#58, July 29th, 2004

 

Traversing Clio (11)

New York, New York

 

 

Falling Towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

 

 

 

In 1913, John Reed wrote his “Hymn to Manhattan.”  This is the Progressive poetic vision, a vision of New York City at the end of a millenium or more of human progress.  Empires and peoples, “conquering races,” are “rolled in one.”  Clearly this is a different Reed from the one who would pen “Ten Days that Shook the World” a few years later, though there are hints of change embedded within this poem.  First of all, it is a defense of New York City from “scorn,” implying that such cherished continuities as he finds embedded in the streets of the city are not endorsed or recognized by all.  Secondly, there is the fact that the harking back to these pasts and the roar of the crowd before its emperor ends with “an army roaring in the streets.”  But, New York City is an antidote to such things, too.  It is potential -- “a world beginning,” even if nothing has yet been done.

 

 

A Hymn to Manhattan

 

O let some young Timotheus sweep his lyre

Hymning New York.  Lo!  Every tower and spire

Puts on immortal fire.

This city, which ye scorn

For her rude sprawling limbs, her strength unshorn—

Hands blunt from grasping, Titan-like, at Heaven,

Is a world-wonder, vaulting all the Seven!

Europe?  Here’s all of Europe in one place;

Beauty unconscious, yes, and even grace.

Rome? Here all that Rome was, and is not;

Here Babylon – and Babylon’s forgot.

Golden Byzantium, drunk with pride and sin,

Carthage, that flickered out where we begin…

London? A swill of mud in Shakespeare’s time;

Ten Troys lie tombed in centuries of grime!

Who’d not have lived in Athens in her prime,

Or helped to raise the mighty walls of Rome?

See, blind men!  Walls rise all about you here at home!

Who would not hear once more

That oceanic roar

“Ave! Ave Imperator!”

With which an army its Augustus greets?

Hark! There’s an army roaring in the streets!

This spawning filth, these monuments uncouth,

Are but her wild, ungovernable youth.

But the skyscrapers, dwarfing earthly things –

Ah, that is how she sings!

Wake to the vision shining in the sun;

Earth’s ancient, conquering races rolled in one,

A world beginning – and yet nothing done!

 

 

T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reframed the city in and through modernity – tying all the empires to a process of decay made recognizable by the coming of the Great War.  The two studies of New York from the inter-war years present a somewhat different city from that given us by Reed.  In part, no doubt, this is a product of the different vantage points from which these authors came.  Outsiders, both born in Spain, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Federico García Lorca were less willing to find a melting pot of races in New York City.  Instead, they saw racial cleavages, and witnessed the underbelly of the city (especially Lorca, who saw the impact on the city of the Great Depression).  Here is Robert Bly’s translation of Jiménez’s prose poem, “Deep Night” (1917):

 

 

Deep Night

 

New York deserted – without a person!  I walk down Fifth Avenue, with lots of time, singing aloud.  From time to time, I stop to look at the gigantic and complicated locks in the banks, the department store windows being changed, the flags flapping in the night…And this sound which my ears, as if inside some enormous cistern, have taken in unconsciously, coming from I don’t know which street, gets nearer, harder, louder.  The sounds are footsteps, shuffling and limping, they seem to be coming from above, they constantly approach and never manage to get here.  I stop again and look up the avenue and down.  Nothing.  The moist spring moon, with circles under its eyes, the sounds, and I.

 

Suddenly, I can’t tell if far off or near, like the solitary soldier I saw on the sands of Castille, that evening when the sea wind was strong, a point or a child, or an animal, or a dwarf – What?  And slowly it comes closer.  Closer.  About to pass.  I turn my face and meet his gaze, the eyes bright, black, red and yellow, larger than his face, all he is is his gaze.  An old Negro, crippled, with a shrunken overcoat and a hat with a faded top, greets me ceremoniously, and then, smiling, goes on up Fifth Avenue…A brief shudder goes through me, and with my hands in my pockets I go on, the yellow moon in my face, half singing to myself.

 

The echo of the crippled Negro, king of the city, makes a turn around the night in the sky, now toward the west.

 

 

In “Deep Night,” the scale of the city is different from that witnessed in Reed’s poem.  While the American radical envisioned emper0rs and their armies on the streets of the city, monuments uncouth, and skyscrapers, Jiménez finds an avenue deserted, and stumbles upon a nameless man, crippled and African American – far from representing the “conquering races rolled in one:”  Here is the subaltern, whose existence challenges the city’s triumphalism, the city’s naturalism, of masculine structures thrusting into the sky amidst nurturing, feminized parks so central to its recuperation.  And it is he who is the king of New York; not some named and powerful demi-god, welcomed by that “oceanic roar.”

 

Federico García Lorca would publish “Poeta en Nueva York” in 1930 and would latch on to some of Jiménez’s imagery.  He would, according to Bly, meet the same Negro, and would describe him as “Your great imprisoned king, dressed as a janitor.”(4).  Three poems in this volume, two translated by Bly, represent Lorca’s relationship to New York nicely:

 

 

Dance of Death (1929)

 

   The mask. Look at the mask!

It’s coming from Africa to New York!

