{"id":2705,"date":"2009-12-27T13:06:18","date_gmt":"2009-12-27T17:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=2705"},"modified":"2009-12-27T13:06:18","modified_gmt":"2009-12-27T17:06:18","slug":"robert-kelly-on-brooklyn-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/robert-kelly-on-brooklyn-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Kelly on Brooklyn (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>

Pitkin Avenue, early 50ies<\/p><\/div>\n

CITY AS PILGRIMAGE (continued\u2026)<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/span> <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/h3>\n

After the movies,\u00a0 a hot potato knish, square as a stiff cushion, peppery, greasy fingers you could lick after the main dish, a delicate aftertaste.\u00a0 A good cure for memories.\u00a0 A good banishment of sentimentality.\u00a0 Lick the salt, lick the skin.\u00a0 And then go left again, down to the end of Pitkin Avenue.<\/p>\n

\n

Hopkinson was an open side street,\u00a0 but most of the side streets off Pitkin were dark with buildings, crowded with tenements.\u00a0 Amboy was notorious for its tough kids in gangs, \u00a0a book about them, \u00a0but all of these streets were forbidding by day, downright scary at night.\u00a0 Not that there were bad people;\u00a0 just so many people, the sheer mass of half-imprisoned crowds stifled in railroad flats, five or more to a room.\u00a0 It is a kind of city panic that one feels, the way the ancient Greeks sometimes, at brightest noon, felt sudden terror out in the open \u2013 too many trees, too many leaves, too many birds.\u00a0 They called it panic fear<\/em>, the touch of Pan, the wild otherness that suddenly chills the blood.\u00a0 Here the street might look empty but you could feel them by their thousands inside, the hardworking poor, the exhausted wives and restless children, studying books in more than one language \u2013 when any language at all is foreign to a child at bay.<\/p>\n

\n

And underneath most of the tenements were basement shops.\u00a0 You went down five or seven iron steps and came into an airless place, a singe naked lightbulb hanging from a tin ceiling, low.\u00a0\u00a0 The one I remember best was a tailor shop.\u00a0 A hairless man with no shirt, in an old woolen vest gaping open, \u00a0sat at a sewing machine;\u00a0 his feet kept moving as he pumped the treadle that ran the motor that ran the belt that made the needle go up and down.\u00a0 He had no fingernails.\u00a0\u00a0 He could hear but could not speak, it seems, and all he did was sew all day and night, taking orders from the tailor we talked to.\u00a0 Who\u00a0 took measurements for my mother\u2019s coat, my confirmation pants.\u00a0 I stood while the tailor\u2019s fingers, he did have nails, probed my thighs and hips and waist to get the measures right.\u00a0 My mother would tell me over and over again every night we were on our way to the tailor, or any merchants, Remember, we\u2019re Jewish, Remember, you\u2019re a little Jewish boy.\u00a0 What did it mean, why did I have to remember it?\u00a0 Anokhi yehudi<\/em>, I\u2019m a Jew \u2013 the words that Disraeli murmured clearly on his deathbed after a lifetime as a practicing Christian Conservative Englishman they told me, every Jew knows that, assert your being with your dying breath, anokhi yehudi<\/em>,\u00a0 and there I am, plump little boy with fat cheeks and a white shirt too tight around the collar and a red tie and a curvy little nose.\u00a0 Whatever I was, I felt this is where my home was.\u00a0 Pitkin Avenue.\u00a0 The people who talk. Anokhi<\/em> yehudi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Pitkin ends at a forking of streets, and aptly at the apex of the fork stood the great garish wonder restaurant, \u00a0Kishke King.\u00a0 This was the pilgrim\u2019s one auberge along his way.\u00a0 Loud!\u00a0 Greasy!\u00a0 Coarse!\u00a0 Ethnic and shouting and profoundly safe, fluorescent bright, homey, heymish<\/em>, cheap.\u00a0 Kishke<\/em> the stuffed small intestines, derma<\/em> the stuffed big intestines \u2013 grilled and sizzling in its own juices.\u00a0 But stuffed with what?\u00a0 Who can say?\u00a0 Chicken fat and matzo meal and carrots I guessed, from consistency, from color.\u00a0 Kishke \u2013 you got a coil of it and sliced and ate like andouillette.\u00a0 With derma you got a big thick slice and tore at it with knife and fork.\u00a0 Everybody ate there, and it was the only place that really counted for such food.\u00a0 But they also provided all the traditional deli meats, pastrami and corned beef, steamed brisket streaky with fat, \u00a0brisket lean but juicy, and kosher frankfurters, called kosher red hots, to be eaten in soft rolls with pale yellow turmericky mustard slathered on it, I never liked their mustard, I liked everything else, and the root beer you drank it down with.\u00a0 Or I did, and the other kids, but the older people drank only seltzer, which, with the faintest affectation, really a kind of delicacy, they called vichy \u2013 visshie it sounded like, and never reminded them or me of the Nazi collaborator regime in France.<\/p>\n

