Things fall together
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Discovery in your book of a journal entry from a year past:
Since
Divided We Stand is unlikely to be given its due in my lifetime, I must content myself with recognizing the fruits of my labors as they manifest anonymously, or under others’ bylines – as the narrative of the almost twin towers unfolds.
Who knows? I tipped the reporter from Bloomberg to the issue of the WTC’s unretired bonds and here it emerges, or rather pokes its nose above the surface for an instant in today’s NYT at the top of page B4:
“Because the building was financed with PA bonds, which place restrictions on any sale, Vornado could not buy the complex. But the deal would effectively give the publicly traded company full control of the 110- story twin towers…”.
The article goes on to synopsize my book as background without deigning to mention it by name, then cites the author of the “other” WTC book as an authority on the towers’ history. But those sentences, however EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 210
there in ink on newsprint. Slowly, slowly the cat claws its way out of the bag.
February 5 Up betimes and took yourself by train downtown, lighting at Park Place where you went the rest of the way by shanksmare across City Hall Park to the R.DOT (Rebuild Downtown Our Town) meeting at Pace University. There discours’d (Bev Willis, Susan Szenazy and Liz Abzug having invited you) upon the origins of the World Trade Center before a gathering which treated yourself in the most respectful manner, of which you felt most glad. Coming up to greet you afterwards, a tall man, whom you no wise recognized, but he gave you wonder at the news that in Riyadh, in Felix Arabia where once he worked, there were built by Yamasaki some time in the ‘70s, twin towers on the general plan of the trade center, but smaller, to house the Saudi Monetary Fund, and this we both did marvel at withal.
Met also there an architect who has writ an article upon the connection between Yamasaki and the Bin Laden family, and Yama’s use, so she says, of Islamic motifs which did inflame some already extreme believers to acts of violence – against the trade center especially. Yet she noted not why they would for this reason also despise the Pentagon.
This Laurie Kerr did also say that the towers collapsed at the speed of gravity, offering no resistance from within. Whether this is true or no, you cannot say, yet when she said it, you did see in your mind’s eye, the great buildings as though being dropped from the hand of a mile-high Galileo – though it is recorded that he loosed instead a cannonball and a sack of feathers. And moreover came the image of a man leaping from the window of a tower at the moment they gave way, and him descending at the same speed as his fellow man who stayed within, and how traveling separately, yet at the same speed, they might meet the earth together – such are the rare physics of our age.
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 211
Get off the subway at your home stop and there in front of you, plastered over a smiling face on a poster, a white adhesive label, two inch by threeish, imprinted: EVERYTHING IS FINE. The Constitution is not under attack. The President is not a thief. Keep enjoying those delicious all beef McDonalds hamburgers made of cow lips and anus.
February 8
At what point do we collectively acknowledge the culture-changing crash – the return from the stratosphere to the springy, but undeniable soil? Or have we achieved Neverland?
You begin to suspect that the unprecedented economic and military power which emanated from the US, and now proliferates far beyond its origins has rendered social life in the West incapable of recognizing the actuality of a crash, no matter how catastrophic. If overnight such a wind blew through that not a stone were left standing among us – as a result of a million suicide bombers, or some equally great destructive wave – you are convinced that dawn’s light shining upon the ruins would be broadly interpreted as yet another great triumph of freedom, democracy, market forces working their through to the next best possible world. Yesterday, a
exposure in derivatives stands at $29 trillion. Is that possible? Did you mishear it? Aside from the raw inconceivability of this figure, there is the issue of it amounting to three times the domestic product. There is no perfect analogy here, but one senses we have entered an era in which a fleet of Titanics, sinking by the dozen, would only spur us to greater, more scale-free feats of ship building.
Another possibility is that when and if the actuality of a crash forces itself on our awarenesses, given the degree of our “exposure,” we will prove inconsolable for generations – perhaps permanently incapable of imagining flight.
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The very words you use suck you down to someplace deep. Emerging, you always sense the tug back into the depths. And the sick feeling of returning to the surface where you no longer belong. Remember when you were a creature of the air?
Not long ago there was a time when you’d get high by writing. February 13
A milder winter that usual, or at any rate the remembered last. But it’s still winter and some of us are not dressed for the winter. White fella in baggy shorts on a cell phone walking down Eighth. Why not?
Overnight Elena’s poem, with which she won “The Arts Respond to 9-11” competition – has gone up postersized on all the neighborhood hoardings: black and white and red all over. Magnificent. Sticks to yet leaps off the tired walls – bare type offering itself ungussied. Machined-down language stands, for the time it takes to read, on two feet.
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• • •
Somewhere down in the pit, pockets of fire still burning. Crews close in on what the Post refers to as a “trove” of bodies.
• • •
Met, last night, with the Pratt design intensive group, invited by Stephan to discuss the Ground Zero museum-memorial they’ve taken as a group thesis project. Where to begin? they asked, all fifteen-odd of them. Begin with a crystalline blue sky. Begin with a color and a quality. Then release the stone toward the pool.
