{"id":2710,"date":"2009-12-29T09:55:43","date_gmt":"2009-12-29T13:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2009-12-29T09:55:43","modified_gmt":"2009-12-29T13:55:43","slug":"robert-kelly-on-brooklyn-4-final","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/robert-kelly-on-brooklyn-4-final\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Kelly on Brooklyn (4 & final)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Brooklyn Public Library, photographed by Underhill<\/p><\/div>\n

CITY AS PILGRIMAGE (continued\u2026)<\/span><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Even before the monastery, I happened on what struck me as peculiar, in this very ordinary neighborhood of dry cleaners and groceries and funeral parlors \u2013 an actual bookstore.\u00a0 The kind that sold used books.\u00a0 My treasures.\u00a0 The fact that most of the books were in German makes it clear now what it meant to have an educated lower middle class that read books.\u00a0 Germany had it before we did, and it was of course dying out in both countries even then, slain by emigration and war in Germany, slain by television here at home.\u00a0 Fresh-feeling, hardly read cloth-bound volumes of Vikki Baum and Felix Salten and Karl May and Lion Feuchtwanger, all the ones you\u2019d expect.\u00a0 Even if I read German easily I wouldn\u2019t read them.\u00a0 But tucked away on a low shelf was a slim little blue book\u2014Kierkegaard\u2019s Diary<\/em> of the Seducer<\/em>, in German.\u00a0 I bought it, less than a dollar, slipped it in my pocket, and my life of Existenz began.\u00a0\u00a0 I jest, but something began that day.\u00a0 An almost sly movement the words commenced, where slowly, slowly, the books that I had chosen because they had the power to lead me off away from the present world into a preternatural Rome or Broceliande or Erin began to be replaced by books that would gently tilt me back towards the world as is, tel quel<\/em>, and me hardly aware of the difference.\u00a0 That is the work of a city.\u00a0 But that\u2019s my story, and this is the story of where anybody goes from Fresh Pond Road.\u00a0 Northwest, into the cemeteries.\u00a0 Northeast into Queens.<\/p>\n

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Or, in ways that seem almost magical, west up long avenues, Gates where the bus ran, or Halsey, out into Bushwick and then through Bedford-Stuyvesant, the heart of black Brooklyn, where Dinah Washington was singing in some club and Alley\u2019s clothing store sold brilliant orange-varnished men\u2019s shoes for elegant slim feet.\u00a0 Amazing that a twenty minute bus ride would bring me from the Brandenburg-like sandy plain of the Germans to the overcrowded liveliness of our first, unwilling,\u00a0 immigrants.\u00a0 Down past the Baptist chapels, and the strange storefront mosques where burnous\u2019d African-Americans taught and studied Arabic, their blackboard set up on the sidewalk, where the new Muslims, converted through the compassionate lucidity of Noble Drew Ali, \u00a0or some of his fiercer heirs who formed the Nation of Islam, \u00a0stood in the Brooklyn street in their white soft skullcaps and examined and tried out their new identities.<\/p>\n

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The Gates Avenue bus, after passing these enigmatic and faintly menacing religions, would pass along into the expensive mansions of Park Slope, where the great surgeons had their consulting rooms, and specialists you dreaded being sent to, partly for fear of what they\u2019d tell you \u2013 some dreadful name for why you feel so bad \u2013 but partly too for fear of their heavy fee.\u00a0 The stone houses of Clinton Avenue were Brooklyn\u2019s grandest.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Off Vanderbilt Avenue the Catholic church and seminary in copper-pointed elegant Gothic stood right next to the neo-classic Masonic Temple, rival monuments.\u00a0 I still dream about that unlikely pair, the exoteric and the esoteric shoulder to shoulder, enemies they were said to be, yet each possessed the same persuasive massiveness that make buildings better teachers than books \u2013 as the Greeks and Romans surely knew.\u00a0 When I dream about them, it is always the Masonic Temple, bulking ever bigger till it fills half the sky.\u00a0 Sometimes the temple moves to higher ground, replaces the Brooklyn Museum, or climbs a hill.\u00a0 It is what a building should be.\u00a0 A solid mystery, an inescapable remark.<\/p>\n

\n

Not far from them, if I veered west and south, I\u2019d come round at last to the other end of Eastern Parkway, far from Pitkin Avenue. Now the stately European breadth that Frederick Olmstead gave it seemed to be coming back to its own fountain, and we realized that the parkway didn\u2019t begin where we first knew it, back in Brownsville, but here, in the actual fountains and triumphal arch of Grand Army Plaza, the hub from which it flowed.<\/p>\n

