Prado Itineraries and the Great Court of London, by the Windowless Consultant

We still don't know what the city is. Flesh, stone, or idea, space or word, practice or representation, a mixture of these or something else that they result from, more spiritual, more instinctive or explained by an enlarged idea of the biological, encompassing the social life of ants. Ultimately definable or not, though, it must be lived, and, as part of that life is its description, definitions, however partial, must be attempted.

The solution found by our fellow citizens at Oxford is a 750 word preamble, a grand tour of historical uses before so much as entering the treacherous terrain of definition proper.

Those seeking to establish whether it's stone or idea might visit the British Museum's Great Court. With this rebuilding, the architect, Norman Foster seeks to draw a line through central London, between the British Library to the North, and the riverside/Trafalgar Square attractions to the South: a 'New Heritage Route', he suggests, shading it onto a map in demonstration. An idea, a name, practices, a long line through stone, processional route for tourists, crossed daily and unperceived by inhabitants, recognised only by the relevant planning bodies or those seeking their language to commission, build or describe.

I came here via Madrid, the Passeo del Prado, at first sight a more identifiable entity in its Baroque rhetoric, linking the Reina Sophia to the Thyssen-Bornemisza around the Prado itself.

The idea was inspiration for a London window on a historical Spanish theme, the paintings there to help me, a flamenco night, the streets, plazas, bars, the food, habits, conversation.

My work in windows is self-assured, as it must be if I'm to survive by it, hence this blog, where everything less certain is collected, conglomerates, everything of or pertaining to the city.

The standard Prado guide is admirable in its clarity and, within reasonable limitations, detail. There's no such thing as Spanish painting, any more than there is Italian, Flemish, French or Dutch, as the Passeo del Prado complex is one of the best places to discover. Rather, there are tendencies, investigations, exchanges, discoveries shared, interpreted, forgotten or relearnt by more or less itinerant workers responding to the needs of more or less international clients, working, within and across ever-changing borders, under the rambling movements of battling dynasties.

El Greco's colours, we come to see, came from Venice, where they landed with the dyes from the trade overseas, his space, tormented, fragmented, and without centre, more a spiralling Tintoretto than anything closer to his anyway adopted Toledo. Goya looked to the Flemish, of course, especially to the works garnered by dominating Spain, not only for the portraits, but even in his darkest nightmares. Velasquez' proximity with Rubens is well documented, with Titian, and if there's one certainty to lie in Las Meninas, it concerns the fluidity of space, its changes over time, the defining place of perspective, representation, in who you are, of where you stand. The monarch is standing before it, the viewer, being painted, Philip IV in flip flops and shorts, unconsciously posing for Thomas Struth, wondering whether they grasp it, before the next one, with an audio guide.

I can't be the only one going abroad who on arriving experiences uncertainty about whether they've left. The language is different, the buildings, faces, streets, practices, space, but it's still language, building, streets, practices, space, still here. Whatever the Dutch at Breda made of their Spanish conquerors, the Spanish of the conquering French, may have been largely irrelevant to the maps being drawn and redrawn around them. The places would stay there, the stones, not least the practices, the stories told there and about them, would develop as they remained the same.

The great museums and galleries of Europe perhaps invite, though each in their own way, each just like the others, the same populations, trading flip flops in one place for umbrellas in another, restless drifting sitters, to tableaux musical chairs. Viewed from what perspectives do the cities expand around them mere wings?

A Small Guide for Phantoms and the London Square by The London Archaeologist

I'm now ready to write up my second day in Paris.

The main task was to explore another of the heavily the annotated areas of the map the King's Cross man claimed had been mine, concerning a guide book whose content may be of particular relevance to this blog. The Little Guide of the XVth Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms has, it transpires, received interesting blog treatment elsewhere, allowing me to confirm the man's account. The guide describes a certain kind of building unaccountably common in that one little area of Paris - the wedge-shaped slice sometimes encountered here in London as a result, particularly, of the course of railways sliced through terrace backs. Their inhabitants, the man explained, are said to be in some way determined by the nature of the buildings. In fact, he said, a grin forming across features otherwise slightly liquid, as I recall, or absent, perhaps from the effect of drink, during his research into the shape the writer finds that these elusive beings include he himself, only now recognising himself, attracted to investigate by obscurer forces than curiosity alone, at last coming to understand that what he's seen as his life's been some kind of illusion, the memories making up his past unreal.

During breakfast, I flicked though the map to plot an itinerary for the day that would take it in, but also allow for research into my other interest in the city - the sense of the French 'square'.

The nearest to my hotel, I noticed with surprise, was that landmark piece of urbanism I'd always known as the famous 'Place des Vosges'. Formerly 'Place Royale', according to the map it was also to be known as 'Sq Louis XIII'.

I'm still working on the question of the London Square. I began last summer, in Hanover Square, where I hoped to establish the effects of geometry on behaviour, but the project remained unfinished. Expect further reports, though I can't say when.

