White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

8

I was back in London on the day it was announced that Charlie Haden had died in Los Angeles, the city I had just come from. As a tribute, I made a sign (reminiscent, I hoped, of the banner on the cover of the first album by his Liberation Music Orchestra) and fixed it to a window in the front of our flat:

RIP CHARLIE HADEN 1937–2014

I propped the stereo speakers in the open window too, facing outwards, filling the street with music. Anxious that what was intended as a tribute might be perceived as a civic nuisance, I kept it to three tracks: ‘Lonely Woman’ from The Shape of Jazz to Come, with Haden’s mournful, melodic bass intro and the country-boy whoop of delight as Coleman cries out the first blues-drenched solo. Then ‘Ramblin’’ (from Change of the Century) with the down-home, country-sounding solo, which is really a duet with drummer Billy Higgins, who keeps the whole thing kicking and tickling along. The last track was ‘Taney County’ from the first of the Quartet West albums, a shit-kicking and elegiac medley for solo bass: as light-footed as a teenage girl, as old and wise as her grandma — and as vast as the Missouri sky. In the course of the eight-minute solo Haden quotes from the ‘Ramblin’’ solo, which takes us back by looking forward to the next Quartet West album, In Angel City. That record came out in 1988 but the picture on the back is from thirty years earlier, when Haden was twenty-one. He’s squinting in the sunlight, bare-chested, not exactly athletic-looking, with a Marine haircut and his arms around his bass. The photo has been cropped so we don’t know who was with him or what was in the background. What we do know is that the future only sounded as it did because Haden’s bass dug so deeply into the soil and soul of the American heartland.

In the film Rambling Boy, Haden reminisces about how he’d travelled to L.A., hoping to find work as a jazz musician. At Tiny Naylor’s, an all-night drive-in restaurant and hang-out for musicians, he met Red Mitchell, who introduced him to pianist Hampton Hawes. This led, in turn, to his meeting — and playing with — Art Pepper. (A clue to what’s missed out from his life story in this invaluable if somewhat over-respectful documentary is obvious to anyone familiar with Raise Up Off Me and Straight Life, the respective autobiographies of Hawes and Pepper.)

As he established himself in L.A. Haden started working with Paul Bley, whose band played at the Hillcrest. On a night off, at the Haig, he heard an alto player sitting in on a Gerry Mulligan gig, playing a solo so crazy he was promptly ordered off the stage. Haden was transfixed (‘the whole room lit up for me’), but the unwanted guest left too quickly for Haden to follow him out into the night. When he started asking around about this mysterious player, the drummer from Bley’s band, Lennie McBrowne, asked if the guy was playing a plastic saxophone. He was! So McBrowne brought the guy along to the Hillcrest and introduced him to Haden. His name was Ornette Coleman. After the gig, Haden went back to Ornette’s place, which was so littered with music that it was hard to open the door. They played all day and all the next night. A little later he met fellow aficionados Cherry and Higgins (who had been mentored by Coleman’s long-time collaborator Ed Blackwell). They began rehearsing Ornette’s music together, playing at the Hillcrest (with Bley on piano) in October 1958.

So this white boy — born in Shenandoah, Iowa, raised in the Ozarks of Missouri — with country music in the marrow of his bones is suddenly at the frontier of the avant-garde. The following year the quartet will head east, to the Five Spot in New York, to unleash the shape of jazz to come. Haden will look up and see Charles Mingus, Percy Heath, Paul Chambers — the great bass players of the age — and decide that it’s best if he plays with his eyes shut, so that it’s just himself and the bass, himself and the music.

Tiny Naylor’s, at the junction of Sunset and La Brea, was demolished in 1984. It’s now an El Pollo Loco. Where was Ornette’s apartment, the place he and Haden went to after their first meeting at the Hillcrest? There’s no mention of the address, either in Rambling Boy or in any of the books I’ve read about Ornette. (It is possible, on the other hand, to locate the place on Wilshire where Bullock’s department store used to be, where Ornette supported himself by working as an elevator operator.) On the front cover of In Angel City there’s a photo of the Hillcrest with a small sign advertising the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Not to be confused with the country club of the same name, the Hillcrest was on Washington Boulevard, a block east of La Brea. It’s not just that it’s no longer there. I was unable, from the information I had, to work out exactly where it used to be.

The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison

While Adorno was living in Los Angeles, did reports or rumours reach him about something that was happening over in the south-east of town, in Watts? That another émigré, an Italian, was building a demented trio of towers in his back yard?

