Things fall together
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They just don’t got no luck. First, the brand new choir, pushed eight meters higher than Amiens collapses after only a year. That’s 1284. Then, in 1573, the steeple – put up just six years before – keels over, on Ascension day no less. Just misses the throng departing after mass. Well, that’s a break anyway.
• • •
It’s not about Bush. Bush is a stalking horse, if that’s the phrase. There are larger forces at work and though the U.S. may seem the dominant player, that is because it’s the most visible and overt. China, moving like the wind, doesn’t register on our awareness because we’re so blind to anything but our own image.
Along with a rue or boulevard Victor Hugo, every town in France has a street named for Jean Moulin. What would the political condition of France be today if Moulin and thousands of others hadn’t fought against the Nazis?
Dream the other night, before waking up in Amiens, of New York taken over by bona fide fascisti, clusters of them, replete with armbands and black carbines. Swastika flags on dark streetcorners lit by electric torchlight. Every little cadre seemed to operate as though it was controlled by an invisible central authority – remotely. Without appearing to receive orders they simply knew what to do. Stopped by four or five of them, who demanded your watch – the Swatch Katie bought for you in Switzerland in ‘86 – and you had to give it up. They would certainly have beaten you with their gun butts, at very least, had you resisted them.
Woke up just at the point where you were making a desperate attempt to talk them into giving it back – knowing that an appeal to its sentimental value would be useless, or worse, and there was only a very limited amount of discussion possible before the rain of blows to be delivered systematically, but without passion, would begin. Hopeless feeling, vying with an impulse to somehow try… they seemed so stupid and closed off, yet if you just managed to find the key…
So here it is, something’s always held up before us, a kind of MacGuffin: right to vote, stop the draft, right to say this, do that, right to abortion, stop this war, that war, exchange a particularly vicious figurehead for a less voracious-looking bone grinder. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 679
But what you want to know is how peace gets made. And what peace might feel like? How would it smell?
From your table, you have to squint to read the blue enamel sign that tells you where you are: Place Flora Tristan. And below, in smaller letters still: 1803-1844, Femme de lettres, militante féministe. Grandmother, you learn later, of Paul Gaugin and diarist of post-independence Peru.
You sit, sip your café allongé, try to cultivate the art of being. But here as everywhere, part of you is always straining toward some forward place.
A treasure trove of herb garden in a courtyard off the rue des Mantaux Blancs – who knew? Among the plants, a good number with mytho-magical properties: Helianthus tuberosus – known as the Jerusalem artichoke; Passiflora caerulea, as in Christ’s Passion; Acanthus mollis, a wound-healer; Lonicera caprifolium to counter nostalgia, and for scent and immunity Lavandula x hybrida. Some are, by turns and even minute degrees, poisonous and curative: Buxus sempervirens, Vinca minor, Helleborus foetudus – handle with care.
It’s not the I-Ching before you, only today’s Libération, just as impenetrable. At what point did you shift your focus away from the outside, passing the touch of your eye evermore over your interior topography? Is it less abrasive in there? A presence enters the space of Le 57 and sits down a couple of tables to your right. An unusual thing – up until now morning customers, apart from you, head for the bar, drink their drinks, pay an leave. You sense this is a woman, doesn’t feel threatening, so you don’t immediately track her. When you do raise your eyes, you see that she’s beautiful, compellingly so, like a fab mod blonde of yesteryear. She’s reading a book, head inclined downward. Full-lipped, serious, not grim. You’re impatient to get back to not looking. To wait for her to turn a page or take a sip from the water glass with the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 680
Lipton Iced Tea logo that stands next to her coffee cup seems intolerable. Your own coffee cup is imprinted with the LAV
A ZZA
logo, as is the unused packet of sugar nestled in the saucer that, when you turn it over, reads Express yourself in minute blue letters. Emblazoned on your water glass, the logo of Virgin lemonade: “The Virgin Experience.”
Fast crescendo of taps over the construction noise outside. Small heels, green eyes, wavy brown hair, black skirt, tanned belly, electric blue top – she’s gone. Your water glass – drain it. Who’s that by the bar? The same woman who sat reading now pays her tab. A chic leather bag hangs off her left shoulder. Black and white, trimmed with piping, it’s pushed way out of plumb by a hip whose width seems altogether incommensurable with the face you saw in profile a few short breaths ago. Another universe.
She turns right out the door toward the Pernety Metro stop at the corner of Losserand where they’re tearing up the street in preparation for laying down new curbstones and surface. Occasionally, you glimpse a backhoe that almost pirouettes in its labors of scoop and dump, a brash young fellow in the cab, fast and precise with the controls.