\n

Just where the parkway strikes Flatbush Avenue, itself spinning off the roundabout of the plaza, stands the strange white geometry of the Brooklyn Public Library, the cathedral from which all the branch libraries I knew were but mission chapels among the infidel.\u00a0 Here was the source.\u00a0 White, huge, triumphalist in design, with gilded relief figures over its concave modernist front, it had and has the kind of belated grandeur that reminds us of what Mussolini tried in Rome.\u00a0 Still, I loved the building, inside and out, and the Museum just east of it, and Prospect Park with its zoo just across the avenue and down a ways.\u00a0 This was the center of civilization as I, or Brooklyn, knew it.<\/p>\n

\n

*<\/p>\n

\n

But it wasn\u2019t my real center.\u00a0 The center was home, always.\u00a0 The place where you sleep.\u00a0 Where your mother calls you.\u00a0 Where your father plays Vaughan Monroe on the radio. Where your sister wonders whether we are Jews or Italians \u2013 there are no other kinds of people.\u00a0 The beautiful stifling railroad flat, the airless ordinary.\u00a0 Your life.<\/p>\n

\n

When you\u2019re\u00a0 home, you can go anywhere.\u00a0 The pilgrim routes I\u2019ve mentioned so far, for instance, the ones where you go along the surface of the earth on foot, like real pilgrims, or in buses or cars, like kings in their coaches or prisoners haled to the Bastille. When you\u2019re home, you can go so many ways.\u00a0 I could walk a few blocks and go down the steps of the IND subway, at Euclid Avenue, which in those days was the end of the line of the A train, that jazz-famous subway train that went from our little nowhere down through Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant into Manhattan, all underground, never the light of day (unlike the BMT and IRT which sometimes let daylight in, sometimes even ran in shallow trenches below street level open to the sky), all the way up the length of Manhattan through the meatpacking district and Chelsea and the French quarter and the railway yards and the West Side into Harlem, Morningside Heights, Columbia, City College (where I\u2019d get off every morning after a ride of an hour and a quarter, if I was lucky, time enough to do my Greek homework and read my German), finally the upper island, Museum of the American Indian, Mother Cabrini\u2019s Shrine, Fort Tryon Park, the Cloisters.\u00a0 What a run!\u00a0 It must have twenty miles of solid city, and even so, it was just one slim pathway along and through the whole, one path among a thousand.\u00a0 And all of them reachable from home.\u00a0 That is the splendor of a city.\u00a0 Everywhere is somehow equidistant from everyplace else.\u00a0 Not in linear distance or in time spent getting there, but in the all-important psychic sense of closeness.\u00a0 They are all just at the doorstep.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong>

Canarsie Beach Park 1951<\/p><\/div>\n

South:\u00a0 The Sea<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

But there was South too.\u00a0 Not a place of streets anymore, but pure distances, shapes and shadows just the same.\u00a0 No streets, except at the beginning.\u00a0 Crescent again, take the bus down to where it ends, and where the marshes begin.\u00a0 Only vacant lots along the way, acres and acres with streets marked out but never paved, developments that did not (yet) develop.\u00a0 All of that land and water is under concrete now, all turned into low income housing and mail sorting facilities for the whole city, and garbage processing installations.<\/p>\n

\n

But then it was field, field leading to marsh, marsh leading to sea.\u00a0 I came down here in summer, not all the time, the place was too powerful, numinous, to be casual with.\u00a0 Or in autumn, always my favorite, when the marsh grass was brown and the clouds\u00a0 were pearly, and the sea birds yammered and the whole sky seemed to be my bible.<\/p>\n

\n

Every city includes as part of its own art or gesture, its chreodes, its access to what seems outside itself.\u00a0 A great city finds some way to include<\/em> its countryside. (The wild boars trotting through Berlin, the sheep grazing beside the runways at Heathrow, the marshlands still even now still alive in the western flank of Brooklyn.)<\/p>\n

\n

And here the marshes, the grasses taller than the tallest man, we walk through wafture, through lineaments uprisen, lines scribbling towards heaven, phragmites and timothy and cat-tails, reeds and grasses triumphant.<\/p>\n

