“All art is perishable” - so opens the first line of that dogeared minor volume which, in 2008, a godfather pressed into the hands of a wayward godson. The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable was for me then a balm pitched perfectly at the resonant frequency of my convalescence from a built architecture that had become altogether saturated with too much sordid meaning. In I tumbled. Bob’s tone - of calm erudition and sanguine melancholy - lured a pilgrimage through Sebald and Keiller and other peripheral prophets beach combing remnant fragments in the cathedral ruins.
Ever an imposter I went up for my MA in 2011 after the party, in the Turnerian half light of higher education’s broader entropic subsummation by a bureaucratic managerialism. And I went up after Bob, a tugged Temeraire. I did not know him. Not really. Not much beyond his very present absence. But, occasionally we were visited by nostalgic happy reveries - his wiry shock-headed warmly transatlantic accordion chorded avuncular laughter creaking as a ship gesturally.
He wrote to me exceptionally, once, wry and self-deprecating after one 200words, feeling he had "gone too far" in what he'd said about my "wild" "kaleidoscopic" V&A plywood piece ~ “why,” he asked, should he be the one to “apply the brakes” - a strangely precious email.
Brigid Brophy had written of Deliberate Regression in 1980 that Bob’s prose had a “pile-up on the motorway manner of writing" - somewhere in that, perhaps precisely in that, touches his allure, and my affection for his earnest enquiry and the resonance I feel still now in my floundering for my own unbuildable redemptive meaning. In all intangible ways I owe some great debt to Bob for furnishing this fragment monger with the pleasure of a synecdochal praxis.
[08.09.21]