I saw the towers — or a picture of them at any rate— before I’d heard about them, before I knew what they were. They’re in the background of the photo on Don Cherry’s album Brown Rice: skeletal spires silhouetted against the twilight, with Cherry in the foreground, cradling his trumpet, wearing robes that seem not only pan-African but pan-astral. Taken together, the purple-blue sky, Cherry’s outfit and these skyrocket towers create the impression that this may have been the site from which Sun Ra would have chosen to blast off and return to Saturn. Cherry grew up near the towers after his family moved to Watts from Oklahoma. I’m guessing that he must have known Charles Mingus, who was born in 1922—making him fourteen years Cherry’s senior— before he started playing with Ornette, before Mingus came to see the Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot in New York in 1959 (keeping, I’m guessing again, a special eye on Charlie Haden, who also plays bass on Brown Rice). In his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, Mingus remembers ‘something strange and mysterious’ being built near his home (‘what looked like three masts, all different heights, shaped like upside-down ice cream cones’) and how local rowdies would throw rocks at the crazy Italian guy who was doing this work.

We drove over there, to Watts, on a cloudy Saturday. Instead of Brown Rice we were listening to ‘Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt,’ the long, slow-to-get-going, two-part song by Pharoah Sanders on Tauhid. Ten minutes of random percussion and bass and plonking around that never seems like getting anywhere. Then the bass initiates a surge that is picked up by drums, electric piano and guitar in preparation for the entry of the sax — which still doesn’t happen, which seems imminent long before Pharoah, after further waiting, eventually comes blazing through like a comet in daylight. You’ve been expecting it for ages and it still feels like it comes out of nowhere. Pharoah started as an R ’n’ B player, and you can feel him plugging back into that before he’s crying and screaming, crying like a baby who knows that’s the only way he’ll ever get fed, that the cry can feast on itself.

‘There they are!’ I called out as soon as I saw the towers.

‘Well, where else would they be?’ said Jessica.

‘What I meant was, we have arrived at the place where they are.’

We parked. We were always parking, either parking or driving around looking for a parking place or easing out of a parking space or getting our parking ticket validated, never confident about the procedure, worried that we had parked in some place that looked like a parking space but wasn’t. Often the mere fact that a parking space was available suggested that it was not a parking space: if it had been a parking space it would already have been taken and would not have existed.

The Watts Towers looked, at first, a little smaller than anticipated. Not in height — the three main ones were tall, elegant, vying with each other for altitude — but in the way they were clustered together, hemmed in. More space between them would have made them airier, less solid-looking. The cramping, I saw as soon as we got out of the car, was the product of the six-foot metal fence around the perimeter of the site. Instead of starting at ground level the towers began, visually, six feet from the ground, over the top of the fence. Aesthetically the trick was to keep people out while allowing the sky in; like this the balance — in a place that was partly a celebration of balance — had tipped away from aesthetics towards security. Maybe the weather had played a part; unusually, the sky itself was hemmed in by a band of cloud.

We walked around the perimeter, seeing for the first time the intricacy of the structures, the abundance of decoration and ornamentation. From the Brown Rice photo the towers seemed made austerely of metal, but each spar, strand and tendril was covered with concrete, adorned with glinting coloured crockery, green and blue glass, bits of tiles.

The only way to get in among the towers is on a guided tour. We bought tickets at the Visitors’ Center — appropriately homey rather than fully corporate. The tickets, pinky purple, were like the ones you used to get at cinemas; the guy handing them over was wearing a large black T-shirt that was just about big enough for him. We showed him the Cherry album cover on Jessica’s phone.

‘Oh man, that’s deep,’ he said. He liked the picture so much he showed it to a colleague, handed the phone back and said again how deep it was. I’d never heard the word ‘deep’ used in this way before. Was it an old expression that had fallen out of use or a new one that I’d not come across, something specifically African American that had not yet crossed over into general usage? I liked it but couldn’t imagine myself ever saying it without sounding sceptical or ironic. Adorno was deep, obviously, but if I said he was deep it would sound like a shallow response or, worse, like I was parodying a shallow response to show the depth of my own understanding.

We had ten minutes to wait before our tour began, so we went next door, to the Mingus Youth Arts Center. I loved the way this place was named after Mingus, the honouring and the legacy. How many times, in London, had I cycled, walked or taken the bus along Brixton Road, past Max Roach Park? How cool that someone had the gumption to name it after the great drummer rather than one of the English poets: Tennyson Place, Keats Street, Shelley Way — reliable signs, always, that you are entering the world of hard-to-lets and potential threat. Not that Roach’s name made crossing the park to visit a friend who lived in the flats behind it appreciably nicer. Nothing ever happened, but it was always a relief to get to his place, to hear the multiple locks being turned, to see the door opening and then being shut securely behind us again so that we could give ourselves entirely to ‘Speak, Brother, Speak’ or ‘Money Jungle.’

