awake asleep awake asleep awake
What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. - Walter Benjamin, Dream Kitsch (1927)
Before Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project was what it is,
[what is it? hard to say]
it was a version of Sleeping Beauty. WB conceived a much more modest project which would fulfill Marx’s prophecy about the reform of consciousness by “awakening…the world from its dream about itself”. But his manuscript grew and grew and his friends convinced him he needed to know more actual Marx before he could write with authority about capitalism.
In this abandoned (or maybe it’s more accurate to say “buried”) story the world is Sleeping Beauty, the Prince is Marx?, and capitalism is the evil fairy. Or capitalism is the poison apple — no, that’s another story of enchanted sleep. Or maybe it’s Eve’s story. “Mister, I met a man once…"
When I lived alone for a little while I painted a sentence on my wall, over the bed.
"Those who sleep are workers and share in the activities going on in the universe.”
Was it a Plotinus quote? no, Heraclitus. Plotinus was a neoplatonist. Heraclitus, if anything, a pre-Platonist. What I know about Philosophy you could fit in a thimble. Still...
The most famous sentence associated with Heraclitus is the one about not being able to step in the same river twice. He was all about flow, and the fact that things which appear to be opposite are really the same thing. Maybe. Both Hegel and Engels credit him with the “invention” of dialectics. Another idea he’s associated with is that fire is the root of all matter, which might be why I suspect I first read about him in Julius Evola’s The Metaphysics of Sex. Julius of Evola is not the most wholesome of references but my net was cast a little wide in those days and M of S is the one J of E book that was embraced by the “New Age”, which should tell you something about the ultimate politics of those ideas.
The problem with lighting on “fire” is that it’s the least stable of any element and an odd choice as an ultimate reality. It is always consuming itself. It “lives” through conspicuous consumption.
The burning of fuel, unnecessarily. We drive back up to the country, narrowly avoiding the Trump-Nutz, truck nuts “rally” taking place on a nearby bridge. Enormous flags and pickup trucks jamming traffic between Tarrytown and Nyack. They love their cars, their gas-sucking cars. They feel safe in there.
We’d brought my mother over for a visit last week, tag-teaming it with my sister in western Massachusetts. My mother drove to my sister’s and then my sister drove my mother out to meet me at a gas station in Chatham. I took it from there. Some conspicuous consumption of our own. (But it’s a Hybrid!) The last day of her visit we went to a park with walking trails and a fabulous view of the Hudson. On the drive back we encountered a Trump “rally” at the intersection of 9 and 9G: maybe six or seven pick-ups, Trump banners and American flags sticking out of every available auto-orifice. Mom shakes her head and her tiny fist at them.
The writing was on the wall, literally on the wall, painted in gold. It went the whole length of my bed. I had scene paint left over from a set I’d made for a play an old friend was directing, and cheesecloth dyed purple for curtains. I can’t say much more about the play now though I did find a program from it a while back and, scanning the names to see if there were any I recognized, realized that Marisa Tomei had a part in it.
(Was it Marisa Tomei? I don’t have the program with me, it’s buried in our life back in NYC which we have not participated in fully for the last seven months. I remember showing Stan and I remember thinking about Melrose Place so, probably not Marisa Tomei. Daphne Zuniga maybe? IMDB tells me she’d only appeared in Quarterback Princess and The Dorm That Dripped Blood before that date so it’s possible.)
When I lived there, in that apartment where I painted slogans on the wall, the buildings across the street were all empty and boarded up. It was that kind of time. Some of them still had stoops and there were men who slept on the stoops, arranging themselves every evening and most mornings cops would come by and “evict” them and they’d have to recreate everything the next night.
When I lived there, lots of vacant space still around though it was getting filled in all the time.
“The American Dream”. Sure everyone talks about it, plays with the phrase, makes it nightmare, etc. Does any other country have such a peculiar idiom? Why do we need to dream; can’t we just be awake?