The bar’s gone quiet for a moment as the smashing sounds continue round the corner. This morning’s barista, an Asian woman, maybe mid-twenties, concentrates on the newspaper spread on the counter. For a moment, she seems genuinely troubled by something she’s read, but then you see the pen in her hand and her eyes brighten as she fills in the letters on the crossword puzzle. Don’t let me lose you comes the lyric out of the speaker behind and above. A soul tenor pleading: Turn it around.
• • •
At the Hôtel de Ville, an exhibition on the Jews of Paris and their fate under occupation in which you discover that “pletzl,” meaning “the little place,” was the Yiddish nickname for the Marais.
Out of a display case, a document, typed and dated 26 October, 1943, stares up at you. That it’s got something to do with the demolition of a house is as far as your EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 681
limited French can go sans dictionaire. But it’s the letterhead itself, imprinted in the upper left hand corner that you can’t break away from:
COMMISSARIAT GENERAL AUX QUESTIONS JUIVES
DIRECTION GENERAL
DE L’ARYANISATION ECONOMIQUE
- - - - - - SECTION V.B.
How many blank sheets of paper did Section V.B. have printed, just like this one, in anticipation of having something to fill in below? Did the printer pause beyond taking a sample closer to the window to check for the correct density and color of the ink?
sheets together, interspersed with carbon paper, tapped them into neatness on a desk or blotter and rolled them onto the platen of a typewriter. Someone did this. What kind of weather did Paris have on October 26 that year?
• • • You shoulda stood in bed. This morning, in an attempt to re-acculturate yourself in advance, you cracked the online Times, and learned that Bloomie’s just handed Lockheed-Martin a $212 million contract to engineer surveillance systems for the NYC subways.
This evening, as you walk down by Les Halles, the great bell of St-Eustache starts a-booming. A line of Thomas Friedman’s you read a couple of days ago fires up on your front burner. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.” Once he seemed a sane man, with a finely tuned conscience. Now he’s gone mad as the age itself.
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Awake and contemplate your imminent return to New York. Think about packing. Better not put the model gun into one of the suitcases. Even though it wouldn’t be carry-on, you can just see some bright-eyed British Air security guard at Charles de Gaulle spotting the pistol’s shape on their x-ray machines and blowing up your bag just to be on the safe side. Not to mention what would happen to you as the bag owner given the bombing massacre in London six weeks ago.
Can’t take the thing with you, so what to do? Don’t want to leave it in L.’s apartment. That doesn’t make sense, only defers the problem. In the shower comes the inspiration – why not mail it to yourself? That’s the ticket. On the offchance the post office scans the package and destroys it, you don’t lose your books, clothes and souvenirs into the bargain.
At La Poste on rue Pernety you buy a pre-paid envelope and return ten minutes later with the packaged sealed, its contents securely bubble-wrapped. The clerk fills out the customs form, asks what’s inside. Your pre-coffee mind balks at the French word for it. You cudgel your brains, then blurt out in English: “a toy.”
“Ah,” he says, “un jouet.” • • •
Over coffee at Le 57 you attempt with qualified success to decode an article in Libération on the future of Gaza after the Israeli pullout. In the midst of which you realize that you’re tapping your foot to the rhythm of a familiar song. Out the speaker above your head, Ruben Blades singing “Pedro Navaja” – his sly homage to a Latino Mack the Knife. Behind the bar, the patron washes cups, one eye on the street, his shoulders making subtle figure eights in time to the beat. After “Pedro,” another vintage Willie Colón, “Timbalero” – a cut you play off an old cassette back home when you need to blow the dust out of your brainpan. It’s a Dionysian tour de force, built around a trombone riff that spins further and further out as the lyrics propel a timbale player – who is riding the N-train – all the way to the moon. Holy cow, this is weird, too much synchronicity for your little head: a Korean DJ spinning ‘70s New York Salsa EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 683
in a Montparnasse bar. But yeah, like the song says: A ride to the moon on a choo-choo train…
• • •
They’re drowning in Romania, Bulgaria, Austria. Lowland Swiss are being swept away on the worst floods in their lengthy recorded history. Drought from Italy to Algeria, and vast fires devour large swaths of Portugal and Spain. One photo shows the town of La Coruña by night, sheathed in the hellacious glow of the approaching flames. In another picture, a man swats at the conflagration with a tree branch. Where are the international armies of relief? Funny, it’s been temperate wherever you’ve traveled this summer, but sweltering in New York. And they say the Atlantic’s hotting up more than usual, so the predictions are for a bumper crop of tropical storms back home.
• • •
It’s down to plumbing. Guns and plumbing. • • •
It’s a wonderful landscape, the warp and weft of your associations. • • •
Early evening. Katie’s recovering from a stomach bug and Gwen’s tucked up with her on the sofa at L.’s rereading Harry Potter. So off you ramble on your own and stop for a beer at Le Select. Last night in Paris this go-round. Emigrating by inches. But to where?
