The space of a city is the emblematic theatre of modernity. Somewhere amid the solidity of the buildings and the monuments, the mobility of the construction scaffoldings and the jostling vehicles, the interstitiality of the park benches and the work shifts, the denizens go about spinning the cobweb threads of their lives as they pass through time and place.
You who read these words, are probably in a city too. Perhaps you sit fenced in by the sights and sounds that are familiar enough for you to feel them as the backdrop and soundtrack to your thoughts.
Imagine for a moment, now, that you climb out of your life and its story. That you pull aside the curtain of what surrounds you at this very moment. Using as hooks the many black typeface alphabets that confront you on this page, tear through to another place, another city. Let us say: Sofia.
A city is a superstory. In the sense that a city is the overarching and always changing superstructural arc of whorling space that runs through the millions of individuals and their stories.
I am in Sofia for the sound of its name, a city with the sibilance of the lingering letters: Soh-fff-iii-yaa, it is surrounded in the very far distances by green mountains. There are broad boulevards that run through the city, with Russian sounding names like ‘Vitoshka’ (think of how the insistent stresses on certain syllables sounds in babushka, an old woman, or matrioshka, the mother). People in this city speak many languages—English is outpaced by Bulgarian, by Russian, by German, by French.
A city is a superstory. In the sense that a city is the overarching and always changing superstructural arc of whorling space that runs through the millions of individuals and their stories.
As the plane approaches Sofia, I lean out of the window, a bit before landing. There is the crescent moon floating in, and falling out of, the afternoon sky. So this is who I am, a travelling stranger who steps into the Sofia superstory for some time to experience a world-switching. There is a beauty to the everyday insignificances. It is as if unknown passers-by are living their lives in a theatre which the traveller spectates upon. I see old men gaze wistfully in the evening light inside shops with male mannequins in smart suits, little children running happily along as their father or mother (rarely both) chat on mobile phones, a heart-shaped yellow leaf is pasted to the pavement by the wind, girls dawdle arm-in-arm with their lovers, people stoop to buy cigarettes at little low-roofed kiosks scattered throughout the city. At one point, I see an odd couple, an overly tanned six feet tall prostitute stumbling along on her pencil heels with her hair in the 80s bouffant style, and a short bald Danny De Vito kind of pimp walking with her and chattering non-stop to her in some foreign language as if giving her some advice.
I feel my way through the city, try to get by on as little as possible, speak to people, observe the ignored, and stay true to a certain private conceptualisation of the artist as a phenomenologist of the peripherals.
I feel my way through the city, try to get by on as little as possible, speak to people, observe the ignored, and stay true to a certain private conceptualisation of the artist as a phenomenologist of the peripherals. The thrill lies in the gaze. Baudelaire had called the flâneur a painter of the modern life. The nineteenth-century flâneur had been a man of leisure, idly strolling a city in order to experience it. When I wander (sometimes undertaking those unplanned urban journeys, what is termed the dérive, or the drift, in psychogeography), I have in my hands the notebook, camera, pen, and in my head I have a sympathetic if cumbersome blending of the many traditions of being-in-urban-space: ranging from the well-to-do Baudelairean flaneur, the perceptively spectating character in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades, the sobering reminder from Virginia Woolf about the gendered nature of flanerie (for a middle-class woman to walk the West End of London by herself even in daytime was out of the question in the 19th century), the complications inherent in the reimagining of the (generally male) flaneur as a (female) ‘flaneuse’.
Someone plays bagpipes in a large green expanse. I pass by a backgammon-playing antique souvenir seller who wonders where I am from. Food sticking to his teeth, the old Bulgarian man asks ‘For what you take picture?’. ‘For memory’, I reply. And he nods, understanding.
