Things fall together
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- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- August 6
- August 7
- August 12 – 2 to 4 a.m.
- August 13 – Ajat – Midafternoon
- August 17 – Early Afternoon
- August 18 – Leiden, Netherlands
- August 19
- August 20 – Haarlem
- August 20 – Early Afternoon
- August 27 – Paris
- September 13
- November 6 – Le G. – Early Morning
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July 25 – Evening For days you’ve seen posters along the local roads for a traveling circus – touring all the nearby towns. You catch up with Cirque Ullman in Thenon just after nightfall, wend your way through the crowd toward the chain of red wagons semi-circling the ring, Gwen in the lead. Find three seats together, reasonably close to the action. Barnum it ain’t, nor Big Apple – silly even to make the comparison, this is la France profonde. You drift into a suspended state that matches the show’s unhurried pace, when midway through, quite unexpectedly, comes its star turn: Katia et ses Fauves. Compactly-built, with an exquisite oval face, Katia – whom you suspect, though not by resemblance, is the ogre-like ringmaster’s daughter – puts the lions through their paces with verve. But beauty’s time-honored dominion over savagery only serves as an entrée. With the fauves returned to their cages and pacing in the background, Katia delivers up a series of ever more complex and risky acrobatic and balancing stunts, her movements so self-contained and precisely focused, she reminds you weirdly of Rostropovich, the night you saw him perform solo at Royal Festival Hall thirty five years past. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 314
Audible gasps, some of them yours, at the completion of each feat, whereupon she strikes a “tada!” pose – with a twist. Gazing out somewhere beyond the audience, Katia offers a half smile, draws her hand across her face in a kind of arabesque, as though both masking and revealing a subtle transformation of her features. “Regard,” her gesture telegraphs, “I possess a wonderful secret, but my lips are sealed.”
An ancient market town, known for its inbreeding, and the resulting mad folks and idiots. But you see no evidence of this until, urgently needing to pee, you stop into a hole-in-the-wall bar on a side street, order a café, and fall into a conversation in horrible franglais with three distinctly lupine fellows, one of them the patron, that eventually works its way round to the putative craziness of George Bush. Seeing that you are in accord with them, one of the men throws his arms around you, kisses you on both cheeks, and embraces you like a brother. A great deal of genial, raucous laughter, but it feels as though you’ve stumbled into a medieval farce, particularly as it begins to dawn on you that all these guys look very similar indeed.
That encounter was a lagniappe. What you came to Sarlat for is the marché and it’s an amazing one – most of it spread across the square, but continuing indoors, enclosed by the nave of a half-destroyed gothic church, its vaulted arches soaring high above the stalls. The immense doors are of modern vintage and made of burnished industrial steel. Painted across them midway up, in bold fire-engine red letters, a quote from Baudrillard:
mixture of nostalgia and extreme anticipation.
Everywhere, each day, some sign calls you back to New York. Which is when you remember you need to buy a gift for Juan and Maria’s newborn – not so newborn, actually – four months old by now. Where are they – have they left for Germany yet? Near the market, you find a shop that sells enameled cups and plates. Ah, here’s a little white cup imprinted with ducks. A big handle, easy to grab. This’ll do the trick. Anna Luna – that’s her name. You’ll see Juan at the café when you get back and give it to him then. If they’ve already transplanted, no problem – it’s durable enough to send abroad without fear of damage.
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August 6 Gwen’s had a little gap between her front teeth since the permanent ones appeared. But she says it here, in the bathroom at : “Whenever I want to look at the World Trade Center, I look in the mirror and smile.”
Work on the novel proceeds apace. What was called Year’s Utopia has become Orogene. The good news is that most of the characters and plotlines will survive. But this is not a revision, it’s got to be a full rewrite – language mowed down to the ground, ploughed under – not a sentence left standing.