 

   The pepper trees are all gone,

the tiny buds of phosphorus with them.

The camels made of torn flesh are gone

and the valleys of light the swan carried on his bill.

 

   It was the time of dried things,

of the wheat-beard in the eye, and the flattened cat,

of rusting iron on the giant bridges

and the absolute silence of cork.

 

   It was the grand reunion of the dead animals,

cut through by blades of light;

the eternal joy of the hippopotamus with his hoods of ash,

and the gazelle with an everlasting in its throat.

 

   In the withered solitude without waves,

the dented mask was dancing.

One half of the world was made of sand,

the other was mercury and the sun asleep.

 

   The black mask. Look at the mask!

Sand, crocodile, and fear over New York!

 

                                    *

 

   Mountain passes of lime were walling in the empty sky;

you heard the voices of those dying under the dung of birds.

A sky, clipped and pure, exactly like itself,

with the fluff and sharp-edged of its invisible mountains,

 

   has killed the most delicate stems of song,

and gone off to the flood crowded with sap,

across the resting time of the final marchers,

lifing bits of mirror with its tail.

 

   While the Chinaman was crying on the roof

without finding the nakedness of his wife,

and the bank president was watching the pressure-gauge

that measures the remorseless silence of money,

the black mask was arriving at Wall Street.

 

   This vault that makes the eyes turn yellow

is not an odd place for dancing.

There is a wire stretched from the Sphinx to the safety deposit box

that passes through the heart of poor children.

The primitive energy is dancing with the machine energy,

in their frenzy wholly ignorant of the original light.

Because if the wheel forgets its formula,

it might as well sing naked with the herds of horses;

and if a flame burns up the frozen plans

the sky will have to run away from the roar of the windows.

 

   This place is good for dancing, I say this truth,

the black mask will dance between columns of blood and numbers,

between downpours of gold and groans of unemployed workers

who will go howling, dark night, through your time without stars.

O savage North America! Shameless! Savage,

stretched out on the frontier of the snow!

 

   The black mask. Look at the black mask!

What a wave of filth and glow worms over New York!

 

                                    *

 

   I was out on the terrace fighting with the moon.

Swarms of windows were stinging one of the night’s thighs.

The gentle sky-cows were drinking from my eyes.

And winds with immense oars

were beating on the ash-colored lights Broadway.

 

A drop of blood was looking for the light at the yolk of the star

in order to imitate the dead seed of an apple.

A wind from the prairies, pushed along by the shepherds,

shivered with the fear of a mollusc with no shell.

 

   But the dead are not the ones dancing,

I’m sure of that.

The dead are totally absorbed, gobbling up their own hands. 

It’s the others who have to dance with the black mask and its guitar;

it’s the others, men drunk on silver, the frosty men,

those who thrive at the crossroads of thighs and mineral fires,

those who are searching for the worm in the landscape of staircases,

those who drink the tears of a dead girl in a bank vault,

or those who eat in the corners the tiny pyramids of the dawn.

 

   I don’t want the Pope to dance!

No, I don’t want the Pope to dance!

Not the king,

nor the millionaire with his blue teeth,

nor the withered dancers of the cathedrals,

nor the carpenters, nor emeralds, nor madmen, nor corn-holers.

I want this mask to dance,

this mask with its musty scarlet,

just this mask!

 

   Because now the cobras will whistle on the highest floors,

and the stinging weeds will make the patios and terraces tremble,

because the stock market will be a pyramid of moss,

because the jungle creepers will come after the rifles

and soon, soon, very soon!

Look out, Wall Street.

 

   The mask, the mask. Look at the mask!

How it spits the poison of the forest

over the faulty pain of New York!

 

 

In “Dance of Death” we see the city’s shape defined, not by its buildings and structure, but by its relations, its connections with other places and other states of being.  Africa and death are the things that limit New York City’s presumption to self definition. “There is a wire stretched from the Sphinx to the safety deposit box/that passes through the heart of poor children.”  Look out Wall Street, center of this shameless, savage north America!  Look out, because this is a good place for Death to dance!

 

The second poem, called simply “New York”, continues in much the same vein:

 

 

New York

 

(Office and Attach)

 

To Fernando Vela

 

   Beneath all the statistics

there is a drop of duck’s blood.

Beneath all the columns

there is a drop of sailor’s blood.

Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood;

a river that goes singing,

past the bedrooms of the suburbs,

and the river is silver, cement, or wind

in the lying daybreak of New York.

The mountains exist, I know that.

And the lenses ground for wisdom,

I know that.  But I have not come to see the sky,

the blood that sweeps the machines to the waterfalls,

and the spirit on the cobra’s tongue.

Every day they kill in New York

ducks, four million,

pigs, five million,

pigeons, two thousand, for the enjoyment of dying men,

cows, one million,

lambs, one million,

roosters, two million,

who turn the sky to small splinters.

You may as well sob filing a razor blade

or assassinate dogs in the hallucinated foxhunts,

as try to stop in the dawnlight

the endless trains carrying milk,

the endless trains carrying blood,

and the trains carrying roses in chains

for those in the field of perfume.

