Things fall together
Download 7.05 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- April 11
- April 22 – Metropolitan Museum of Art
- April 29 – Princeton Museum
- May 6 EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 655
|
April 1 As I walk along the Bois Boolong with an independent air, You can hear them sigh and wish to die, You can see them wink the other eye At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.
• • • The woman sits on the bench outside Le G. eating a croissant. She pulls off a piece, bites it in half, then feeds the rest to one of her dogs, a big guy, nearly Great
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 646
Dane-sized. The next chunk is smaller and half of it goes to dog number two, a tiny, foxy-eared fellow. This system she repeats until the croissant is consumed, whereupon she reaches into the paper bag in her lap, brings forth another croissant and begins the process again. A man passes, walking a terrier which strains to approach the banquet. Without skipping a beat, the woman adds a beat to the sequence and the newcomer stands up on his hind legs to receive a morsel before he is pulled unceremoniously away. The woman’s two dogs seem not to have noticed either the terrier’s arrival or departure – their focus never strays from the magic show of her hands. Back to A, B, A, B. Your attention’s pulled inside the café and when you turn back, the woman and her dogs are gone. So you’ll never know how, or if, she distributed the crumbs.
• • •
In a letter from Istanbul, Bronwyn refers to Mam Naturaliza – Mother Nature in Turkish – and how weird she’s acting. Just the facts, Mam. April 2 Runs deep and old – this recurring sense that everything and everyone you care about id provisional – that any good you find yourself in the presence of may instantly evaporate or be torn away. This seems the fundamental mode on which you operate. Is it any accident that a fellow with this substratum would be preoccupied by daydreams of Cockaigne? Live in New York while building castles in Spain?
• • •
PIG. Pope is gone. April 7 Last week a sinkhole opened up at the intersection of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane. Your old stomping grounds, but better not put your feet down too hard. As of today the abyss has engulfed the several police barricades set up around it. And the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 647
hole has widened well beyond the dayglo orange outline someone sprayed on the pavement to designate its perimeter. All porosity down there. Minetta being a stream and spirit wending its way beneath the latest pancake slapped on top.
Day of the hybrid eclipse. • • •
Whoever wishes to take over the world will not succeed. The world is a sacred vessel and nothing should be done to it. Whoever tries to tamper with it will mar it. Whoever tries to grab it will lose it. So observed Laozi. • • •
The wine was wrong so we sent back the year.
• • •
Once upon a time, the King of Spain decreed that henceforth, to account for the beneficial effect of sea breezes, cities and towns would be built on a grid set 26° off from the north-south axis. Here and there in the once-new world, the King’s plan survives. You remember wondering, once long ago when your plane flew over Los Angeles, why
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 648
you saw two distinct street patterns below, adjacent but divided by main roads, one cardinal, the other veering off. Heteroclite.
• • • The perfection of things depends on each and every one of us becoming a perfect world, so that by all souls being in me and I in all others, and I having the being of all and they – each and every one of them – mine, the entire machinery of the Universe should be linked and embraced… So said Fray Luis de Léon in De los nombres de Cristo, written during his four years in prison. There is a story that upon his return to the University of Salamanca, Fray Luis began his first lecture with: “As we were saying yesterday…”
• • •
Era y non era, jeers and jeers ago, when you were researching the Tower Twins, a friend introduced you to Chiasmus, a creature you had not met before, at least not formally. At the time you had been speculating that these great duple buildings were parallel in ideal only and wrote that: Somewhere, then, at a great height or depth, our
So when you found that Chiasmus was derived from the Greek chiasma, an arrangement of two lines crossed like the letter X, and that Chiasmus himself was said to inhabit the transverse space of crossed lines, you wrote him into the story.
Ultimately Chiasmus didn’t make the cut from thesis to book manuscript. You plowed him under because Divided… needed to speak plainly. But now, a decade later, you copy and paste these lines into another text born of a different intent, and at a moment where there’s nothing to lose:
speculate, may be a chasm. He is known for spouting rhetorical X-shaped truisms and false equivalencies such as: Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, Knowledge is Power, Time is Money, Health is Wealth, or Might is Right. When, in the face of such bold and compelling statements, we grasp at the glimmer of transcendence they promise, we momentarily ascend to look down at the world from insupportable heights. But the price Chiasmus exacts for this sublime moment of EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 649
Why the above? Because today, in a book on Unamuno, you read of the belief that by wedding opposites into a single image, as Chiasmus does, one can partially repair the split opened up by the Fall.
Wooeeee, Poppy. Don’t look down. • • •
The dignity of humanity, according to Pico della Mirandola, lies in our protean capacity for change.