The very term 'square' in its application has obscure roots and entangled branches. A key stage in the development of its form in London was at Covent Garden, where it took on the name, of course, of Piazza to suggest the Italian influence of the buildings lining it and the Palladian purity of plan. The design of the form there, what's more, warrants the individuality of its name. As is again visible now in post-modern souvenir, the mixture of red brick with stone details, and, more still, the open arcades lining its terraces, were continental influences that were to be dropped from what would soon come to be known as the 'square': an open space surrounded by terraced housing as focus for a unified urban development. Inigo Jones visited the Place Royale before designing Covent Garden. Having been an influence on the form, that it was later to borrow back for a name suggested that, when analysing even such a specific entity as our local London square, peering into the behaviours it produces, as is my plan, considerations of its wandering - indeed rambling - abroad will always be à propos.

'Square' in French, according to fr.Wikipedia, is a legal term, brought into use under Haussman, describing only the central open space, not what we would think of as the entire area - their place -, and thus not the address itself, either, hence the ability of the Place des Vosges to be simultaneously also the Square Louis XIII. Furthermore, being legal, the term is less descriptive of the form than ours, as noted of Menilmontant, and defines more the sort of activities allowed and required inside. This I take to confirm my suspicions about the secret relation of the English form to behaviour.

From my research in Hanover Square, I had at first been unable to determine whether these relations were a result of the shape of the square or that of the photographic frame. It seemed possible that the forms that appear result from the coincidence of the two.

In our Foyles Café discussions, the Landless Landlord informed me that Phoebe White's seminal Photography and the Obelisk contains a chapter suggesting that this works on the same principle as - is a form of - photography. The cloister, he suggested, was shown there to function as a camera obscura, cutting out the random noise of terrestrial life to retain only the focused spiritual forces coming directly from the sky. These would then be recorded in the form of the inner state of the monk, spiritual texts such as meditations, or pictorially as illuminations. The same might surely be said of the gymnasium of the ancients, antecedent of both the cloister and the square, the postures of the athletes, the peripatetic philosophies themselves direct representations of a higher cosmic order.

According to the Windlowless Consultant, Marks and Umbridge's Secret History of Photography, which she'd come upon several months earlier, had better claim to seminal status, and contained what she suggested was a more scientifically grounded hypothesis. She herself had proved on British Land Land before his encounter with his book that it was the influence of Daguerre's ramas that first unleashed the photographic potential of planned space.

I'm not convinced arguments about origins are helpful, or that the theories are incompatible. I do, however, suspect that at least one of the books may well have contained a chapter on the town square, arguing that it performs an equivalent function to the gymnasium or cloister. Passers by entering the camera obscura centre would, while obviously maintaining their usual identities, in some way become simultaneously units in a larger representation in exactly the same way that the individual silver crystals, dyes or phototransistors positioned at the back of the camera box maintain their identity as the substances they are, and yet also have a role in representing objects and events from beyond the shutter.

This was the hypothesis I sought to confirm as I stood in the Square St Jacques at the end of the day.

After the Square Louis XIII, my first destination had been Caillois' XV Arrondissement. There, as with the other locations, I was unable to decide with certainty whether any sense of recognition I might have stemmed from having truly been to the place before and read the texts that the King's Cross man, who might on the basis of his activities both on and off duty be called the Legless Lecturer, claimed I had. It was possible the man had implanted in me a false sense of recognition by the powers of suggestion alone. Indeed, as I photographed the oversized air vents the otherworldly beings were said to emerge from or the unnaturally thin buildings they inhabited, and thought back to the man's blurred features and manic grin, I wondered not only whether he himself might be one of the creatures, but also whether he might have been seeking to imply that I too, would be one, trying to entice me to the habitation I would, seeing it, recognise as my own, attempting to rewrite some kind of new past for me.

It was not without trepidation that I made my way to my next destination, the rails behind Montparnasse, also marked on the map as figuring in the work of another writer, whom I've been unable to track down. If I ever were to become sure about my recognition, and yet if this recognition were unfounded, would that not perhaps confirm my status as one of those creatures that it's the object of this blog not to represent but to record?

At Square St Jacques my purpose had not been to follow up annotations on the map - there were none for that location - but to pursue the work on squares. Directing my lens towards the centre, though, I immediately recognised the tower as the subject of innumerable other photographs, including, most notably for me, one in a book I was sure I'd once read. If there were such a work, that would strongly imply that I was in fact able to distinguish true recognition independently of the Legless Lecturer from that vague sense arising from his suggestion. That text, to my relief, I've found. The fact that I do recall enthusiastically reading Breton's L'Amour fou all those years ago when I'd lived in Paris proves beyond doubt that the Legless Lecturer was some sort of impostor. In fact, I seem to remember that early on in our conversation we'd swapped cards. It's in many ways to emerge from a nightmare to realise that if, instead of that I use for my archaeological practice, I'd accidentally given him that of the blog, he could, say with an iPhone in a visit to the toilets, have gleaned from a few posts there much of that information about my past by which he'd convinced me that we'd known each other all those years before.