What characterizes the “clean-up”? Immediate erasure. Move this scrap to this heap. This fragment to another. Scatter the evidence. Subvert the forensics. Don’t above all calculate what went into the air – what substances still possess the air. Don’t read the chemistry of the liquids that runs out the sewer lines and into the Hudson from the great hosing down. Pulverize the dismemberment. Dice fine the already chopped. Atomize, semper atomize. Silence the ruins before they can speak. The ruins we hardly learned to know.
• • •
Hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies die in a freak frost in central Mexico. They rain out of the trees, their collective wingspreads deep and wide enough to carpet the Bathtub’s bottom, whenever the diggers reach it. If only the mariposas were here, not there. Should we bring them north in a shrouded train for burial by the Hudson?
Where Robert Moses’s Coliseum once stood, The Time Warner Center, a.k.a. One Central Park rears up, its monstrous, tortured gridwork of beams absolutely dwarfing Columbus stuck up on his column marooned like a flagpole sitter left over from the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 214
south end of the Trump International Hotel and Tower, stands a chrome-plated globe, roughly thirty feet in diameter, planted on a pedestal. In this morning’s late winter sun, the globe, with its jagged-edged continents overlaying a gridwork of longitudes, resembles nothing so much as a kindergarten project (“OK kids, we’re going to make a model of the world out of tinfoil”) gone absurdly out of hand. True, the flashy metal served to distract the eye, but for little more than an instant amidst this hodgepodge of urban mixed signals: the gilded, overwrought memorial remembering the Maine, the funky old Huntington Hartford building, traffic islands, radiating arteries and beckoning parkland. Now, Trump’s globe has shrunk still further – it looks no bigger than a cat toy when set against the vast backdrop of the AOL Time Warner Center as the towers extrude from their massive, asymmetrical plinth. Thus dwarfed, the silvery earth seems less a planet than an unhappy moon, knocked out of orbit, isolated in an alien landscape that can never be home.
Across Broadway, the city’s latest twins are not billed as anything so modest as a nexus of world trade. Bold type bannered across the scaffolding announces the coming “Center of Everything.” Unlike the oddly passive quality of the WTC’s aggression, the Everything towers present all acute angles and fractal edges undergirded by a heavy- duty steel cage – trusses and buttresses abound. No ticky-tacky bar joists hold up slab floorplates – this puppy is massively overbuilt. Though their designers could not have anticipated September 11, the violent feng shui of the AOL twins fairly taunts passing jetliners to make their day. These two-billion dollar babies won’t just kill planes, they’ll castrate ‘em.
From within the matrix of steelwork draped with immense American flags, a repetitive infernal clanging. Soon – you don’t know when but it’s bound to happen – the anvil chorus will shift location across Eighth Avenue to the very base of the roundabout and modulate from sounds of construction to those of demolition. They’ll be taking down the Huntington Hartford building, even now encased in a matrix of scaffolding. Built in the early sixties as a gallery to house Hartford’s collection, then taken over by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and now abandoned, Edward Durell Stone’s strange caprice, the silliest, most endearing slab building ever designed,
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the scaffolded walkway below.
How many more days? All at once you hear, close at hand, a sardonic laugh, No, it’s a horse neighing – you see it pass, at full trot, lip curled, pulling its carriage, empty of the customers whose heads you imagine might press close together, framed in the canopy’s heartshaped rear window – like the irising down of a silent film. The sound of another set of hoofs, and a second horse, a dappled gray, follows just behind, the driver, sitting stiff as the whip he holds vertically, muffled against the cold breeze. Then another horse cab appears and another, a half dozen or more – a cavalcade – rounding the corner of Eighth Avenue, clip-clopping east along 59th Street. For a moment your mind tricks you into believing the city’s slipped back a century and change and these beasts have trotted north from Longacre Square. Where do they stable the carriage horses now? A few years ago you saw some stables way over in the far west lower fifties, not far from where the aircraft carrier lies berthed in concrete. But which street exactly? Somebody knows. Not you.
Glance at your watch. Almost ten. Within a few moments, these animals and their drivers will assume their stations at the hackney stand between the gilded Sherman memorial and the Plaza fountain, and stretches west across the bottom of the park toward Sixth Avenue. Now they are hurrying, as fast as circumstances will permit, to begin their workday, to the place where the horses, their muzzles deep in feedbags, and the men, talking in clusters will await the opportunity take whomever has the time, the inclination and the do-re-mi, on the most sedate ride in town.
T. has forgotten the keys to his office, so you have your meeting an immense, echoing café on Greene Street. Ideal for a gallery space of the mid-seventies, but now a sort of holding chamber for a transient population of urban passers-through. How much the young peoples’ possessions, scattered on chairs and tables – backpacks, cell phones, CD players, laptops, articles of dark overclothing – look like the debris blown out of an airplane.
Awful thoughts. All the time. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 216
You read an estimate that since 1950, the year that you were born, your country has spent $17 trillion dollars on its military.
