Things fall together
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Steven Fleisher, a drunken air traffic controller plows his boat into – literally runs over – another pleasure craft near Robert Moses Causeway in the Great South Bay. He kills one twelve-year-old girl, Brianna Leineck, and injures her parents, sister and a friend, two of them critically.
• • •
Whassa matta George, Katrina got your tongue? • • •
Bush à la Cagney in White Heat. What’s holding up? September 19 “The businessmen should come here, to Afghanistan, and build buildings in the plazas….” So said an Afghani-in-the-street interviewed by BBC the day after the election.
• • •
Chemtrails and contrails at sunset. All in all, today’s was a seriously man-made sky. Eric B. calls from the Battery to make sure you see it. Lovecraft’s color out of space. Erik L. calls from up north, on top of a mountain in the Gunks. He does these things, EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 693
rides his bike, or hikes – goes out to commune with nature. Sun’s just gone down. He’ll stay out till moonrise. What did he think of that sunset? Bizarro, daddyo. Biz-ar-ro.
All those strange crisscrosses and swatches of chroma that wouldn’t quite blend. Too dark to see them now, but you have a sense they’re still up there, lurking at the threshold.
Nearly freezing in here. The woman is large. So is her arm, reaching up to grab the horizontal rail that serves as a handhold for standees in this jampacked subway car. The short sleeve of her knit top slides down to reveal some what’s tattooed on her warm brown skin. A design like flames, or sunflower petals. And beneath them in curlicued script Eden is Burning.
• • •
South to Alaska. Old Orleans. The spectacle of the all-consuming spectacle consuming itself.
• • •
The dispossessor must always live in terror of those he’s dispossessed. September 24
8:35 a.m. Heavy duty optical migraine turns your visual field into a vibrating crystal palace. Slight nausea, nothing more.
• • •
On the way home. “There’s a muddy road ahead,” calls out Donaldo of the missing left leg from his wheelchair in the dappled shade of 24th Street.
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Gwen announces that Friday will be Hope Day at school. Everyone’s expected to wear something white as a symbol of support for the victims of Katrina. Why white? Better not ask.
• • •
Standing by the Central Park reservoir leaning against the iron fence rungs at the perimeter, you palpably sense the seasons change. Sun, then cloud, then sun again – a wash of orange on the backs of your eyelids. Crunch of runners’ soles rolling gravel on the path behind you. And the wind. A strong gust. Subsides, comes another. Plays with the idea of blowing you away. You keep your eyes closed, face toward the sun and in no time at all, the breeze returns, gently now, ruffles the treetops and pushes the water northwest, pretending it never entertained violent thoughts at all.
The sun is warning that it’s soon going to pass behind the twin towers of the El Dorado. But you’ll start walking west before it does.
• • •
Waiting for Gwen, you sit on the steps of a brownstone on 91st Street, just east of Amsterdam. Residential upstairs, some kind of business on the ground floor. Glance over at the sign next to the entrance. PREP FOR PREP. Hey, sure, from each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs. It’s a beautiful day.
Across the street, perched on the gateposts of the playground, a matching pair of concrete owls. Owls? Yeah, sure, didn’t you hear? Athena just bought a dozen condos between CPW and West End! She’s not planning to live in the neighborhood. But still, things is looking up.
The Center of the Universe: that’s what the billboard says, wrapping round the base of the office tower known as One Times Square. ‘Scuse me – they’re calling it 1X. Clever these publicators. We had a World Trade Center (too modest), then a Time EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 695
Warner “Center of Everything” (too abstruse), but Center of the Universe just nails it shut. And when such a claim is put forth by Newmark Real Estate, let doubters bite their tongues. Any lingering skeptics will genuflect when they read the tagline that follows: The Ball Drops Here.
You wish you were making this up. • • •
The Great Wall-Mart of China. • • •
“This Little Bit of the World Belongs to Us” – a song sung by Australian soldiers at Gallipoli where 115,000 soldiers died before the Allies evacuated.
Raining in spits and farts but you can’t put up an umbrella because it’ll just rip to shreds. So you shelter beneath an awning, the drops driving sideways, west. As you turn to go, you spot a gingko leaf plastered up against the brass awning pole. Funny little brown dots all over its fan rays. Go on, put it between some folded paper. Take it home and when it’s dry, stick the leaf between the pages of this book. Almost ended up in the Hudson, didn’t you, l’il cousin?
Glories of Chelsea number MCMDXOXOX: Into the café walks a woman built, as they once said, like a Mack truck, shirt hem riding up over tanned, flesh-dimpled, stretchmarked belly. In white type on red, her tee-billboard reads: Trust Me I’m a
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 696
divine world, universal soul, developed and divided into a series of eons. Also the realm of pure light, abode of the invisible gods.