\n

The place I speak of, that is never far from my mind (perhaps because my mind is one of the few places where it exists)\u00a0 is one of the few places that New York has utterly \u00a0lost.\u00a0 All gone, the marshes and the catwalks.\u00a0 When I knew these marshes, there was still an old fishing village, the houses built on stilts (like our La T\u00e8ne ancestors eight thousand years ago), the fisherfolk getting to the mainland by rowboats and motor boats.\u00a0 Arriving at one of the old rickety grey wooden jetties stuck out in the bay, where one of the rickety grey wooden catwalks ended, they\u2019d dock, then from there walk a mile or so to catch the same old Crescent Street bus, for shopping.\u00a0 Because even they got to go to Town.\u00a0 They had no electricity or gas, boated in their kerosene, boated out their fish to the docks in Canarsie and Sheepshead Bay.\u00a0 Kinderhoek was the name of the town, old Dutch name, the houses did not seem themselves very old, just archaic in their relationship to the water and to the rest of the world.\u00a0 Field of Children, the name must have meant, or maybe Child\u2019s Point, to be nautical about it.\u00a0 Miles of catwalks, boardwalks, with grasses higher than your head on either side, glimpses of the immense sky, the black, really black, mud at your feet.<\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes you dared to step off the narrow catwalk and test the mud.\u00a0 You could stand in it, it wasn\u2019t quicksand, and sometimes lovers, finding no better privacy than isolation of sky and sea, would venture in, come away smirched and happy, joyful as Eden could make them, cold skin and cold mud joyful, nobody around them but the birds.\u00a0 And such birds!\u00a0 The marshes were on the great East Coast flyway, and birds from all over the Americas would show up, and exotics bewildered from Europe at times too.\u00a0 I heard a bittern there one evening.\u00a0 Never saw snakes or frogs, but the rats must have eaten something.<\/p>\n

\n

So when I read nowadays about the Maremma, or about Romney Marsh of Turner and Henry James, it is these lost miles that come to mind.\u00a0 The city held the whole sea inside it in those days, and a good piece of the sky, thanks to this navigable but not drivable landscape.\u00a0 Cars couldn\u2019t come in.\u00a0 We walked, one at a time or two at a time and no more.\u00a0 Nobody came here. \u00a0In all my years I never met a single person walking on those flimsy boardwalks \u2013 it was as if the whole array of sky and sea and land were only for me, or me and my friend.\u00a0 No wonder I loved it!\u00a0 \u00a0The houses nearest to the marshes, the scattered houses, city style row houses but standing alone, weird isolates, \u00a0strange as Rabbi Schneersohn\u2019s house in Israel, a rowhouse all by itself in empty acres, these houses held, we were told and believed, criminals lying low, hideouts, secret places to which soldiers of the Mafia or agents of Murder, Inc., came to be inconspicuous.\u00a0 Crime was never far away \u2013 up Sutter Avenue not far from our house was the tavern where Murder, Inc. had its headquarters.\u00a0 And our closest friends in the neighborhood were, it was clear but never spoken, middle-echelon Mafiosi.\u00a0 Jewish criminals, Italian criminals.\u00a0 There were no other people.<\/p>\n

\n

Except me in the marshes, staring into the sky, knowing already a little about love, the skin.\u00a0 But mostly about streets, and these marshes, where the city gave up its streets and instead took on the endless sea and endless sky, and borrowed from them an infinity of its own.<\/p>\n

\n

Even here the city spoke its characteristic sentence:\u00a0 the Belt Parkway, the circumferential,\u00a0 Brooklyn\u2019s own p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/em>, bounded the horizon.\u00a0 It scratched a line between the bay and the open sea beyond, and along it\u00a0 black cars scooted east into Queens, Rockaway and the Hammels and Idlewild, where soon the city began building a new airport that would turn eventually sprawl out as JFK\u00a0 International.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\"\"

Canarsie Pier 1951<\/p><\/div>\n

Leave it to the city to make its own horizon, so all the marshes and fishermen and their little boats and the rats and the lovers and the marshbirds were all held within the city\u2019s gesture.\u00a0 A city, whose only sentence ever is a street.<\/p>\n

\n

So it to the street the young man I was had to return.\u00a0 Enough of standing in cold black mud up to my calves, sloshing through reeds and timothy grass, loafing on grey empty boardwalks and praying to seagulls. The beauty of the periphery returns me to the center.\u00a0 The half-mile hike over catwalks and up a dirt road to the paved world, where the bus turns round, idles, waits for me, takes me back to the copious lexicon of streets where I like every other being have to find my own text, the thing I mean.\u00a0 All my life I have to spend my life saying the thing the street tells me.<\/p>\n

\u2014 The End \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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