Two more Bowery views

Belle époque Paris boasted its arcades and flâneurs; turn-of-the-century Manhattan had strolls under the El. This postcard, which was mailed in 1910, was issued by the firm of Theodor Eismann, which had branches in Leipzig and New York and published cards with the Theocrom brand. It's a lithograph based on a photographic original, with considerable added color, thus neither strictly a photograph nor an artistic "print." The obviously photographic ironwork in the lower righthand corner hardly seems to belong to the same image as the cartoonish buildings in the background in the upper right, yet the whole composition has a distinct liveliness and beauty.

The Bowery was once New York's theatre district, rowdy and open to all classes in a way that Broadway wouldn't come to be. The poster on the sidewalk appears to advertise the London Theatre, founded by the impresario and politician Henry Clay Miner, but the London itself was several blocks away at at 235 Bowery. I haven't been able to find out what the Saranac at 57 Bowery was, but there's a photographic view of the same sign here at Shorpy (you'll have to click through to the enlarged version there to see the sign in the lower righthand corner).


The card above, published by the Rotograph Co. some time in the first decade of the 20th century, looks down the Bowery from where it ends at Cooper Square. It appears to be a collotype rather than a lithograph, but once again the image has been extensively colored. Browning, King & Co., the large building on the right, was a clothing chain with stores in several cities.

Below, a few thoughts which are not meant to provide any kind of rigorous analysis of these hybrid pictures but rather an attempt to come to terms with why I find them particularly interesting.

An image that is entirely one thing or another -- a photograph or a print or a painting -- is an object that purports to be existentially intact and complete, a fulfillment, to the degree that it succeeds, of a single artist's intentions and abilities. (In saying that it only "purports to be" I am, of course, deliberately deferring to another time the issue of how reading the context of an art work affects our understanding of it.)

An image that has originated in one process but which has then been visibly altered by being subjected -- usually by someone else -- to techniques from another process, an image that continues to preserve visible evidence of having been "worked on," is an image that refuses to be complete, refuses to be "flat." When we examine such an picture we see a disjuncture, a clash between multiple processes and multiple creators, and that conflict re-opens the image -- in fact it refuses to allow the image to re-close. Instead of seeing an "artistic statement," we see an unresolved dialogue. An image that may have originally intended to be documentary, to represent what is as closely as possible, takes on a layer in which what will appear is shaped by an entirely different set of aesthetic or market considerations, but without entirely erasing the trace of the original or revoking its documentary claims. There is no way of deciding how much "weight" to give to the claims of one partner in its creation or another.

In some cases retouching may take over an image and conceal the original entirely. When that happens the underlying structure remains but by no longer being apparent on the surface it loses its destabilizing power. It has become fully contained.

Of course photography is never merely documentary; the way in which an image is framed and developed is necessarily guided by the photographer. But we don't see the photographer, at least at first sight; we only see the image. In a hybrid image, on the other hand, we see visible evidence of the ways in which one set of intentions and processes interferes with another.

There are some of them here yet

This postcard was mailed from Noboribetsu on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on May 12, 1914 and addressed to E. J. Thompkins in Albany, NY. The inscription on the back reads "These people inhabited Japan before the Japanese came here and there are some of them here yet." The name of the sender seems to have been Henry Russell. Was he in Japan on business, as a tourist, or for some other reason? (Intriguingly, a Henry Russell, who had a Japanese mother, was born in Yokohama in 1880, but that may be pure coincidence.)

The town of Noboribetsu (the name is derived from the Ainu language and is said to mean something like "dark river") is today known for its hot springs. It also boasts an Ainu museum village. Though the photograph doesn't necessarily represent Noboribetsu itself -- it could have been elsewhere in Hokkaido -- I wonder whether the scene depicted might not have been a tourist trap even then.