Something was happening to me here in L.A., something new or at least something that had been sneaking up on me that I’d only recently become conscious of. Things from my late twenties that had meant a lot to me — films I’d seen, books I’d read or music I’d listened to — kept coming back to me with a force that had been dormant for much of the intervening thirty years. Cherry had been a constant presence — because he had mutated and evolved beyond jazz into other kinds of music that I became interested in — but Ornette, Miles and some Coltrane were re-claiming me in a way that was also touched with loss: the thoroughness of their claim was somehow related to a diminution of feeling of which I had hitherto been largely unaware. There was something deathly about it.

And Mingus had meant so much to me, even though he was dead before I knew anything about him, unlike Cherry, Haden and Pharoah, whom I saw play several times, all of whom I spoke to, albeit only briefly. There were plenty of pictures of Mingus in the center named after him, some album covers and CD cases on display and an exhibition of artworks, but ten minutes was plenty long enough to take everything in. We walked outside again, joined the other people on our tour: ten of us, mainly Europeans, gathered in a semi-circle. Our guide, a smiling African American woman, asked what the most important rule of the visit was going to be.

‘Enjoy yourself,’ said a man in an already-enjoying-himself Hawaiian shirt.

‘Have fun,’ said Jessica, tuning in quickly to the spirit of the place. But no, the main rule was ‘Do not climb on the towers.’ Fair enough — you can’t have people clambering all over the towers as if they’re part of an adventure playground — but it was a bit of a downer in the way that prohibitions always are.

We were admitted to the towers through a locked gate so that the guide became a warder, a turnkey, a screw. In the future an invisible force field might prevent people from entering except at designated times.

In among the tendrils and arches of the towers, we listened to the story of their creator’s life. The story was consistent in broad outline with the versions of Rodia’s life online, though there is considerable variation as to some of the details, including his name. Sabato Rodia — who for much of his life went by the nickname Sam, whose last name is sometimes given as Rodilo — was born in 1879 or 1880 in Rivatoli, Italy, and immigrated to the States in the 1890s. He settled in Pennsylvania, where Sabato and his brother worked in the coal mines. The brother died in an accident in the mine. Sabato moved to the West Coast, married Lucia Ucci in 1902. They had three children, lived in Seattle, Oakland and Martinez before the marriage collapsed in 1912. He then worked as a labourer in rock quarries and as a construction tiler, and lived with another woman, named Benita.

In 1921 he bought a triangular-shaped lot here at 1765 East 107th Street in Watts. The lot measured 151 by 69 by 137 feet, and Rodia, at the age of forty-two, began to transform it into his home and his lasting monument. According to some accounts, he started work on the towers to give him something to do after he quit drinking (though Mingus remembers him ‘drinking that good red wine from a bottle’ as he worked). He lived with a woman named Carmen, who left him in 1927. From then on he lived alone, building the towers until 1954, when he gave the property to a neighbour and moved to Martinez to live near his sister. He was seventy-five. The following year, the neighbour sold the property to a man named Joseph Montoya, who intended to open what would have been the world’s most spectacularly located taco stand. These plans came to nothing, and he in turn sold the property to two film people, Nicholas King (an actor) and William Cartwright (then a student at USC, later an editor), who began the long process of ensuring the survival of the towers.

As the talk about Rodia and his work continued, we shuffled through the site, sometimes on the edges, near the boundary walls, sometimes right by the towers, with the glinting and shining bits of glass and imprints either of the tools he’d used to make them or of anything else that came to hand: cornbread moulds, rug beaters, faucet handles. Rodia salvaged and scavenged what he could — rebar, glass, crockery, bottle bottoms (green for 7UP or Canada Dry, blue for milk of magnesia), junk that might be left over when everything else of apparent value had already been taken and used. That is the essential contrast: the scale of the undertaking and the modest means of its construction and materials. Klara, in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, is struck by exactly this. ‘She didn’t know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality.’

The towers soared overhead, sturdy, intricate, graceful: science-fictiony, daft and Gaudi-esque all at once. They were like a forest of trees, linked by concrete creepers but without any umbrella or canopy of leaves. But they were also like inverted and bejewelled corkscrews. Or like. . The power of the place comes, in part, from how impossible it is to put your finger on quite what the towers are or look like. To Klara in Underworld it seems like ‘an amusement park, a temple complex and she didn’t know what else. A Delhi bazaar and Italian street feast maybe.’ Whatever we come up with, a crucial part of the experience resides in that ‘what else’: a suggestion of skyrocket, the masts of a triangular ship heading east but becalmed forever in the doldrums of Watts with only wave patterns in the perimeter walls to serve as the sea. Our guide took these nautical references as evidence that Rodia’s heart and course were set on Italy, the land he had come from, but this was greeted with some scepticism by a white-haired member of our group who spoke for us all.

‘How much of this is supposition?’ he wanted to know.