• • •
Hypocrite = actor, comedian. Afternoon. Chase. Nice to ‘ave a banker wot shows a bit of tit. Morabundance.
Rumsfeld, old Uncle Strabismus • • •
One nation under g d, in a dirigible… April 11 Discovery of a Utopia hither unknown to you: Fiddler’s Green. According to Bénet, it’s the Elysium of sailors, a land flowing with run and lime juice; the air filled with perpetual music, dancing and plenty of tobacco, something like Dixie Land or Land o’ the Leal.
Dixie Land? Look that up too. Could derive from Mason-Dixon, or the Louisiana Dix, the ante-bellum ten spot. Possible too, but weird: Dixie Land as a southern black invention based on the name of an 18th Century slaver from good ol’ EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 650
Manhattan. So kind was trader Dix purported to be, that his former chattel pined for Dixie’s Land back up north.
• • •
My parents time-traveled back to the Warring States Period and all they brought me was this Laozi teeshirt.
• • •
MyOPEC = vision distorted by oil in the eye. April 18
Waiting for Paul to arrive you hang out in the lounge of the Hilton Club. Thirty- seven floors up, the irresistible view is out the window, but on the wall behind you is hung a plasma TV approximately the size of Manet’s Bar at the Follies Bergère. At present, CNN monopolizes the pixels. You’d glimpsed the newswoman’s face on the way in, noted the little square at the lower right hand corner of the screen – a live cam of the Vatican chimney, just in case a white gust billows from its mouth.
The market’s down, she’s saying, lowest in whatever. But then the language catches you. “A tsunami of selling.” Yes, that’s it. Exactly.
• • •
On the train downtown a woman sits down next to you. She looks deeply, anciently Mayan. Converse sneakers, gold hoop earrings. Beautiful features, thickening in the waist. She rubs at her lottery tickets with a penny. Doesn’t litter, just files them in her purse.
• • •
Take the A Train: EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 651
Akrasia, ancient Greek word for weakness of will.
as attributed to Ben Franklin: “In thy youth learn some craft that in thy age thou mayest get a living without craft.”
successive clauses. “I know what I like and I like what I know.” Calling brother Chiasmus.
• • •
Thump thump! What’s there?
Enthymeme, an argument in which one or more of the prepositions is suppressed or taken for granted, e.g.: “We cannot trust this man for he has perjured himself in the past.” Or as Tom DiMattis your old EMS instructor used to say, “Never assume – it makes an ass of u and an ass of me.
• • •
And yours you will allow, And you may have a sister, Who needs protection now. I’ve come to this great city, To find a brother dear And you wouldn’t dare insult me, sir, If Jack were only here.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 652
Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation. His colors!
Here’s a quote from Luke (1:35): And the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. Which the Florentine Dominican, St. Antonio, interpreted as: The body of humanity will assume in Mary the incorporeal light of God.
• • •
Who sees what how? Theophany. What touches whom through the gauziest veil?
• • •
Bard. She lives for the stage.
• • •
Let gold be gold.
• • •
Yet, said Meister Eckhart, all corn suggests wheat, all metal suggests gold, all birth suggests human beings.
• • •
While you slept, an epoch howled by. Lhude sing Van Winkle.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 653
earpieces dangling out a hip pocket of his suit jacket, head inclined toward his cellphone: “I’m headed home. I’ll walk Oliver.”
Oliver’s got to be a dog, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?! • • •
Every day wondering: has the great turning come yet? And then: there is no great turning, just little shifts. Bit by bit. Bit by bit, the opening out of that place, part home, part plein aire, where the baffled find a bit of clarity and the too certain embrace their atom of doubt.
• • •
Sign in the window of the reopened Le G., so peculiarly hand lettered it takes you a moment to dope out that “Under some management” must mean “Under same management.”
“In the doctrine of Marxism, there are one thousand principles and ten thousand guidelines, but in the final analysis, it comes down to just one saying: ‘In Revolution there is Justice!’” Slogan on a poster from the Cultural Revolution.
• • •
Hero Peleus falls in love with Thetis, a sea nymph. He seizes her on the beach and keeps his grasp as she transforms into water, fire and a succession of fierce beasts. It’s all there on a red clay vase.
• • •
Owed on a Grecian urn. Three more payments and it’s yours. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 654
• • •
Rubbing from a stone, probably 2nd Century, Easter Han Dynasty. Great action of horsemen and archers on the bottom two thirds while above the fray, literally, Confucius meets Laozi.