You promised Gwen that she could have her ears pierced when she turned ten. She’s been lobbying for years, and now three whole weeks have passed since the official date. Patience, patience. Only now, in Montignac, a little town where, under the right circumstances, you can imagine spending the rest of your life, do means, motive, and opportunity converge. Just past the bridge over the Vézère you spot a little jewelry shop and cross the street to look inside the window. A tasteful selection of earrings. Gwen fancies those studs there. It’s midday, but the shop is open. Enter. The bell on the door tinkles, the jeweler comes forward to the counter. Tu
dis: Bonjour. Pantomime: do you pierce? Mais oui. Friendly, but serious. This is the man into whose hands you are delivering the fate of your child’s ears. He meets your eyes and you decide you trust him. He steps out of the room and quickly returns wearing a white lab coat. Gently, but with precise formality, he sits Gwen in a straight-backed chair, wipes her earlobes with alcohol, marks tiny dots on them with a felt tipped pen, looks at her straight on to check their symmetry, raises the CO 2 gun –
pwok! – one’s done and she’s scarcely had time to blink. Pwok! number two, and c’est un fait accompli. Fast and painless, not like in her mother’s day. Another Rubicon crossed. How many more to go?
Gwen asleep inside, you and Katie drag chaise-longues thirty meters or so out into the open meadow, cover up with blankets and gaze up at the sky. No lights
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the meteor shower and a great visual stillness sets in. You wait what must be ten minutes and wonder is that it – are they all done? And then, just as you’re glazing over, eight or nine flash by in succession, from an unexpected quadrant of the heavens. Katie’s annual birthday gift of Leonids.
Gwen frolics in the piscine – she’s found a couple of girls to play aquatic volleyball with. Papa does his best to chill out, lies down on a towel at the edge of the concrete perimeter, opens Bloch’s Principle of Hope. “Functionalist architecture reflects and doubles the ice-cold automatic world of commercial society –“
A swallowtailed butterfly lights on his right knee. Tickles. What to do? Book tented on his chest, he waits. It’s gorgeous. His breathing slows.
A great splash from the pool, someone’s cannonballed in at this end. No spray hits, just displaced air. The creature’s flown.
Tomorrow to Brive, then by train through Paris, to Leiden. Begin to feel your way toward a farewell.
These past weeks you’ve worked at the novel in a way you’ve rarely had the opportunity to write before, intensely, but without a clock of obligations ticking loudly in your ear, nor punctuation of alarms. So the metaphor’s come, and it’s fits Périgord, that you’re cracking walnuts – each sentence is another hard little spheroid, and you’ve got to find the seam of it, and apply pressure just so if you’re going to separate the shell halves without damaging the meat inside. Bagsful of walnuts to go, far too many nuts to count. But given what you’ve gotten done, so much more than you could’ve accomplished in New York, there’s hope. And you’re grateful for it.
• • •
Evening. You noticed it the first day, but only now do you tilt the lamp to read in full the handwriting penciled on the wall of the gîte, just to the right of the door. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 317
with a valentine heart made of red foil.
9 E DE STRASBOURG DU 20 SEPT. 1939 AU 10 DEC. VIVE L’ALSACE ET LA DORDOGNE À BAS HITLER! And their names:
No seats to be had three abreast on the Paris-Rotterdam train, so you take a place on the aisle in the row just behind Katie and Gwen. Next to you in the window seat, reading, a young woman, black, pretty in profile. She turns toward you once, smiles, and you catch a flash from the small gold cross on the chain around her neck before she returns to France Dimanche. You can’t resist the New York subway sidelong glance. There are the towers afire, the iconic wreckage, the straight-on face of Mohammed Atta and the boldface headline: “C’est l’armée americaine qui a détruit les tours du World Trade Center!” Double take. Of all the gin joints in all the towns…
She’s either so absorbed she doesn’t notice, or doesn’t mind your peering over her shoulder. Aha, the article is an interview with Thierry Meyssan, one of the authors of The Frightful Lie. No way you read the fine type so you work at translating the breakout box: Plus que bizarre: le passeport du pilote d’un avions meurtriers a été retrouvé
murderous airplanes was retrieved spotless from the wreckage.
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A new word learned in reading: saccade – rapid eye movements from one fixed point to another.
