Anne Carson writes that Ovid is her favourite poet, because he is a poet of the gap. That which is always in the process of becoming something else. This wanting for what is just out of reach, or what has already passed is ancient Eros driving us on.
In his 1909 Futurist manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti declared the death of museums, libraries, and nostalgia in favour of acceleration, speed and action. Emboldened font brandished across his call for destruction, he and his comrades declared "Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack…” and yet here we stand in another century as our need for speed and progress shifts gears again, from lightning connectivity and attempts to reach immortality, the borders between our bodies and our devices have morphed us into a shiny new hybrid creature, at one with our phones. In light of this, we consider Kontinuum, that which breathes outside of our concept of progress. We wander instead between library walls, pay attention to what the seasons do, plant in the waxing of the moon, set the table and break our bread.
The etymology of maintenance comes from the Latin manu tenere — to hold in the hand. For this issue we begin at the topiary garden of Sanssouci park built in the 18th century, tended to and outlived by generations of gardeners, before continuing to the restaurant Sale e Tabacchi, where a tablecloth thrown high twice daily situates a place for reconciliation, pausing bodies engaged in slow digestion. And finally into the Philharmonie of Berlin, conceived by Hans Scharoun from three archaic forms: the mountain, the cave and the tent, a sheltering room where the audience is enclosed on all sides by an orchestra, facing one another while a cascade of music covers them.
Isn't all wanting to make, also a wanting to halt time? To bring flowers into our houses on the edge of decay, a fascination for something already transitioning? Topiary gardening, a careful maintenance, arrived in Rome at the same time Ovid was writing his Metamorphoses, the most ceaseless collection of myths ever written. Without ending, it heaves and surges like a downhill flood, from the conception of the cosmos to the fall of Julius Caesar. Each nymph, god or mortal given to sudden, painful, yet inevitable change. Bark reaches up the throats of the mourning Niades, their tears crystallising to amber as they fall in the river, later to be worn around the necks of Roman brides. Even the grief that grips their bodies transforms; all is in movement. Or, as Ovid writes, everything changes, but nothing dies.
Running counter to our millennial Marinetti-esque need for progress and speed, we also hear a slow resurgence of something murmuring beneath the water's surface, a re-telling of ancient myths, a return to tradition and practices that line us up with the seasons, which engage our hands and demand slowness, for access to the garden— from Proto-Germanic gardaz, an enclosure, a protected space.
For all his speed and distilled comprehension, Claude could never capture the weightless, erotic feeling of flying over the rooftops of Moscow, naked on a broomstick with Margarita, 300 pages into Bulgakov's masterpiece, or thrown from myth to myth in Ovid’s metamorphoses. We experience these surges in our bodies as we attempt to hold time as it passes; these acts which continue, on and on, do so because they remind us that all things are in a constant state of transition and flux; nothing truly dies. Kontinuum comes from continere, a reminder also to hold together, to contain.
