THE COSMIC FOLLIES:

BENJAMIN.

I'm always amazed at the way Americans use the word "history". You're history, man! A total obliteration. No one needs the past. Everything starts from right now. Who needs memory?

At the northern end of Cooper Square, in the Village, where Saint Marks Place, Astor Place, Lafayette, 8th and Stuyvesant cross Fourth and Third Avenues, there is a giant cube, placed diagonally so that it seems to rest on a point. If you put your shoulder to the cube and push with all your strength, you can rotate it, very slowly, and uselessly. A lever to fail to move the world. Interactive art. Its no longer enough to think. You have to touch and feel.

A blustery day, the wind against me as I cross Broadway, past Washington Square. The skateboarders practically windsurfing and the chess players driven away by the spattering rain. Storm warnings up and down the coast. Hurricane Hilda. Why are they always named for the ladies?

On my way to Caroline. Battering past the signposts. UNNECESSARY NOISE PROHIBITED. That one always gets to me in this city. I've read my Barthes, I know we are a society of signs, chasing the invisible signifier. NO STANDING! ONE WAY! LOCAL TRAFFIC! YO FAGGOT! MEAT, TECHNO-TRIBAL, HEART-BREAK! There can be a career, a mystery, in anything.

Descending into the West 4th subway. The maze of corridors, peeling walls, vomit flecked stairs, multi-level platforms. The arrows Uptown and Down. The uptown A train has just drawn up, so I dash inside, find a seat between a tiny Chinese old woman with twelve string bags bulging with what appear to be raw roots of some kind and a vast beer bellied African- American local with paint spattered overalls and a baseball cap with YSG in red letters on faded blue. Gazing up, as the train judders out of the station, past the strobing beams, at yet more supplications, pasted above the swaying passengers:

CALL US WHEN YOU'RE PREPARED TO RETURN FROM THE LIVING DEAD: Users of drugs and alcohol lose their friends, their families, their jobs and their lives.

LASER TECHNOLOGY - Stop the Agony of Hemorrhoids, Hernias, Warts, Quickly and Painlessly...

TORN EARLOBE? Call 212-665-EARS.
Also specializing in nose surgery and breast enlargement -
Board certified plastic surgeons.

YOU TOO CAN HAVE BEAUTIFULLY CLEAR SKIN -
Custom designed skin care regimens:
Dermatological facial cleansing -
Acne treatment / complexion problems -
Skin - hair - nails -
Removal of moles - chemical peels - scar correction -
Jonathan Zizmor M.D.
Board certified dermatologist.

DID YOUR PROBLEMS START BEFORE YOU WERE BORN?

Tell me about it. I often wonder, what is this Board, sitting in ethical judgement over these prophets of pure skin and straight teeth? A youngish man, carrying the stigmata of the street, the rags, the ravaged face, the chapped lips, the toeless boots, the paper cup, the calloused hands, moves down the carriage, moving in on his captive, deaf audience:

" Good afternoon ladies an gennelmen. Ah don want you to feel upset or intimidated in any way but ah wanto interduce myself an explain my predicament. I was born in Noo York City but I have been severely disadvantaged from the year of my birth. My father died a violent death an my mother was left to bring myself an my six brothers an sisters up on her own. Two of my brothers were also killed on the streets an my older sister had to become a prositute in order to support the rest of us when my mother fell ill with a terminal disease which was the result of the poor an unhygienic conditions in which we were brought up. When she died at the age of thirty two she looked like an old woman. I have been permanently unemployed an I have suffered from a variety of diseases includin tubercolosis, chronic bronchitis an uremia. I have recently contracted the HIV virus but I have not yet developed the full symptoms of AIDS. Owin to this I have not been able to receive the full disability payments which my status and condition should allow. I am livin on the streets an do not have sufficient clothin to survive the comin winter. I have applied for accomodation at several shelters but have been told there are no places for me at the present time. Please give generously and do not be afraid to contribute notes as well as coins because I am in a bad way an your contribution will help me to survive. I hope you all have a pleasant trip, thank you very much have a good day."