The ducks and the pigeons

and the hogs and the lambs

lay their drops of blood down

underneath all the statistics;

and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle

fills the valley with suffering

where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.

I attack all those persons

who know nothing of the other half,

the half who cannot be saved,

who raise their cement mountains,

in which the hearts of the small

animals no one thinks of are beating,

and from which we will all fall

during the final holiday of the drills.

I spit in your face.

The other half hears me,

as they go on eating, urinating, flying in their purity

like the children of janitors

who carry delicate sticks

to the holes where the antennas

of the insects are rusting.

This is not hell, it is a street.

This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.

There is a whole world of crushed rivers and unachievable distances

in the paw of a cat crushed by a car,

and I hear the song of the worm

in the heart of so many girls.

Rust, rotting, trembling earth.

And you are earth, swimming through the figures of the office.

What shall I do, set my landscapes in order?

Set in place the lovers who will afterwards be photographs,

Who will be bits of wood and mouthfuls of blood?

No, I won’t; I attack,

I attack the conspiring

of these empty offices

that will not broadcast the sufferings,

that rub out the plans of the forest,

and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle

when their mooing fills the valley

where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.

 

 

Here, New York is once again connected, this time to the world of death in the Hudson Valley that makes its own life possible, and reduced to its material elements: the statistics associated with the number of pigs, cows, and other livestock slaughtered to sustain New Yorkers in their lavish existence.  Once again Lorca frowns on we who would focus on the “cement mountains” being raised, who would know nothing of the other half, “the half that cannot be saved” and which is razed from this planet.  “This is not hell, it is a street./This is not death, it is a fruit-stand,” tells us that these might indeed be considered such, if only we were to observe them from a different perspective.  Interestingly, the connections beyond New York to the hinterland and the world are not merely reflected in the words of the poetry.  According to Robert Bly, Lorca “adopted old Arabic poetic forms to help entangle that union of desire and darkness, which the ancient Arabs loved so much.”(102)  We are left wondering whether much of the best Spanish literature, in the aftermath of Cervantes, but also in memory of this Arabic connection and the Moors’ literary signature, would inspire poets like Jiménez and Lorca to connect the romanticized real of the city with the unreal of their imagination, and the harsh reality of the imagined beyond.

 

One last poem from Lorca is required – his verses on Harlem.

 

 

King of Harlem (translated by Prospero Saiz)

 

With a spoon
he scooped out eyes of crocodiles
and banged on the monkey butts.
With a spoon.

 

The fire of time still slept in the flint
and the scarabs drunk on anise
forgot the moss of the villages.

 

The old man covered with mushrooms
moved to the corner where the black men were wailing
and the tubs of rotting water went by
while the spoon of the king crackled.

 

The roses fled on the edges
of the last curves of the wind,
and on the heaps of saffron
the small boys mauled the tiny squirrels
flushed with a stained exaltation.

 

The bridges must be crossed
and the blackness reached
so the perfume of our lungs
may beat against our temples with the vestures
of burning pine-cone.

 

We must kill the blond huckster of whisky,
and all of the friends of apple and sand,
and we must smash with tight closed fists
the small kidney-beans that tremble in the bubbles of air,
so the king of Harlem may sing with his multitude,
so the crocodiles may sleep in the long lines
beneath the moon's amianthus,
so that no one may doubt the undying beauty
of the feather-dusters, the graters, the kitchen brass
and the casseroles.

 

Oh, Harlem! Oh, Harlem! Oh, Harlem!
No sorrow to equal your crimsons enslaved,
or the fierce blood of your dark eclipse,
or the dea-mute violence precious in your vague borders,
or your mighty chained king, robed in janitor's cloth!

 

                                    *

 

The night had cracks and quiet ivory salamanders,
and the American girls
carried children and money in their bellies
and the boys, arms and legs stretched, passed out on the cross.

 

They are the ones.
They are the ones who drink silver whisky at the foot of volcanoes
and gulp small pieces of heart on the frozen heights of the bear.

 

On that night the king of Harlem with a hard, hard spoon
scooped out the eyes of the crocodiles
and banged on the monkey butts.
With a spoon.
The blacks, confused, cried out
under parasols and suns of gold,
the mulattoes pulled on condoms, anxious to fall upon a white body,
and the wind spotted the mirrors
and opened up the veins of the dancers.

 

Blood has no exit in your night with its belly up to the sky.
There is no blush. Raging blood hidden by black skin,
lives in the thorn of the dagger and in the breast of the countryside,
beneath the pincers and the brooms of Cancer's celestial moon.

 

 

Returning to the Anglo-American tradition, we see again the epic scale of world history.  But by September of 1939 we have traveled far from the imperial pretensions of the Augustan Age of the fin-de-siecle.  When W. H. Auden comes to write his reflections on hearing of the outbreak of war in Europe while sitting in a coffee house in Manhattan, the mundane world of Jiménez and Lorca, piercing the pretensions to nobility of the modern savage, is nestled alongside the images of armies marshalled for Emperors and their lineage.  The towers have fallen, indeed, and henceforward we may have difficulty discerning the very structures, the architecture, of a civilized order.   

 

 

September 1939

 

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.