My Time in Space (2 page)

Horizons are the eye’s best attempts upon infinity; we scan them avidly as if desperate to see as far as possible or searching for escape through the threadlike gap between the impenetrable globe and the indefinite depths of the sky. Perhaps two puzzles, one
explicable
and the other inexplicable, condensed into the mystique of horizons for me in childhood.

First, the rules of perspective, which I grasped at an early age. My parents were gratifyingly impressed by a drawing I did when about eight, of the undersides of the diningroom table and chairs seen obliquely from where I lay on the carpet – a worm’s-eye view, they told me. The trick of drawing in perspective is to imagine that one has a single, cyclopean, eye, keep it fixed in position, mentally reduce the edges of things so viewed to a flat array of angles and intersections, and copy that onto paper. The result is nothing like the world as registered by two eyes set in a mobile head and backed by an interpretative brain, but it is
curiously
convincing. In a sketchbook mainly of childish scenes of interplanetary war, piously preserved by my parents, I find a little diagram evidently drawn to convince myself of the fact that an object subtends a smaller and smaller angle at the eye as it is removed farther and farther, and that, taken far enough away, it disappears. I used to like demonstrating this with drawings of roads winding away over rolling hills into the distance, vanishing into valleys and reappearing as ever-narrowing strips, until their two sides converged to a point on the horizon. I remember that a primary-school friend thought these drawings absurd; roads kept the same width all the way, he insisted.

The other puzzle was that of parallel lines meeting at infinity. (The unworldliness of the consideration suggests I was told of it by my uncle Richan, a quiet, unassuming Scot, my mother’s brother and regarded with irritation by her because of his lack of initiative, who read Sir James Jeans and Baudelaire and did his best with limited talents to make a living as an artist.) Since parallel lines are chiefly famous for never meeting, this meant that
anything
and everything might meet at infinity, which therefore I could draw as a menagerie of whatever I was capable of drawing. Since I particularly liked drawing elephants, I made many pictures of parallel lines arrowing in from all directions, with constellations of elephants big and little.

The horizon, then, is where the possible and the impossible meet. Did it also impress me as an all-encircling threat? For
otherwise
I cannot account for a painting from my mid-teens, called ‘A Man Cut in Half by the Horizon’. The man staggers towards one with terrifying or terrified hands raised above his head; his midriff is missing and in the gap one sees the dwindling road behind him and a low horizon between desolate heath and a lurid
sky. Splashes of dark red along the roadside perhaps owe more to my defective colour-sense than to thoughts of blood. I showed this work to the physics master of the small provincial grammar school I attended. Why him, of all people, the representative of a version of reality compounded from blackboard-chalk and stale pipe-smoke, in the dragging gravity of which the school clock ran slow, who for year after year had reduced all the fantastic and
precise
‘Properties of Matter’ to half a dozen experiments of mortal tediousness and indefinite outcomes? If I wanted to shock him I did not succeed. Instead of fulminating over the impossibilities of my scene, he merely asked why I didn’t paint something
beautiful
, such as a sunset; nobody, he said, could even imagine a
painting
called ‘The Ugly Sunset’.

That grammar school was in Ilkley, Yorkshire; the horizon of my fantasy was the skyline of the plateau above the picturesque crags and winding walks of Ilkley Moor itself. It is one of the
Pennines
’ dark moorlands underlain by millstone grit; the next, north of it, is Emily Brontë’s, and then come heights of the more
luminous
grey of limestone. I spent much time up there, sometimes with my younger brother and his small friends whom I coerced into scouring miles of heather for elephant hawk moth or oak eggar caterpillars, or with schoolfriends of my own, looking for golden plover nests or trying to rediscover a shallow pond we named Swoopers’ Tarn because we were once driven off from it by diving seagulls and which lay in such a level expanse of bog that with our small statures it was difficult to locate from a
distance
, or alone, seeing the two gaunt pylons on the highest point of the moor – disused radio-masts from the war years, I think – as elementals, giant embodiments of nature’s forces, stalking the edge of the world.

Cities were invented to protect us from the terrors and
temptations
of horizons. Façades stare down the would-be-wandering eye, direct it along perspectives that terminate in monuments to the centrality of the places they occupy. And the rebellious urge of some citizens – myself among them – to overcome these
constrictions
drives us to the tops of whatever poor heights the city’s bounds enclose. In London my urge to drink space and inhale
distance
had to be content with the views from Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill. Constable could look out of London from there, into the countryside beyond, but now it is impossible to see the city whole. Nor do these views have anything of the map about them; they reveal neither the grand theorems scored by the Enlightenment nor the knots left in the grain of the modern city by the medieval villages it has grown around. The subject may occupy 180 degrees or more of the visual field horizontally, but hardly five degrees from top to bottom; we see the city edgeways on, an expanse almost without volume, a crust.