Certainly not silent, these walls of Leiden. Starting high up and running across and down a whole apartment building’s side at the corner of Langebrug and Diefsteeg:
Riposte
Love is like water or the air my townspeople: it cleans, and dissipates evil gasses. It is like poetry too and for the same reasons Love is so precious my townspeople: that if I were you I would have it under lock and key – like the air or the Atlantic or like poetry! – William Carlos Williams
The Blue Stone, laid down on Breestraat in the 14th century – at the crossroads of the Hospital, Meethall, Woolhouse and Cloth Hall quarters – served as the town’s gravitational center. From investitures to executions, every kind of public ceremony was held above and around it. Dug up in modern times, it’s in the museum now.
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Paniers packed with lunch, you’re setting off to cycle from Leiden along the bike path to the beach. Rich heads the procession, followed by Ellen, their two boys, Gwen, Katie and yo. Nearly out of town when Rich pulls over, leans his bike against the kickstand and trots into a shop. He’s out again in no time and bearing a bag from which he presses into your hand, before you can you form a thought, a cold can of Heineken. He snaps one open himself, hops back on his bike and resumes the lead, looks back to make sure all the ducks are in line. Does he favor you with a wink?
Somehow you feel enormously uncoordinated, like Gerald Ford, trying to bicycle and drink beer at the same time. Hot sun and the beginnings of a buzz. Along the path, a sign points to Katwijk and it’s no exaggeration that you almost careen off the blacktop and into the dunes. This is it, the same path you biked along with Justina, you nineteen and she twenty, just met that morning at the Amsterdam youth hostel. You talk, she laughs and decides to rent a bike. When the sun goes down, you’ll build a fire on the beach, unzip your sleeping bags and spread them carefully one on top of the other. They won’t stay that way long, twisted soon, and the sex, not her first, but yours, spiced with sand. You’re way too fast, but thankfully Justina’s a tolerant soul, and anyway, what’s youth for but quick rebounds?
Stars when the fire goes out. Comes a flash in the dead of night. Two cops. Blinking, you catch the jist of what they’re saying: it is forbidden to sleep on the beach. Ah, yes, you didn’t know. It’s an awkward moment. But the year is nineteen sixty-eight. And in truth, there’s nothing to get hung about. So they look at one another, shrug and then they’re off down the strand, lightbeams sweeping to and fro before them. You remember thinking if you had some dope, you’d have hooked them up.
The morning dawns gray. You and Justina cycle, headed vaguely toward Paris, along a path flat as a pancake, past immense concrete bunkers, long abandoned – the Nazi line of defense – facing out to sea.
At Hôtel Carnavalet, the city museum of Paris, a series of small engravings records the panoply of les petits métiers: street peddlers circa 1630, each captioned with his or her cry: EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 320
Des fin chappeau de papier à vandre! Fine paper hats for sale!
A pâtissier hawks Ratons tout chau’st! – cakes in the shape of rats. And the fruitseller of four seasons calls out her vinegar, cabbage, radishes and onion:
Heading home this afternoon. Coffee’s drained. Deep funk. Same as last year, only worse. Did church bells ring unnoticed, or did the old tune just pop into your head?
“Go so far and no further,” sing the sad bells of Asnières “Pass through, pass through,” call the clear bells of Paris “No life here, no life here,” toll the green bells of Ajat “We never stop ringing!” boast the stout bells of Leiden “No comfort, no comfort,” booms the great bell of New York “Take courage, take courage,” sound the soft bells of Apt “Approach and abide here,” urge the sweet bells of –
Emigrating by inches. Not there yet. September 3 – Midmorning The view from the living room window doesn’t lie. They’re not there any more. Almost robotically, you begin writing an op-ed piece.
It is nearly one year after the fall of the World Trade Center. Gone like the towers themselves is the once-smoldering mound they were reduced to. We have arrived back at the bare foundation that supported these structures, the enormous pit known as the Bathtub – sixteen acres square and five stories deep – now rendered pristine. Yet we are, for all EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 321
on 9/11. How can that be?
