Things fall together
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- January 20 – Central Park – Late Morning
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Twins, twins, twins. Iroquois beadwork at the Museum of the American Indian. Here Skywoman walks the Great Turtle’s back, her movement expressed in paired, curved, scrolling lines. When these lines face in opposite directions, they suggest the duality of twins, and the struggle of life to achieve a balance – to negotiate a path between opposing forces. On one beaded bag (Seneca?) around 1830, two male figures joined at the hip: Skyholder and Flint, twins sons of Skywoman’s daughter. In certain tellings, the brothers are of two, quite opposite minds. As Skyholder walks the earth he creates life-sustaining plants and animals. Flint sows poisonous versions of all good things.
Up at the Met, a Bifacial Head from Easter Island. Two human faces made of painted barkcloth over a wooden frame dating from the 1840s. Joined back-to-back, the faces are about half life-sized, and are said to depict Rau-hiva-aringa-erua (“Twin Two- Faces”), a legendary warrior and son of a chief. Oral tradition has it that during a battle, Rau-hiva-aringa-erua’s rear face saw an enemy approaching and asked the front face to turn around and look. The front face refused and began arguing with the rear face. Both ignored the enemy, who seized the opportunity to go in for the kill.
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Snowed last night, though less than predicted, as often seems the case of late. Generally the dire warnings of Huracán and flood manifest as garden-variety overcasts, sunshowers, or straight-up blue sky days. Nonetheless, enough white stuff came down to justify taking Gwen and her friend Daphne – who strangers usually imagine as twin sisters – up to Central Park to see what could be done with Katie’s childhood Flexible Flyer brought in recently from the house in Sea Cliff, its rusty blades cursorily steel- wooled to a semblance of sheen.
So much for intentions. New York evermore resembles Maine in that you can’t get there from here. Had to take the downtown train to change for the uptown, then got off at 59th Street because all the uptown trains were going express to 145th Street. It would have been nearly as easy to go to Van Cortland park where they have some real hills, or the ferry to Staten Island if they’d open up the Fresh Kills landfill to winter sports.
At Columbus Circle, snowcapped, its steelwork shrouded, New York’s newest twin-towered folly riseth apace. The name Time Warner itself sounds like a B-movie victim’s dying gasp: No time – warn her! And what to make of the acronym AOL? Absence Of Liberty. Almost Outa Luck. From which it’s no great associative leap to AWOL: America Without Legitimacy. A Wealth Of Lack. A Waste Of Lucre. A Wash Of Lacrimae. Here comes the AOL Time Warner Center like a bat out of hell, someone gets in our way, someone don’t feel so well – a creature that, like the WTC used to, projects plenty of aggression, but knows no hint of playfulness, nor irony.
Yet these towers appear less as direct descendants of the trade center than a bizarre mutation of the older race of residential twins that processes up along Central Park West: The San Remo, The Century, The Majestic, The El Dorado, The Beresford – standard-bearers from the glory days of the ultra-swank Manhattan apartment.
If you were to ride an elevator up to the topmost I-beam on a clear day, could you see, as Steinberg did for his famous New Yorker cover, over the foothill Rockies and all the way to Hollywood? Look south. How shrunk to dwarf scale the derelict slab of the Huntington Hartford gallery – evermore precariously holding down the circle’s six o’clock. How like an ancient ancestor it seems, set next to these massive newcomers.
Perhaps it’s the skeletal look of the Park in the midwinter light, but the city is beginning to feel more like an animal, or if not precisely an animal, than some sort of EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 200
promontories constitute its resident flea circus.
These days, one never knows which parts of the Park will be fenced off, allegedly for the protection of some fragile seedlings, or the delineation of a lawn to be admired from afar but not trodden on. Walking there feels more and more like negotiating a labyrinth than rambling across a variegated landscape. Everywhere one is guided, lest one stray. But amazingly enough, Cedar Hill remains open to sledding. And ringing the treetrunks, bales of hay, just in case. Not like in your day, when kids would regularly plow into the trees, then complete the adventure with a quick trip to Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital – now a palatial warren of condominiums. But the hay is a lovely, elegant solution – a safety measure that smacks of good fun, of the country come to town.
Almost everyone – and there’s a horde of us – sails down the slope on a plastic vehicle, but there are a few vintage sleds in the crowd, and they perform wondrous well, for they can steer and go great distances if you’re lying flat on your stomach. G. & Daphne are the ultimate size age for this. Nine – the charmed moment before the onset of the great disconcertion. Plus the sled fits them to a tee, and they insist on shooting down together, over and again, a dozen times or more – one in front steering, the other holding fast to the steerer. Then they get more aerodynamic, take turns lying down on top of one another, their little human sandwich flying fast and long, jouncing over the hump of the snowcovered path, sliding partway up the gentler slope on the far side. There’s just enough ground coverage to make it work. This is the day for sledding. Good thing you didn’t wait until tomorrow, Martin Luther King Day, though the kids are off from school. By then, given the traffic and the thaw, this slope will be mostly muddy grass. Sky as clear and blue as the day of the trade center planes. Vapor trails crossing one another to the north in an arching diaphanous X. Gwen & Daphne profess to be vastly thirsty, take a break to scrape snow of the fir branches and eat it out of their mittened hands. Then zoom down again.
