Falling Upwards

Our balloon ride over the Garrotxa

Whilst in Spain last month we took to the air in a balloon.  I also read Richard Holmes' entertaining history of nineteenth century ballooning, Falling Upwards, which included some details that reminded me of our flight over the volcanic landscape of Garrotxa.  Holmes describes an ascent made by the leading Victorian balloonist Charles Green, accompanied by a wealthy MP and an Irish musician, Monck Mason, who wrote the trip up as Aeronautica (1838).  They set off in the Royal Vauxhall from London on a November afternoon in 1836 and by dusk they were over the Channel and tucking into ‘a huge meal of cold meats and wine’.  I smiled on reading this as it was exactly what we were given to tuck into after we landed.  Whilst aloft we toasted the flight with a glass of pink cava.  Champagne drinking seems to have been de riguer on most nineteenth century balloon trips, although Monck Mason claimed that the lower pressure at altitude made it too frothy, shooting from the bottle and ‘revealing what he called its "natural tendency to flying".  Perhaps under the influence of these refreshments, the landscapes of northern France seen after dusk, with isolated points of candlelight "burning late" in the villages below, seemed infinitely romantic and mysterious.’

Above the Garrotxa we were flying over winding rivers, terracotta-tiled farm buildings and the densely wooded slopes of extinct volcanoes, but it was impossible not to register too the motorway network, ribbon developments and light industrial buildings on the outskirts of every sizable settlement.  Holmes recounts how, when the Royal Vauxhall reached the Meuse, the crew were astonished to realise that the great industrial complex visible below them was the historic city of Liège.  Its surrounding districts "appeared to blaze with innumerable fires … to the full extent of our visible horizon."  At the height we were flying we could not hear the sounds of industry below - perhaps it is relatively silent these days.  Holmes describes what the balloonists could hear as they passed over Liège: 'disembodied shouting, coughing, swearing, metallic banging and sometimes, weirdly, sharp echoing bursts of laughter.  They were being granted a unique, nightmare vision of the new industrial future, a world of ever extending ironworks, where every street was "marked out by its particular line of fires."’

The Royal Vauxhall continued into the night.  "Occasional faint flashes of lightning would for an instant illuminate the horizon ... Not a single object of terrestrial nature could anywhere be distinguished; an unfathomable abyss of 'darkness visible' seemed to encompass us on every turn." 
Holmes observes that Mason's description of night's "cold and dark embrace", like "an immense block of black marble", might have come from Edgar Allan Poe, whose story 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall' appeared the year before this flight, and who went on to feature Green and Monck in his newspaper hoax 'The Atlantic Balloon' in 1844.  Eventually the aeronauts recognised the Rhine but continued eastwards and by morning thought they might have reached "the barren and inhospitable Steppes of Russia".  In fact they finally landed in some north German fir trees.  Our balloon flight looked at one point like it might end in some trees too, or even on a small traffic island, but we eventually touched down smoothly on some rocky ground and once the balloon had been furled and loaded onto its trailer we set off back to enjoy our botifarra.

The Domain of Arnheim

"The usual approach to Arnheim was by the river. The visitor left the city in the early morning. During the forenoon he passed between shores of a tranquil and domestic beauty, on which grazed innumerable sheep, their white fleeces spotting the vivid green of rolling meadows. By degrees the idea of cultivation subsided into that of merely pastoral care. This slowly became merged in a sense of retirement — this again in a consciousness of solitude. As ­the evening approached, the channel grew more narrow; the banks more and more precipitous; and these latter were clothed in richer, more profuse, and more sombre foliage. The water increased in transparency. The stream took a thousand turns, so that at no moment could its gleaming surface be seen for a greater distance than a furlong. [...]  The windings became more frequent and intricate, and seemed often as if returning in upon themselves, so that the voyager had long lost all idea of direction. He was, moreover, enwrapt in an exquisite sense of the strange. The thought of nature still remained, but her character seemed to have undergone modification; there was a weird symmetry, a thrilling uniformity, a wizard propriety in these her works. Not a dead branch — not a withered leaf — not a stray pebble — not a patch of the brown earth was anywhere visible. The crystal water welled up against the clean granite, or the unblemished moss, with a sharpness of outline that delighted while it bewildered the eye." - Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Domain of Arnheim', 1847

This uncannily perfect landscape is the work of the narrator's friend Ellison, now deceased, but a man who had been borne from cradle to grave by 'a gale of prosperity'.  Having inherited a fortune, he spent four years searching for a site that he could re-shape according to his aesthetic ideals.  Ellison believed it would be possible to unite the beautiful and the sublime, to combine vastness and definitiveness, to design 'a landscape whose united beauty, magnificence, and strangeness' would resemble 'the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God.'  There is something godlike in the way he controls the traveller's passage and manipulates their mood like a poet, passing from the georgic to the bucolic, before they enter the silent gorge as the sun begins to set.  The boat then emerges into a clear basin of water, its surface reflecting steep hills of flowers that resemble a 'cataract of rubies, sapphires, opals and golden onyxes, rolling silently out of the sky.'

At this point the visitor must descend into a light canoe of ivory and proceed alone, past wooded slopes that display 'not one token of the usual river débris' and through another winding channel until a gate of burnished gold is reached.  The story is nearly at an end and, this being Poe, one expects some kind of dark revelation, perhaps a sepulchral vision like  Böcklin's Isle of the Dead.  The boat descends rapidly into a vast amphitheatre. 'There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of strange sweet odor; - there is a dream-like intermingling to the eye of tall slender Eastern trees - bosky shrubberies - flocks of golden and crimson birds - lily-fringed lakes - meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths, and tuberoses - long intertangled lines of silver streamlets - and, upspringing confusedly from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself as if by miracle in mid-air, glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs, of the Fairies, of the Genii, and of the Gnomes.'

Poe wrote another story two year's later, 'Landor's Cottage: A Pendant to "The Domain of Arnheim"', in which a walker, travelling through 'one or two of the river counties of New York' comes upon another magical vista.  This vale, emerging from the mist, with its crystal clear lakelet, emerald grass and triple-stemmed tulip tree, is described in (rather laborious) detail, as is the house itself.  Eventually the reader is led inside and shown the interior decoration of Landor's cottage.  The simple furniture has 'evidently been designed by the same brain which planned 'the grounds': it is impossible to conceive anything more graceful.'  Hopes of meeting the designer of all this beauty are disappointed however, as the narrator ends abruptly at this point: 'it is not the purpose of this work to do more than give, in detail, a picture of Mr. Landor's residence - as I found it.'  To what extent the narrator has projected his own dream landscape onto the New York countryside remains unclear.

Harry Clarke, Landor's Cottage, 1919

Public domain

'Landor's Cottage' and 'The Domain of Arnheim', along with Poe's essay about an ideal room, 'The Philosophy of Furniture', form the basis of a "study of the inner refuge" made by a character in Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies.  Taken together, he says, they comprise "a fully elaborated system of human longing."