In the months since their destruction, the nearly identical towers of the WTC have been retroactively adopted as the preeminent symbol of American culture. But the fact is that the trade towers – immense as they were – existed for their entire thirty year lifespan without really making it onto our collective radar. It has only been belatedly, posthumously, that we’ve became aware of the enormous symbolic importance these particular buildings held for us.
Until the towers were lost, few of us had an inkling of how deeply identified we were with them. We’d made an enormous emotional investment unconsciously, and took the objects of that investment for granted, or simply ignored them. Today, one often hear a sentence begin with “After the World Trade Center…”. This preamble serves as a kind of verbal shorthand to indicate the threshold between a past forever closed behind us, and a new era as yet undefined. But the phrase also contains within it the tacit admission that the towers only really sprang into our awareness at the moment of their obliteration.
Yet there they stood, for just over three decades, begging a host of questions that, even now, months beyond their singular destruction, remain largely unasked.
at being marginalized by the aftermath industry? That it’s galling – all the years you served as Boswell to these two very uncooperative Johnsons – to have your privileged relationship with them ripped away, your painstaking research supplanted by a host of Monday morning quarterbacks rehashing, without attribution, the narrative you assembled – the parts of it, that is, that they find useful – as though they’d thought it all up themselves? Worse yet, Divided… has vanished into obscurity for the second, and final time. Books don’t come up for air thrice like drowning people do.
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Jesus, all it would have taken was for Basic to send out a new press release and buy a couple of ads. Well, why the hell didn’t you do it then? I’m a writer, Jim, not a publicist! See where that gets you.
First and foremost, how did World Trade Center come to be? What forces converged to extrude, out of the bedrock of New York’s financial district, twin buildings that made all previous architectural power plays obsolete – structures so massive and blank-faced that even people well disposed toward their design found it difficult to imagine that, on any given workday, they were filled with humanity.
Conceived just after World War II, though in a very different form, and actively planned as part of a wider Lower Manhattan redevelopment scheme, the trade towers were constructed into the mid-nineteen sixties, at the height of the Vietnam war. As I have documented elsewhere, quite stunning abuses of power had been written into the life of these buildings at every stage. Initiated by banker David Rockefeller and owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the WTC displaced an active and longstanding merchant community called Radio Row and ultimately expropriated sixteen acres of land from the jurisdiction of the City of New York – a seizure upheld by the Supreme Court.
Once built, no feat of the imagination could begin to domesticate the trade center. So there it stood, isolated and immune to mediation – telegraphing not just New York’s greatness, but also America’s claims to global supremacy – asserting in two emphatic strokes of skyscraper domination, both the threat and the promise that America intended to rule the world.
Did Americans see the World Trade Center this way? Probably most of us, even New Yorkers, did not. Even now, the idea of being the frontline city of an empire just doesn’t square with our self-image. But the horror of the towers crumbling ought to have cracked open even the most resolutely clamped-shut eye. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 323
In the World Trade Center’s short and brutal history, before its catastrophic return to earth, we can observe the mechanics of unchecked power on the rise. Between the heroics of construction and the heroics of rescue, search as we may, we will be hardpressed to pull a thread of everyday humanity from the fabric of the tale. If we do find one, it immediately shrinks to insignificance beside the drama of the giants. The fact that at no point could the towers be brought into scale with their surroundings should tell us something about what our attitudes were when we thought it right and proper to build them.
Our awakening, like sleepwalkers, to the discovery that they had so powerful a hold on our imaginations, may offer clues as to the sort of people we have become in the intervening years. Prior to raising new buildings on the WTC’s “hallowed ground,” we would do well to listen to the echoes of what the towers, even in their absence can tell us.
In doing so, let us permit ourselves the possibility of acknowledging the horrific equation between the vast quantity of materiel that comprised these buildings: steel, glass, concrete – millions of tons of it – and the literal pulverization of thousands of people. Let us take into our deepest awareness how nearly instantaneously the seemingly impervious mass of these buildings turned to smoke and dust, and with such extra-human force that we were often denied even the grim affirmation of witnessing the bodies of the dead being brought out of the ruins. Of the majority of the victims, there is simply nothing left to bury, no physical evidence to ground our shock and grief. Our eyes saw such prolific images of destruction, yet there is so little human evidence to wrap our minds around.
