Two Spiral Towers
Play and freedom, as viewed through two towers.
In humanity's youth, all people formed one society and spoke one language. Having only just learned to differentiate one thing from another, to create and destroy, they were still freshly independent, and still too insecure in their abilities. Ashamed that they were mortal, they set their lights upon themselves. They saw that all that they legislated would perish in time.
The people gathered in the city of Babel to surpass their last limitation. The dream was to erect a tower that would spiral upward, layer upon layer, grasping onto Heaven, so that it would last for eternity, and no earthly disturbance could destroy it. This tower was to be called History. It was to be built out of the congealed experience of all dead generations.
The tower must have been built, for Freedom demanded it. The tower could never have been built, for Freedom forbade it. Freedom needed a monument, but any monument would have been a pale mockery of Freedom: by what right can the dead cling to the living?
The tower was destroyed to obey its inner obligation. To do otherwise would have destroyed its concept. Humanity scattered, having done no wrong, because to do otherwise would have been self-betrayal.
Even so, the tower must have been built. The compulsion to build the tower is called Play, and its concept is called Beauty.
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Tatlin's tower, the Monument to the Third International, was to bring a new world to the old. It was to unify form and function, art and politics, utopia and history, spiraling impossibly high, gently rotating and proudly profane. It was to be a radio tower, broadcasting hope to the divided peoples of the world. It was to be at once beautiful and also the herald of the end of Beauty, stripping from Play any concept left to attain.
Conceived in 1919, the tower stood amidst a landslide of tragedies. The disintegration of civil life in World War I, the failure of German social democracy, the Russian Civil War and the subsequent bureaucratizing of Tatlin's party each gave the apparently triumphal design the sober reflection of a hope in crisis. If it was impossible to construct, its austere metal skeleton appeared all too easy to dismantle. That a Babel-shaped tower was dedicated to the Third International is indicative. The scattered remains of Babel demanded to be picked back up.
Tatlin’s tower was never built and could not have been built. The very conditions by which it could be imagined precluded its construction. Any attempted unity of art and politics betrayed the inadequacy of one to the other: that the Third International had to exist at all indicated that Play, too, was still a tragic necessity. The radio tower was intended to preach to those who were, in retrospect, unready to receive it. Otherwise, it would have been preaching to the choir, and no such project would be needed. Tatlin’s tower could only have found purchase in a world in which it was redundant.
By the 1930s, it was decided that the tower was too far removed from the people, and any intent to construct it was buried. Hence, the tower was not redundant. The meaning of its beauty remained bound up with its impossibility, which it displays proudly within its skeleton, as the inner proof of its necessity.
It is possible that the tower was not impossible for Tatlin. Perhaps art and politics, long divided, seemed for a moment able to be reunited: perhaps the ancient tower really could have been rebuilt. It was just as well, then, that the tower was not built, and remained a schematic of hypothetical steel, waiting to be picked up by another crew. If it looks impossible to us, we can trust that we are not reliable narrators. The blind abuses of the twentieth century have at the very least not shown us the truth. We are not the crew to pick it up.
To remember the spiral towers is to remember their impossibility. Their lasting beauty requires that the impossibility of unity be confessed: art against politics, form against function, medium against message, utopia against history. Any apparent reconciliation subjugates one to the other and destroys both. If usefulness demands that they be deceitfully united in propaganda, honesty might survive only in the seeming uselessness of Play. To hold fast to hope is to hold fast to the deformity of all things existing. This is the duty of Play.