The card, which was undoubtedly part of a series, was probably published by the Tomboya company in Japan. It lacks the little dragonfly in the front right-hand corner that was Tomboya's emblem (tombo or tonbo means dragonfly in Japanese), but there is a dragonfly on the back next to a row of characters. The photographer could have been Takaji Hotta, whose work was often published by Tomboya. The caption below the photograph (its true color is blue-green) has been printed so firmly that an impression can be felt on the back.


The block on Hamilton Street in Albany where E. J. Thompkins lived apparently no longer exists.

Postcards, continued

Below, two more examples of the mutability of historical images, as filtered through various technologies employed in the mass reproduction of postcards in the first half of the 20th century.


This Real Photo postcard from an unnamed commercial studio (almost certainly the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co.) depicts the Waldo-Hancock Bridge in Bucksport, Maine. The bridge was completed in 1931, so the image probably dates from the early 1930s. (A newer structure at the same location was completed in 2006.)

In the postcards below, which appear to be later modifications of this image, the steamer becomes a sail boat, or disappears entirely, obeying whatever the whims of marketing or aesthetics were at the time they were produced. Despite extensive retouching and radically shifting color palettes it seems almost certain that the card images began as copies of the photographic print. The bushes and trees in all three views have almost exactly the same branch structure and orientation, even though in one of the views an attempt has been made to suggest fall foliage.


The next two postcards show the Equitable Building in Manhattan. The first, postmarked 1919, is from an unknown publisher and is probably a tinted halftone. The second version shows a virtually identical perspective -- note the horse-drawn wagon at bottom left -- but by day. All of the indications of night seen in the former image -- the moon, the dark clouds, the illuminated windows, and the glowing lamps above the sidewalks -- are artifacts of the printmaking process, as are the sky coloring, the red of the adjoining building, and the flag in the daytime card. Underlying both cards is the ghostly trace of a single black and white photographic original, now possibly lost.



Mass-produced postcards were never intended to meet high evidentiary standards, of course, but their wide distribution must have had a profound effect on how people regarded their surroundings and how they interpreted two-dimensional representations of sights both familiar and distant. These cards sought to portray a real world but they also built imaginary worlds as well.

The Bowery, looking north

This tinted postcard depicts the Bowery in Manhattan, probably between 1901 and 1905. It was published by A. C. Bosselman & Co. of New York but like most better quality postcards at the time it was printed in Germany.

The tinted halftone process added layers of printed color to an original black and white image, and thus represented a kind of hybrid between photomechanical and traditional ink printmaking. The appearance of the finished image would be affected by the skill, the patience, and in some cases the imagination of the printer; details might be added or brushed out as desired. Some of the vehicles and figures shown above appear to have been retouched by the printmaker, and details like the steeple in the distance between the two converging rail lines were probably added as well.

The New York Public Library has a photograph, attributed to John Loeffler and dated 1895, that depicts a similar vista.

(Courtesy the New York Public Library)

John Loeffler died in 1901; the postcard below, which corresponds closely with the Bosselman card, was published by his brother August, who was active until 1905.

(Courtesy the New York Public Library)

Here is yet another version, issued by the Souvenir Post Card Co., which was active from 1905-1914. It uses the relatively crude line block halftone process.

(Courtesy the New York Public Library)

In addition to the coloring, there are a number of differences between the photograph and the postcards. Whether there once existed an alternate photographic original or whether the differences were due to retouching I don't know. The general prospect looking uptown was evidently a popular one, and a number of imitations or variations were marketed. The next image, published by Valentine & Sons (active from 1907-1909), has only one train and a far less busy street, but a bridge has sprouted crosstown in the middle distance.

(Via Wikipedia)

Looking from one image to another, pedestrians who stride by unaware of the photographer's presence or who may never have existed at all appear and disappear, signs leap out or vanish, streetcars and elevated trains advance like the flickering phantoms of early motion pictures. In some images trucks replace trolley cars, day becomes night, yet some of the same figures seem to stroll in the shadows of the elevated rails. Below are a few among many. The first one, by the way, is the only one that clearly depicts the casket factory sign that appears in Loeffler's photo, and thus is probably a direct descendant.





