Things fall together
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Keep working through the Book of Margins. Again Jabès offers up that which you could not name, but which you grasp at in the instant as though you could hold it fast, like a thing: Day after day, my writing has consisted in savagely weeding intruding grass and roots; then in refusing to fertilize my land by slash and burn. …Write to shake off the dust; write at the peak. …Never have you paid particular attention to dust, yet it is the limit of time abolished. You write one last time in the dust because you cannot free yourself of words. You still move within your limits. …You work in the vineyards of death, but you refuse to die this early. …Dust! Air spreads its own suffocation. Every grain in the lot has chosen its victim.
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 183
It begins to come clear that the vast majority of those who died in the trade center were casualties of a decision made a generation before to create unbroken fields of rentable space at the price of tremendous structural vulnerability. These buildings were engineered to resist the pressure of wind and violent impacts, but not the heat of a fire within.
Yet something nags and it goes on the great list of unanswerables. Questions of a certain type one cannot even ask in such an atmosphere. No history of a steel frame building collapsing from a fire before, even blazes that burned hotter and longer. Unlike the towers, WTC7 was a “traditional” steel structure, no Achilles heel at the level of floor joists. So why did that one fail?
And how to account for such incredible pulverization? Like those old novelty games: what’s wrong with this picture? You were always good at spotting the anomaly, but here you have no clue. It just doesn’t add up. But one thing’s sure. If someone wanted war, wanted, in fact, to open up the prospect of eternal war, and usher in an era of unending fear, then those towers coming down made a lever long enough to shift the world.
• • •
Social life continues at its feverish, caffeine-driven pitch, but with a new distinction: we can scarcely bear to look at one another. Smiles more forced than before 9/11, as though a baring of teeth in “friendly” mode might effect a deeper mood shift, turn a snarl into something else – outweigh the heaviness of shame. Nothing righteous about what we’re doing. Yet friendly smiles in the street. Friendly fire over there.
Are our smiles of the same or a different sort than those the song evoked back in the war to end all wars?
and smile, smile, smile… What’s the use in worrying? It never was worthwhile… If we can just smile insistently, relentlessly even, we might yet abolish death, and history besides and have only victories, only punchings of the air and triumphant crows
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stadium, almost black against the sun. Now soar, Harry, soar! You can do it! Win the Quidditch cup for Gryffindor!
• • •
You can beat a dead horse. And if you hit it hard enough, you may get it to bounce upright on its stiffened legs in a semblance of life. Now, how do you get it to run the Kentucky Derby?
A host of opportunities, breathtakingly missed. Peace, like the lady, vanishes.
• • •
All these years of progress and what have we got: subways with lighting that makes people of every complexion look like ash.
Behind this mask is the voice we would have to imitate… And the face of another we would have to tame. – Gérard Macé, (Leçon de Chinois) in Jabès’s …Margins.
– Kafka
November 19
Somewhere between a fingernail and a quarter moon rises ten degrees to the west of the WTC’s filmy plume.
We feign to be roused by injustice; in fact, we are roused only by what suddenly, for a moment, disturbs the comforts we enjoy. –
Jabès, …Margins EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 185
The organism moves along rapidly. From a sore throat, to a stretch, to a sigh. It peers from underneath its hood, takes the sweeping of its fingertips along surfaces for granted. Brushes with those fingertips a swollen gland on its throat, sits with the toe of one sneaker pressed up against the other. Takes its hat off, tosses it in the air. Bang! – shoots into the air in triumph. Bats at piñatas. Fabricates. Cuts and eats what is fabricated by others, by the earth. Gets used to its swollen tongue. Leans in to confabulate. Compensates. Shakes its head to clear the senses. Returns from Buenos Aires. Pays the cabbie through his open window. Mistakes Korean for Chinese.
The organism shifts its weight, becomes conscious for a moment that of its breathing. It sings along to a corredo, feels discomfort, compassion; it sighs, stretches, takes off from La Guardia. It experiences itself as oceanic, immeasurable. Folds itself in half. Runs a tongue over the metal-edged surface of its braces. Worries a loose flap of skin. Imagines that the burden it carries belongs by right to someone else. Leaps out of the water. Feels its lungs fill with something, but can’t tell what it is. Shifts its weight. Waits. You smell macadam, stretch, and see that you’re the road.
An innocent plane passes outside the expected flight pattern. The turbine whines its assertion overhead. Below, we dolls wait to be blown apart. The indirect object of the terror the state directs outward is the subjugation of its own subjects.
• • •
Most conveniently forgotten political lesson: you don’t become more intact by dismembering others. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 186
Will the unacceptable become part of the acceptable? The void is irrigated with blood. – Jabès, …Margins November 27
“Everything changed after September 11.” Did it? Or do a myriad of incremental shifts suddenly achieve recognition in light of a generally acknowledged before and after? Where would we be without the liminal catastrophe to locate us, to permit us, like a door opened onto technicolor to recognize that we’re not in Kansas any more?