It was all a matter of record, she insisted, could all be verified by things Rodia had said in interviews either while the towers were being built or after he’d finished, when they began to attract the attention of the world at large. By then they had become mythic, and it is the nature of the mythic that it remains true to itself while subtly adapting to the spoken or unspoken needs of those to whom it appeals, whose hopes it embodies. But the towers’ adaptive capacities are also a proven physical fact. They bend away from the sun, our guide told us, like sunflowers in reverse. This was met with a long silence, a breathing scepticism, but then she explained that concrete does this because of thermal expansion. The fence kept people at bay; the towers leaned away from the sun, their non-denominational appeal causing myriad meanings and associations to flow towards them, unimpeded, free. From them too, as if they were not ship but radio masts, transmitting the sound of which they were the visual embodiment, broadcasting their location, drawing us to them.

Those earlier mentions of Mingus and Cherry were not just circumstantial: in another passage in Underworld the towers put DeLillo’s narrator in mind of ‘a kind of swirling free-souled noise, a jazz cathedral.’ The improvised nature of the undertaking, of learning in the process of doing and making — of being in the grips of something without necessarily being sure what the outcome will be — seems intrinsic to it. But jazz, in essence, is communal, and by Mingus’s time there was a considerable history and a large body of theory to draw on — or reject. Rodia worked alone, building his intricate and epic solo inch by inch, without the benefit of architectural theory or the support of collaborators like Dannie Richmond, Roland Kirk or (in Ornette’s case) Cherry and Haden. What he most wanted from the community — which may have been the motive for buying his plot of land here in Watts — was to be left alone, to go about the business of bringing this thing into an existence that would owe nothing to anyone else, but which would end up being for everyone.

Actually, the other half of that phrase from Underworld—‘cathedral’—is as important as the adjective ‘jazz.’ From certain angles, especially in photographs, the towers loom over the landscape like the shirey spires of English cathedrals in Gloucester or Salisbury. But the crucial thing is that at some point the comparisons fall short, as it were, of the ramshackle magnificence of Rodia’s structures. The comparisons are helpful because they emphasise the towers’ defining what-else-ness. But let’s stick with the cathedrals for a moment and see how they measure up.

Raymond Williams once spoke of how, though moved by the great English cathedrals, he saw ‘the enormous weight of them on man.’ He was amazed by the ‘sheer material effort involved in the production of these buildings, many of them fine churches in stone which have survived from periods in which hardly anybody actually would have had a stone house.’ On the one hand, it is ‘perfectly clear that this was a mode of construction imposed from above.’ On the other, they suggest a willingness to expend huge amounts, ‘often under protest but at times of their own will, of productive labour on buildings which had nothing whatever to do with satisfying the physical urgency of survival.’ The people doing this were physically exposed ‘at the very time when they were building shelter for an authority which was not human, which was not of them.’

Rodia worked by day for the means of survival and continued to labour in the evenings and at weekends, working on something that had nothing to do with either necessity, survival or personal gain. He was under no external compulsion to do this and was not collecting any tithe from the community to fund his efforts; nor was he being paid. Naturally, before he worked on his towers he had to make sure he had a house, a shelter for himself. The towers that he went on to create were not designed to shelter any kind of authority. They are an expression of authority — of his authorship — and therefore of his humanity. If that — humanity! — sounds sentimental or lazy, we can go back to another passage from Williams, in his book The Country and the City.

About the spread, in the eighteenth century, of English country houses and the ideas of ‘heritage’ they incarnate, Williams is less ambiguous. Yes, such houses are invariably beautiful, but

Think it through as labour and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient isolated farm, in uncounted generations of labour, has managed to become, by the efforts of any single real family, however prolonged. And then turn and look at what these other ‘families,’ these systematic owners, have accumulated and arrogantly declared. It isn’t only that you know, looking at the land and then at the house, how much robbery and fraud there must have been, for so long, to produce that degree of disparity, that barbarous disproportion of scale. The working farms and cottages are so small beside them: what men really raise, by their own efforts or by such portion as is left to them, in the ordinary scale of human achievement. What these ‘great’ houses do is to break the scale, by an act of will corresponding to their real and systematic exploitation of others.

Seen in this light the houses become ‘a visible stamping of power, of displayed wealth and command: a social disproportion which was meant to impress and overawe.’

