CITIES AND MEMORY

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BARBARA HENNING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inferno of the living is not something
that will be; if there is one, it is what is
already here, the inferno where we live every
day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is
easy for many: accept the inferno and
become such a part of it that you can
no longer see it. The second is risky
and demands constant vigilance and apprehension; seek and learn to recognize
who and what, in the midst of the
inferno, are not inferno, then make
them endure, give them space.

        Marco Polo's advice to Genghis Khan
        Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

 

When I was a seed half revealed, perhaps I
imagined a cinderblock house, in a row of others,
on the periphery of the city, halfway between
Detroit and Mount Clemens, below and above, through the walls and towers, a karmic necessity, squatting down on the white side of Eight
Mile Road for eighteen years. Lilacs bloom.
A woman carefully winds her daughter's hair
into little curls, pinning them neatly into rows.
In the fall, apples drop and maple leaves gather
in red and yellow. Three miles from Lake St. Claire with no mountains to tremble at the cleanliness, efficiency, quiet sidewalks, the blue lights of the televisions and the picture possibility even in
hindsight that I might have easily found everything
I desired and married some boy, some man and
lived there for the rest of my life.


Many houses go into the making. On the corner of Mack Avenue and Alter Road, a streetcar stop, a two-story flat, and my grandmother's flowered dress set apart for the protection of her nine children who branched out west and east and returned periodically for Sunday dinner and a stroll to the A & P, dime store and corner bar. Standing at the curb, my cousin and I play hitchhikers. The sum of all my wondering. A man pulls over in a big car just as my grandmother comes rushing down the steps. At night, I dream with the
 smell of yellowed wallpaper, the creaking sound of
old wood, half-open blinds, and the lights from the
cars and the buses splashing a world of shadows
on the walls destined to crumble. The neon light
at the gas station rotates 21¢ and the breeze
carries a question -What are they doing?
Where are they going?

 

 

 

 I'm on the bus heading east in the dark from work
 to home, passing by the Jefferson Chrysler plant
 and the yellow windows in the bars and
 restaurants. For a certain lost grace in
 eighty-three, empty lots and boarded up buildings
 with an occasional brave soul walking by.
 In sixty-eight, I duck down in the passenger's
 seat of an old Plymouth. The police are
 on the riverside, the rioters on the other,
 shooting at each other and we pass unharmed
 in between. Blinking. Best not to fall in, linger
 over St. Jean burning, Twelfth Street leveled,
 Saigon burning. Communism. Capitalism. Racism.
 We are fighting that which we hold in common.
 A shotgun in the living room, loaded.
 At night break martial law and ring
 the red bell at an old house in Indian
 Village. I'm dancing in a blind play pool
 and fraternize pig, anarchy and disorder
 making a new order.

 

The Corridor between General Motors and Masonic Temple. The inner center, art museum, library, Old Main. The imaginary city is the city hidden within, the like-minded anti-war counter-culture, the ordinary abiding place of the emperors. George singing opera at the Del Rio. Over the edge, dancing to Bobby MacDonald on the piano at Cobb's Corner. Taboo in a cocktail dress on the stage at Anderson Gardens. Crossed six, they fling him away, ducking down under the bar at Our Place while some guys shoot it out over a game of pool. Oblique movements. The wink of an eye. David, tattooed and ornery, signals me in for free. Shadowfax on stage. Reading the New York Times with the crowd on Sunday morning at Alvin's. Out in front of Né's elementary school in the car, listening to loud Motown sounds. Stomp dancing on Thanksgiving at the Unitarian. After hours, on the back of Gabe's bike, heading back to my place. Cass City was sociability revised. Each mind bears in his mind, the underworld, comradeship, intelligence, creation, danger, sometimes too much danger.

 

Sally Young and her little girl pack up and drive to the East Village, and then we follow. The most densely populated island. A network of tunnels, yellow lights and intersecting stairs. We are walking up and down the avenues. The gravestones in the yard at St Marks
at Second and Tenth. So many poems and eulogies in the ever ongoing take a slant and run with it. A dime bag at a window. Avenue ABC. Knock. Underground clubs. Knock. The homeless sheltered in the park. Knock them down. The police surround the square, spending more than the cost for housing. A student's photo of the war on my desk. Piles of bodies along
the road between Basra and Kuwait City. Passersby
and soldiers. Heads, legs, arms. Fast and furious.
No chance to protest. The boat draws up, empty
and good as new. Avenue B overnight pricey
furniture stores and expensive restaurants. Kuwait
City a new business hub. Giuliani and his guys do a number on rent stabilization. Rents go up and the World Trade Center comes down. Devastation. The rents go down for a day or two and then the war machine gears up, and we get talking, working and rushing around and whoa, trouble city has arrived. We discover that we will never be able to stop working no matter how old. In a rusty can, all have gone. Abundance for the well off.

