Not Far From Here
CREDIT: Meghan Ho-Tong
I drove to Paarl alone. It was a Sunday and spring, and the grass along the highway was a brilliant apple green. I left the city at ten, driving down to the Foreshore to join the N1 outside the Convention Centre. That morning the roads were quiet, and the low sun cast long, deep shadows across the side streets.
I had begun writing a short story about a daytrip to the Taalmonument. A fictional story, but only just. There would be one other person in the car, and it would be June, not September. But as I had never visited the monument nor spent much time in Paarl, I thought it best to see it firsthand, to weigh my story with some semblance of truth, and with a feeling of the place.
The story would begin with a conversation about an artwork. A friend called K had asked me if I knew Bruce Nauman’s artwork Body Pressure. I didn’t.
No?
No.
It was one of those unusually warm June afternoons, and we were sitting at a balcony bar in the winter sunlight. We had happened across each other, coming up the stairs, and shared a drink together as we waited for our respective friends to arrive. A glass of white wine for me, a deep orange cocktail for her.
I think of Body Pressure every time I visit the Taalmonument, K said, There is something about the sensibility of the architecture that is so, oh, sensual, I suppose, and feminine too. Something vaguely erotic about the curved lines, the circular motif, those hollow spaces — She paused to unzip her jacket — We should go together one day. I’ll take photographs, and you can write about the space.
In the end, we never quite made plans, and K went without me. And now, four months later, I drove to Paarl with some idea I could recreate a daytrip that had never happened.
As I drove out of Cape Town, I imagined what I would write about the trip; the clean, crisp air, yes, and the pastoral impressions of the passing scenery, too. Seen from the highway, all the imperfections of the landscape were lost in a blur of that pervasive spring green. Everything looked bright and fresh and newly washed — the budding trees, the cows composed on picturesque fields, the endless white line down the middle of the road. I kept meaning to take note of what I saw, but it was such a glorious day, and I was mollified by the bucolic setting, and by the humming of the car, which soon dissuaded any literary inclinations.
•
After that first conversation with K, I looked up Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure. The artwork is understated in form, a conceptual sleight of hand that exists somewhere between text and performance. The only physical attribute of the work is a stack of pink posters that list suggestions towards an action. The printed lines read like the verses of a poem or those of a strangely lyrical instruction manual, inviting the viewer to enter into a performance and to merge their body with an architectural surface.
Press as much of the front surface of
your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek) – the text begins –
against the wall as possible.
Press very hard and concentrate.
I tried to follow these directions alone in my bedroom, only the beige wall produced a decidedly bland effect. Besides, the smooth painted surface was cold to the touch and I was in my underwear. It didn’t feel like art but rather foolish and vaguely unpleasant. This private performance ended after only a minute. My cheek left a faint smudge on the wall, to the left of the window. It’s hardly noticeable now.
•
The route from Cape Town to the Taalmonument follows the N1 for forty minutes, then turns left towards Paarl, peeling off the highway and running down to the main street. From there, the route turns left again, up through suburbia and back in time, past houses from another decade and another country. Here, above the main street, the houses are built in that ubiquitous 80s vernacular unrecognised by any architectural discipline, with mono-pitch roofs and stone cladding and dreams of a long, hot summer. And here the streets are empty too. Further up the road, idle cars lined the lawn outside the Dutch Reformed Church. I wound down my window to listen for hymns, but all I could hear were unseen birds singing, the cars passing on the nearby highway, and my own engine, which broke the morning’s stillness.
Past the church and the last line of houses, the road continues upwards, winding through a forest of blue gums and offering a view of the city below. The earth is red here, no longer the loamy dark soil of my own city. The light is harsher too, more brilliant and glaring.
I reached the entrance to the monument and parked my car. A pair of raptors rode the thermals above the granite face of Paarl Rock, which will always look like a painting I once saw of it and never like itself: vast and flat and brushed with bronze. I cut the engine, and suddenly the day seemed very still, save for the murmur of traffic from the tangle of roads below. It is always a curious effect, I reflected, stepping out my car and onto that red earth, to momentarily feel how slowly one’s feet carry one forward after the speed of a car.
•
Seen from the car park, the Taalmonument appears strangely contemporary, a product of the new South Africa rather than its violent past. Yet it was built in 1975, at the height of Apartheid, to commemorate the semi-centenary of Afrikaans as a recognised language. The monument was designed by the architect Jan van Wijk and constructed on land owned by a then deeply oppressive state on the northern slopes of Paarlberg, with a commanding view of the local farmlands and of the blue mountains beyond.
While the monument first appears timeless, even futuristic, it betrays elements of the Brutalist movement that was then in its heyday, with its rough aggregate, pre-cast concrete, thick walls, and deep recesses. Yet here the similarities end. In form, the monument is an anomaly, belonging to no definite style, more a sculpture than a building. Where Brutalism favoured right angles and grids, here the square is replaced by the circle, the corners are rounded, and the function given to the visual rather than the utilitarian.
The Taalmonument is pragmatic in its symbolism. Each architectural element represents some element of the Afrikaans language. The meaning is definite and static, the room for interpretation vanishingly small. Visitors to the monument are given a brochure with a diagram of the structure, where each architectural feature is assigned a letter, and each letter corresponds to a brief explanation.
There is no mention of femininity or sensuality in the brochure, nothing poetic or suggestive. Rather, any complexities the monument might embody have been reduced by the brochure’s shallow explanations, which dictate the structure’s symbolism from A to F in the same dry and uninteresting way.