Aspects of this new reality – not least the ever-shrinking number of 9/11 fatalities – certainly lends itself to projections of the fantastical. What if it turns out the three thousand never died in the pulverization of the towers? That they simply failed to appear at work on the fateful morning, and have been now tracked down by a special police unit – found living in Belize or some similar paradise?
Out to Sea Cliff for dinner with Katie’s mom. Every bloody place you look, United We Stand signs, flags up the wazoo.
Gobbles America. Goebbels’s America.
God Blast America. Our eyes are watching something, but it surely isn’t God.
Pull quote for an article by Jane Smiley in the Times Magazine: “The pictures of Afghan women that we have been seeing in the last few days have been beautiful, moving and an unequivocal good thing.” Each day, official language presses further into the territory of unmeaning. Does someone write such a sentence – its grammatical torture so evident – in full possession of their will? Can this prose represent the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 187
face, an act of ritualized submission?
December 19 – Early Evening
Katie picks out a cravat that works with your shirt. Attempt to transition into teaching mode. Over the years you’ve fallen into the habit of wearing a tie when you lead Writing X, or meet with individual students. A technique you picked up from Paul who explained it to you once in terms of transference. Whatever the mechanism, it seems that this small, formal gesture on your part permits those who study with you to exercise a greater associative freedom. And to imagine that what they write matters.
Just as you realize that the thin end of your tie is too long and you’ll have to reknot it, a screech of brakes from downstairs and an enormous crash. You walk into the livingroom – the best sightlines in the apartment – and look out the window, but there’s nothing to see. The intersection’s clear. A few cars have pulled over and double parked along the avenue, but none of them seems damaged. Here’s an EMS van too – they certainly came quickly enough – but no signs of any emergency treatment in progress. A moment of cognitive dissonance. How could so violent a sonic event have produced so little visible result? You’re running late so you don’t spend a lot of time trying to logic it out. Plus, when you live twenty floors up, there’s a sense of disconnect from ground level. However loud the bang, since it didn’t shatter your windows and no further alarms followed, it might as well have happened in Timbuktu. Fuggedaboudit.
When you reach the street though, a big Aha! Of course you couldn’t see it from your living room, the corner’s masked by overhanging trees. On the sidewalk, just a few yards from the pathway to your door stood a subway entranceway – standard issue cast iron lantern poles and railings – bolted into the concrete in the era of Edward Hopper, when this was still a neighborhood of tenements.
You moved here in the early sixties when this development was brand new, and in the intervening years must have run or walked up and down the subway steps literally thousands of times, in every conceivable state of mind – once after shaking off three fellow teenagers who’d surrounded you on the platform and credibly advanced the notion of throwing you in front of a train if you didn’t fork over your wallet. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 188
entrance remained a fixture of the scene, hardly noticed its own right, a taken-for- granted constant. Over the years, small changes: its back rail became an armature for two public telephones and an advertising poster. Most recently, color-coded globelamps replaced the classic lanterns. Nothing significant enough to alter its basic nature.
Now a large black SUV squats cattycorner atop the wreckage of poles and globes and railings, covering with its bulk the stairs that, a moment ago in the elevator, you’d previsualized walking down. There’s a comic touch to the angle of the big vehicle – as though it had wanted to drive down the stairs but discovered too late it wouldn’t fit in. A few passersby mill about, intrigued by this spontaneous display of public sculpture. The driver of the SUV strolls calmly round his creation, detached even, mobile phone pressed to his ear. “Ah, yeah, well, I’d be there now, but, uh, something came up…”. A cab’s parked just across 25th Street. The driver stands leaning against it, looking on. Saw it all, he says: the EMS van was heading west and ran the light. The SUV, zooming northbound, swerved to avoid hitting it, jumped the curb.
• • •
You return, four hours later to find the wrecked SUV vanished and the subway entrance encased in a plywood sarcophagus festooned with strips of yellow “caution” tape. A surviving column, one of four, juts out, its globe shattered. Somehow what remains of the structure heroically supports the unmarred advertisement: WKTU 103.5
Upstairs in time for late dinner and the 11 o’clock news: on the ninety-ninth day, the fire in the ruin has finally been put out. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 189
THE MAN AT TABLE 4 December 20, 2001 – December 20, 2003
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 190
Who can count the dust of Jacob? – Numbers, 20:13 EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 191
1 THE SORRYASS BUSINESS
December 20, 2001 – Le G. – Midafternoon
Conversation with Tobias at the café. He mentions that Sebald was killed last week in a car crash in England – a daughter, with whom he was driving, seriously hurt. You can’t help but think: why this one? Why one whose work seemed so poised for further evolution? And then: well, he pushed matters as far as he could in the time he had. Was he aware of what he was doing, how he moved the whole framing device: the idea of what may be told to whom and by whom, and under what circumstances of telling – of story and remembrance-making – into new relationships, proportions, asymmetries, units of weight and measure? And in a mode that seemed the inversion of the post-modern: seamless prose to glide over, radical disjunction beneath, so you might not notice, until it sneaks up on you, that you’re more than implicated – that the subject, the subject cyclically shattered and reconstituted, is, or might be, you.
