It's hard not to think that there's some biological imperative
at work in our passion for this rentable and temporary supremacy –
some ancient advantage to having a panoramic view of the
surrounding land which flickers within us as we take the express
elevator up to the viewing platform. Elevation has always been a
privilege of the powerful and the wealthy, after all. They take the
top rungs of the ladder, the upper echelons of the pecking order,
and the penthouse suites in the tower block. So when you visit one
of these attractions, there's a sense of borrowed grandeur in the
perspective you get – which is further enhanced by your grasp of a
spectacle that always evades you at ground level. Roland Barthes,
in a famous essay on the Eiffel Tower, suggested that it made
structuralists of all its visitors (without them ever knowing it)
because it gave them a tool to analyse the power relationships in
the city in which they lived. But you don't have to go quite as far
as he did to agree that what's usually marketed as a sensational
pleasure is surreptitiously an intellectual one, too.
Up the Shard, I found myself thinking of something else as well,
though. And that was the recent popularity of tilt-shift
photography, that technique which takes a scene from the real world
and converts it into a model village (you'll have seen it somewhere
on television because it's very vogueish at the moment). The
satisfaction of tilt-shift isn't entirely unconnected to the thrill
we feel up a high building, where the rail networks that so
frustrate us in actual use become toys, shuttling to and fro with
perfect neatness. Both height and that trick of focal depth bring
the world into our grasp in another sense, because they make it
look cherishably manipulable. We understand the complexity of
systems, can see how they interlock and sense how they might be
rearranged, as in a game with scale models. So while it might still
be "horrid" in Boswell's more ancient understanding of the term (as
something that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up),
it's also profoundly gratifying, hinting at an imagined world in
which we're the biggest thing around and our thumb can blot out a
building. Above about 500ft we're all children again. Did our
ancestors feel that, too, before cathedrals or skyscrapers? And did
being the king of the castle long predate castles?
A four-letter word arrives on Radio 4
The news that Radio 4 is to broadcast an unexpurgated reading of
Tony Harrison's poem V took me back to the furore that greeted its
first publication. This newspaper reprinted the whole poem so that
our readers could judge for themselves, a decision which, as I
recall, took the editor Andreas Whittam Smith about half a second
to make. He was just as brisk when someone suggested that the swear
words might be hyphenated into semi-decency. I remember how nervous
I was, because I dreaded the possibility that a typo had crept into
its 3,500 words. And I don't think any of us would have credited
that it would one day go out on Radio 4.
The latest spin on a misused word
Back in 1917, when Guillaume Apollinaire used the word to refer
to Satie's Parade, "surreal" referred to a dreamlike, irrational
conjunction of real objects. These days – as demonstrated by
eyewitnesses to the Vauxhall helicopter crash the other day – it
means something more like, "Honest... I've never seen anything like
it before." I suppose the wreckage of a helicopter on a London
street does qualify as an unexpected juxtaposition. But it's hardly
as unpredictable as Lautréaumont's famous instance of surrealist
conjunction – "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an
umbrella on an operating table". So unless the fire-engines were
covered in fur and the helicopter was shaped like an elephant, I'm
just not convinced surreal is the appropriate word.
Amol Rajan
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