Pining for horizons, I used to walk through London so far as possible as if I were in open countryside. The site of my ‘
University
of the Woods’ could have been Hampstead Heath, but was in fact, or in imagination at any rate, a scruffy bit of parkland by the Welsh Harp reservoir, beyond Cricklewood and Neasden – beyond, that is, from the point of view of West Hampstead, my village when that piece of fiction was written – across which I used to ramble, until the body of a youngster from a delinquent family we knew of was dug up there, and it no longer seemed a safe landfall from the sea of chaos growling all around it. From that (quite properly) modest eminence one sees the Greater
London
of dingy towerblocks, cardboard-box industrial units and
turbid
rivers of traffic, with enough aircraft overhead to define a
loose skein of flight-paths hanging above and declining into it at various grey points of the compass. Some notes have surfaced, of my first expeditions there:

But in the modern city’s layout ‘the land’s directions’ have been overridden by the impetus of transport; it is perverse to identify oneself with the losing side, the buried past, in this historical
agon.
My 1960s artistic projects for bringing into consciousness
London’s
suppressed geography – for instance, a walk along the course of the long-built-over Kilburn, the Kyle Burn of lost rural ways, leaving a bunch of watercress on the doorstep of each police
station
I passed – could be seen not only as whimsical but as
life-denying
. The city builds, tears down, rebuilds, its own horizons; its skylines burgeon and decay like the close-packed petals of a rose. For the truly London pastime of identifying from
half-obscured
profiles buildings with names and histories, Primrose Hill, on the verge of the inner city, is the place. I forget what exactly is underfoot at the highest point of that shallow dome of trim grass and treed walks, but it is worn down into hardness or concreted or tarmacked, as if the constant directing of attention away from it to the vistas below has somehow annulled it. I used to call it ‘The Point of View’ and identified it with the site of the foot of Jacob’s ladder, and indeed it did occasionally reveal a visionary dimension to the city. One evening M and I were strolling on the slopes of the hill when we met a poet of our acquaintance coming down. He said, ‘There’s a lot of people up there; they must be expecting an event,’ and went on his way hunched in introspection. We hurried up to join the gathering on the Point of View. Nothing was happening but the evening itself; the event was London’s bewitchment by the level rays of sunset, its transformation into a poet’s city, Samarkand, Xanadu.

Flying across the Great Plains, say from New Orleans to Denver, one looks down at a flatland divided precisely into squares, most of them further divided into four. Many of these smaller lots
contain
a huge circle, the extent of a crop irrigated by sprays on a
centrally
pivoted, slowly rotating beam; anyone seeing these discs for
the first time will think, as I did, of a giant game of draughts played on an endless board. Underlying and half-effaced by this modern, rectilinear, rule-bound geography is another, vague, senescent, of sprawling elevations that look too slight to be
captured
in contours, and meandering streambeds abandoned to
stagnancy
and evaporation. If nature seems to be wandering at a loss in a directionless expanse, the work of humans knows the
cardinal
points of the compass exactly, and the roads that follow and define the boundaries of lots are singlemindedly intent on getting out of here, wherever ‘here’ is, as directly as possible. As the shadow of the plane advances over it for hour after hour, the
agricultural
geometry at last begins to lose conviction, the succession of squares wears out, a subdued chaos of desert shows through. Eventually only a few highways persist in their monomaniac
westward
career towards the Rockies.

Westward is the warp-direction, the underlying and sustaining drive of ruthless purpose, in this awe-inspiring tapestry of the advance of the frontiers of cultivation. A thousand miles of Euclid might also appear to be a convincing demonstration of the flatness of the Earth, the potentially limitless extent of human domination, but on reflection the grand theorem of the Plains proves just the opposite. While Manifest Destiny is obviously responsible for the general westwards trend of this landscape, why is it in fact
orientated
so precisely east-west? Could it not have run towards the west-north-west, for example, or in whatever other direction
historical
contingencies might have aimed it initially? In laying out such a uniform schema, the ideal would be for at least one set of boundaries to be straight and parallel, i.e. to maintain a constant compass-bearing and a constant lateral separation. But a line that intersects the meridians at any fixed angle other than ninety
degrees will wind around the globe and if prolonged will
eventually
spiral in towards one of the Poles; therefore another line
starting
at a given separation from it and following the same compass-course will ultimately converge with it, and the strip of land between them will taper to nothing. On a continental scale, the only way to avoid the convergence of loxodromes, as such lines of constant bearing are called, is to have them running exactly east-west. Thus the claim of human sovereignty over the land, so aggressively asserted by this whole vast system of subdivision, is subverted by its prime parameter, forced into a covert assent to the curvature of the Earth and the finitude of our dominion.