To read this passage is to be moved still more deeply by Rodia’s towers. First, again in contrast with the building of the cathedrals, because no tax was levied on the surrounding community. Second, because Rodia was able to produce, in his own words, ‘something big’ only by dint of an effort that goes so far beyond the scope of ‘ordinary human achievement.’ In its way it exists in the same relation to the ‘ordinary’ as a Beethoven sonata does to someone teaching himself basic tunes on a piano. While Williams has to urge us to view a country house and ‘think it through as labour,’ it is impossible to look at Rodia’s towers as anything other than labour, without thinking of the extraordinary work involved in their construction. How else could we regard them? So, yes, in certain extraordinary circumstances, what one family — one man — can produce is not ‘so small’ if his hobby consumes his entire life to the extent that there is no room in it for a family. The towers are disproportionately large compared with the surrounding bungalows and railroad tracks, which so often serve as indicators or gauges of flatness, but they do not ‘break the scale.’ They are not a visible stamping of power, still less, in another of Williams’s phrases, ‘visible triumphs over the ruin and labour of others’; instead, they’re a gift. They don’t make the buildings around them shrink but have served to raise up the surrounding community — almost as if, to revert to the idea from Heidegger mentioned earlier, the towers caused Watts to be founded around them.

Which makes it still more of a shame that a condition of the towers being protected and conserved is that they are surrounded by that unclimbable steel fence. The great country houses were designed to be seen and to keep people out. Within Rodia’s modest plot and its low walls, the structures were designed to be part of the community. Hence the name he inscribed in them: ‘Nuestra Pueblo,’ our city. The necessary fence grants the towers a special status, which their specialness explicitly rejects. The harm done by this fence does not stop there. At the same time that the fence annexes off the towers it also shrinks them, reduces their scale. They feel confined, ghetto-ised. It’s a far cry from the early sixties, when, as Thom Andersen puts it in Los Angeles Plays Itself, ‘the Watts Towers were the first world’s most accessible, most user-friendly civic monument.’ He illustrates his point with nutty footage shot there by Andy Warhol in 1963. It’s impossible to cavort around like that now, or even to be photographed in the way that Cherry was. You cannot be photographed by the Watts Towers; you can only be photographed by the fence that surrounds the towers. Stonehenge has been similarly shrunk — very nearly destroyed — by the measures designed to protect it.

The fence is doubly frustrating since the essence of the towers is that they are self-contained. At a certain point, when he was quite high up, Rodia was able to work from within the safety of each of the towers, so that the thing he was building — that grew around him — also served as a safety feature. Beyond that point, as the radius of the spire tightened, he had to step outside the spiralling cage but no scaffolding was used. The towers were—and remain — scaffolding: a highly decorative exo-skeleton for an absent interior. They were built with simple tools, with Rodia’s own hands, from basic materials — rebar, steels twisted and bent together without welding, bolts or rivets — so that the intimacy and intricacies of their construction are not concealed but laid bare. The sense is of something organic rather than planned: as if blood flowing through one of the main structural arteries will end up going though the smaller decorative radials. The hieroglyphics and patterns imprinted in the wet cement were formed by the tools used in the towers’ construction: hammers, the head of a garden hose. All of which adds to the impression of self-containment. If the towers are temples, they are dedicated to their own construction. Our guide told us that the legal limit on the height was a hundred feet. That, she said, was why Rodia brought the tallest of the three spires in at ninety-nine and a half feet. She might be right, but Rodia’s story is adorned with sentiment — bits and pieces of good feeling that cling to the legend like the broken bits of crockery and glass that he stuck into the cement of his towers. It is possible that the achieved height created the ceiling beyond which they were officially forbidden to grow. Freed from bureaucratic interference, they could implicitly have continued on forever, ad astra, in spite of the foundations being less than two feet in depth.

This was one of the reasons why, after Rodia had moved on, the city of Los Angeles condemned his construction as unsafe. Having purchased the property for three thousand dollars in 1959, Cartwright and King devoted their energies to preventing the demolition of the towers. The campaign for their preservation in the face of the city’s insistence that they be torn down (before an earthquake caused them to topple over) resulted in a deal and a test. If the structures were able to withstand ten thousand pounds of pressure — the equivalent of a seventy-mile-per-hour wind — they would be allowed to stay. On 10 October 1959, cables were attached, and force was exerted and increased until, our guide explained, the cable snapped. When a new and stronger cable was found, either the crane to which it was attached broke or the truck doing the tugging tilted on the axis of its wheels. We were getting into a realm of variant specificity where the facts are adorned so decoratively as to acquire a suggestion of the miraculous. This is either the enemy of truth or the product of insufficient documentation. It is also a highly malleable proof.