The big whitish streetsweeper JOHNSTON, its name stenciled just beneath the windshield rips down 9th Avenue, wire brooms whirling, water jets spritzing the gutter. Just ahead a Buick, illegally parked at a meter – no, on closer look the Buick has a special handicapped sticker on the windshield. Tomás, one of the Le G. kitchen staff stands outside the café spraying the sidewalk with a hose. The waters meet. Whomever is piloting JOHNSTON this a.m. is in a rare hurry. He, you can see that much – the sun silhouetting him in the cab – hulks over the steering wheel like a long- haul trucker, turns the sweeper sharply, nearly brushes the Buick’s bumper, cuts the corner of 21st, heads west. And that’s it, the big, noisy machine, like an illusory thing, vanishes.
Today, still thinking of Confucius and Laozi, the sound of its brushes echo Shu. • • •
Cellphone personalities: the furtive, the hurried, the harried, the haunted- hunted, the brash.
• • •
Now we live beyond all possible ages of reason. Or remorse. May 6 EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 655
Friday afternoon on the E train platform at Lex. the garbage cans have overflowed like cornucopia. An Asian man bows a stringed instrument held vertically, an aire that begins with a phrase that reminds you of “I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus,” and finishes a bit like “Sounds of Silence.” What transpired in between gets lost in the roar of the trains entering on both the downtown and Queens-bound tracks.
You hear a few opening notes of the next song before they’re cut off by the bing bong of the chime followed hard upon by the closing doors and the rumbling of steel on steel mixed with the howl of tunnel air, outraged over having to move out of the way.
That tune sounded a bit like “Red River Valley.” Oh well, it’s gone. Across from you sits a morbidly obese man, fast asleep, head down, chin bouncing gently off his chest. Apart from his Timberlands, he’s dressed entirely in the green, white and black colors of the Boston Celtics. At 42nd Street, he lifts his head, eyes slitted, to reveal a fastidiously trimmed beard and prognathous jaw. But only for an instant before he falls to nodding again.
Up the stairs at 25th Street to find the St. Columba street fair in full cry. Roast corn on a stick for two bucks. Plenty of butter and salt. Gwen loves this stuff. You’re exchanging dollars for kernels when a scuffle breaks out in the crowd and bursts into view: several young fellows hammering on a guy. This is in earnest – something about payback and punishment. Over fast. The thugs blend back into the crowd, mission accomplished. The boy with the flattened nose, surrounded by his helpless mates reels away, pie-eyed with shock. The corn man has not yet received your money, but is already on his way round the counter to offer a wad of napkins to stanch the blood. “My man,” he says, “my man.” He has to nudge the kid, who finally reads his gesture and accepts the benison. “Put your head back,” says one of the girls.
• • •
The dragon sings in celebration. East. Yin. The tiger roars auspiciously. West. Yan.
While downtown, toward greater ground zero the (S)Lower Manhattan Development Corp(se) slouches on. Forever laying cornerstones, then moving them somewhere and ceremonially dedicating them anew. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 656
And yet you step – by step – through it all with only the talking cure for company and a glass of red or beer to smooth the way.
On Seventh Avenue off 28th Street, a street vendor sells “Port Authority” polo shirts. Made in Vietnam.
From the café window you watch two huge, gorgeous white horses, Princess and Hero – though you only learn their names on the news later – as they draw a stage coach down Ninth Avenue. Ah, there’s the signage on the coach’s flank – it’s a publicity stunt for a country music diva’s new perfume.
Like so many happenings, the apparition vanishes into the city, so you don’t see what happens only a few blocks south, when a cab nicks the coach and panics the horses. The both of them bolt, galloping east across 14th Street, past Starbucks, past Gristedes, past Papaya King. Hero is apprehended by cops conducting a counter- terrorism drill who tie him to a lamp post and create a corral of sorts with yellow Crime Scene” tape.
Princess flies on, hangs a ralph on Fifth then another onto 13th Street. Hemmed in by cars she finally halts. “I leaned over the barrier, grabbed the reins and restrained the horse,” says Bob Di Giorgio, a cool-headed crane operator from a nearby construction sight. The Times also quotes Carla Morreale, who had emerged from the subway en route to work. “You don’t expect horses to be charging toward you on the sidewalks of Manhattan.”
Return with me now, Carla, to those thrilling days of yesteryear. “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty Hi-Yo, Silver!”
Not gone for good, but spiraling round once more. • • •
A sewer is not someone who sews. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 657
Lynndie England, shmingland. It was Bush holding that leash. And Lynndie England.
• • •
Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. Kidnapped by Zeus, she is taken to an island which he then names after her. Ox-eyed Hera sent a plague to destroy the inhabitants, but Zeus responded by turning the island’s ants into a fierce, hardy race of people, the Myrmidons.
Do people still turn into animals, and vice versa. How many theriomorphs out there?
• • • Download 7.05 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|