 

 

 

 

 

I remember sitting in an empty apartment in Brooklyn looking down at the buses and cars, the hardware store across the street, the café, the bodega. It was snowing outside and I was new in town. Walking toward the subway with snow on my collar. Then bicycling fast down the hills in Prospect Park, so fast that Linnee falls off her bike and never rides a bike again. On a bench in the Third Street Park sitting beside Lewis, his children and mine in a row on the swings. High and low. Black out. Where were you when the lights went out? On Third Street in front of the Hell's Angel's storefront talking to Lewis on my cell. Sylvia's passing through Tompkins Square at the same time I am. We meet in the center directly in front of the Krishna tree, across from where I used to live, and we hug each other. The line that separates the inside from the outside is constantly under revision. In the morning even in the desert you can hear the pigeons warbling.

 

 

Passing through the swamps into New Orleans. Someone left the windows open and now the house is moldy. Michael buys a mattress and some candles and then we start cleaning. On Magazine Street in August, it is so hot I can barely breathe. A black man passes by and I nod. He looks down at his feet. Who am I? In the quarter, dinner at a restaurant with an excellent wine list, Café Mesparo, the original location of the slave exchange. Suddenly a brass band comes down the center aisle of-is it the Mermaid or Wanda's? Then a long bike ride across town to the museum in City Park. I am alone and Louis Armstrong is on television, singing-What a Wonderful World. At 3 am, on Canal Street a tall robust policeman is following us. I can barely remember the details, just the fear, and standing in a station for no reason at all. As I get older, I remember less. At the same time my memory fades, all the cells in the city transform, and then the hurricane breaks fast and furious. Bodies floating in the flood. Canal Street is a canal. Looters in styrofoam boats controlling downtown. An eclipse of the moon. The end of a gun barrel. Where is the national guard? Jets and helicopters overhead. Where is the Red Cross? The French Quarter has survived. Billions of dollars for rebuilding. The biggest rebuilding effort in the USA. And now everyone wants to move somewhere else, maybe Mexico.

 

 

 

Borough of Kings. City of many villages. When you come up out of the subway at dusk, there are trees and people quietly heading home. Don't speak. Manhattan is still rattling. Upstairs on the fourth floor Allen's cooking spaghetti for Michah, Linnée's at her friend's apartment on Eleventh Street and I'm sitting in Café Greenfield on Seventh Avenue writing in my journal. Or perhaps Allen is in Copy Cat, sitting on a stool below stacks and stacks of disorganized papers and envelopes, listening to Miles Davis. Ephemeral dreams. At the Methodist church on Sixth Avenue, Daniel Ortega speaks about Nicaragua. We're in the back pew. The FBI and secret service agents are outside and inside every door. Their black cars on the street. Down with U.S. Imperialists. Or maybe I'm in the front pew with Né and Mook, mourning Allen. The quiet beautiful rows of brownstones, two hundred thousand, one million, two million dollars each. A man passes across the window with a book in his hand, and the sixty-seven bus heads toward Flatbush and over to LIU.

 
A city of palaces. When I walk out of the hotel lobby, I am on the other side of the globe, moving along with honking rickshaws and motorcycles, cows, goats, elephants, dogs, humans and whatever else on a maze of mostly unpaved side streets. Jasmine. Lotus. Rose. Golden yellow. Leaf of basil. In the dark, I'm perched on the back of Andrey's scooter as he swerves smoothly around Mysore palace. City of white lights. Offer to God, sandalwood, oil and camphor, tinge of red. A rickshaw swerves around a calf, grazing her side. A woman jumps out of the road, a red bus barreling through the intersection, colliding with a lorry on Ashoka Road. My son's leg broken in two places. Mangled. A dalit's house. Water strike. Deep-rooted corruption. It is enough to be a Mahout like my father. A garland. Sex workers and eunuchs. Karnataka music. Hindustani. For him music was God. Stay away from soothsayers, doomsday -callers and the astrologers. Global computer business coming soon to Mysore. Good for work, for money. All the things contained in the city are included in the design even these puffy little yellow flowers with no stems. Hastily in a whisper -Hey yoga, you take this. Good smell. Su gandhim . Threaded jasmine in your hair . I had come to find peace. To begin, Madame, merge your mind with the ONE and your scooter with the traffic.

It's cold here, even wearing two jackets and a Russian hat, and I need an escort and a translator to shop for vegetables. Little Sasha's wearing a red coat and dancing with an umbrella. On the sidewalk, a big stocky woman in an old overcoat sells wool socks on a card table. A square enclosure with writers dressed in black, smoking cigarettes and reading poems in a language I can't decode. The escalator down to the subway is so deep. Put your camera away or the police will take it. Waiting in line to see Lenin's body. Don't speak now. We foresee the exceptions. The people under these stones are responsible for the death of millions. Leave the manslayer no city of refuge. The tall buildings are fortress like and ominous just as Stalin intended. A Russian Orthodox Church and MacDonald's on red square. Just as the American global political businessmen intended. Freedom. Andrey on television demonstrating advanced yoga poses. Beggars on the corner. Displaced and running a fever, my India visa renewed, pack up early, leave Moscow and return to safety under a mosquito net in Mysore.