Crossing 25th Street toward home, you notice the johnny pump that got knocked over the night an SUV jumped the curb and plowed into the subway entrance late last year still lies on the sidewalk nearby. It’s ridiculous, of course, but your imagination projects the fireplug as a wounded creature, immobile, helplessly mourning the smashed railings and lantern posts of its dead companion. Then the civic order freak in you – the gremlin that lurks inside every New Yorker – kicks in: just wait, someone will
passing thought to dragging the hydrant over to the edge of the curb to minimize the obstruction, but again, like a New Yorker, leave the job to someone else. Apparently a knocked-over johnny pump constitutes debris of a different order than a wrecked subway entrance and therefore gets hauled away by another department, which hasn’t gotten round to it yet.
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 192
“What is Sexy in the Wake of September 11?” – headline in The Onion • • •
You set up the electric trains of your youth in a circle around the fiberboard case for your steel drum which, covered in a white cloth, serves as a base for the Christmas tree. The whole process, even of steel-wooling the rust off the tracks and then connecting them is of much delight to G. She adjusts the position of the searchlight mounted on the flatcar so that it shines up on an angle and its rays glance off the ornaments as the train goes round – the effect particularly striking when you turn the room lights off. And with wooden blocks, you’ve build a series of arches over the tracks for the train to pass through.
Someone, perhaps the water department, perhaps an artifact-hunter with a strong back and a van, has taken away the johnny pump that lay at the boarded-up subway entrance.
Deck the halls. G’wan, deck ‘em. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 193
2002
not always pleasant. As you trudged wearily toward your dorm for a nap before dinner in a too-early dusk, you made out shape of one of your students approaching on the only-room-for-one path trodden through the calf-high snow. When you got close enough, you saw her face flushed with excitement beneath her wool hat. Normally undemonstrative, she enfolded you in a hug and delivered the news that her graduating class has voted you commencement speaker in July. So knackered from a daysworth of teaching, you acknowledged the honor in a perfunctory kind of way and the two of you maneuvered around one another to continue on your opposite trajectories. But as you reached the dorm’s slippery porch, you caught an unbidden lump rising up in your throat. Your reserve shot. Eyes filled. Took some breaths since tears freeze on the cheeks in weather like this. Phoned Katie and Gwen. They’re happy at the news, though they really can’t imagine – how could they? – what this means to you.
Back from the Northeast Kingdom you begin reading William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. The volume nearly leaped off the shelf into your hands at Rivendell Books, Montpelier’s wonderful second hand bookstore where you invariably find what you’ve been searching for, whether you knew it or not. A semi-crumbling New Directions paperback from 1956 with an incredible b/w photo on the cover: what turns out to be WCW’s open hand, palm up, as though about to receive some offering. First published in 1925 in what can only be called a hog time for the nation. Which makes his excoriating tone, his enraged poetics of history all the more immediate. You have to read each piece several times, first to adapt to the key and cadence. Adamant Puritan hearts of stone and literalist “reason.” The wages of which we’re paying even
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 194
McCarthy’s reign. No wonder it’s sunk so out of hearing again.
How does arrogance come into the world? • • •
Osama
bin Enron.
January 15 – Le G. – Early Morning German-Jewish Steve has brought his Mercedes into Manhattan for a tune up. Sits next to you at Table 5. Always bemused, ever detached. Or so he seems. Today offers up the nugget that Bismarck had declared a special provenance for fools, drunks and the U.S. of A.
• • •
Four stages of Medieval drunkenness corresponding to the humors: Lion drunk: choleric, hot and dry; fire. Ape drunk: sanguine, hot and moist; air. Mutton-drunk: phlegmatic, cold and moist; water. Swine drunk: melancholic, cold and dry; earth.
• • •
A new postcard graces the bathroom racks at Le Gamin: “Even Heroes Need To Talk.” White on a baby blue background. On the reverse, a toll-free number for “when you do” (1-800-LIFENET) coupled with the bracing motto: New York Needs Us Strong. Thus September 11 has delivered the talking cure its ultimate victory via the good offices of the New York City Health Department EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 195
to Feel Better.” How many slogans can you fit on a four by six inch card?
