anatomy of Norbiton
accidental
Let us fall, like a mason of Babel who has lost his footing, toward Norbiton, out of the blue and unresisting sky...
aetiological
The Ideal City it transpires, is, like any city, built piecemeal. People drift together, interact, multiply; build hospitals, cathedrals, forums; become cities. So we have Norbiton or Florence or Rome...
anatomical
Anatomising a cadaver, you might think, would be a simple enough matter of reverse engineering the body. But, as Civ Clarke sagely informs me, the body on its inside is all smoky mirrors...
arboreal
A city entails a wilderness. You strike out beyond the city walls, cross a narrow stretch of hinterland and step into the forest, the grotesque anti-matter of the city, a place of magic and beasts...
archaeological
Norbiton: Ideal City has no archaeological record. You cannot dig into its fragmentary prehistory of potsherds and burial urns and walls. Similarly, it will leave no physical remnant when it disappears...
architectural
The Ideal City of the Renaissance – the città ideale – is a singularity in architectural space: a city of Total Architecture... There is no building, no planning as such; only an infinite weight of architecture...
bibliotechnical
Some of my most tedious, hence productive, hours have been spent in libraries...there is a curious opiate power in the Dewey Decimal system, in the copiousness of an academic library...
bureaucratic
A good administration is not in itself an object of knowledge... . However, when we believe ourselves to be handling an object of knowledge, we are in truth usually handling its administrative apparatus...
cartographical
How would you go about mapping the Ideal City, diaphanous, as it is, with ideas? Ideas, and by extension Ideal Cities, have their location after all, their interrelation. You can get lost in them. Why, therefore, not map them?...
celestial
The celestial sphere as seen from Norbiton is, like Borges’s map of the Empire, a fragmented, torn and faded object. Norbiton is light-polluted, dull-skied.No one looks up; no one need look up...
circumambulatory
The logic of Norbiton’s streets has nothing to do with its circumference. If you try to walk its perimeter you are committing a minor spatial infraction...
contractual
Each time you sit down and uncap your pen and put your name to a contract...you emerge from an uncontracted space... .The contract marks your entry into civility.
diurnal
The transformational power of the sun was well known to the renaissance magus, for whom solar or Jovian energies and influences countervailed against the melancholy opacity of Saturn.
emblematic
Renaissance emblematics, in short, is a dry brittle science, like a desiccated songbird. Pick it up by its hooked toes: it weighs nothing...
epistemological
Under certain conditions — in a garden, in the Ideal City, in a garden of the Ideal City — objects of knowledge achieve weightlessness. Or, at the very least, a considerable buoyancy...
ethical
Norbiton: Ideal City is a haven for the Failed. No one is expected to pitch in, to rub along, to cheer up; no one is ever shouted down, stepped on, chivvied along or shut out. Everyone is afforded the space they need...
fantastical
Commonplace mutations accrue significance, weight, granularity; and in time, the animating principle of the city will be expressed in an evolved monstrosity...
gastronomical
I once knew a bishop, a noted theologian, who ate only salted toast for breakfast....
geographical
There are as many geographies in the world as there are yards of earth upon which a body may squarely stand...
geometrical
The Ideal City as imagined by the quattrocento Renaissance is not a city that defends itself, but its geometric regularity ... can also be tuned to a diamond hardness...
horticultural
A garden in the Ideal City is not merely the proper dwelling place of herbaceous plants. It is, to adapt a phrase of Francis Bacon’s, a way of vexing nature...
iconoclastic
The citizens of the Ideal City of the Failed Life are not image breakers, any more than we are book burners. This is not how we have chosen to inscribe ourselves on the World. But we are learning...
infernal
The Geography of Hell is well known. It has its plains and rivers and cities like any other place. And it has its entrances, its gates. There are roads that lead there which are well marked, and guides to give you directions...
labyrinthine
Some deaths are linear; others are labyrinthine. In some the journey of the soul is straight, direct, if necessarily troubled...In others the passage from life to death is convoluted, retrograde, baffling...
ludic
Some say that Norbiton: Ideal City does not exist: it is merely a game we play, a Dungeons and Dragons of Norbiton acted out by a community of forlorn solitaries. This is an understandable error...
melancholical
What is a city, if not a natural anti-melancholical? The Renaissance Magus understood this: what most looks like melancholy, what grows near melancholy, cures melancholy...
microscopical
Pictures are like prepared slides... . To look at a picture hanging in a gallery is akin to looking down a microscope at some object or other and marvelling at its ultrastructure.
mnemonic
How can we best encode the dead?...I am talking of the dead, but the dead are only a case study. To repeat my question in more general terms: how can we remember well?
nocturnal
Norbiton at night is never wholly dark. It is a jerry-rigged electric light show, an awkward cluster of variable noctilucence.
ornamental
Were I to design a city from scratch – and I have tried and failed once before, so I know what I am about – I would begin by planting orange trees.
pastoral
The pastures of Norbiton...are long since subducted beneath the great cordillera of the city...But fragments occasionally surface...
priapic
Adam, before the Fall, exercised magisterial control over his penis. He could ready it for procreation as an act of Will, in the same way that he could lift his arm over his head. There was nothing to it...
quantum-mechanical
No one ever fully understands Norbiton: they just get used to it...This is the reality of things, after all; there is nothing odd about it. Our failure to grasp it in its own terms is no more than that: our failure...
restorational
In the late 1970s, my brother’s chemistry teacher, ex-ICI, white-coated, old, cynical, impenetrable, used to drink gin and smoke in class. So my brother says...
sartorial
My ghost suit has hung disembodied in my wardrobe for several years – since the day, in fact, I quit my job, demobilising myself from the World – a sagging Bartholomew of lost purpose and ambition...
spatial
The basic spatial unit of any city is the interior, but an interior space... requires the backbone of a proper desk. And Norbiton: Ideal City is nothing if not a city of desks...
structural
Where are the pillars of Norbiton? In what shifting sands do they plant their feet? How do they sustain our giddy, skyward brickwork?
taxonomical
Norbiton: Ideal City is a binomial place: a place opened up to science. But whether the generic name be Norbiton and the specific epithet Ideal ... or the reverse, is not susceptible to logic...
transcendental
The Ideal City has no bureaucracy of knowledge. Nothing categorical to work with. It is peopled only by a motley of philosophes, of scratching, slouching, yawning souls...
typographical
Norbiton: Ideal City is a place not so much of stones, of paving and brick and architecture, as it is of letters, of characters, of chiselled marks; in short, a place of words.
umbilical
Let us theorise that for each earthly city we are able to calculate a point where any one quality of that city slides suddenly toward the antipodes of that quality...and let us name it: the Umbilicus
urban to zoological
Urban to Zoological are on their way...