A different kind of test of their ability to withstand potential damage came in August 1965, a few weeks after Rodia had died. During the Watts riots, when the neighbourhood was set ablaze, the towers remained untouched and unmarked. This is factually correct, but Rodia didn’t just leave Watts and give the towers to a neighbour because the work was complete: he was tired of battling the city for permits and fed up with vandalism. Also, Watts had changed, had, by the early 1960s, become almost exclusively African American. In her book Pop L.A., Cécile Whiting writes that Rodia ‘seems to have envisaged the towers at certain times as a refuge from deteriorating conditions in Watts’ and ‘may have abandoned his home in 1955 because of the changing population around him.’ The irony is that after the uprisings the towers — spectacularly realized symbols of immigrant dreams — became resident totems of African American cultural expression and aspiration. ‘In other words, at virtually the same moment as the Watts Towers were preserved as part of the city’s cultural heritage, arguments broke out over whose heritage they represented.’ The malleability of the towers is such that they can surmount this perceived schism; their strength allows them to hold competing claims together like rope in a tug-of-love. Within a year of the uprising, they had become, according to a prestigious reporter for The New York Times—Thomas Pynchon, no less—‘a dream of how things should have been.’ The tense is crucial. Not how things might or will be in the future, but, with more than a touch of regret — even of nostalgia—‘should have been.’ It’s almost a corollary of the way the towers are always putting one in mind of something else: whatever one says always needs qualifying. Even loyal admirers would not claim them as an unqualified masterpiece. Unless. .

We are familiar with the idea of the work of art never being completed, only ever abandoned, but Rodia would seem to have abandoned his at the moment of completion. The moment of the towers’ completion was also the moment at which he was completed by his life’s work. In another sense, they are constantly being completed or fulfilled — by things like the Cherry album cover, by the visitors who come from all over the world, by the various festivals that take place here each year. (Explanatory panels on the fence stress the importance of the Gigli Festival held in Nola, Italy: ‘The Watts Towers resemble the icons used in the festival so closely that they are considered a likely inspiration for his work.’) Repairs have been needed, but the surprising durability of the original work was further enhanced and authenticated when it became apparent that, over the years, it was the repairs that needed repairing. The towers were more robust than the means employed to preserve them. Their capacity to create legends about themselves was self-generating and inexhaustible.

The wayward greatness of the towers — resolutely local and eccentrically universal — and the scale of Rodia’s achievement were attested to by admirers such as Buckminster Fuller and Jacob Bronowski (who in the course of describing a visit to the then unfenced towers in The Ascent of Man, declared them to be his ‘favourite monument’). Whether or not Rodia created a work of art is another question. Or at least the question ‘Is it a work of art?’ brings with it another: what kind of work of art might it be? There is the tacit belief here that ‘work of art’ is the ultimate proof of value and test of worth (more rigorous and demanding than the force exerted by the stress test), but one of the functions of the towers might be to resist or undermine this idea — to question the legitimacy of the question being posed. Maybe the towers are more than a work of art and the idea of art is not an adequate gauge by which to measure this kind of achievement.

The towers are unique, but as a phenomenon of determined, self-sufficient creation on an epic scale they are neither unprecedented nor without equal. John Berger has written about one such endeavour: ‘a palace passing all imagination,’ as the postman Ferdinand Cheval termed his creation in Hauterives, in the Department of the Drôme in France. Cheval (1836–1924) worked for thirty-three years single-handedly building and sculpting his ideal palace. ‘This work is naked and without tradition,’ writes Berger, ‘because it is the work of a single “mad” peasant.’ Viewed from Watts, however, the existence of Cheval’s palace means that there might be a tradition after all, even if it’s a scattered and meagre one. That Rodia was unaware of such a possibility enables us to identify one of this tradition’s defining elements as a lack of consciousness of such a tradition. Another is that other instances or components of that tradition remain unknown and uncelebrated by the world at large, and therefore unpreserved (to say nothing of the large number of such projects that, in spite of their creator’s best intentions, were never completed). Cheval’s reasonable boast—‘I have carved my own monument’—might provide an epigraph for all such lonely enterprises but, by definition, those words have to be re-conceived, recarved and re-written every time an individual pledges himself to an undertaking of this kind. Quotation is impossible, even if the message is the same.

Although our tour had started late it finished on time, in order to prevent a knock-on effect of delays. So our visit felt squeezed, hemmed in by time as well as by the security fence. We dragged our feet, took a last few sulky photographs before being marched back to the Visitors’ Center. Surprisingly, as we looked back at the towers, it was not the work of a kindred spirit such as Cheval that came to mind but one that was absolutely antithetical: a monument built by others at the command of a ruler who sought to impose his will on eternity itself. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ decrees Ozymandias in Shelley’s famous poem. Time destroys and makes nonsense of this vaulting ambition. All that remains of the ruler’s ambition are ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ and a ‘shattered visage’ amid the lone and level sands stretching far away. Rodia’s ambition was just ‘to do something big.’ It wasn’t even an ambition as usually understood. E. M. Cioran claims that the mole blindly burrowing his tunnel is ambitious, that ‘life is a state of ambition,’ but, as usually understood, ambition always has some goal beyond the satisfactions afforded by the task itself: acclaim, recognition, fame, money. Contra Adorno, building the towers would seem to have been Rodia’s hobby, something he did with his free time — albeit something he pursued with unswerving single-mindedness. That’s where Adorno is wrong about hobbies: a hobby can become the defining purpose of one’s life, the thing that gives it meaning even if — as in Rodia’s case — one is obliged to spend the bulk of the day doing something else to earn a living, to buy that time. He did all the work himself, he said, because it would have been too complicated — more trouble than it was worth — to explain to someone else what he was trying to do. Possibly he didn’t entirely know what he was doing. Even his claim that ‘You’ve got to do something, they’ve never got ’em in the world,’ came after the fact, after he was done. So maybe there was something akin to Garry Winogrand’s compulsive credo—‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed’—about the undertaking. He built the towers to find out what they would look like built.