•
The path from the car park leads you up several steps, and it’s here, under the shadow of a tree, that the words Dit is ons ernst have been laid into the walkway, the letters cut from brass. This is our conviction. Ahead lie the strange monoliths of the monument, bright in the full sunlight, and to the left, a green plaque with two poems by Afrikaans poets. The first, by N.P. van Wyk Louw, speaks of Afrikaans as a bridge between two continents; the second, by C.J. Langenhoven, of the language as a rapidly ascending curve. Below these poems, the reader is informed that the architect was inspired by their images, and looking up to the structure, you can see the bridge-like shape and the exponential curve of the monument’s tallest point.
The sound of falling water led me past the plaque and towards the dark mouth of the monument. The sun, which had appeared low only an hour earlier, was now at its zenith. After the glaring brightness outside, the darkness of the structure’s interior rendered me momentarily blind. The sound of water echoed through the empty space, refracting off the hard surfaces and finding nothing soft to dampen it. The floor sloped gently downwards, and the ceiling upwards, higher and higher, until I lost sight of it in the shadows. The spires of the monument are hollow, and the tallest has a small opening at its apex, seen from below as a pinprick of light in the dark emptiness. The path led me to a small, circular water feature. Light from a nearby opening fell on the moving surface, and its reflection danced on the opposite wall. I counted ten coins in the shallow pool. Ten coins for ten wishes.
I stepped out into the light and into the amphitheatre that marks the centre of the structure, around which all its forms converge. From here, you can see all the elements of the monument: the two spires, the spheres that appear to rise up out of the amphitheatre’s steps, the geometric blocks that delineate the circular pool.
•
Here, at the monument, I tried to perform Body Pressure again, choosing a more secluded wall halved by a hard diagonal shadow. I lent against that textured surface, tried to push myself into it, my left cheek against the sun-warmed concrete, and my right hand against the shaded hardness. My hipbones grated against the course finish.
Form an image of yourself (suppose you
had just stepped forward) on the
opposite side of the wall pressing
back against the wall very hard.
I pressed harder and closed my eyes. I could feel the line of the shadow against my body where the wall changed from sun-warmed to cool. The concrete smelt like city streets after a sudden downpour, wet and dusty and cold.
Press very hard and concentrate on the image pressing very hard.
I leaned against the wall, harder still, as if that surface would yield to the pressure of my body, would give way and let me in. The new director of the Taalmonument complex has called for porous museum walls, but here, pressed up against them, they pushed back, solid and impermeable. I suppose he was only being metaphorical.
Show me what love looks like. This from someone I couldn’t see. I stepped away from the wall and looked around the corner. A photographer was gesturing to a couple in matching blue jeans and white T-shirts. They held each other close.
(the image pressing very hard)
press your front surface and back surface
toward each other and begin to ignore or
block the thickness of the wall. (remove
the wall)
Good, good, now look towards your future life together. The couple stared into the mid-distance with studied sincerity, still holding each other, white T-shirt pressed against white T-shirt. Bodies are more pliant, more forgiving, than walls. I watched the couple for a long while, half hidden behind the corner. I wanted to know what love looked like, too.
The only other visitors were a mother and daughter with backpacks and hiking shoes, and a family spread out on the lawn enjoying a picnic between islands of clover.
•
It was soon midday and time to leave. I felt oddly tired, and the beginning of a headache hesitated behind my eyes. A long afternoon stretched ahead, formless and blue-skied. A Sunday afternoon, and nothing else to do. I was anxious to return home.
I walked back to the entrance gate, leaving behind the sound of running water and the smell of fresh-cut grass. Pulling out of the car park, I retraced the roads I had followed, driving down the hill, turning right and right again, to follow the highway until it runs out in inner city Cape Town.
You can see the Taalmonument as you drive back along the N1, but only briefly. You have to look for it, hidden among boulders and fynbos. From the highway, the spires look like curious rock formations or the thin-fingered hand of some great colossus. The monument seems insubstantial from here, dwarfed by Paarl Rock and linear perspective. A strange nationalist folly of little significance rather than a modernist testament to a new language.
Further along the N1, with Paarl far behind, you can see Table Mountain in the distance, rising above the Cape Flats. A line of grey smog clings to the horizon, but the sky above the city is still bright and clear, and soon you will be home, beneath that blueness and that mountain.
My cheek and palms carried the impressions of the monument even after I’d left it. Irregular depressions and pink pockmarks on pale skin. My white canvas shoes were dusted red.
•
K and I have never been close. We are more acquaintances than friends, two people who find themselves at all the same parties. Now that I think of it, the first time we spoke was at a club in Long Street, over the sounds of electronic dance music and alcohol, and under flashing lights. I believe we had been talking about romantic failure, pressed close together on the crowded dance floor, and ever since then we have shared the vague camaraderie of the disappointed. This was some time before I heard that she had started seeing my ex-boyfriend. I’ve known since she first invited me to the Taalmonument. And no doubt she doesn’t know that I know.
It’s not that I mind, really, but I keep thinking of Bruce Nauman’s piece. Only now, I realise how easy it is to substitute the wall for him. And how easy it is to imagine K pressing against that hard, vertical surface.
Think how various parts of your body
press against the wall; which parts touch and which do not.
I am curious to know why K chose me to share in the erotics of the Taalmonument. Was it not enough to share a lover? And how like two lovers that place is. The phallic spires with their feminine emptiness. The convex and the concave. The hard, untreated concrete and the gentle curves. The marriage of symbol and its spatial form.
Think how various parts of her body
press against his; which parts touch and which do not.
•
A week after I drove out to Paarl, K emailed me her photographs. It had been overcast the day she went to the Taalmonument, four months earlier. The sky was close and grey, and the recent rain had darkened the concrete of that strange structure. I am not in any of the photographs, of course, but nearly all the figures captured in the images are turned away from the camera, and it is easy to imagine that I am one of them. It is easy to misremember my own visit, to misremember the addition of low clouds and a light rain. And to write a story of only one road trip, taken together. A story about a secret and about three bodies.