\n

After the Kishke King, the streets darkened the way residential streets do;\u00a0 the shops are gone, their quivering\u00a0 neon signs all blue and yellow still shimmer back there when I turn and look out of the back window of the bus \u2013 that now moves faster, close to its destination.\u00a0 Utica Avenue.\u00a0 The great crossroad.\u00a0 Where Eastern Parkway begins, the splendidly wide boulevard, grand and gracious as anything Baron Haussman sketched out,\u00a0 four lanes in the middle, lined with two broad leafy medians with benches spaced out among trees, wooden slatted benches on which all of Brownsville and Crown Heights sat out late all spring and summer and fall.\u00a0 The trees hummed all round with the talk, argument, reminiscence \u2013 a Homeric sound, like the old men on the walls of Troy, \u00a0\u00a0but the sound of business too, deals and contracts and arrangements, people giving vent, singing their aggravations.\u00a0 \u201cHarry, you\u2019re aggravating me.\u201d\u00a0 Beyond each mall ran a one lane street rimmed with parked cars.<\/p>\n

\n

On the corner of Utica and Eastern Parkway was the real spiritual homeland of this end of Brooklyn Dubrow\u2019s Cafeteria, the agora of us all, where every Marxist who still could walk, and all the young intellectuals, squinting through our hornrim glasses at the pretty girls we were bold enough to call out fancy literary references for them to overhear, too shy actually to talk to them.\u00a0 Politics and religion, serving God and getting rid of Him, McCarthy and Eisenhower \u2013 sitting there watching we talked big, but watched with awe, almost envy, \u00a0the tough still-young men with rolled-up sleeves that let us see and study their hairy muscular arms marked with blue tattooed numbers from Dachau and Buchenwald and Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"(There was another Dubrow\u2019s, on Flatbush Avenue, right near Erasmus Hall High School where the smart kids went, and near Brooklyn College.\u00a0 That Dubrow\u2019s duked it out with Garfield\u2019s on the other side of Church Avenue \u2013 and Garfield won by virtue of its spectacular mosaic wall, all colors and nativism and popular front imagery, and glittering in green and gold.\u00a0 And yet another Dubrow\u2019s in Manhattan, in the garment district.\u00a0 The cafeteria as an institution is gone \u2013 the Automat, the Waldorf (long the center of Village indecorum and the midnight arts), Bickford\u2019s \u2013 and I miss them all, but none more than Dubrow\u2019s \u2013 an agora it provided, as well as decent food, bright lights, and tolerant of long sieges of babbling intellectuals at the pale tables.)<\/p>\n