And standing together, even in this jumpin’ café, the invisible and the visible. • • •
Dream in which people have to take a Human Equivalency exam. • • •
in which the schizophrenic drowns.
• • •
The fellow who introduced the concept of the Rapture – the notion that certain true believers are whisked away to heaven before the Last Judgment – was a 19th century British evangelist named John Nelson Darby. Darby also preached that the Second Coming would be heralded by a return of the Israelites to the Promised Land, leading some of his theological descendants to interpret the 1967 capture of Jerusalem by the Israelis as a powerful augury of Christ’s return.
But the Rapture’s roots grow far deeper into the past. Some flagellant millenarians in the middle ages believed that the Old Testament figures Elijah and Enoch were “translated” to heaven without undergoing bodily death.
Something to look forward to: 12/21/12. In only six years plus a couple of months, the Fifth Sun Cycle of the Mayan Calendar commences. Also called the Great or Long Cycle, each epoch begins with the purported alignment of the earth, sun and center of the Milky Way, and lasts 5,125 years. Sure, why not?
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vans and trailers full of movie equipment. Another episode of “Law and Order: Special Victims.” Who is that fellow on the corner? You’ve seen him mediated somewhere. Yes, a famous rapper. Ask one of the waitstaff, a young ‘un named David. “Oh, that’s Ice Tea.” Right. “And that’s his wife, Cocoa.” What a font of knowledge! You hadn’t really noticed Cocoa, Ice Tea’s face is so compelling, but now you do. She is almost rivetingly white. Blonde hair hangs long down her back. Her black leather jacket’s unbuttoned, and from the gap jut twin synthetic forms that show up mortal breasts as paltry things indeed.
Suddenly, an ultra sleek car parked on the south side of 21st Street, starts into behaving very oddly indeed. As though by an exercise of its own will, it opens and shut its doors, hood and trunk, retracts its convertible top, then commences cycling through a lightshow of headlamps flashers and signals, like a mechanical character demonstrating its prowess in a futuristic cartoon. Which is when you become aware of the remote control in Ice Tea’s hand. Eventually, all its tricks exhausted, the car winds down and returns to quietude almost circumspectly, the way a caged bird tucks its head under its wing and puts itself to sleep. The crew members who’ve been watching this display begin to disperse and Ice Tea and Cocoa, hand in hand, walk north on foot, past the café and on up the block. An instant later a gofer comes running after them, headset askew: “Hey Ice – Ice!” Something forgotten.
Time to look away. The drama goes on without your witness. • • •
Once upon a time in the 8th century, Rabia al-Basri rushed through the streets of Basra. She carried a blazing torch in one hand and a jug of water in the other. Why, my daughter, why?
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 698
November 22
A small, tinny carnival comes to town. Ah, it’s only the cell phone at the next table over.
• • •
Banlieues convulse across France in the thousandfold light of burning cars. Says Renzo Piano, “If the place is impossible, the community becomes impossible.”
Says the Song Dynasty poet whose name you forgot:
One mistakes a mule for a horse.
• • •
Says the Sufi Wali Muhammad: Know that God cannot be contemplated independently of a concrete being and that He is more perfectly seen in a human being than in any other and more perfectly in woman than in man.
“Honestly, it doesn’t feel like a holiday. But for the guys that are conscious, we try to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to them.” So says Maj. Alex Lee, MD, stationed in the U.S. military hospital in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad.
• • •
You read of a Sufi pharmacist in Istanbul who kept an extensive library above his shop. He avowed a belief that only by going to “the core of the truth that we have in EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 699
common,” rather than trusting in the divisive man-made institutions of religion, could there be any hope for the future.
• • •
According to Corbin’s interpretation of the beliefs of Ibn ‘Arabi, “it is not within the power of man to “explain the tragedy of the human adventure… to explain, in other words, why men in the mass prefer the anonymity of non being, why they reject the (Divine) Name which aspired to find in them a vessel, a compassionate organ.
• • • The flag is flying ‘cross the country, Me and the band we play the bars, And Glyn, she points out to the highway, “The flags always fly highest where the people buy their cars”…
—Lizzie West, “19 Miles to Baghdad”
• • •
Recrudesce, literally to become raw again. January 1, 2006
Resolution: Columbus Circle henceforth to be called Colobus circle – a move that requires only the dropping of a consonant. As form follows meaning, the trees of Sensual Park will seed southwest, pushing their canopy past the No Time – Warn Her! Center, and in through its cracked portals to form, one day, an atrium jungle. Jump, me sons and daughters! Let the new world monkeys swing.