Another helpful comparison is with the temples designed by David Best at Burning Man in Nevada. They’re similarly big but, unlike Rodia’s towers or Ozymandias’ monument, instead of being built to last they’re built in order to be burned at the end of each year’s week-long festival. And whereas Rodia’s towers were built single-handedly, Best’s are the work of hundreds of volunteers, all working together. But both towers and temples are community-based, providing a focus for a neighbourhood (in the case of Rodia) or a city (admittedly a temporary one in Best’s case).

So Rodia got on with it, went steadily about his work day after day, in spite of tiredness, periods of sickness and the never-to-be-underestimated urge to lie down on the sofa and do nothing. My uncle built his own house after working as a brick layer during the day — and said it nearly killed him (before he killed himself, many years later, in the garage of the completed house). Perhaps a cussedness was essential in enabling Rodia to stick at the task, in the way that some people are able to sustain grudges over several decades. He had something to do, and he did it until it was done. Even so, there must have been days when Rodia had to drag his aching legs to the towers and force his heavy arms to climb them, when it was only after working for several hours that the friction of dull drudgery gave way to the steady rhythm of ongoing accomplishment, that he no longer had to overcome the reluctance of his own body, did not have to force himself to keep going. Or perhaps, at some point, he was so habituated to working that it didn’t occur to him to do anything else. This was what he did to relax. Travailler, ça repose: the ideal of the artist’s life embodied by Rodin. Gathering materials, doggedly lugging things up the towers, day in, day out, not stopping.

For every Cheval or Rodia there must have been hundreds of eccentrics who conceived the idea of devoting their energies to doing ‘something big’ before running out of time, resources, energy or will. Some got bored, fed up. Having committed themselves to doing whatever it is that keeps them off the sauce, the lure of the bottle at the end of a day — or a week or a year — of thirsty work proves irresistible and, on reflection, adequately rewarding. It doesn’t even need to be ‘something big.’ The most modest ambitions go unfulfilled: a loft conversion, a planned extension to a house, fixing a wonky front door that doesn’t close properly. The knowledge that there are things to do, tasks to be completed, is enough to keep postponing them, to give life a sense of projected purpose and improvement. Having made the long-postponed decision to go into the office just three days a week so that he can have more time to devote to his frustrated urge to play the saxophone, a solicitor discovers, in the two extra days at his disposal, that the main purpose of the musical dream was to blind him to the truth of his existence and identity: that he is a solicitor through and through. (Maybe men like Rodia have to exist in a state of something like sustained desperation, to be devoid of other options, even the most common one of all: the support of a marriage, happy or otherwise. ‘Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it,’ writes David Mamet. ‘They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently.’) Or think of the person who believes he has a book in him, only to discover that the imagined book is destined to stay in him, that it will not be written, will never be completed, let alone published. Such disillusion or resignation is not the preserve of those who dream of writing a book. Writers are dogged constantly by the fear of not being able to do it anymore. The suspicion that each book might be their last is often what fuels their continuing productivity. Fear of future inability proves to be a powerful and immediate incentive. Along the way, however, they become conscious of the books they won’t or can’t write. At some point many writers will contemplate doing their own version of George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books—though for most it will take its place among their unwritten books. Under that title there are perhaps two categories of book: those that are unstarted and those that are unfinished.

For several years I have wanted to write a book called The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison. It would be about Coltrane’s bassist, the way he stayed with Trane after Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner had left, after the classic quartet first expanded to a sextet (with Rashied Ali and Pharoah) and then shrank back to a quintet (with Alice Coltrane taking over from Tyner on piano). It would also, necessarily, be about Ornette Coleman (with whom Garrison and Elvin recorded Love Call and New York Is Now), about the meeting of Coleman and Haden in L.A., and about Pharoah and Albert Ayler. I loved the title of this projected book even though I knew it was never going to be a book-length project, would at best be the title piece in a volume whose subtitle—And Other Essays—would be an admission of failure and abandonment; a failure which turned out to be more thorough-going even than that.