\n

One long block west along Eastern Parkway I finally came to the library, full of books on social theory and psychology that I was deep into in those days.\u00a0 But to remind me of my other, older, inner nature there was on the wall of the main staircase, so I had to see it every time I climbed up to humanities section, a sepia reproduction of a painting of a life-sized Sir Galahad, rapt in contemplation of what only he could see.\u00a0 Sometimes I mocked as I stepped up.\u00a0 Sometimes I was ashamed, and wanted to see it too.<\/p>\n

\n

The \u00a0street corner outside Dubrow\u2019s , where the bus ended and began, was well-lit by the big shining letters of Dubrow\u2019s sign, right by the kiosked entrance to the IRT subway (the letters stood for Interborough Rapid Transit, but only pedantic little kids like me every remembered that).\u00a0 Right next to the entrance was the big news stand, to which people came from a mile or more around at ten-thirty or eleven every night to get next morning\u2019s New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0 One autumn night half a dozen people and I stood around among the shifting yellow leaves and talked with young John F. Kennedy, then campaigning gently, even refinedly, through overwhelmingly Democratic Brooklyn.\u00a0 The man glowed.\u00a0 With his brown hair and the candid intensity of his face, he had an aura I\u2019ve never seen in any other human.\u00a0 Not an aura of power, not at all.\u00a0 He had little power, and little effect in government, as it turns out.\u00a0 But an aura anyhow \u2013 was it fate?\u00a0 Was it Eros?\u00a0 Whatever it was, maybe the Elf<\/em>–shine<\/em> the Old English called what we call beauty, he had it, and it made his presence absolute.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have much to say, he listened, he smiled, and what he said was spoken from inside that presence, and had not much to do with the usual deployment and reception of words.\u00a0 Phatic<\/em>, the linguists might call it, speech that tells you only I am here and you are here, we are together in this world.\u00a0 And maybe that is enough for words to say.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"

IRT on Livonia<\/p><\/div>\n

North:\u00a0 Cemeteries and Kierkegaard<\/strong><\/p>\n

If I cross Crescent Street the way I did whenever I would, several times a week, I would set off on my pilgrimage east to the book, but this time instead just stand there on the northeast corner of Crescent and Belmont, my back to the vacant lot with that strange deep declivity in it, weed and dirt, where we could sled down twenty or thirty feet in winter, now stand and wait, and wait, the B-13 bus would come along for me.\u00a0 I would be able to see it coming from blocks away, trundling up the largely empty Crescent Street from the real emptiness south of us along Jamaica Bay, to which I would also at the proper time be journeying, in search of what only emptiness can give.<\/p>\n

\n

But you have to understand the heat of Crescent Street.\u00a0 Hot enough so a fig tree grew in one back yard, like the peach tree in ours.\u00a0 Hot with a gentle, pleasant heat I have only felt anywhere else in Italy, in the marshy fields of the Veneto, the little mainland towns back of Mestre,\u00a0 on the way to Venice.\u00a0 Crescent Street, I then understood, years later, felt the way it did because Italians brought their weather here with them.\u00a0 A microclimate, an empty street shimmering asphalt between vacant lots.<\/p>\n

\n

So when the bus comes it takes me up this Crescent Street, my long walk to Conduit Street and Sunrise Highway and Liberty Avenue all crammed into two minutes of jolting bus.\u00a0 And then the streets I less often walk, from Liberty up past little streets, Italian streets, passing old Buonfiglio the tailor, who made me my Confirmation jacket, two-tone, fawn and beige, soft cashmere, we were never Italians, the bus kept going, stopped at the long light at Atlantic Avenue, the wide busy street and the only one that stretched from one side of Brooklyn (the freighter docks in Arab and Kurdish Red Hook) to the other (mild Catholic white Woodhaven in Queens).\u00a0 Then one long block to Fulton Street, another very long Brooklyn street, this one too petering out into Queens, but starting not due west like Atlantic, but angling down from its start right across from the greatest of all islands, at the ramp down which the Manhattan Bridge spilled heavy traffic into our holy borough.\u00a0 Fulton Street bore on its back for miles the elevated trains of the Jamaica line, and just at the point the bus is now, the great elevated structure bends north, and runs above Crescent Street a quarter-mile or so to its turn east at its appointment with Jamaica avenue, along which it will run far out into the commercial center of Queens, where Gertz\u2019s department store brought people (like my mother) even from Brooklyn, and the great Loew\u2019s movie palace was Moorish and gold.<\/p>\n

