Things fall together
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- Ides of February, 2005
- February 22 – Carvoeiro, Portugal
- February 25 – Faro
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BRAVE NEW YORK February 15, 2005 – January 12, 2007
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 634
One must have spirit in applying techniques, Spirit makes the ears and eyes brilliantly real. No matter that his hand flies like a swallow, I can sense ants singing like the roar of a dragon and tiger. —Ba Gua Song 36 EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 635
Toward Ba Gua class in the not-quite dawn. Walk east down 27th Street, Fashion Institute students still sleeping in their dorms, nary a light on. Only the jocular banter among delivery men and security guards. Walking briskly on the street, the few remaining printers, printer’s devils, East Asian and Subcontinental folks opening up their wholesale storefronts.
Mudstep in a circle for an hour and change, the turns accomplished with ko bu and bai bu steps: first hooking with the outside foot, then swinging out the inside, then hooking back. Shvitzing like a pig. Afterwards, Tom B. shows the advanced ones all sorts of terrifying moves with swords. You watch a while, then out the door.
Downstairs the neighborhoods alive. Everyone, their brother and sister, on the way to work. Everyone’s holding a coffee, a cell or a cigarette, sometimes all three. Some come running.
Walk west. Try to keep mudstepping, knees brushing. Drop your center. Easy in this cold to pull your shoulders up around your ears. Twenty-seventh now alive with student fashionistas.
On the agenda: move the Gray Ghost and sit in it until the parking space goes legal. Noontime until whenever, parent-teacher conferences. Dinner with T. & M. at Shah’s. Write in the gaps if any.
• • •
On the radio, BBC world news drones on, an interview with an expert on Islamic fundamentalist something or other, Robin Lustig’s questions filled with entirely too much self-satisfied and palpably false bonhomie. Out the window to your left, the superbly detailed brick wall of the Seminary stretches all the way to Tenth, on the right, rows of brownstone townhouses. The whole of it suffused with wan midmorning light.
“But honestly, do you think the Taliban have really established a…?” asks Robin. The drums, bass and organ intro to the Brian Lehrer show, pops you out of reverie. You’d been dreaming a variation on a scene in a movie, where the first of several canaries, caged in a submersible turns color and drops, and in the way of dreams, you were he, and at the same time, watching.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 636
Air’s warmer on the way home. Sun’s making a game try. Lhude sing cuccu. February 22 – Carvoeiro, Portugal
Escape, canary, spring the cage! Fly to Iberia. Here, on the road that runs besides Colina Branca, doves coo most insistently. A cock crows, several other birds offer varying high twitters. You climb to the turret at the very top of this house and look out over water that’s not the Mediterranean – which lies east beyond Gibraltar – but feels close to it, though a cooler blue, in quality of light.
When you drive west along the coast to Lagos you learn of the conquest, in 1415, of Ceuta on the North African coast. Then Madeira in 1419, and a few years later, the Azores.
twentieth century when it was a fishing village, long before its discovery by the Brits and Germans, and prior to the hewing out of huge chunks of the western bluff for the vacation quarters to spread upward, leaving orange-ochre scars in the rockface of the V that opens onto the beach.
Beyond, way beyond, on a particularly clear day, one is supposed to be able to glimpse the Barbary coast. You’d like to think you’d seen that other shore, but that dark line on the horizon is likely just the place where sea meets sky.
On the wall near the door of the A Taska restaurant, where you’ve just eaten the most mind-expanding shrimp and cornmeal chowder possible under the sun, a framed broadsheet, nearly filled with scribblings in a hundred different hands. At the top, in large lettering, it’s labeled Quadro do Bem e Mal Dizer.
Now your Portuguese is even more tenuous than your Spanish, but this seems to indicate a place in which one is invited to say all things, good and bad. And yes, there’s EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 637
still room, a little, at the bottom of the sheet and, from a string, a felt tipped pen hanging down.
But what to write? Your thanks to Portugal for showing you in no uncertain terms how Africa, Europe and America connect? That walking the gridded streets of downtown Lisbon, rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1755, you came down with a case of Candide flashbacks? Then, off the grid, into the Alfama quarter, its name sliding fricative over the centuries from the Arabic al-Hamma, meaning fountain or bath.
And even as you soaked up strains of Fado, came images of the tiny burying grounds in your own city, one of them just east of French Roast on 11th Street and Sixth, the other in your neighborhood, a huge loft building to the left and rear and on the right, a luxury apartment house looming above its tumbled gravestones. To these cemeteries, well north of the old Dutch Wall, were carted, kan ya makan, the Portuguese Jews who, driven from Brazil, died once upon a time in Brave New Amsterdam.
But you write none of that. Leave the space blank. Pour it into your book. February 28 Fly away home to find, thank goodness, the house not on fire. Nor the child alone, ‘cause she went with you. Took notes and wrote up the Portuguese voyages of discovery for her social studies class.