If we can find some way to grasp, in its totality, the inhumane-ness of the World Trade Center both as it went up and came down, perhaps we can use this knowledge to feel our way toward a vision of what might be sensible to build where it stood. More broadly, we might begin to ask – and perhaps one day answer in a wiser way than the trade towers did – the question of how to design cities that are workshops for coexistence, not
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see eye to eye? What would the architecture of peace look like?
Aw, fuggedaboudit! What were you thinking? Better keep to your books – however adverse the conditions, they’ve a better shot at seeing the light of print one day.
You insist on getting out of town, spending the day at Jones Beach. Katie accedes, Gwen’s delighted. Much indolence until late afternoon when you commence, at Gwen’s behest, to help her build a sandcastle. She digs like anything, steps back from time to time to keep get some perspective on the grand design. You don’t think, just scoop with your hands, feel the friction, the grit of sand under wearing-down fingernails. Pat things into shape: towers, a moat and a tunnel for the water to flow through underneath a castle if an incoming wave breaches the trench you’ve dug parallel with the shore.
“When did you start?” You look up at a dayglo orange bikini suspended in midair. So close is her tanned skin tone to the darkening sky that you have to blink a few times to make out the woman’s face.
“Around an hour ago,” says Gwen. You stand up, suddenly self-conscious, legs stiff. Brush off your knees and appraise your labors. Though there’s no ziggurat, something about it reminds you of a Sumerian city. “Nice,” says the woman. Bright flash of smile.
central well within the castle. You get back down to work, build a breaking wall to guide the water into the channel. It seems the tide is coming in because you have to buttress the walls evermore frequently. Still you continue raising the superstructure. It’s an art finding the exactly right mix of sand and water that produces a solid tower, neither too granular, nor too soggy, when the bucket’s overturned. By the time you leave, the castle is many-turreted.
Sometime in the dark tonight, the waves will sweep and take care of it all – with infinite patience, rearrange the sand to its cyclic purposes again. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 325
September 13 Pictures are our own surfacing in another place. So said Franz Marc, via Bloch in Principle of Hope.
Some time during the night, amidst the potted lime trees in the Spanish Patio of the Metropolitan Museum, a larger than lifesize 15th century marble statue of Adam (grasping an apple) keeled over and shattered into bits large and small – in any case many. Apparently the plywood base, only two years old but poorly built, gave way beneath the sculpture, a putative masterwork of the transition between the middle ages and renaissance.
This time, no seductive rib-girl precipitated the Fall of Man, just bad carpentry. He crashed to the ground unheard, to be discovered later by a guard on his rounds. The Met puts a brave face on for the Times – promising to restore Adam to his former state so flawlessly that “only the cognoscenti will know.”
You recall the sculpture well, passed it dozens of times, but are certain that the figure possessed a navel. So how could he have been Adam? Or was there an Adam before Adam? In which case this Adam may not be all he’s cracked up to be. Perhaps they’ll restore the statue sans navel – more authentic that way.
Same paper, different page. A fatal accident during a trial run of the Port Authority’s new JFK airport monorail link. As the train negotiated a steep turn, the sixteen thousand pounds of concrete ballast – intended to simulate the mass of human passengers – shifted radically and crushed the motorman. Another marvel of engineering, brought to you by the folks who dug the hole and raised the WTC.
• • •
Look out the window toward nightfall. The sykyline’s gotten very active. Not so much with construction as communication among buildings. More birdlike, their calls to one another. Though we can’t hear them, its clear they’re sentient, that they understand, in their way, what’s going on. You wonder what they think of the
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plays its resources for all it’s worth. Do they read the signals in the atmosphere and talk about them? If only we could still hear the ground and read the sky. Look up. what drama transpires there in the play of light and shadow. And even at the horizon. Or what would be, if you could see it.
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