(no subject)
“There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.”
John Ashbery, 'They Dream Only of America'
We sit here in the immaculate classroom and we wait for the lesson to begin. But the seats around us have been vacated, the whiteboards have been washed clean and we have arrived too late for the lecture. Past the window, the city is a raw nerve and it invites our restless speculation, its boulevards and backstreets throbbing symphonies of sorrow, dissonance and disaster like an asteroid’s fall to earth. There are drawn faces we pass in the city everyday; there are tears shed in each of its infinite corners; there is a casual cruelty inside it beyond our ability to believe. But from afar, it seems so subtle, the violence of this disneyland, the malice of this conurbation we hold to our hearts as a home, it hides from us within the shattered tail lights of a taxi, it skulks in the stretches of an old Armani suit. "In modern Athens", de Certeau tells us, "the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a 'metaphor' - a bus or a train". If this is so, then, our travels through the city take place as a kind of dreaming, a communal creation of meaning that all of us share in secret. But away from Athens, here in this metropolis, our metaphors malfunction, our transportation takes us nowhere, we have no symbolic webs. We spend most of our lives alone and so it is hard, Henry Miller, to forget ourselves as you advise, to "develop interest in life" separate from our solitude, to see and savour the world in its wider, exterior richness. There is either too much in this life or there is too little; either way, the calculation is extreme and the sum is beyond us. And laying on a dirty city step in the dusty city breeze, we find philosophy amounts to nothing as our memories flicker and fade, like old celluloid lost to the light or like the crowds which passed around us.
But is that all there is to be seen from the classroom, from our empty annex of knowledge, where we sit with our noses pressed to glass, peering out at the scene? Remember how we shared stories at the table that time like they were the bread we broke between us; or how we remade suburban landscapes and filled their flatness with our love. These things should make a difference, they should declare defiant that we exist. Still, out of doors, the clouds assemble and the play equipment rusts; then the children scatter, screaming, and we must leave all hope behind. And in the classroom, we are waiting, and we are trembling as we do, because - as Siken says - we “thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull this all together” but instead “here we are in the weeds again, here we are in the bowels of the thing” and boots are falling from the sky and our world has lost all meaning. Yes, we are waiting and we are waiting and we are watching through the window; we are trying to decide the moment when it will be right to make our journey. Yet, look, it's late, the light is failing, did we wait too long to make our move? Grab your coat, secure your shoes - we have no time to lose. We may step out into our own undoing, into a city that eats us alive. But if our hearts must be committed to a condition that kills us, at least the dying shall be sublime.