Exit the WC and turn toward the magazine rack. On the cover of the NY Post a familiar face you can’t immediately recognize, surmounted by the headline “Ring of Love.” Read the finer print. The smiling, middle aged blonde woman with pink-cheeks turns out to be your old client Berry Berenson. She died when her plane hit one of the towers, and her ring, a strange trinket ornamented with a kind of cross, was apparently identified by a friend who’d spotted it in a photograph of excavated mementoes published in a previous edition of Hamilton’s barrel organ. No report on the condition of the ring bearer, whether dust or something that a sieve would catch.
You knew nothing of Berry’s life these past thirty years. Weren’t even aware that she’d married Anthony Perkins, and was widowed by him. But back in the grim post- movement days, you, Danny of the Joe Stalin moustache and the occasional Vince had renovated her living loft cum photo studio, installed pulleys to hoist her rolls of seamless paper, and stenciled huge lipstick kisses on the white-painted bricks of her bathroom.
Berry had been a dream to work for. Cooperative, no attitude, paid on time, loved to collaborate on design ideas, then left you free to do your work. And she turned you on to her rolodex of fast and fashionable friends who discovered that having their painting and plastering done by an ex-heavy revolutionary without portfolio lent the enterprise a kind of unspoken panache, or as the phrase went: radical chic. You and Danny and Vince were one jump from being street people in those days, and the Superstars and rich hippies liked to have you around, gussying up their pads and making the rough plain, bringing light to the gathering darkness. There must have been something about you that felt echt – just as the culture was kicking its feet at the top of the great commodity slide. Though relentlessly apolitical, they could look at you and recognize a possible self, one that had ascended to unimaginable heights – had in fact been to the mountaintop – then plunged back into the valley, intact enough still to embody the tale.
And it came to you, looking at her life-sized ink-on-newsprint face, a generation aged, that if you had permitted yourself to back then, you might have been attracted to EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 196
But not really.
Well into the month of Janus – god protector of doors and gateways. He begins as an emissary of light, opens the sky at daybreak and closes it at night, eventually evolves into a general-purpose deity of beginnings and endings, entrances and exits, depicted as looking both toward the past and future. It is this double faced image of him that appears on Roman coins. A temple to Janus was built near the forum in Rome. According to legend, the temple doors were kept open in wartime and locked only in times of peace – only four times from the earliest kings until the reign of Augustus.
Now he rules over the end of one year and the beginning of another. And then there are Janitors – persons who once presided over comings and goings.
You’re so out of time, that despite the date, it takes you this long to realize it’s January, and that whoever it was destroyed the towers blew our doors off. • • •
Pane e cioccolato. Meet W. for afternoon coffee. It is only with him and a few others that you can share astonishment and nausea over the degradations of the moment, which pile up like the snow we so infrequently get here any more. You talk about Baudrillard’s L’espirit du terrorism – his placid, measured, refusal to be pulled into an ideological game.
W. says that a Der Spiegel report on Mohammad Atta, a.k.a. “the Hamburg Terrorist,” referred to him and the other September 11 hijackers as “murderers.” W. wrote the editor requesting the name of the court they’d been convicted in. Of course he has received no reply.
• • •
Amazing that you didn’t write this down before. Back in November last year, Katie opened the Visa bill and found this astronomical charge from your ISP for hosting EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 197
reassured her, they probably added some zeroes by accident. But no, the charges were real. Between September 11 and the month’s end, over three hundred fifty thousand visitors had clicked seven million times through the pages of the Living Archive of New York’s
Calm in the face of a $10,000 claim – supremely so since there was no way you could pay it, you began to negotiate a lesser fee with your webhost and found to your surprise that without much ado, they dropped the charges altogether. Your site wasn’t, after all, a profit-making venture, and the inclination toward spontaneous generosity still hung in the air. You also learned how to log in and monitor the visits, saw for yourself, in bar graph form, the virtual seismology of the “event”: flat, flat, flat, then an enormous tower of hits. A small step down for October and a gradual descent to a new, much higher plateau. Still running at a rate of several thousand visits per day, whereas before 9/11, you got maybe a thousand a month.
The numbers contain a kind of brute evidence. But of what? You’d love to know what passes through the minds of the clickers. No gauges for that.
Spent the morning trying to unlock a frozen heart. Looked at kilims yesterday and other gorgeously patterned carpets – contemporary ones that have the feel of wool mixed with silk. Now to work. Run your hand over the cover Katie made for your iBook. Rough fabric, like a tapestry. A frontier scene – a town with a saloon, a corral and cowboys riding broncos and unexpectedly lush deciduous trees. Find a way to weave yourself in.
• • •
The target is not Osama bin Laden. That is a projection. There is, inside us all, a little fellow with a musket, standing on a high peak, looking out trying to reconcile with the infinite. When that little fellow is bombed off his mountaintop, and comes down into the valley to sit on a couch and watch TV, the war will be won.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 198
Infinite hate for the infinite. • • •
Want to be the Bodhisattva of the Last Train Out. • • •
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