While we were back in the city, I walked as much as I could but there was a lot of rain and I had people to see. The last morning, Sunday, an old route: up Amsterdam, turn right after the halal chickens, down one of the streets whose numbering got skewed in post-war development (where Columbia is now seeping in like an ink stain). Galleries temporarily closed (or gone? surely this was Gavin Brown but now looks to be an outpost of the Studio Museum of Harlem, encountered everywhere, open nowhere). A group of men, one woman, who are camped out under scaffolding, just like the old days. The last one in the row speaks to me, tells me…what? I can’t remember now the shape of the platitude but it is meant kindly but also (this part is heartbreaking) to demonstrate that he knows what the niceties are and he wants no trouble.
“You too” I call out, hating myself.
Along St. Nicholas, a parked car which I’ve seen before, here probably, the dashboard and back window full of small stuffed animals, “Peace” in the right-hand back window, which reminds me of a car that I kept seeing parked on our street the last last time we were in the city, a sign in the same spot reading No Justice No Peace, on cardboard, same kind of sign in the same space where we used to put the No Radio sign back in the old days.
Well not me since I didn’t have a car then but you get the picture.
No Justice
No Peace
No Radio
This time I keep coming across one of the dumber sidewalk stencils:
Don’t Panic,
Just Believe
(and I remember clearly the de la Vega era, so that’s something. Truth be told, as someone whose original NYC was peppered with the works of SAMO, I am just a snob).
But… just believe what? isn’t that the problem? people “just believe” all kinds of nonsense. To my ear it sounds too similar to “do your own research”. I've read Julius Evola, I know too well the perils of auto-didacticism.
The Sleepwalkers is a book about WW1 which happened because people were tired of the 19th century. It’s true, look it up.
Further up St Nicholas, KBL Studios has giant blow-up Halloween decorations set up directly across from the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses: a dragon, a spider, an all-seeing eye. Curious how the Witnesses are taking it. I know they’re not allowed Halloween. In Brooklyn, they had tunnels everywhere to avoid being on the street, brushing up against the damned.
A couple blocks north a vacant lot boarded up, former home of St. Nick’s Pub, the last in a long line of clubs occupying this spot since the 1930s. There was a fire here in 2018 (the club closed — finally? — several years prior; it had been operating without a liquor license). It was being used as a location shot for Motherless Brooklyn, which generated numerous lawsuits (a firefighter died, people in adjacent buildings were “unhoused”). In front of the plywood stands a — permanent? something oddly contingent about it — heavily shellacked Celtic cross. 5-5-5-5 NeverForget.
5-5-5-5 is the radio call code for a death “in the line of duty”; NeverForget is the slogan we attach to everything now.
Around the corner, the blue and white awning of a former bodega (probably) has been re-purposed, painted over and reads “African Movies”. On closer look, the tracks of the former letters read SHOE REPAIR — the painter has grabbed the H of shoe and turned it into HUMBLE; besides movies, the featured stock is t-shirts, men’s boxers, thermal shirts, hand bags, hats and oils, but I’ve never been past when it was open.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE written on the closed gate of a Mexican grocery in some “appropriate” typeface style: Taco Modern maybe or Rojo Frijoles.
Se renta un cuarto.
Samana Mansion, on Fort Washington, heading back downtown. When I look it up later (built in 1920, the name obviously came with it) I only get a page which appears to be translated for me from the Spanish the google search result indicates as its original language, which may explain this odd phrase:
“moving to this community gives you a number of nearby experiences”
Walter Benjamin quote I come across in reading for class: “Motif of dream time: atmosphere of aquariums. Water slackening resistance”.
Except I read it as “Walter slackening resistance."
And then, on the way out of town, in the rain, Regina’s ghost, crossing Broadway. She practiced Candomblé and lived on the tenth floor. Did she die before or during Covid? I can’t remember now.
2 november 2020
addendum: it was neither Marisa Tomei or Daphne Zuniga. Who knows why that stuck in my head.