At the summit of the hill, a gaggle of parents and extended family members give and receive snowballs, romp with dogs, build snowmen. But for the chirping of cell phones this could be a generation past. The moms behave like moms, circumspect and optimistic, light yet solid. The dads act bluff and physical, sliding with their sons,
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as not to miss the game. Anyone here but white people? Ah, there’s a black man, a white woman and their daughter, who’s verging on teenage. “Give me a good push,” she says like a proper princess, and dad complies. Down she goes, sitting erect, not holding on, hands elevated slightly. Dad tracks with his camcorder. Amazingly, she rides it out. How long will we be allowed to pretend that race is a dead letter?
Just enough snow to cover the ground. Hay bales, just in case. A hilltop full of upper east side weekend far niente. Almost as if never.
• • •
Has your writing changed much since you began these notes? It’s likely that it has. At first you narrated from a place of isolation, of internal exile. Observed without much feeling. Which made sense because like most folks, you would rather feel less of everything than more pain. And then too, nothing big seemed at stake. So you laid down a series of dots without investing much in how they might connect. Beneath your city’s clamor, its stasis was palpable, its pacification, its sickly complacency. Bluntly put, the city had become an indifferent lover, a partner always looking past you as you danced, fascinated by its own slick moves, too hip for history. Now it vibrates from within, begins to shudder. Reveals a pulse with a deeper energy. It is coming active with its fear. Does it start to learn that there’s more to the meal than eating? There’s the digesting too. Let them eat flags.
• • •
It’s a paradox, and an unholy one at that. There isn’t a lot you wouldn’t give – up to and including your own existence – to have the people who died when the WTC was hit come back to life. As much as you love G. & K., as little as you want to stop this adventure of the senses midway through, you’re pretty certain you would strike such a deal, if there were anyone or anything to bargain with. Yet for all that, you still believe the trade towers were an awful thing – like knives stuck in the side of the city – and you’re glad they’re gone. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 202
January 21 This is the Y train to 403rd Street. • • •
Do questions and answers not come out of a mad desire to know ourselves, a relentless determination to knock down the walls around us in the hope finally to win out over silence – as if we could, with our voices alone, fill the abyss? Jabès, Book of Margins, p. 187.
The exhibition “A New World Trade Center” at the Max Protetch Gallery. Approaching from the east, you cross Tenth Avenue and then under the rusting elevated High Line, passing a minimalist tea room. Opening the gallery door you emigrate from the embodied De Chirico of the street into the white order of Gallery World. Directly facing you as you enter is a series of large photographs of the WTC: scale models and actual buildings, interspersed so it’s hard to tell which is which unless you look closely. Balthazaar Korab took them between 1966 and 1978. Taken in ‘66, the same year as demolitions on the site began, one image, an angle from above, shows Yamasaki full figure and wearing a suit. Framed by his towers, he looks down toward the plaza and smiles. The plywood on which Yamasaki stands would be the Hudson River. His feet straddle one of several piers, projecting out from the shoreline. Rendered with simple, cosmetic perfection, the docks the trade center landfill buried are miraculously preserved in wood and plaster. No ships.
The exhibit itself – what a horror show. The proposals as a whole present a mixed bag of aesthetic capitulations. Only one possesses real vitality: Eytan Kaufman’s scheme for a pedestrian bridge from the World Financial Center to Jersey City – two strands of walkway bowing into one at the center – connected to a World Citizen’s Center on the old WTC footprint. Referencing the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge serves as a platform for a mix of commercial and residential structures.
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What most of the programs reveal, in their relentless insistence on new construction, is how badly the whole area needs building down. Is it possible to hold the images of people leaping to their deaths, and the collapse of the towers in a kind of sovereign, protected emotional space while considering the possibility that we ought to continue the unbuilding until we arrive at a Lower Manhattan we can reclaim as habitable ground – as a fit place for the living and the dead?
That said, if you can stomach the stentorian pretensions, the barely disguised grandiosity, the unseemly presumptions of projecting, before even a breath can be drawn what should be done, you’ll return and study the proposals again.