Bulgaria was once communist. Many buildings, some dilapidated, have the hammer and sickle symbols in the masonry, but these old relics are overwhelmed by the glitzy signs and billboards of an entirely capitalist place like any other. The collapse of communism brought much misery to large swathes of Eastern Europe. Like in Russia or Ukraine, one cannot help but observe an older generation of people who grew up under a different system and now appear impoverished. I see people scavenging from street-side bins, just as I see the luxury wedding dresses in the shops and the posh R-n-B clubs.
At one point in the conversation, he says, with a memorable decisiveness, ‘We are not East Europe, we are Europe and West Asia’.
A construction worker, Bulgarian of Lebanese origin, speaks to me of the social problems, and especially corruption. He also tells me that the chestnut tree under which his workmates, including women workers, are sitting during their break time, is used to make medicines. At one point in the conversation, he says, with a memorable decisiveness, ‘We are not East Europe, we are Europe and West Asia’.
It is a warm sunny day, the forecasts have been all wrong. At a sidewalk, a sparrow turns the corner with me, another eats crumbs at my feet. There are many in this city. Small food kiosks hang bananas on electricity wires for display.
Vasilin has the face of Christ. There is an utterly melancholic despair in his eyes. He sits by the roadside with his trousers torn, his shoes split; he is poor and dirty. Also unwell. Nonetheless, he has something eerily angelic about him. Near one monument, an unshaven toothlessly grinning hobo offers to sell me his ‘Zenith’ camera. It is in a leather case, ‘ZENIT’, he repeats, as he pauses his smoking to fish it out of his little trolley for me. I lose and find myself in the architectures of affinity that arise from the random wandering. I think again, how, from its bin scavengers, its rag pickers, its poets of the street, its homeless, its forgotten, one learns more about a city than from its best ambassadors.
From its bin scavengers, its rag pickers, its poets of the street, its homeless, its forgotten, one learns more about a city than from its best ambassadors.
Dodging the relentless summery heat of the streets, I step into the Alexander Nevski cathedral, the city’s most famous landmark. It was built to celebrate the struggles of the Bulgarian people (and people of other surrounding countries) to liberate themselves from the Ottoman Turkish empire. I recall reading Ivan Vazov—the novelist who wrote Under the Yoke about the Bulgarian oppression under the Turks—and almost instantly, a bent old man with a beard white as snow appears on the stone steps; he is dressed in traditional clothes and looks like a character from the novel. The cathedral is grand, in the manner of the bastions of orthodox christianity. There is a Blake-like God in the centre of the domed ceiling. Several bronze chandeliers with hundreds of electric candles and ornate baubles hang from long rods which are the length of small buildings. There are velvet curtains embossed in gold and marble thrones that have sat empty for centuries in crypts with polished pillars resting on the backs of open-mouthed, deliciously-maned, prominently-eared, lean lions, with their tails folded over their shins. All stone.
A group of schoolchildren come into the cathedral shortly afterwards, one sits on the same wooden bench as me, the others wander. It is a semi-lit, huge, quiet, grand space. A curly-haired, overall-coat wearing, middle-aged woman who has been polishing the stone floors all this while, gets slightly agitated. She guards her latest shiny patch of stone slabs and diverts people around it, In her brown court shoes, she hovers around the rim of her rectangular stone stretch (about the size of a large room) and darts vigilant glances around, like a bird, one hand in the large pocket of her coat.
Orthodox churches are my favourite kind. Grandly morose, pleasurably grim, they recall an era of absolutes, that, while it did not exist for real, or for everyone, still held so many in thrall for so long. Crowns and crosses sit atop intricately carved marble structures inside, and each wall is covered with ancient paintings. The cracks on the ceiling, like those in old Italian monuments, have become almost a part of the frescoes of angels, light, and what else, divinity? Interestingly, stained glass windows, so beloved to churches elsewhere (in England for example) seem to be not such a fixture here. There are windows with yellowish orange glass, but no scenes on them. I see winged stone eagles, and medievally dressed warriors ready to battle for their beliefs, with halo-ed saints in peeling plaster blessing them from every wall and direction. Allegories and stories that I can’t understand, and did not inherit.