The winter you were in gestation, George F. Kennan, a high foreign policy official circulated within the State Department a memorandum allowing that:
situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming… February 24
These notes have become increasingly notes to yourself. You still relish conversations with others, but even with intimates feel it is best to be very circumspect.
You observe that it is as difficult now to see the World Trade Center, as it was before its destruction. But it is a subtly different form of “unseeing.” Increasingly you are fascinated with ways of unseeing. You think back at your mother’s terror when the ball of the moon was hidden behind the Empire State’s superstructure and the only visibility that emerged around the edges was the bent light of fear.
The media is, of course, still covering the WTC story, and never more literally than in the sense of a burial. You think of your cats endlessly working over their litter box, attempting to mask, at an olfactory level, their presence as predators. The stakes of their hunt, so they are instinctually aware, depends on the suppression of evidence. And so they rake their cat sand over their telltale droppings repeatedly and from every direction, never satisfied with the result. With the WTC, we witness the burial of a possible political awareness unframable in the grammar of our cultural lockdown.
For every story printed, ten unasked questions. Impermissible questions. What is permissible takes new and strange forms, as though the visual world of mediated images has been genetically modified for maximum disconcertion value. Eventually, I suppose, the shock of biting into an apple that tastes like fish wears off. We adapt. We come up with a new idea of what an apple is. We are dealing with the explicit existence EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 217
chimerical forms.
Page fourteen of the Times: today’s installment of Portraits of Grief, the brief, intimate obits of those – apart from the hijackers – who died on the planes and in the trade center on 9/11. WTC. Each “portrait” indeed include a photo, passport-sized, of a “Man With Many Sides,” or a woman who had “A Thing About Cats” or another, gone before his time, who possessed “A New Passion.” In total, fifteen miniature faces, nestled into print, surround the dominant image on the page: a spontaneous shrine assembled at a park in a New Jersey town, replete with flags, flowers, candles, snapshots of the dead and an assemblage of reverently-placed tchotchkes. This shrine shares a common vocabulary with a thousand, or ten thousand others – it is familiar and particular. Like the rest of the page, the picture of the shrine is printed in black and white and framed to such perfection that we might, if we could, reach in and touch the slate atop a brick wall to which a photo has been taped, or feel the warmth of a glass candle holder, or lift for a moment, the brass lantern that serves to weigh down one edge of a delicate flag.
But then there is the opposite page of the spread, the recto page, the visually privileged page, from which leaps – in brilliantly colored stars and stripes, augmented by blonde, and peachy fleshtone – an exhortation by Macy’s to “Ride the Red White & Blue Wave” of spring swimsuits. One model, three poses, all frontal – the sea and sky at her back. How to choose among them? A “TOMMY Signature flag X-back softcup tank…” or the “NAUTICA striped softcup tubini…” or “VM SPORT Big Apple NY triangle softcup bikini.” Or shall we splurge and go for all three?
Each style has its distinct charm, all are swimsuits, they do what swimsuits do. Yet so presented, they become, in their arrested moment, utterly particular, though not nearly so cluttered with detail as the adjacent shrine. But now the cat claws its way out of the bag, or rather stops for an instant in its eternal scratching at the sand, for if one looks as closely at the ad as at the opposite page, one sees that the “Big Apple bikini” features on its left cup, hovering northeast of the model’s heartbeat, the red, stylized shape of an apple imprinted on the navy blue fabric, surmounted by white capital letters: “NY.” The model would place her hand over this message if she were to pledge allegiance, but she stands not to attention, instead at rest, weight on left leg, hip jutted EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 218
eyes from the rays of the sun.
Thus, by increments, by leaps and bounds, by whatever means narcissary, a whole culture arrives at a ground zero that is no longer a place where something happened, but rather a burnt-over district of the mind.
• • •
A party in celebration Marshall’s appointment as Distinguished Professor. Talk with Mel. He spent days, in the immediate aftermath, shooting the crews emerging from the WTC site, and due to an inadequate mask came down with inhalation pneumonia. High fever, hospitalization, near death. Saved by antibiotics and acupuncture. Well recovered though – he looks more robust than you ever seen him, better coloring. You’d never know he’d been sick. When you leave he wraps you in a strong, almost vice-like hug.
The doctors showed him his x-rays, pointed out the white stuff coating his lungs. What was in there? he asked, and they told him. A toxic mix, containing among other things pulverized asbestos, fiberglass, and human particulate.
Are some of us more vulnerable to breathing in the stuff of our fellows than others?
Suddenly it strikes you, after all these months of rumination: they died for our sins – the sins of greed and imperialism we cannot apprehend, much less own. This is the fire that, beneath the threshold of consciousness, fuels the drive, propounded in evermore militant language by organizations of the WTC widows and orphans, to preserve the entire sixteen square acres, as a permanent, undeveloped memorial – eternally sacred and hallowed ground: a graveyard without bodies. When the towers fell we lost our real estate Notre Dame. Now we dig our way toward Golgotha. Heretofore the office tower stood as the supreme symbol of urban wealth extraction. But might not the place where so many were martyred, in the long run, generate more EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 219
location, location.
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