Just before you leave, take a copy of the show’s promotional postcard. Another image by Balthazaar Korab. Again Minoru Yamasaki framed by a large model of his towers. But this time we look up at him as he stands on a metal construction ladder, leans against its railing, fingers lightly clasped before him. Again he looks down at the plaza. His weight rests on his right leg, while his left foot is placed on the rung above – the summit of the ladder. He has been recorded in the act of climbing to the top, pausing to contemplate what lies below.
Around 9 o’clock the evening of the day the trade towers fell, G. got up on the stepladder that stands beneath your kitchen window. She rested her arms against the sill and looked out over the city to the south. You turned off the lights and she stared toward the plume of dust and smoke and said: “I'm beginning to see the new view.”
Today, reaching and pulling and sliding on the Nordic Track, you look toward the V of buildings that gesture toward the spot where the towers stood. Now it is possible to see what was hiding behind them all these years: the trapezoidal forty- something-story black slab of the former Bankers Trust Plaza, now Deutche Bank and abandoned – damaged beyond reclamation. The upper part of the building’s north face has become a backdrop for a huge American flag, perhaps a hundred and fifty wide by seventy five feet high, dead center above the nadir of the V. Slightly higher than the flag from this perspective, and to its right, another symbol vies for dominance on the skyline: the pinkish red neon umbrella that day or night announces the presence of the Traveler’s Insurance building, as though its height and mass were somehow inadequate
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margin of the Lower Manhattan V. Forming the eastern slope of the wedge is Liberty Plaza, a black slab Zeckendorf (père) monstrosity, designed for, but never occupied by US Steel.
Just north of Liberty Plaza, and ten or so stories shorter than its neighbor, a slender tower, the Millennium Hotel. Both these structures were, astonishingly, spared in the massive implosion just across Church Street at “Ground Zero.” From your twentieth story aerie, three miles to the northwest, the formal relationship between Liberty Plaza and the hotel is such that under certain conditions, the light reflecting off the western face of the Millennium creates a weird optical illusion. The hotel tower ceases to read as a building at all, and appears rather as a void space cut through Liberty Plaza’s tenebrous mass – the whole effect weirdly reminiscent of the hollowed- out Arc de la Défense in Paris.
Gwen, for her part, is less preoccupied with sightlines. At one point during post- 9/11 media frenzy, you mentioned to a reporter her observation on “the new view.” Published somewhere or other, a professor at a midwestern University was so struck by the remark, he emailed to ask if he could quote it. You consulted Gwen on the matter. Would this be OK with her? Sure, she said, but she wanted to elaborate – to make sure that it wasn't just the cityscape she was talking about. What she’d meant went deeper. “After the smoke cleared, that would be our future. And I couldn't have reached my hand out and said ‘stop,’ because the world went on.”
• • •
them to be forever reborn in their daring. Jabès, Book of Margins, p. 197.
• • •
Through terrorism the extreme duality transmogrifies into singularity. Enormous economy. Astronomical cost.
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True ventriloquism is achieved at the point where the dummy believes it’s doing the talking.
• • •
Proverbs written into the mind of Ponce de Léon:
Where the ocean goes
The sand should follow
For wolves’ flesh
Dog’s teeth are needed – WCW,
…American Grain, p. 43.
false pleasures, manufactured just in time. The world is full of actualities so vivid that you’ve grown an entirely new part of your brain, a small bilateral peanut that triggers an avalanche of narcotic gloss which coats it all in simulation. The world is full of agonies, real and imagined, but it overflows in adaptations.
Mark and Bruce enter, assume their parallel stations at tables 10 and 11, open their (nearly) twin laptops. Passing by on your way to the loo, you fall into conversation and Mark lets go a quip so fluidly epigrammatic you write down at once: ‘Tis no drama but in the doing.
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Osama Bin Aladdin: “Collapse sesame!”
When you stepped into the elevator this morning, your nostrils were assaulted by a truly vile scent. You could only think of a virulent fart. But the smell lingered, and though the noisesomeness of it carried a different quality, you couldn’t help but remember an incident in the same elevator nearly forty years ago when these buildings were still raw and young. Then, you’d gotten on with Bea, she on her way to work and you to school, accompanied by a neighbor from your floor, a tiny woman named Mrs. Fishbien. The reek hit first and then your three pairs of astonished eyes, beheld the button panel caked in semi-solid shit. You immediately flew to the intellect, wondering who had plastered it there and why – and even tried to imagine what sort of container they had carried it in, and how it seemed far more crap than any one person could generate in one go, but Mrs. Fishbien, who had a good sixty years on your thirteen, had a quite different reaction. Nearly collapsing against the farthest wall, she clapped her hand over her mouth and nose, and half moaned, half screamed: “Oy! Human dirt!” Your mother’s face grew pale, but she remained stoic.