This uncredited photograph, via the Bowery Boys, also shows a roughly similar perspective, though it doesn't seem to match up closely with any of the postcards. The "casket" sign isn't shown, but there seems to be a "coffin" one on the same building.


Here, from the digital collections of Library of Congress, are two photographic views taken by J. S. Johnston in 1895. Either or both may have been retouched a bit.



The card below, published by the prolific Detroit Publishing Co., provides a different angle and a better view of the faces of some of the buildings on the west side of the street, including the Gaiety Musée, a famous vaudeville theatre, whose garish facade, just uptown from Glassman's Hats, is much less obvious in the other pictures. Dominating the scene is the monstrous bulk of the Bowery Savings Bank, designed by Stanford White (and now a registered landmark).

(Via the Georgetown County Digital Library)

One of the things that appeals to me about many of these images (other than their historical content) is that they seem to inhabit a fertile middle ground, staking out various points along a spectrum between the supposedly "documentary" status of photography and the "artificial" methods of painting and drawing. (Later postcards, which fall solidly into one camp or the other, seem as a consequence far less interesting.) The same basic scene could be reshot, or an older original could be adapted, in order to include details that would make the final image more quaint or more contemporary as market tastes might demand. Complete "fidelity" in mass reproduction, at least in regard to color, was as yet impossible in any case. In my next post I'll look at a few more examples of image manipulation.

I am grateful to the phenomenal resources of the Metropolitan Postcard Collectors Club for much of the background information above, but any confusion is my own.

A temple bell in Kyoto, Japan

The image above, hand-dated 1905, probably depicts the bell at the Chion-in Temple, which is said to be Japan's largest. It appears to be a hand-tinted collotype; there is no dot pattern that would indicate lithography.

The card is addressed to "Mrs. Militz" at the Home of Truth in Alameda, California, presumably Annie Rix Militz, a prominent New Thought minister who had co-founded the Home of Truth that year before traveling abroad. The initials on the front also read A.R.M., so she may have mailed it home to herself as a souvenir. The stamp has been torn off, no doubt for a collector's album, obliterating with it most of what must have been the original Japanese postmark. There is no message on the back, as postal reservations at the time reserved that space for the address alone.

The Russo-Japanese War had concluded a few weeks before this card was mailed. Lafcadio Hearn had died in Tokyo one year earlier; the great San Francisco earthquake, across the bay from Alameda, still lay a few months off.

Cortázar: Último Round and La vuelta al día

Julio Cortázar's collections La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos ("Around the Day in Eighty Worlds") and Último Round ("Last Round") were published in 1967 and 1969 respectively by Siglo XXI Editores in Mexico. Each work is made up of of two volumes and contains stories, essays, poems, and anecdotes as well as photographs, period engravings and other artwork selected by the designer, the artist Julio Silva. Among the highlights are Cortázar's long introduction to the Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima, appreciations of Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, and Clifford Brown, the short stories "Silvia" and "With Justifiable Pride," and an essay on Jack the Ripper and other notorious murderers.


The coincidence of the author's and designer's first names goes further than is immediately evident, since another "Julio" -- Jules Verne -- serves as a kind of tutelary spirit, at least for La vuelta al día, which borrows its title, in mutated form, from one of Verne's most famous works.


In designing the layout of the interior of the books, Silva employed a variety of different typefaces, some of them antique; here and there the text is rotated 90 degrees, proceeding across the page from left to right. The illustrations chosen to complement Cortázar's texts were taken from a wide variety of sources. For the essay on Lezama Lima, to cite one example, he incorporated engravings from 19th-century editions of Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre, early scientific and hermetic treatises, runes, and tarot cards. Elsewhere he uses original drawings, old advertisements and clippings, and paintings by Paul Delvaux.