\n

But the bus wanted none of that.\u00a0\u00a0 It turned left on Jamaica, went a few blocks and turned right again, and immediately entered a holy land, a land apart.\u00a0 Now the bus began to climb a narrow houseless crowded street up the terminal moraine left by the last glacier \u2013 a vast geological remnant that stretches from Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene Park all the way through Brooklyn and Queens, dives under the sea into Long Island Sound, surfaces a hundred miles later as Cuttyhunk and the Elizabeth Islands, then Cape Cod, then Charles Olson\u2019s Cape Ann, before it vanishes for good in the ocean.\u00a0 In this part of Brooklyn the moraine is called Cypress Hills, our cemetery ridge, cypress (the actual tree does not grow in cold New York) from its association with cemeteries.\u00a0 For here the graveyards are, Jewish, Christian, common.\u00a0 Squeezed between fields of monuments and gravestones that stretch west and east as far as the eye can see, the little street called by the name of the hills climbs steeply. The bus climbs, and I am in heaven.\u00a0 This is my sainte-terre, my terrifying magic place through which I would never dare walk alone at night, but in the daytime, in the diesel perfume of the little squat bus, in chatter of engine and rattle of newspapers of the passengers, I can feel the utter ecstasy.\u00a0 This place is literature.\u00a0 This is the land of symbols.\u00a0 Blind angels with stone bedsheets draped over the invisible dead.\u00a0 Shrouded urns on Jewish tombs.\u00a0 Here were the people who had gone before, and who were now, if they were at all, in some condition where they knew the answers to the questions that worried me and all the living.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"But here was not the place for questions.\u00a0 Here was the thrill of understanding something enclosed by the city but that was not the city.\u00a0 This place, with the Empire State Building clear in the not great distance when we reached the top of the ridge and tilted down into more cemeteries, more grey stone and personless avenues, this place was further away from New York than the pine woods of Pennsylvania or the mountains of Greene County where I spent a summer around his time of my life and got bitten by a copperhead.\u00a0 This place was further than a snake, further than a mountain.\u00a0 Because this was the eternal landscape of the book, of the Bible, of death and dream \u2013 all present here around me safe on\u00a0 the bus.\u00a0 When I came by at night I could see the hound of the Baskervilles if I chose, or the demoness (really a goddess) Lilith flitting naked pale among the tombs.\u00a0 In the daytime I was in Rome or Athens, these funny Greekish sarcophaguses and miniature mausoleums had the scale of antiquity all jostled wrong.\u00a0 Nothing was the right size.<\/p>\n

\n

Really, it was and is a very curious zone, this ridge through the whole borough;\u00a0 how odd to make the highest land in the city into a necropolis, where the dead, who have no eyes, have the best vistas in all New York.\u00a0 Instead the dead are conspicuously housed in great stone markers with cubes and pyramids and spires, to be looked up at by the living.\u00a0 When I was a child, it made me feel that dying was the entry to some world of wealth and power, solidity and grace and dignity.\u00a0 No hint of worm or rot, just big stone geometries to live quiet in.\u00a0 Quiet as a book.\u00a0 Quiet as a child living in his imagination.\u00a0\u00a0 When I read Poe and Lovecraft, of course their graveyards were here, my own.\u00a0 But when I read Malory or Wolfram, these phony classical buildings felt like the Roman ruins on which the great Grail legends had been built in the Middle Ages.\u00a0 All fiction grows out of rubble, as these imposing almost-empty edifices rose out of death.\u00a0 And death\u2019s sinister partner, Fama, the lust for reputation, for admirers in posterity, for a name to come.<\/p>\n

