Mural in El Barrio - corner of 104th Street and Lexington.
*********************************************
A snippet of cellphone conversation overheard along Astoria’s 35th Ave: “So when he had the hat on they booed, and when he took the hat off they cheered? That doesn’t make sense, no?"
*********************************************
As a child I entered a poetry contest that had a title something like “The Earth.” I submitted what I thought was an epic entry, “Ballooning the Earth”, about a hot air balloon travelling around the globe. I tried to put everything in that poem. The winner of the competition wrote about a single earthworm. That was a good lesson in the value of small details and component parts. The lesson also applies to writing about cities. It’s only through the stories of cities’ individual inhabitants that any sense can begin to be made of the whole.
With that idea churning around in my head, of course now I am encountering it all over the place. For example, I came across the concept of psychogeography, and intrigued, got a short overview of it by Merlin Coverley. (It’s aptly called “Psychogeography”.) Although formally claimed by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1950s/60s Paris, it’s an amorphous term and Coverley traces it both backwards and forwards from there: back to Daniel Defoe, Blake, and other London visionaries; forward to people like Ballard, Peter Ackroyd and Ian Sinclair. Recurrent elements are city street wandering (particularly à la dérive, with no particular direction or purpose), using that wandering to sense the effect of urban environments on the individual psyche, a consciousness of the city’s past as it manifests itself in the present, an openness to re-imagining the city, and challenging the status quo. At times I've felt myself wondering if such a broad concept needs a term at all. It seems a bit contrived to put a label on it, as if to try to rarefy and pigeon-hole into a "discipline" an experience that should be so accessible.
When Coverley gets to talk about Michel de Certeau’s "Walking the City" though, de Certeau’s ideas certainly resonated with me. Perhaps in particular because in that book he was writing about New York? De Certeau describes two roles within a city, the voyeur and the walker. In New York that division is accentuated by the height of the buildings, with the voyeur gazing down from the detached top of skyscrapers to the street-walker below. (Presumably he’s talking, as so much “New York” writing does, about Manhattan). The latter group experience the city as a conceptual whole, removed from individual perspective. The distinction between the two, De Certeau says, “emphasizes the democratic importance of the street-level perspective to be gained from walking the city and reconnecting with individual life...In the light of this distinction it is clear how the simple act of walking can take on a subversive hue, abolishing the distancing and voyeuristic perspective of those who view the city from above.” The history of the city is written from the individual perspective at ground level rather than the generalizing perspective up above, he says.
An 1896 “History of Long Island City, New York” (which used to encompass Astoria and by some definitions still does) by JS Kelsey also makes this point. Written soon before the five separate boroughs merged to form New York, it aimed to preserve details about Long Island City for posterity: the full book is online here. Its preface begins: “The history of a city originates in individuals. In its frontier days stands a household or two as lone prophets of better eras. In the lives of men therefore lie the records of society, whether it is developed into a municipality, state, or nation.”
These are just some of the reasons it is important to release stories of the lives of individuals living in cities. I was delighted to discover the “Spitalfields Life” blog featuring interviews with people in that area of East London. It’s on a far bigger scale than my interview blog on 30th Ave in Astoria was, but it seems the author shares similar motivations. Its “Gentle Author” (s/he aims to keep their identity anonymous) said in an interview: "I believe in microcosm, that everything in the world is here.” S/he also said: "I don't understand why everybody isn't doing what I'm doing. I don't understand why this isn't everywhere. It's free to do. It just takes time." Well yes, time is a significant factor. But here’s to many others following suit.
*********************************************
Recently they knocked down two of the small houses opposite us. (How easy to refer to authorities / developers with a murky “they”). The space where one was is still a gaping hole. In the other, there’s a building site. While if we were a purely adult household that could be seen as a pain because of the noise, with little JNH around it provides endless entertainment. Each morning he asks to see the “orange digger” soon after waking up. Then when we go outside, he wants to “touch orange digger" (depending on whether it's in action or not, C and I try to oblige). He could stand for hours watching the trucks hauling their loads, the men go about their work, the brick walls ascending.
This morning, our neighbor E. was outside his front door. He’s at the opposite end of life to JNH. Now in his nineties, until a few days ago he was sprightly as if he could go on and on. Apparently he only retired about four years ago. Then he had a fall, and suddenly he seems vulnerable. He gave JHN a little green toy train when we past, then as we walked up the street he was still standing by his front door gazing up at the building work across the street.
No comments:
Post a Comment