For Último Round, he created newspaper-style exterior art that worked in references to the pieces inside the book as well as quotations from Italo Calvino and Gary Snyder and at least one sly allusion to one of Cortázar's earlier books. Circled on the back of Tomo I, in what appears to be a clipping from a column of personal ads, is a nod to Cortázar's novel 62: A Model Kit:

ARE YOU sensitive, intelligent, anxious or a little lonely? Neurotics Anonymous are a lively, mixed group who believe that the individual is unique. Details s.a.e. Box 8662.

(In the novel, one of the characters discovers this ad, purportedly found in the New Statesman, and decides to investigate.)

In keeping with the vernacular spirit of the design, and perhaps under the influence of 19th-century Mexican chapbooks by artists such as José Guadalupe Posada, these "artist's books" were nevertheless intended to be inexpensive. They were printed on relatively cheap paper in small formats (La vuelta is only 3 1/2 inches wide) and have gone through numerous printings both in their original editions and in other formats, including this curious version of Último Round, which I haven't been able to identify:



[In an editor's note to one of Cortázar's letters to Silva there is a cryptic reference to "a book guillotined in the middle," but judging by the date the letter seems to refer to La vuelta al día rather than Último Round, and may describe the presentation of the book in two volumes rather than one.]

The 1986 North Point Press edition of Thomas Christensen's translation, below, is based on the contents of the French edition, Le tour du jour en quatre-vingts mondes, for which Cortázar himself chose selections from the original volumes of both La vuelta al día and Último Round, some of the excluded pieces probably having been deemed to be all but impossible to translate.


The North Point volume dispenses with the original array of fonts but makes a handsome book in its own right. The jacket design, by David Bullen, uses a painting by Paul Delvaux, Le Veilleur II. The panels on the cover have a pale greenish tint that for some reason doesn't show up well in my scan.

Cortázar: Hopscotch (Signet)

This Signet edition of Julio Cortázar's most famous novel was the first American paperback publication, issued in December 1967. I don't know if the cover art depicts an actual George Segal sculpture or just a deliberate rip-off of his style; in any case the book credits neither the designer nor the artist. It's a fairly generic piece of art; perhaps the salient point was that the woman is naked and lying in bed, as the publishers were eager to punch up the erotic angle of the book, which is prounounced "an underground classic" on the cover. The words above the title read LIFE | LOVE | SEX, which I suppose is one way of summing up what Rayuela is about. Just in case anyone missed the point it's spelled out again on the bottom of the back cover: “Hopscotch / a game of / LIFE, LOVE, SEX.”

The blurbs are pretty hilarious: Harvey L. Johnson of the Houston Post promises “Sexual bouts, drunken orgies … escapes into hallucinations and trances, emphasis on sex, unmindful frankness … shocking and sordid … crude or amusing … Hopscotch will not soon be forgotten,” while the Baltimore Sun simply promises that it “leaves you limp.”

Cortázar apparently first saw the cover by accident in June 1968, in an unlikely part of the world:

And since we're on the subject, in Tehran (of all places) my wife came across, by pure chance, in a supermarket, Hopscotch in the paperback edition. She bought it and gave it to me as gift. I stood aghast to read the bit about LOVE/SEX: by the author of Blow-Up, etc. Eventually I realized that all pocket-books are the same, and that on the other hand the edition was a good one and didn't, I think, have any major errors. But that naked couple (made out of clay, no less) depressed me quite a bit. It's unbelievable how "mass-market" editions can debase a work that tries to aim much higher. Every day I hate consumer societies more (which is why in Argentina they catalog me as a dangerous Red, and from that point of view they're right, what the hell).

(From a letter to Gregory Rabassa, in Cartas 2 (2000 edition); translation mine.)

Eventually this edition was superseded by Bard's, which had a much better cover. In addition to Hopscotch, the New American Library (of which Signet was an imprint) apparently also bought the paperback rights to The Winners at the same time, but I've found no evidence that a Signet edition of that novel was ever issued.

Update: Below is the Plume edition (another NAL imprint) from 1971, which I haven't seen before. I can't say I care much for it.

