volume 2
this is art holding a mirror up to life. that’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.
-- granny weatherwax, wyrd sisters
A few weeks ago, in the throes of a heatwave, I took a walk to the nearby river. The river Sihl runs parallel to our street. Shallow and slow she may be, but her working history has kept keen bathers far from her shores.
A storied river, the Sihl has been connected to circulation since 1471. This was the age that saw the population first hunger for paper, for books, for documents and art. Paper mills shot up, the industry roared with success, churning out fermented linens that would let words and images flow. This is when the river first welcomed its own paper mill, planted on the river’s edge.
postcard from the paper factory
As I passed the river’s shadowy banks that evening, I crossed many a wanderer, hoping we might catch a sweet evening breeze to dry the day’s sweat. Untypically (but increasingly so), the city sweltered in miasma of humidity, caught between the two hill ranges that frame Zurich. The water ways and lake are both sign and solution of this thick air. Not one cubic centimetre of water is free from city dwellers’ cool down rituals. And yet, it is these very waters that dissolve into the summer heat and produce the miasma that has us flock to its wells.
The sun hung low, as long fingers of sunlight crept underneath the highways above and tickled the riverbed. Light danced across the murky waters. Water streamed across rocks and seaweed and flossed through the legs of a dinner table. Eight guests were seated for an evening meal, their party calf-deep in the Sihl. The table was bedecked in linen tablecloths, candlelight flickered off the silverware and crockery. Dressed in starched collars and tailored dresses, the dinner guests raised a glass at passers-by.
When the river waters were still clear and sunlight filtered through to the river ground, 1572 saw the municipality of Wiedikon purchase land on the riverbanks, and 1837 saw them build a paper factory. The printing press had arrived – and with it, ever more readers were famished for words as educators and writers spread the reach of paper. Newspaper, flyer, short or longform; nobody met a paper they did not like. The undulating margins and formats had rendered the word flexible to roam the city.
The walkway along the river is a shadowy one, with needle-thin trees rising high above the highway that crosses above. Not a single branch lives on their bodies, they are spindly giants, armless and efficient guides that frame the steep banks that lead into the waters. Most amblers avoid this clinical, yet overgrown path, preferring the wide, paved road that follows the stream with more distance. The highway above rushes, the bikers and pedestrians battle automobiles for roadways, but the river has since fallen silent.
The paper factory’s final act was transparent. From the pulpy confections of its beginnings, 1973 saw world’s largest production of transparent paper. The banks of the river made solid in the see-through surfaces that held words – a monument to the once clear waters that had invited print makers to its banks.
Fifty years ago, the infamous highway built into the river fully usurped the river’s flow. Fifty years ago, with dreams of the everyman’s car circulating through the city arteries, Zurich pierced the river with pillars that hold a six-lane expressway to the heavens. The concrete route echoes the river below for two and a half kilometres, a modern-day Styx that has grown murky from its non-life as the highway’s shadow. Ever since, the working stream has grown dim.
But in the pungent twilight airs of July, through a neighborhood party, I caught a glimpse of reanimation.
A window of sunlight had turned the river into the neighborhood’s canvas.
Forks and knives clanked, napkins draped across laps, and conversation rung across the hungry riverbed and carried fragments of their talk across the defunct paper mill’s grounds.