\n

I couldn\u2019t read them from the bus, hence could not know the names on these gaunt sepulchers, so in that sense they failed in their design.\u00a0 I could not name, let alone revere or revile the beings inside them.\u00a0 But they in turn, those strange buildings, could inhabit my mind.\u00a0 So this drive over Cemetery Ridge into Ridgewood was the delight of the week.\u00a0 Sometimes I\u2019d go with the family in my father\u2019s car on our shopping trip to the German butcher and the big A&P on Fresh Pond Road.\u00a0 But I liked best being alone, on the bus, where I sat much higher up (we always said \u2018high up\u2019 in Brooklyn) than in a car, and I could see far off into the fields of the dead, and imagine I was staring into Lyonesse or fairyland or some fool thing that would not have let me come in anyway.\u00a0 But Brooklyn was always a great place to look away from \u2013 it gave you all the differences and sullen dogged presence you needed in you, around you, to free you to look up and see far off the other country, the Ailleurs<\/em> of Michaux and Borges and Blackwood.<\/p>\n

\n

And here something like that came about me.\u00a0 After the cemeteries the level plain again, Ridgewood and Maspeth blurring out over the fields east into Queens, west along Myrtle Avenue back to Brooklyn.\u00a0 I had come from Italy and from the land of the Jews, and was coming now into Germany.\u00a0 Here the pork butchers, any many a dark beer saloon, and the cheese shop under the el where I could buy my favorite cheap Finnish gruyere, nuttier and sweeter than the real Swiss I wouldn\u2019t get to taste for years.\u00a0 Cheese and pork and bakers.\u00a0 And under the el too Ridgewood Grove \u2013 a grove it might once have been, now a squalid small-town arena for wrestling matches when wrestling had just come into fashion, after World War II, when we had bodies again, and we could slam them around on the canvas or slap them around in the ring or, roller derby girls, on the rink.\u00a0 Our bodies came back and we watched the bodies of others to understand our own\u2014Antonino Rocca, Lord Carlton, Gorgeous George, the strutting muscular characters, none too young, who taught us the thrill of pretending, of mock blood and real gravity, and made us hope that we too, when we had reached a certain age, would have muscular presence, and a smile on our haughty faces as fate slammed us down the third time.\u00a0 Wrestling suited the mood of that day, after the war, when we still needed to fight, but no longer needed to kill.<\/p>\n

\n

But out from under the el on Palmetto Street, out into the open on Fresh Pond Road, through the airy northern feel of Ridgewood, you could walk a long ways, up towards the Passionist monastery, whose priests wore a white heart and\u00a0 cross stitched on their cassocks, along with signs I don\u2019t remember, that may have been words.\u00a0 One of the priests took an interest in me I felt grateful for but did not understand.\u00a0 I understood nothing but streets and shadows, the shapes of houses, the intimate landscapes of pages of the books.\u00a0 How this very street seemed to open out towards Metropolitan Avenue and the broad plain north of the ridge, a plain also filled with the dead, the endless rolling fields of Calvary (the Long Island Expressway runs past it now) and Saint John\u2019s cemeteries, where my own family was buried.\u00a0 There was an obscure rivalry, too strong a word, but what a child felt as a difference-with-pressure built into it, between the branch buried in Calvary and the branch buried in Saint John\u2019s.<\/p>\n

(to be continued)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CITY AS PILGRIMAGE (continued\u2026) After the movies,\u00a0 a hot potato knish, square as a stiff cushion, peppery, greasy fingers you could lick after the main dish, a delicate aftertaste.\u00a0 A good cure for memories.\u00a0...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,55,68,75],"tags":[1709,645],"class_list":["post-2705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cities","category-intellectuals","category-memoir","category-new-york","tag-brooklyn","tag-robert-kelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}