The ghost in the rain

It's been raining since morning and the wind has been driving drops like shotgun pellets against the windows of my room for hours. Outside, the gutters are choked with crabapple petals, and here and there clusters of maple leaves have blown down as well, as if autumn had arrived before its time, but night still hasn't fallen, even at this hour, and the trees that line both sides of the street show the pallor of new growth. I'll stay inside now until the storm is over; I've had my dinner and I've nowhere to go. I may have another inch or two of wine before I retire.

I saw him again today. He was standing in an alley, a few yards back from the sidewalk, in among the empty crates and windblown trash. He tucked himself into the shadow of the adjacent building just as I approached, but it was too late. When our eyes met he averted his gaze at once, but as I stood there watching him he lifted his face again after a moment and under the brim of his soaked fedora I could make out his features, the same dismal eyes, the soft nose that could almost have been a woman's, the small, frightened, half-opened mouth. I chose not to intrude any longer. Already I could feel the pain he felt at my discovering him again, though I have never pursued him or presumed on his sorrows more than I could help. I went on my way. I didn't need to look back to know that already he would no longer be there, that he would have shuffled off to some other forsaken corner, away from the crowds and the lights and the din. By now we both know that he can't escape me, any more than either of us can ever leave this city. Weeks will pass and I won't see him; he will trace his silent and mysterious routes through the streets and back passages, unseen, as I trace mine, and day after day our paths won't intersect, but sooner or later, just at the hour when the city is at its most forlorn, in the shadows of the giant beech trees of the park or down in the deserted cobblestone lanes by the docks, just when I think I've forgotten him at last, I will sense him even before he appears, and then I'll see him, he'll be there once again, my curse as I am his.

Stasys Eidrigevičius

There are some disadvantages to living in the shadow of a cultural capital, and one of them is not being sufficiently exposed to work by artists who may have long been well-known in their own countries and elsewhere but who through whatever whim of the art circuits never seem to earn comparable notice here.

Stasys Eidrigevičius is a Lithuanian-born artist who now resides in Poland. His work first came to my attention sometime in the 1990s, when at least three of the children's books he illustrated were published in the US by NorthSouth Books. Those titles, all of which now seem to be out of print, were Johnny Longnose, The Hungry One, and the best of them, Puss in Boots. (At least one other children's book, Little Pig, has been published by Viking Press; it too appears to be out of print.) Children's books, however, represent only a tiny fraction of Eidrigevičius's output, which includes painting, drawing, posters, political art, sculpture, photography, theatre design, and performances. As far as I can gather from the list of exhibitions on his website he has never had a significant show in New York City.

The images below are, respectively, from Puss in Boots, Johnny Longnose, and Little Pig. The images in the last-named work aren't paintings but photographs centering on painted masks.



There is a distinctive Eidrigevičius look in his picture books, and much of it has to do with the eyes, which are nearly almost wide-open but alarmingly expressionless. As in the films of the Quay Brothers, the worlds of animate and inanimate objects blur disturbingly into one another. Many of his subjects are being held against their will -- perhaps a reflection of his childhood under Communism -- although, as in the images below, it's not always clear exactly who is the captive and who the captor.



It's a fair question whether or not Eidrigevičius's work was ever really marketable for children. I suspect that it may well be in Europe, but perhaps not in the US (though my daughter enjoyed Puss in Boots). It would be nice if the full range of his work could get fuller exposure here.

A Journey Round My Skull has some additional images, and there are many more at the artist's own website. For those with the wherewithal there is a new retrospective collection of his work, Stasys 60, which can be obtained from ABE Marketing in Poland.

I'm not sure what the original purpose was of the image shown at the top of the page, which I found through image searching on the web. The cat's eyes are so mesmerizing that at first I didn't even notice the beaks of the birds, but I think it's the mouth, at once so realistic and so alien, that is the most unnerving.