Orthodox churches are my favourite kind. Grandly morose, pleasurably grim, they recall an era of absolutes, that, while it did not exist for real, or for everyone, still held so many in thrall for so long.
The city is layered with street art. Right from when one leaves the airport, there are long concrete bridges and highways with graffiti scrawled under every pillar; in Cyrillic, in visual pictorials, in tags of angst. One loud scribble near a revered memorial reads ‘You do not understand me’: probably the existential outcry of every one of the seven billion plus living souls on this planet! In a large yard full of bricks near racks of tyres, there is a spray painted picture depicting people’s minds hooked onto a TV so that they are being consumed by it.
At the Bulgarian National Gallery of Foreign Art, one can admire the woodprints of Japanese masters such as Hokusai and Hiroshige (such as the ’36 view of Mount Fuji’ scenes), European art from 18th to 20th centuries, the bronzes from Benin, the African wooden masks from 5th century onwards; tribal art forms that look like futuristic cyborg faces. I am struck by an abstract painting called ‘The road to the Irreal’ by Yves Trevedy; it makes me think of the need to hold on to absurdity. In the second last room of the museum, on a sofa, I write the following lines:
If we must be uncertain in our love,
let us sit and learn hesitation from the waves
as they kiss by turns the sea and shore
For the past, we make a precious cairn
from echoing shells not quiet stones
For the present, we sip fire-red wine
tipsy at the turn in the road to tomorrow
For the future, we wear the wind’s ways
swaying as stalks in a flowering field
Outside, an ant hurries away through the concrete pavement slabs broken by patches of grass. Gusts of an evening breeze blow seeds—fluffy little balls of white silken-cottony stuff—that float about the streets. It is oddly reminiscent of a childhood memory from Delhi when, in a certain season, I would chase the feathery dispersing seeds on my cycle, trying to gather enough of the furry material to make a pillow someday.
The city is layered with street art. Right from when one leaves the airport, there are long concrete bridges and highways with graffiti scrawled under every pillar; in Cyrillic, in visual pictorials, in tags of angst.
I look up to see a red, green and white Bulgarian flag fluttering atop a government building behind fir trees some distance to my left, and mountains much further beyond. There is the sound of cars, trams in the distance, taxi-drivers with dark gasses and headphones (are they really taxi-drivers?), and a rusted bronze statuette of a womanly man who has his penis cut off (decades ago I guess, because the entire figure has greenish patina on it). A black mynah bird patrols a manicured garden, someone rushes across the street to meet a girl, happiness written on their faces.
Bulgaria is the land of roses, in Europe and beyond. Dimetina, the middle aged female flower seller, sits on a bench among her flowers; she looks down and worn-out. I smile, say hello and as she smokes, offer her a cigarette. This cheers her up and she gives me a bunch of red roses. Oh no! but I can’t, I protest. She insists. We have no language in common except that of signs and a shared humanity. Later, I watch her as she gets water from a jerry can and puts away her unsold bunches of flowers – it is end of day and she is packing – in sliced-off bottoms of 1.5 litre plastic cold-drink bottles filled from the park fountains.
I walk back through neon lights, shadows, people, traffic, and also, occasionally, a flower-laden tree that would drop a petal just for me. It is one hour to midnight and I lie exhausted on a single bed with the TV on mute. There is some Spanish red wine in a small plastic bottle – the kind they serve with meals on a plane – I kept it, but I don’t feel up to drinking it. I must have walked dozens of kilometres, taken pages of notes, and clicked hundreds of pictures.
Sofia is softly tucked back into the country of memories called Elsewhere. The yearn to gather the world within sense-experience dies with death alone.
Sofia is softly tucked back into the country of memories called Elsewhere. The yearn to gather the world within sense-experience dies with death alone. Tomorrow, I will open more letters from the unknown.