In 2013, Jessica and I spent four months in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Whenever there was any excuse — a meeting on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, an exhibition at PS1—I took the East River Ferry, one of those rare and wonderful services that combine sightseeing for tourists with functionality for commuters.

Albert Ayler’s body was found in the East River on 25 November 1970. When Don Cherry first met this man ‘with sparkling eyes and a happy smile’ in Copenhagen he felt himself to be in ‘the presence of someone that was carrying the gift and the voice and reflection of god.’ Ayler played at Coltrane’s funeral service on 21 July 1967 (as did Ornette and Haden). He believed that Coltrane was the Father, Pharoah the Son, and he himself the Holy Ghost. He ended up dead in the East River. There were rumours, conspiracies, but the accepted explanation is that it was suicide.

By jazz standards Ayler was not a prolific composer, but the best of his songs are amazing concentrations of jazz history: from New Orleans marching bands to music that pointed beyond what he called ‘the cosmic bebop’ of Coltrane. It’s easy to see — to hear — what Cherry meant when he said that Ayler’s best-known composition, ‘Ghosts,’ ‘should be our national anthem’ even if it’s an anthem that turns the idea of nationhood — and of anthems — inside out before tearing them to shreds and, eventually, bringing them back from the dead.

I listened to the ecstatic despair of ‘Ghosts,’ to ‘Universal Indians’ and ‘Omega’ on repeated trips on the East River Ferry, from Williamsburg to Thirty-fourth Street or down to the Brooklyn Bridge. The few notes I made amounted to nothing except the knowledge that it was too late, that I should have written about Ayler in 1989, that there would be no more to The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison than the title.

It is so difficult to know whether you are giving up on a book because it really is unwriteable or if you are just being lazy, if you have rationalised the idea of its being unwriteable because you lack the stamina to stick at it, to keep grinding it out. Even if you have been writing for a long time—especially if you have been writing for a long time — it is almost impossible to work through the layers of subterfuge, the self-deceptions and self-exonerations that lead you to abandon a book and to forgive yourself for having done so. Once you have made the decision to abandon ship, it requires a certain amount of will-power to persist with the abandonment, not to lapse back into sneaked looks at the manuscript, to learn to ignore the little glimmers of hope, not to gnaw away at it until the ‘it’ becomes that which has been abandoned, that which is still in the process of being abandoned and that which is in the exhausted process of being revived. At some point complete withdrawal is the only solution. After which, it is possible that some parts of what was abandoned and discarded can be used in an entirely different way, in the creation of something new.

There are other scenarios too. You can run out of time long before you run out of ideas or sanity. Some unwritten books are the result of unfinished lives, of premature deaths. Albert Camus had the manuscript of the novel he was working on, The First Man, in the car with him when he was killed at the age of forty-six. Camus had popularised the mythic figure of Sisyphus, whom, he said, we should imagine happy as he rolled his rock up the hill each day. But for anyone engaged in some kind of personal labour, Rodia is a far better model, for two related reasons. His labours were, like Camus’s, the opposite of futile — and they rendered the question of happiness futile, irrelevant. (Is the word ‘happy’ ever part of the vocabulary of the cussed?) Each day, instead of starting from scratch, from where he had begun the previous morning, he made progress. The protagonist of Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North thinks of Sisyphus as an example of ‘the Greeks’ idea of punishment which was to constantly fail at what you most desire.’ Two of these three terms (‘failure’ and ‘desire’) play no part in Rodia’s work — but the task he had set himself was nothing if not punishing. The punishment was all but indistinguishable from the satisfaction and success of his endeavours. With every passing day, either the towers grew or the materials for their continued growth increased. Setbacks, false turns and dead-ends became the precondition for keeping on, for making something. Mingus recalls that Rodia was ‘always changing his ideas while he worked and tearing down what he wasn’t satisfied with and starting over again, so pinnacles tall as a two-storey building would rise up and disappear and rise again.’ But every day some small improvement was made, because mistakes, too, are essential tools.

In a famous passage about forgiveness in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes: ‘Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain agents, only by the constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.’ Was there something deeply unforgiving about Rodia — unforgiving, that is, towards himself — something punishing (that word again) about his labours? He would see the error of his ways, change his mind, start over and continue with the same old thing. Always the same thing, the one thing.

Progress was made — but so incrementally as to have been imperceptible — as each day he climbed what he had built in order to build the as yet unmade. Every day (the contrast with Sisyphus is crucial) it took a little more effort to ascend to the point where he could start work. So his purpose was perhaps similar to that of people who climb mountains. Maybe the only answer to the question of why Rodia built his monument is a negative version of Hillary’s famous response about why he had climbed Everest: because it wasn’t there.