Thomas Bewick

In our image-saturated culture it may be hard to imagine a time when the average European's exposure to visual representations of the world might be limited to tavern signs, decorations in churches (where these were not proscribed), and the crude illustrations of chapbooks and broadsides, an era before photography, lithography, and their digital successors made possible the routine mass-production of pictures. Thomas Bewick's oft-reproduced wood engravings may appear quaint and bucolic to us now, at least at first glance, but in their day they represented a revolutionary advance in the production and marketing of images. For much of his audience, Bewick's depiction of the wonders of nature was a revelation.

Bewick was born in 1753 in a village a few miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. By his own account he was a fairly incorrigible youth, given to pranks and outdoor escapades and subject to canings for his misbehavior. His saving grace was an early acquired fondness for drawing, his stroke of good fortune an apprenticeship to the Newcastle engraver Ralph Beilby, later his partner. Under Beilby's stewardship he took on a variety of metal engraving tasks, but it was his knack for the relatively novel technique of wood engraving that brought him renown and a good living for the rest of his long and largely fulfilling life.

Unlike traditional woodcuts, wood engravings use sections of wood -- boxwood from Turkey was the preferred source -- that are sliced across rather than with the grain. The resulting blocks are small but tough, and a skilled hand like Bewick's could achieve fine detail that could otherwise only be obtained through the more expensive metal engraving techniques.

The three images below are from Bewick's illustrations for The Fables of Aesop and Others (1818). Though confined within strict borders, they display vivid naturalism -- the result of the marriage of technique and first-hand familiarity with the countryside -- and a flair for drawing out the personalities of his subjects.


For Bewick's most famous productions, his illustrated natural histories of quadrupeds and birds, the borders were shed, allowing his subjects to come right up to the viewer's eye.


In printing the great natural history works, Bewick engraved a series of tail-pieces (or "tale-pieces," as he called them, with deliberate wordplay), intended to occupy empty spaces at the end of a chapter. These rustic slice-of-life scenes afforded Bewick an opportunity to make subtle satirical or moral statements that can be easy to miss with a cursory glance. Bewick was in his day what might be called a moderate radical, sympathetic to political reform movements, to the Scots, and to those displaced by enclosures, skeptical of sectarian creeds and war makers. In one "tale-piece," entitled "The Proper Use At Last of All Warlike Monuments," a jackass rubs its posterior against an inscribed pillar leaning over in a field.

Many of Bewick's pictures have been endlessly reproduced and are widely available on the web, but the number of high-quality scans is surprisingly low, especially for the "tale-pieces." (Bear in mind that the original blocks were often only a few inches tall.) I was unable to find good versions of the illustrations Bewick created for Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Deserted Village" ("Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;"), and only one of the copper engravings Bewick executed for Matthew Consett's A Tour through Sweden, Swedish-Lapland, Finland and Denmark.


With the exception of the reindeer, the images shown here are from the galleries of the Bewick Society, which also publishes a blog entitled Tale-Pieces. The Edmonton Art Gallery has a fuller selection with, unfortunately, fairly poor scans.

In the end, though, Bewick's engravings are best appreciated as they were intended to be seen, on paper, and fortunately, there are various collections of his work, ranging from inexpensive paperbacks to budget-breaking limited editions. Two years ago the Ikon Gallery published a hardcover catalogue of the first comprehensive exhibition of the "tale-pieces," and for those with deep pockets Nigel Tattersfield's three-volume Thomas Bewick: The Complete Illustrative Work will be published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press this month.

Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver, the most recent biography of Bewick, has a number of illustrations, as does printing historian Iain Bain's definitive edition of the artist's posthumously published Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1975 & 1979), which is recommended both for its unaffected charm and as a valuable record of rural life and workshop practices.