Lots of sidewalk traffic – a thousand gestures on ready display – designed for and reveling in the public air. Who can record them all? Every so often you see a face EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 684
you almost recognize – a total stranger whose features, for an instant, remind you of a friend’s. Come on, you tell yourself, this is Paris – you hardly know anyone here.
It’s been raining on and off, but now, pushing eight o’clock, a change in the atmosphere. Above and beyond the rooflines along the Boulevard Montparnasse, a contest between the white-pink clouds and the deepening blue. Paradox of light. Makes you shake your head. The sun’s almost down, and suddenly, the sky’s got brighter.
Flight home this afternoon. Gwen breaks her usual pattern of sleeping in and ventures out with you to the boulangerie. She consents to have her picture taken at the foot of the street you’ve often walked and on which, if you could, you’d live: rue des Thermopyles.
At some point, you’re back at the café. Meyer is there too, your grandfather. Bea’s over by the register, talking French with Samantha and Noëlle. Jack could come by if he wanted to – he’d fit right in – but you’re not going to hold your breath.
Mark and Bruce sit side by side at Tables 10 and 11, working away at their parallel laptops. In a few minutes Katie will come. When Mark takes off for his class, she’ll hang out with Bruce talking food and knitting. Little Isis, Grainne’s daughter by Eran, runs nimbly among the tables, beacon eyes fully intent. Mario, between crêpes, steps out from behind the counter and scoops her into his arms. Eric B. pulls up outside on his brown-orange bike. Slings his chain around its frame and the parking meter, but he never actually locks it. You can see Eduardo down the street, approaching at a brisk walk. He looks excited, or is it anxious? Put a postcard between the pages and close the book. It’s here. August 31 Katrina, the too-perfect storm. Material special effects. Or, as the occultists used to call automata: real artificial magic.
Prayer to self: May grief make us wise. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 685
All quiet on the Washington Front.
Says Kathleen Blanco, Governor of Louisiana, on the arrival in New Orleans of National Guard Troops recently returned from Iraq: They have M-16s and they’re locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will. • • •
No one knows how far that Green can span. And Fannie she Mae, or Mae not.
It took a while to sneak up on you, given that your focus in the immediate aftermath had been on sounding out your city’s vital signs, and your own recuperation, but a year or so after the fact, you sought out all the visual evidence you could find and concluded that whatever hit the Pentagon on 9/11, it probably was not a 757. You realized then, in a kind of watershed, that the signals your body had started sending – in however tentative and fragmentary a fashion – the moment you saw the great gash in tower one and then second tower struck were by no means entirely false alarms. You’d responded to the awfulness of the moment, but something beyond it too. A great evil had been loosed in the land and this evil now manifests in unambiguously clear gestures of destruction. Could you then have imagined how, only four years later, that evil would exponentialize to the point where it could pass for a force of nature, or even, by sheer magnitude – in some folks’ beliefs – a god if not God?
It took until the coming and going of the hurricane for you to cohere into an image the fallen portal of the tower twins, and the West dragging the rest of the world through it into the age of reverse miracles, an age in which the Corporate State, for want of a better term, had reduced its function to forcing people to their knees – and then to grinding noses down before the dark power it had always served and worshipped. As EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 686
Lake Pontchartrain swept through the Lower Nine-eleven, the mask of Apollo washed away. And behind it…?
• • •
On the front page of the Times, an image of a body, waterlogged past human scale, floating near an overpass in New Orleans. For all the liquid surrounding her, from this distance and angle, the drowned woman appears as though in free fall.
• • •
The members of the Cuban legislature rise for a minute of silence. • • •
Up at the Met, in the Gillman Collection, a curious display. Gelatin silver prints from 1893-94, roughly three by four inches, selected from over four hundred cards made up to identify suspected anarchists. This is the work of a fellow named Alphonse Bertillon who devised a system of body measurements, physical descriptions and photographs for the Paris Prefecture of Police Bureau of Identification. In 1898, Bertillon’s system was adopted by the International Conference of Rome for the Society of Defense Against Anarchists, attended by representatives from a score of countries.
Below, in the display case, twenty-seven faces. You spend a great deal of time trying to read these vanished souls: lawyer, dressmaker, auto mechanic, photographer…
• • •
Doubt attends your every keystroke, like a dutiful servant or an eager child. And then? And then?
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 687
Like a mutated Joe Hill, George W. Bush appears at your side to urge you on if you think, for a second of flagging:
“It’s as if the entire Gulf Coast,” he says, “were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine.” No, George, you say, it can’t be. Yet he says the same thing to Associated Press.
• • •
Hands to work, hearts to God, feet to the fire. • • •
Carthage, kan ya makan.
• • •
Blackwater mercenaries just returned from Mesopotamia on guard in front of the Royal St. Charles Hotel. A reporter asks one of them whether New Orleans is as “wild” as Iraq. “Nope,” says the man with his M-16 held at the ready, “It’s pretty Green Zone here.”