Vacation’s fine, but now it’s culture-lag. 23rd Street crosstown. Eastbound, like those navigators. No matter what they did, the winds kept blowing them toward the coast of Africa. You read a bit of Beyond Cape Bojador, the Sea of Darkness, wherein Gomes Eanes de Azurara, a chronicler of those days, records how Prince Henry the Navigator “sent every year two or three ships… because he wanted to find out what kinds of lands existed beyond the Canary Islands… and because, until then, in the memory or in the writings of men, no information existed about the quality of those parts beyond the cape.”
And this continued throughout much of the fifteenth century until, fitted out the with pivoting booms to augment windcatching, the caravels made voyages further still down the coast of Africa until, attempting out-tack the winds and round the southern tip, they bumped into… Brazil. And thus, the seekers of slaves religatured in the minds of men, two largish bits of long-fractured Gondwanaland. But this discovery the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 638
Portuguese kept secret twenty years. Or perhaps the mariners on that ship didn’t realize what they’d seen.
The bus jolts into motion. A gazillion passengers trying to squeeze on, some past the bottleneck of folks clogging the middle. Down the aisle, precariously, a borderline elderly fellow, avuncular, makes his way toward where you sit at the rear of the bus. When he reaches the seat ahead of you he stops, turns a quarter turn and grabs the handrail above. A teenage girl, very dark skinned, who, like the rest of her buddies has been lunching from a collection of grease-spotted paper bags, half rises from the seat beneath him and offers her seat, which he declines, with thanks.
And keeps the ball of good-fellowship in play by waxing rapturous over the scent of what have got to be the raunchiest French fries in Christendom – “No wonder I’m hungry for lunch, it’s almost three” – even as he checks his cellphone. The kids and geezer share a larf. He speed dials. Starts talking to “Sir.” It takes you until this to actually focus on him. Clean-shaven, slightly flushed, rounded face, pleasantly mild. He wears a cap with an appliqué sewn on the front – the words Homeland Security Service embroidered around some sort of eagle-ish symbol.
“Just want to let you know, Sir, all our flights were scrubbed due to the snow. Yes, that’s right, sir. Yes sir. Going down to One Liberty, sir. OK, just letting you know.” He snaps the cellphone closed, takes in a deep breath of fries. The girls smiles, turns toward him and offers up her brightly-colored bag.
• • •
Bush’s otherworldy European bubble, case-hardened, entails: One presidential limo, known as “The Beast,” nineteen escort vehicles, two hundred secret service agents, fifteen sniffer dogs, half-a-hundred aides, five cooks, countless bottlewashers, and, for a lagniappe, a Blackhawk helicopter to ride shotgun in the sky over the town of Mainz – birthplace of Gutenberg’s revolution – which has been entirely emptied of people so that this one weak and insubstantial man may shake hands with his feeble German counterpart in a perfect political vacuum.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 639
Swine o’ the times.
Walk through Central Park and witness the beginning of the Gates disassembly, the loosening of the nuts holding the fixtures plumb, then the lifting up of the arch and tilting down. Then the unbolting of the crosspiece from the stanchions. The heavy bases scooped up, stacked in threes on forklifts. Sad, but only for a moment.
• • • I cannot fix my object. ‘tis always tottering and reeling by natural giddiness. I take it as it is at the instant I consider it. I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.
Said Montaigne.
• • •
• • •
Need to reclaim the old Russian word Intelligentsia. Pare off the acquired connotation of an intellectual elite, and endow it once more with the sense of intelligence as an active social force.
Also require, in order to make it through this frigid day, a steaming cup of hippocras, the spicy medieval wine named for Hippocrates.
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 640
A Sicilian word via Gioia: s’fuare, to get something out, off one’s chest, out of one’s gut.
• • •
They’re talking PEPs, those Navy boyz – pulsed energy projectiles – laser bursts of expanding plasma that, fired from more’n a mile off cause excruciating pain. The electromagnetic pulse, see, irritates the nerve cells most unbearably, yet leaves victims “unharmed.” PEP’s set to go online by ’07, according to the researchers at U. Florida, Gainesville, who’ve been zapping animals like there’s no tomorrow.
• • •
BUSH VERGOGNATI! Sign held up at a demo in outside the U.S. consulate in Milan, in response to the fatal shooting, in Baghdad, of an Italian secret service agent, and the wounding of his charge, just-released hostage Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for Il Manifesto.
Imagine! Some of these silly dagoes think we did it on purpose. Why ever would our boys go after a journalist?
March 9
Absolute lack of We-sense. • • •
What was it about that submarine sonar that made those dolphins beach themselves. Irresistible siren song?
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 641
reality in miniature, to constitute the center of a place from which the prince could symbolically reclaim dominion of the entire natural and artificial world.”
So wrote Giuseppe Olmi. • • •
When did we drop the vestigial possessives: Hudson’s River, Murray’s Hill? • • •
Heteroclite, that which leans differently, such as a word irregular in its inflection, or a noun whose declensions are good, but Oh Lord, please don’t let them be misunderstood. Also someone or thing who deviates from common rules or forms. Good name for a band: Eros and the Heteroclites.
• • •
Avalo-Kitehvara, a Tibetan deity described as “The all-seeing Lord with eleven heads and one thousand hands.” Homeland Security, eat your heart out.