Construction

Most cities grow by tearing down the old to make way for the new, erasing the past, eradicating their own histories. With us, this was never possible. Within a few centuries of the city's founding our numbers had increased to the point that we had filled every square meter of available space between the sea and the wasteland at our backs. To tear down would have required the displacement, if only temporarily, of some of the existing occupants, but so quickly do we set out roots that our homes, once established, become as inseparable from us as the shell of a tortoise. Instead, we ascended skyward. The city rose like a coral reef, each layer serving as the foundation for the ones above it, each building carefully buttressed against its neighbors. The weight, it is said, eventually pushed the oldest strata into the earth, and in those precincts a new race evolved, or so we are told, born without sight or incapable of tolerating even the faint sunlight that reached them. Did they then tunnel down even further into the earth to fill their own need for space, hollowing out the bedrock as far beneath as we have soared above? No one knows.

After a time our metropolis rose so high that descending to street level whenever we needed to leave our homes became burdensome and impractical. At that point we had no other recourse but to seal off the layers below. If nothing else the danger of falling made it imperative. To precipitate from a tall building to one's death is terrible enough; to fall forever, to tumble endlessly through dark and dusty columns of air, to be glimpsed, fleetingly, by creatures whose nature we can only guess at, is a horror beyond words. Did those who surrendered their last view of the sun's rays object, when our platforms and causeways sealed them in for eternity? They did not, for had they not done the same to those below them in their turn? Innocence is a luxury no one here can afford. By the time the darkness was complete they were resigned to their fate.

None of this would be possible, of course, were it not for our gardens, which are without peer on earth. There is no terrace, no stretch of wall, that is not surmounted with growing things, not just crops but flowers as well -- for there is nothing we love as much as the sight of flowers. Even in the winter we garden under glass, the windblown loess from the distant valleys is all the soil we need, we dump our scrapings and our night soil into the depths, and colonies of fungi nourish those below. Does the percolated energy of the sun dwindle to nothing in the lowest tiers, or do secret sources seep up from the center of the earth, bringing nutrients to sunless gardens perhaps even lusher than our own? No one can say.

The ghost

The man steps from the doorway, hands deep in the pockets of his worn gray coat, and passes into the crowd unnoticed, flowing through the throng as if he, or they, were immaterial. He hears voices, sounds of traffic, but muffled; they swirl and echo randomly around him, separated from their source. He recognizes the language -- it's not the one he was born with -- but he can't pick out the words. Above the rooftops the sky is opaque and sunless, yet each passing taxi reflects a blinding flash that makes him lower his eyes.

He stares into a shop window. There is a name displayed across it, a semi-circle of bronze decals that are peeling a bit at the edges, but the inscription makes no sense to him. The letters morph and transpose and won't stay still. Behind the glass gaudy objects in velvet-lined boxes have been laid out with great care on a background of dark gray fabric, but he doesn't recognize them, can't guess their purpose. In the shop's interior a man in a white smock is talking to a patron, or maybe it's the patron who wears the smock, he can't tell, they've already moved away or another person has taken their place, a woman he thinks. He walks away.

He passes a church, its heavy stone walls rising abruptly behind a hedge of red-berried yew. A man is slouched against the railing on the porch of the rectory next door. He recognizes him, somebody he knew years ago, and he stops and stares but the man doesn't return his gaze and suddenly he vanishes and when he looks again it's not the same man at all but someone he's never seen before. He hears a sudden shout behind him and turns but there's no one there, just the same incessant river of strangers.

The traffic has stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, and crowd drifts across, light as birds, their clothes rippling and slacking in the intersecting breezes. A signpost rattles on rusty bolts. He looks up at the street number on a building, remembering the address of a bar he used to frequent. It's still a bar but the name is different, everything is different inside, he thinks maybe I'm wrong, it was another place, so long ago... He lingers at the door. He's feeling thirsty but he won't go in, nothing will slake his thirst, not now.

In the center of the street the pavement divides around a narrow park. He crosses, walks past a shuttered newsstand, climbs a flight of stone steps, and takes a seat on a bench in the variegated shadow of a vast beech tree. It's quieter here, above the cars, just now and then the sound of a woman's heels on the cobbles, approaching or receding he can't be sure until all of a sudden he doesn't hear them anymore.