Hardly enriched by my dollar bill, he passes on down the carriage, past the seeing blind, rattling the door to the next compartment, making way for the next supplicant climbing through the door from the other end - "Good after- noon, ladzangennelman, ah know you just wanna geton with your journey..."

I never asked to be taken on their journeys. I've travelled enough on my own. From the moment I landed here, mooning about the streets like the Invisible Man whose bandages even were invisible, having endured the eleven hours of non-stop flight from Tel Aviv, and survived the pitiless gaze of the Immigration official who couldn't find my name in the databank of national enemies, undesirables, malcontents, agents of the Evil Empire of the month, members of organisations hostile to the United States, its constitution, its government and its people. It used to be a book, I am told, a great Bible of subversion. I remember feeling, in my bones, as the officer's fingers flew over his keyboard, that I was sure to be found out. Not because I had any hostility to the people of the United States, their government, which I thought was no worse than any other group of national or international criminals, or their constitution, which seemed to me a fine dream, but because I seemed by definition to be a suitable case for exclusion...

" You're history man!" I tried to live by that once. For a long time I refused to remember anything, and tried to just merge with the mass. I decided, at one point, to redefine everything as if I had been born the day before. I would wake up each day on an alien planet, and every sound, vision, gesture would be mysterious and unique. I would rediscover my own limbs, objects, furniture, the pristine wonder of the world beyond the windows. But my brain refused to co-operate. As soon as I woke up, it crammed my head with memories like an angry swarm of bees.

The next obsession was a recurring urge that had first grabbed me, I remembered, when I was about twelve, back in the Unholy Land: I would try and understand everything, what motivated not only the people I thought I knew, but people I had never met, whose actions I read about in the newspapers or history books, or even the people who just passed on the pavement. I would try and grasp the universe, in its human entirety. The more impossible the dream, the better. Even passing by U.S. Immigration, with my seditious thoughts engraved on my forehead like the mark of Cain.

But the man, who was a short, friendly Hispanic type with spectacles, just waved me through. Three years have passed, and now I have practically melted in the pot: The city that grips, rattles, rolls and shakes me, bloating my skin and eyes in summer, freezing me stiff in winter, soaking me in its sudden downpours, allowing me those few precious moments of crisp sunlight in the spring and fall. Settled, as far as settling goes, at this point of time - if time has a point - in my dilapidated cage in the city's human zoo, East 4th between First and Second, an as yet ungentrified block of four flights of rough stone stairs, with the cracked plasterwork blowing out in the corridors and rooms as if past tenants who've been buried there are straining to break through and get out. An absentee landlord who lives in Spanish Harlem and a super, Esteban, who keeps the whole gimcrack show going with his old brown bag of monkey wrenches and magical spare parts. No elevator of course. A mythical eldest resident, Mrs Yugo of apartment 2c, whom Esteban feeds through a cat flap in the reinforced door.

But it suits me fine. I am not upwardly mobile. Just travelling sideways, on as even a keel as possible, shuttling between my self-furnished four walls, and Caroline, Doctor Caroline Dexter's Sanctuary on Amsterdam and 93rd...
At 59th Street, I have to change trains, or I will be carried Express to 125th Street, gateway to Harlem. Follow all the white folk rushing out. Threading the tunnels towards the Uptown Number One or Nine. Stupid questions: Why the merger between One and Nine? One of my "students", at the East 4th Film-makers Co-op, is obsessed with this kind of number mania. She would tell me that nine are the Kabbalist sephirot without the One, and the One stands above the Nine. It all means that hidden hands are manipulating the New York subway system. The gnarled tentacles of endless conspiracies. The high and the low. The deep and the wide...

But I believe that chaos has no meaning. I'm always ready, in this city, for surprises. My life here has flowed, from point to point, by chance, by random meetings. The chain of strange connections that led from Frances to Salim, Salim to Darwish, and from Darwish, to Caroline...

	[previous]	[top]	[next]

:: home :: fiction :: non-fiction :: films :: news :: :: unpublished :: links :: about :: contact :: sitemap ::