Like cream curdling the morning coffee, the Post headline “City’s ‘poor’ health – Low-$$ women hit hard,” beneath which the latest official stats. Black women die from AIDS-related illnesses at seven times the rate of white women, and twice as often from pregnancy complications.
How is that as the brutal asymmetries of the city become evermore extreme, the less they can be reckoned with? Even the most manifest horrors seems somehow incapable of pushing our political will toward different outcomes.
Move the car and while you’re waiting for the sweeper to pass down the block, half-listen to the BBC World Service. Did the reporter say that Shanghai has banned EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 642
bicycles? All ears now. They’ve inaugurated a new magnetic levitation train from the airport to the city. 235 mph top speed. Six minute ride.
China, moving like the wind. Still – is it possible? – a country with seven hundred million farming the land.
Up rises the Isthmus of Panama rises and then a great drying out of Africa. Trees thin out, opening spaces between too far to swing, so certain apes come down and ambulate, warily, to forage on the new savannah. Dangerous opportunity. Some won’t stand for it. Others do.
• • •
She, he, it, them I and you-topia. Ides of March – Afternoon
Cold, but spring’s icumen in. Walk east along 21st Street toward Le G. Something high and bright catches your eye. Must be twenty-five feet up, a soccer ball wedged between the forked branches of a naked pear tree. Just like that.
No, not naked. On closer look, beginning buds. • • •
A detail – how’d you miss it until now? St. Nicholas, the Greek Orthodox church in the foreground on the cover of Don Delillo’s Underground, was crushed beneath WTC 2. Very small it was. Built in 1916. Did you dream or read about some yearly rite wherein a boy from the parish leaped into the Hudson to retrieve an object the priest had cast in? Too deep in your memory. Too daunting your clip files. Maybe it’ll surface. Maybe you’ll have a look for it. One day.
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Sprinkled with fascinating jewels, today’s paper. “Siem Reap Journal: Cruel Race to Loot the Splendor that Was Angkor” tells of the arrest and conviction, in the 1920s, of André Malraux for stealing sculptures from the Banteay Srei temple near Angkor. Sentenced to 3 years, but never serves time. A few years later, back in Le Hexagon, Malraux is appointed Minister of Culture and head of the urban conservation program.
On a different page, another site, more recently sacrilized – this one a creature of the west, and closer to home. “The most important thing,” says Helen Curry, Cass Gilbert’s granddaughter, “is that 90 West Street is still standing.” And that is because the architect (Gilbert) “designed it to endure.”
In this statement is she, perhaps unconsciously inferring that the trade center was designed not to? In actuality, WTC 2 collapsed so nearly straight down that Gilbert’s neo-Gothic tower, standing a little way off across Cedar Street got raked by debris, whereas the church, a hundred feet closer, got buried.
Every gargoyle of 90 West has since been restored – all its fantastical detailing. No more an office building though. It’s a congregation of condos now.
• • •
Some weird pleasure taken in the clarity of this moment. Wolfowitz guards the IMF henhouse, González declares “no need for a special prosecutor” to investigate torture – it just goes on and on. Never in your lifetime has the cat shredded the bag so thoroughly. And what an animal! Not slouching, but racing full tilt toward Bethlehem. See what a little catnip can do?
• • •
Them lions is ferocious and may bite! When they get them angry fits, They may tear you into bits, So don’t go in that lion’s cage tonight. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 644
When a verb ends in “n,” why not eliminate the “in” in written gerund forms and just append a “g”? That way training could tighten up to traing, frightening to frighteng, lightning to lightng, et cetera. Just now, outside the café, cats n’ dogs is what it’s raing.
• • •
A subway poster exhorts: LIVE YOUR MYTH IN GREECE. On first glance you read: WATCH YOUR MOUTH IN GREECE. A tall, respectable-looking guy around your age checks out a movie ad a few yards down the platform. He whips out a pen and writes some fast words above John Travolta’s head. The train pulls in and as it the doors open he bolts inside. You push your luck long enough to scoot over and see what he’s written. SCIENTOLOGIST
to make eye contact, but graffiti man is stone-faced – retreated to his own world.
• • •
If there is one great collective soul of humankind, does it get stretched thin, compromised even, when so many demand their share of it? Is there any way to prevent its shredding? Or does the fabric naturally grow to accommodate us all?
• • •
Cafés con piernas (legs!) in Santiago, Chile, where patrons drink cappuccino served by women wearing thongs.
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 645
• • •
Zekes and Dadas, the territorial gangs of Kingston. Sometimes they lose their heads, literally. So says Melinda.
Death of Theresa Schiavo. Like Molly Malone, “she died of a fever, and no one could save her.” Beyond the issues of compromised mortality, her beauty drew forth many paeans.
• • •
Seeded throughout Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia, little nuggets from which you draw hope. As in Bakunin’s counter to Hertzen’s despair:
“Reaction is only the optical effect of the river running backwards on the tide, while the river runs always to the sea, which is boundless and indivisible.”
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