<

 

On a small boat, I cross the bay, leaving behind Elephanta Island, passing giant ships and approaching the sprawling city, brown water and miles of shanties, with a cloud of pollution overhead. Mumbai. Bombay. Bollywood. Gray sky. Thick air. The hotel room is very spacious with a big mission bed, a table to write on, a standing fan and a chest of drawers. Everything that suggests a breeze floats in the window. Colaba and the sounds of sea birds and pigeons. They uproot and gather in the trees outside the windows, arguing all day long. I lie on the bed in my slip, happy to have survived the long trip, at home in a city that seems a cross between London, New York and South India. The city roar that hails Lakshmi, Ram and Muhammad. At the moment I am resting, the city of Kabul is being transformed into rubble, tottering buildings, and half walls, beggar children everywhere. The city of poets. Once the capital of the Mughal Dynasty. 3,500 years old. Ravaged.

 

 

A woman named Violet chatters about tarot
cards, western lands and city lots. A year of
drought. Public relation consultations for new
age businesses in Santa Fe. Photos of an old
man in the newspaper staring with disbelief
at his street, outsiders and insiders attacking,
murdering and looting. God-given Baghdad,
circular city, circling into worldwide
consciousness. The American Indians are lined
up on the plaza selling precious stones and
figurines to the tourists. I'm missing sociability and alienation, that little bit of NYC distance that
brings the music of everyone busy doing
what they're all doing. On public tv, a moment of silence for each dead US soldier. 600,000
plus dead Iraqi civilians, oil deals, military and reconstruction contracts. A few people on
a few corners yelling at each other.
Support our troops. Out of Iraq now. Chilly here
on the outskirts, high up in the clouds, the
inevitability of sunspots. Sharpen your eyes.
It'll take a couple of years to adjust to the altitude.

Each city receives its form from the desert it
opposes. The skyline in Tucson is jagged, four mountain ranges, a big beautiful blue eighty
percent all day umbrella, tall swaying palm
trees and graceful saguaros. Hot in the daytime
and at night pink lightening storms. Then quiet darkness and the jasmine climbs the trellis,
a botanical thread connecting one reality to
another. Ten percent chance of rain today.
The sound of military aircraft overhead.
Eons ago an ocean bed. Then the rain pours
out of the sky dramatically for twenty minutes
in one neighborhood but not in another.
Scattered flooding, the influx of those
following the sun, and the sound of military
aircraft overhead. A white line of smoke
in the sky. Pedal a little further south,
away from the university where the houses
are smaller, a little closer to Mexico. Hot,
dry and dusty. The roar of military aircraft
overhead. The rush of traffic on Broadway.
Errands and appointments. The gift of water.
It will last only so long. For the time being,
I'm here, arms working, legs working, coasting
along on my bicycle on the edge of traffic.

 

 

Outside the train window, grass, trees, houses.
They grow taller and greyer until the city
overcomes the vista and whoosh underground
I go straight into Penn Station. Socks and shoes
soaking wet. Even The Confidence Man is wet and
falling apart. Water everywhere, all day long, for
two days, dragging a heavy suitcase. Second
Avenue Deli closed, a Hooters moving in.
Little Esther's rent is higher than my monthly
salary. Have trust the cosmopolitan man says.
A sign in Cliff's kitchen: Do you really want to
work at Sardi's in December? I do not wish your
eyes to catch a distorted image. On the corners, smokers congregate and plot some kind of
revolution. Under her wide-brimmed hat,
Rosemary Mayer sits waiting for me at a table
at Greek Delphi. I'm late. I'm running. I'm
knocked around, I'm bumped. A network of
wires and pipes. Standing outside 158 E. 7th Street,
I look through the blinds at my once apartment,
now a modeling agency with two guys in front of computer screens, talking on telephones.
The leaves from the trees in Tompkins
Square are drifting downward. They crunch
under my feet. Up above, the sky and a
little bit of blue.

 

These poems were originally published in Detroit: Imaginary a publication of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit (MOCAD) . Fragments from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cites are woven into this text. Special thanks to Lynn Crawford for inviting me to write this poem, and also special thanks to Harris Schiff, Paul Klinger, Lewis Warsh and Rodney Phillips for reading it in various stages.

Long News PO Box 43978

Sun Station

Tucson, Arizona 85733-3978

© 2007 Barbara Henning

Printed in an edition of 108, signed and numbered.

barbhenning@mac.com

 

 

 

CITIES AND MEMORY

 

 

BARBARA HENNING

 

 

LONG NEWS