Dodging Armageddon
Notes On a Dancing Wu Li Master of Urban-Narrative Physics
Imagine the diarist at his twentieth-floor window.
Looking out the same boyhood portal that has beckoned
every morning since Wonderama and Similac. Here,
never does the city never change. Grow up, move piano,
replace old curtains, grow beard, lose hair, walk squalling
newborn to and fro past the matrix of lights, re-caulk sill,
send newborn to Cooper Union to learn to paint like Vermeer.
Never does the city never change.
Of course not. Of course.
Imagine, year upon year, the diarist harvesting notes—
mental, verbal, musical, typographic, photographic.
Up and down the twenty floors, sky to pavement, pavement
back to sky. (Buddha Sez: You never step into the same
elevator twice.) Sole after plimsole, beaten down
to canvas. (They tried to stop me, but I had on my Converse.)
Pencil after pencil, scorched in a Fresh Kills puja
to appease the city’s storytelling gods. Shaken, not stirred,
into entries less Woolf than Nijinsky. Less an ephemeris,
more an augury from the I Ching weather channel on
particle-consciousness motion.
More Woodstock than Burning Man, more Callas than Zorn.
Walk the diarist’s walk. His notes harvest you, too.
You are J, S, F, K: city tribe conjured by initial alone, raw
evidence of puro mente y libre corazon. Pocking the asphalt
haze with darts of clarity, real or imagined. Things you still
recognize between cranes and girders ghosting the old
book district. Places you once and future knew.
Where coffee is served in a cup the color of morning order.
Where the scent of geography books cracked open at first period
suggests a world outside P.S. 41—a dimension where this spoon
at Taza de Oro, and that chopstick at Hop Kee, buddy up
to eating with the right hand, and the right hand only,
in a faraway Fez medina.
A chorus of the real, who never meet,
yet exhale the Angelus as one
in the diarist's bell tower.
(Snug as a bug in the CIA’s rug)
Then are, singly and collectively, transfigured into
the synchronal Tao. Where the address keeps changing.
Where, like jazz, the note that changes is sovereign.
For a moment so brief it might never have occurred.
Yet leaves its imprint everywhere. These notes,
urban oratorio fitted out in shadow comedy— special,
definitive, emphasis on shadow—
plot a denouement of implicit composure, stubbornly
rising, unassailable proof of long-fomenting catastrophe.
More Antonioni than Kurasawa, more "Z" than "Salo".
Suzuki Roshi, on his deathbed:
"I am not afraid to die, because I know who I am."
The self-regenerating body of the city— hidebound
locus of self-consuming flux, still heaving its first breath
alongside its last— has no fear of death.
Does this balls-out, music-hall act necessarily indicate
the city knoweth itself?
Of course. Of course not. Of course
every one thing disappears into another,
grain of sand into nub of wheat, dune of
loss into life.
Of course, our scarred hands know not what to do
with figment compartments broken and re-broken,
but to reseal (by force of will) and re-break again
(in service to the forces of natural decay).
Of course the city, like the samurai, knows it is dead already.
nothing is what we think it is
no one is who we think they are
we never are who we think we are
More Hopper than Weejee. More Bearden,
lit by Vermeer, than Schiele illuminated
by Schjeldahl. Less ripped to shreds by Burroughs
than eased into bandages by Mother Seton.
Of course not.
The motion, like the Tao, never ceases.
With every footfall down West Street
to Ground Zero, over the African burial ground,
past the silent cenotaph of the old TV-tube district,
the Angelus sounds.
Across the harbor it calls a perfect, unknowable
nothingness, blind and disperse as gangway fog,
gently returning the unstained original self of the city
to a state of permanent repeal.
ericdarton.net, 2010
(Eric Darton, author, Divided We Stand: A History of the World Trade Center, Basic Books).
Sections
Dodging Armageddon
Notes On a Dancing Wu Li Master of Urban-Narrative Physics
Imagine the diarist at his twentieth-floor window.
Looking out the same boyhood portal that has beckoned
every morning since Wonderama and Similac. Here,
never does the city never change. Grow up, move piano,
replace old curtains, grow beard, lose hair, walk squalling
newborn to and fro past the matrix of lights, re-caulk sill,
send newborn to Cooper Union to learn to paint like Vermeer.
Never does the city never change.
Of course not. Of course.
Imagine, year upon year, the diarist harvesting notes—
mental, verbal, musical, typographic, photographic.
Up and down the twenty floors, sky to pavement, pavement
back to sky. (Buddha Sez: You never step into the same
elevator twice.) Sole after plimsole, beaten down
to canvas. (They tried to stop me, but I had on my Converse.)
Pencil after pencil, scorched in a Fresh Kills puja
to appease the city’s storytelling gods. Shaken, not stirred,
into entries less Woolf than Nijinsky. Less an ephemeris,
more an augury from the I Ching weather channel on
particle-consciousness motion.
More Woodstock than Burning Man, more Callas than Zorn.
Walk the diarist’s walk. His notes harvest you, too.
You are J, S, F, K: city tribe conjured by initial alone, raw
evidence of puro mente y libre corazon. Pocking the asphalt
haze with darts of clarity, real or imagined. Things you still
recognize between cranes and girders ghosting the old
book district. Places you once and future knew.
Where coffee is served in a cup the color of morning order.
Where the scent of geography books cracked open at first period
suggests a world outside P.S. 41—a dimension where this spoon
at Taza de Oro, and that chopstick at Hop Kee, buddy up
to eating with the right hand, and the right hand only,
in a faraway Fez medina.
A chorus of the real, who never meet,
yet exhale the Angelus as one
in the diarist's bell tower.
(Snug as a bug in the CIA’s rug)
Then are, singly and collectively, transfigured into
the synchronal Tao. Where the address keeps changing.
Where, like jazz, the note that changes is sovereign.
For a moment so brief it might never have occurred.
Yet leaves its imprint everywhere. These notes,
urban oratorio fitted out in shadow comedy— special,
definitive, emphasis on shadow—
plot a denouement of implicit composure, stubbornly
rising, unassailable proof of long-fomenting catastrophe.
More Antonioni than Kurasawa, more "Z" than "Salo".
Suzuki Roshi, on his deathbed:
"I am not afraid to die, because I know who I am."
The self-regenerating body of the city— hidebound
locus of self-consuming flux, still heaving its first breath
alongside its last— has no fear of death.
Does this balls-out, music-hall act necessarily indicate
the city knoweth itself?
Of course. Of course not. Of course
every one thing disappears into another,
grain of sand into nub of wheat, dune of
loss into life.
Of course, our scarred hands know not what to do
with figment compartments broken and re-broken,
but to reseal (by force of will) and re-break again
(in service to the forces of natural decay).
Of course the city, like the samurai, knows it is dead already.
nothing is what we think it is
no one is who we think they are
we never are who we think we are
More Hopper than Weejee. More Bearden,
lit by Vermeer, than Schiele illuminated
by Schjeldahl. Less ripped to shreds by Burroughs
than eased into bandages by Mother Seton.
Of course not.
The motion, like the Tao, never ceases.
With every footfall down West Street
to Ground Zero, over the African burial ground,
past the silent cenotaph of the old TV-tube district,
the Angelus sounds.
Across the harbor it calls a perfect, unknowable
nothingness, blind and disperse as gangway fog,
gently returning the unstained original self of the city
to a state of permanent repeal.
ericdarton.net, 2010
(Eric Darton, author, Divided We Stand: A History of the World Trade Center, Basic Books).
Sections