None of you attempted to push the Ground button, but Ground is where the elevator defaults to if another floor’s not pressed, so you rode down and on the path outside the building met Steve, the security guard and told him what had happened, and when you got home from school the mess was gone, and nothing like it ever occurred again, at least not in your building. But the event’s singularity, and the anonymous virulence of the gesture impressed you powerfully. Someone out there had come inside, full of hate for your building – your brand new building – and by extension, for you. Someone was angry in a way you weren’t familiar with at all, quite unlike your father’s spontaneous rages, and this someone had chosen for private and undisclosed reasons to attack your elevator in this particular way in their own inscrutable moment. Put crudely, the shit was warm, but the blood was cold. Yet there was something very direct and economical about what had been done – an eloquent act, which no amount of speculation as to motive could ameliorate or contain. But there was no way to avoid connecting this act, however impersonal, with your own presence in that place and moment, and circumstances. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 207
It took years before you found yourself studying slum clearance, by which time the name Robert Moses meant something entirely different to you than when you were a kid, dimly aware of him as a distant, mythic figure. You don’t remember telling yourself any sort of story back then, in 1962 when you moved in, about how your building had gotten there – you were just so relieved to not be living in the East Village any more and in awe at the luxury of having your own, huge, sleek, smoothly plastered modern room in which to be an American Boy. You were, in fact, the first person to live the space bounded by those four walls. No history, apart from the fugitive ones of the builders. And you spent uncounted hours gazing out your wide window over the low- rise valley toward the mountains of Lower Manhattan.
So when as an adult, you came by the knowledge that a whole perfectly useful neighborhood had been bulldozed to make possible your eagle’s lair, you gained a tantalizing thread of causality to cling to: a fine line drawn between displacement and the angry flinging of a bucket or a basinful of shit. But like a tug on a fishing line that lets you know they’re biting, this tantalizing almost-knowledge gets reeled back in with the worm gone, as though there’d never been any bait on the hook at all.
There are days when, on your brisk walk to the café, your mind races ahead of you physically, arrives before you, wants to explode on the page. Deborah comes over to ask what you want. On the tip of your tongue, an order for a “verb omelets.”
• • •
Look up from work. A group of five retarded young men from the Chelsea Residence walk past the café. The tallest wears a knit hat appliquéd with an FBI logo. You burst out laughing, nearly spew your café au lait. From her post near the register, Deborah looks over to see if you’re alright, and you nod that you’re fine, if a little abashed. Some jokes only live an instant – can never be told.
As Bea used to say, off the old radio show, “T’aint funny McGee.” • • •
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9:30 p.m.: a Columbia architecture prof calls. She’s organizing a conference there on the World Trade Center. Wants to know if you’d participate in a panel tomorrow afternoon. She is mortified that, despite having assigned Divided… for her course in the Politics of Space and knowing of its induction into the classics section of the Avery Library, you were “somehow” left off the roster of invited participants. Embarrassed too that what got her off the dime was a call from Marshall B. to the effect that you would almost certainly want to participate if asked and that your exclusion would be unconscionable. She offers you a ten minute slot in an already crowded panel that includes not one critical voice, but features a slide show of the WTC’s construction and nostalgic reminiscences.
You respectfully decline. The timing of the panel conflicts with a writing tutorial for a student who travels two and a half hours every three weeks to meet with you. The professor sounds relieved, and you wonder why. It is only after you say goodnight and put the receiver back in its cradle that you realize what an embarrassment you must be to those who are now in charge of creating a post-mortem discourse around the WTC. If you were to appear physically among them, how much more difficult it would be to pretend that they had cared a whit about the WTC, or thought, even for a New York second about what those buildings meant, before they came crashing down.
• • •
WCW, “Red Eric,” In The American Grain.
You try to imagine what it would be like to have written the cultural history of the buildings whose destruction served as the flashpoint for… you can’t imagine.
Yet it is so immediately forgotten, and now too, just a few weeks ago – you don’t even recall how many, perhaps three, perhaps six – the airplane bound from Kennedy and full of Dominicans fell out of the sky. First the engine landed on the apron of a gas station, then the rest crashed into some houses in Queens on a morning just as
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word that this calamity was accident pure and simple – not terrorism – and not a word since about the cause.
Williams says: “We make no right use of our disasters.”
It was in John Sanford’s published correspondence with Williams that you first heard of …Grain. Sanford says he read it once and that was enough, the influence was so profound.
True enough, Sanford appropriated Williams’s tonality and many of the particulars of Columbus’s fictive voyage log – the foundation of all future American deception – straight out of …Grain and plunked it down in People From Heaven. Plagiarism? Close to, but the contexts are so different that they read as essentially distinct texts. And Sanford cranked up the Discoverer’s mendacity and cynicism more than one notch.
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