not here. In principle, Cavafy agrees, though not in the way I’d like.
In the second stanza of ‘The City’, the poet makes a devastating reply to the first speaker quoted above.
You won’t find another country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll always walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life in this small corner
You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
Cavafy leads us through a long series of negations that broaden fanwise until they blot out the world. He repeats himself and doubles back on himself, as though with each previous iteration of ‘no’ he has failed to match his words to the loss they denote. A space has opened up between what he says and what he refers to. I think of Cavafy as a poet of far distances and butting proximities: between past and present, memory and lover, word and world. He builds his poems with and around these distances, in the way we build our sense of self out of and around the contours of our possible, impossible lives.
It feels at the moment as though those lives, in those other cities, are more unreachable than they have ever been. ‘You won’t find another country, won’t find another shore.’ But a crack of hope has got in here unnoticed. If, as in ‘The City’, my life’s (admittedly) abject failure has destroyed the other city, then maybe it wasn’t entirely a delusion. It had, at least, a transient half-reality. Cavafy’s other great poem about this city takes place at the moment of its evanescence. The night before he lost the city of Alexandria, Mark Antony heard a procession of ghostly music pass through the streets out the gates. It was a sign that Apollo, the God of music and the prince’s divine patron, had left him.
In ‘The God Abandons Antony’, Cavafy writes:
At midnight, when suddenly you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now
Instead, he says: ‘as one long prepared, and full of courage, / say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.’ This is a very different idea, and we’re urged to take this advice not in the service of some higher ideal — truth, honour, dignity — but by the simple inevitability of loss. The word in the first line is ‘when’, not ‘if’.
Cavafy goes on to suggest we have obligations to our memories, that we should insist on them:
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
The poet George Seferis said that Cavafy did not exist outside his poetry. I’ve increasingly been falling prey to a similar sense that I barely exist inside my own life. It would certainly be convenient to believe that things have never been very different. I think the Cavafy of ‘The God Abandons Antony’ is right though. We degrade ourselves by believing we imagined our past happiness. The truer and harder thing is learning to live with its memory. And there’s something to be said for that battered but intensely felt sense of a life forgone — midnight, a procession, exquisite music — that finds us stumbling blindly away from happiness, like we do from love, muttering, ‘I know what I saw’, and already wondering when we will, since we surely must, return.