• • •
Almost robotically you log onto iTunes, search and download New Orleans, the Gary U.S. Bonds version circa nineteen sixty-early-something. You’re right, amidst the Dionysian overload of the saxophone, surging back beat, the call and response to Gary’s edge-of-orgasmic distortion vocals, the half-remembered lines are in there:
…Come on take a stroll down to Basin Street And listen to the music with the Dixieland beat. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 688
Sure, it was a great pop tune back then. But who knew one day it would vibrate in your body like a kirtan? Mississippi turns Ganges. Sacred rivers, sacred names. Divided waters one.
September 3
Steeped to your gills in a New York hate of mind.
• • •
Baffled for years over the distinction between putti and cherubim, you look ‘em up and discover that the former, also known as amorini, are winged infants who accompany Cupid on his missions, while the latter, according to Pseudo-Dionysus the Aeropagite, comprise the second-highest of nine angelic orders. Maimonides’s Jewish angelarchy posits ten ranks, wherein the Cherubim occupy the tier second from the bottom. In the OT, they ain’t so cute as their images in post-medieval Christian art would suggest. Genesis has them guarding the eastern gate to Eden where they block access to the Tree of Life with flaming swords held high.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 689
even know themselves? How is it possible to distinguish between their successes and reversals? Still, one thing’s clear. The fascists lost the war, but won the peace.
• • •
Dans la langue Creole on dit: Au prensip – in principle. Mais, au praktik – in practice – ce n’est pas le même chose. • • •
Will the next really big awful thing to hit us take place out on the Pacific shore? They’ve done New York, the old Dutch-English, Euro-immigrant city and first stage of New World trade and pluralism. And now, the Afro-Franco-Caribbean city, roots stuck deep in plantation swamp, Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion beyond the Mississippi – our great age of agriculture. New York and New Orleans represented, arguably the most subversive, polyglot cities, each with an utterly distinct culture, altogether idiosyncratic and unto themselves. What remains – assuming one wanted to symbolically erase American history by epochs – would be an urban center on the coast linked to the great Asian future.
Now is that a nutty idea or what? Yet Thomas M. says you have buen olfacto – a good nose.
• • •
Immense skywriting stretches in an arc across the Chelsea sky and out over the Hudson River towards Joisey: UNCLE JACK’S STEAKHOUSE. Out of what reality did that come?
Meet Samantha, latest addition to the Le G. waitstaff, who started working here while you were away visiting her country. This morning, with her hair down, she EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 690
nearly stops you in your tracks with an unanticipated jolt of everyday French beauty – the kind possessed by saleclerks there who would aim to be supermodels on these shores. On top of which she wears a navy blue sleeveless dress with yellow and white trim around the neck, armholes and waist which serves to transform her into a vision of the ultimate, idealized Air France stewardess of the ‘60s. These are the images your mind escapes to these days, in the face of so much horror.
• • •
Superdome, Astrodome, Thunderdome. Has anyone made the connection between NO and Mad Max?
• • •
Bertrand Russell to Anthony Dallardo, Jr., 20 May 1959: Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of May 14. My reason for not writing about Whitehead’s philosophy is that I radically disagree with it but have never thought it desirable to emphasize this fact. Yours sincerely,…
• • •
Walking your way along 23rd Street, a woman wears a teeshirt that says: A RESTRAINING ORDER IS JUST ANOTHER WAY TO SAY “I LOVE YOU.”
• • •
Katrina, a Frankensturm. Not the last surely. Nor have we seen the last of the drang.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 691
turned. You cannot see his face. No one but him lying there, across tracks the garbage truck made when it came through a little while ago, its mechanical arms lifting the wire trashcans and flipping the refuse over the cab and into its hopper.
Posed as he is, the kid looks weirdly like a hit-and-run, though reason says he’s just being recalcitrant. Still, you stare a moment at his back to satisfy yourself he’s breathing before your gaze travels on. Here comes a guy who looks to be his father. The fellow squeezes a stream of water from a Poland Spring bottle into the boy’s face and up he comes, and protesting bitterly, cheek plastered with wet sand.
Tonight those stupid blue light beams travel up from Battery Park City into the clear sky. Will they do this every year until Kingdom bloody Come?
Odd thought: If Reagan hadn’t broken PATCO in 1981, would things have gone differently on the morning of September 11, twenty years later?
• • •
Glance out your window again. A pretty near perfect half moon hangs there as though supported by the light beams.
• • •
Look again before you pull down the shade. Moon’s moved away and now you see planes at a lower altitude coming in for their approach to Newark: one, two, then three, passing through the rays.
Only 9:30, but your eyes are dry and raw. And your body is telling you it’s got to lie down.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 692
nervous.
• • • p.m. What is that goddamn thing still doing up there, circling round, scaring good people shitless.
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