And that name, New York City, what’s that? York? Hardly new any more. Not Old School, just old. G2G. And what instead? RFP the eight million, no the six plus billion, in serarch of monickers to signify us now. Then plebecite, yo, SVP. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 700
Ba gua class. Tom fields a question about weight distribution, when and whether it should be equal in the legs. In response to which he launches into a short disquisition to the effect that an absolute 50/50 stance has no energy or life to it – this is called being “double weighed” – the least favorable stance in martial arts. He proceeds to demonstrate this most unfortunate posture, stands with his legs rigid and immobile, body pure dead weight.
And then, like a gust of cold air through the loft it hits you: WTC. • • •
does anybody notice this kind of scenery? Does anybody notice? – Chen Hongshou
• • •
Six is the new nine. • • •
How many false dawns? • • •
Tom B. was on a tear this a.m. So much so that you still remember several of his phrases more or less verbatim.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 701
• • •
“Fellow-creature.” Term used by London Ranters in addressing one another circa 1650.
• • •
Nine is the new three. • • •
Winter and its discontents. February 1 In the window of the petstore a banner beckons: 12-Piece Value Pak. Look closer at the brightly-colored package. Pig Ears.
• • • In the coldness of the street, people pushing their lives around as though to a check-out counter.
• • •
Arnolt Bronnen, playwright, born in Austria in 1895 and in the Berlin of the ‘20s, palled around with Brecht and… Göebbles. Arnolt, Arnolt, ya turned right when ya shoulda hung a Louie.
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 702
look completely unlike their predecessor selves. In many cases the transformation has tended toward the grotesque.
• • •
The slippage of everyday minds. • • •
A wild and shitty day.
• • •
We are the culture of spit on a griddle. • • •
When and where not to suggest: Spit on a griddle vs. Spit on a hot griddle.
• • •
Your words fall into hollows at the center of the world. February 17 Death of Ray Barretto at 77. El Watusi.
Between Manchester and Londonderry, the red fingers of the birches. February 22 EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 703
The woodstove at John’s octagonal house needs constant stoking. You’ve walked, banked the fire, and now, Gwen reading and Katie knitting, you doze before it.
The spirit of a soldier killed on a battlefield ascends and contemplates the pattern – some in clusters, others isolated – made by the distribution of the dead and wounded. This pattern is invisible from the ground, or even the mountain ridge to the west. From his vantage though, the uniforms of his comrades, are indistinguishable from those of the enemy, as are their rank, and together, the casualties comprise the lineaments of a fast-winging bird. So vivid the image, that he can almost hear the rushing of its feathers.
Every fire is different. Some leap like sprites. But when, behind the glass, this stove really gets going, the flames look like a waterfall of orange, surging up and back. At last – elements in full reverse.
“…a thing so thunderous, I immediately understood.” Said by Daniel Clair, a French turkey farmer upon discovering four hundred dead birds, and others sick in his flock.
• • •
Said John Smith in his General Historie of Virginia (1624): For as Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion, so History without Geography wandreth as a vagrant without certaine habitation. February 28 Tom B. paraphrases a Ba Gua poem: If you want to go forward, move the front foot first. If you want to go backward, move the back foot first.
• • •
If the social fabric were pantyhose, they’d never make it through the prom. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 704
• • •
of Central Park, a stately tower called Essex House. And so it was known by generation upon generation, until one day, a traveler, weary of traveling, stood looking up at its marquee and noticed that it was now called the Jumeirah Essex House – the former word very large indeed, and the latter two quite small. What did this change of name signify, and how had it come to pass? And what meant the beautiful stylized flame that burst from atop the “i” in Jumeirah like a caligraphed stroke from the Holy Qur’an?
The traveler turned to another traveler and said, Brother, what does this mean? But his brother shrugged his shoulders, for he knew not. Sister, he asked another passerby, who or what is Jumeirah? Surely this is the palace of some great potentate, perhaps even the dwelling of the Caliph! But she only shook her head and traveled on. And in truth, no one in that place could help him understand the riddle.
But in the fullness of time, he learned that Jumeirah was a magical potentate indeed – a “hospitality” corporation based in the United Arab Emirates, and that Jumeirah had bought Essex House and made of its forty-two stories a hotel and some one hundred and forty-nine condominiums. And also that Jumeirah owns the Burj (tower) Al Arab in Dubai and a vast pyramid one thousand feet high, the Ryungyong Hotel, in the fabled city of Pyongyang, North Korea.
For he lived on the other side of the world, in a city that, though great, was every day shrinking, just as the desert increases grain by grain. And he had never seen the city of Dubai, much less its skyline by night with its myriad skyscrapers – among which are built not just one pair of twin towers, but two!
Yet the traveler had to laugh at how exercised his countrymen had become at the prospect of their ports being owned and run by the corporations of Dubai, when here, right here in the center of the city, Jumeirah had planted its flag and boldly raised it high.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 705
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