Loitering: New and Collected Essays (30 page)

Whereas prison, well, what is it, really? A shortage of space compensated for by an excess of time.

—Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky’s equation is just, I think, but you can tinker with the terms and arrive at other prisons, other compensations. This picture also brings us to a prison, one without a shortage of space; in fact, there’s a sudden, horrifying excess, a terrible liberation, with time in short supply.

In this moment the falling man’s time on earth is a spatial concern, and he has more in common with a stapler than he does with you or me. Natural laws explain why he’s dropping, and a formula can easily calculate the rate of his descent. A man of roughly that weight, from roughly that height, in that specific gravity, arms and legs spread, reaches a terminal velocity of 125 mph, beyond which there’s no further acceleration. Terminal velocity—of the man, a stapler, a raindrop—is the square root of [(2 x W) / (Cd x r x A)].
¹
That’s the irresolvable contradiction in this picture, a man subject to mechanistic forces, a life obedient to
an indifference—although
obedient
is a somewhat dead metaphor here, since rebellion or refusal is impossible. One might wonder if he jumped or not, a last act of volition, a final insistence on self, but either way falling is the consequence. In falling, he’s lost connection, he’s ripped free from every relation, to his love and work and family, to his own biography, to the choice he made that morning about what shirt to wear. The descent strips him of every cherished thing, even our regard, and one thinks of Auden’s Old Masters who understood the position of human suffering, “how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,” and the amazing boy from Breughel, falling out of the sky, seen by a ship that “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” The falling man is falling because that’s what things do, and in some awful way it’s not remarkable.

Just the same, there’s an abstract purity to the picture, in the geometry of sky and building, that strangely suspends the man in a constructed space, entirely drained of time, so that one imagines him there forever. The composition is immaculate, even icily harmonious. In the picture’s arrested moment you get a pure feel for the falling man’s incomprehension, his emptiness, but in the days following the attack, obviously, this sensation would become intolerable to survivors, to the witnesses
we were turned into, and the point of view would shift, the images would progress. Something was needed to distinguish the falling man from a fluttering scrap of paper, from the nothing of his silent descent. The pristine space began to blow with dust and fill with debris. Attention was focused on the broken hierarchy, the jumbled ruin. An accessible idea of heroism, Homeric but not tragic, occupied the human void, and suddenly firemen loomed up and moved across the foreground of the new images. “The savagery of the struggle for existence,” Miłosz has written, “is not averted in civilization,” and now we knew this, possibly. But a hasty gloss of evolution from primitive to modern was improvised, phoenixlike, out of the ashes, and contra the terrorists, who seemed to have reduced a symbol of at least one kind of civilized aspiration to a barbaric rubble. Rebuilding began in a rudimental, dark, superstitious state where blind luck or chance either saved or did not save. Later, it turned out that God was with the people who survived and the people who perished were now with God, a tautological tidiness that always breaks my heart, tearing at an old longing for universal justice. Faces were shown, names mentioned, chronologies elaborated, stories told, helping to rehabilitate the present scene, applying a patch to the moral sense. An ideal
civitas
emerged, so that, looking into the shadowy
precincts of Wall Street, where certainly some of the dead were embezzlers, no mention was made of precisely the sort of intrigants who would, later, populate stories about Enron. It’s almost too obvious to state, but in a random sample of any three thousand people, some will be beating their children, others will be addicted to heroin, and others still will be caught in the midst of affairs that would, left to run their course, damage families and undo to some degree the social fabric. But this was a new polis—from which those folks were now symbolically banished. Sincerity worked like a conduit for connection. What might have been viewed as a great equalizer, falling on the just and unjust alike, visited on the rich and the poor, the fair and the homely, black and white, instead rose out of the wreckage with a perfectly familiar face, looking quite the same as life before. Hierarchy was restored, and hatred with it. Enemies were declared, war was in the offing, and now the falling man, not knowing what he’d done, was descending through—or perhaps into—the medium of history, which sits between all of us and oblivion.

There has been considerable reflection on the origins of the phenomenon known as individualism, on Byronic despair—the revolt of the individual who considers himself the center of all
things, and their sole judge. No doubt, it was the contents of the imagination itself which forced this to happen,
as soon as hierarchical space began to somersault
. Anyone who looks into himself can reproduce the course of the crisis. The imagination will not tolerate dispersal and chaos, without maintaining one Place to which all others are related, and, when confronted with an infinity of relationships, always relative only to each other, it seizes upon its sole support, the ego. So why not think of myself as an ideal, incorporeal observer
suspended above the turning earth
? [Italics mine.]

—Czesław Miłosz

Hatred organizes space—think of Dante’s
Inferno
, the structure of which is partly animated by personal enmity—and in the gray waste of the Philipsburg in Hugo’s poem, it’s the principal supporting business. The contracted, hating ego restores hierarchy, creating an armature for the emotions, organizing a defense of the inner life while it’s attacked from outside. But hate and rage are emotions we summon to survive a crisis, and the acute phase can’t be sustained for long. The adrenal medulla can’t hack it. The surge of epinephrine is meant to peak and subside and pass entirely
with the passing of the injury or threat. Without relief the nerves blunt, and even if the emergency remains, a numbing settles in obdurately; and that’s the harmed, sinking, downward passage, from hatred to boredom, captured in the second stanza of the poem. Hugo moves in a quick line or two from rage and hatred to boredom, and I think he’s right to push the association. Here, the hatred is against history, the mere unfolding of life, its indifferent or brutal or oblivious progress, against which the spiked rage can’t strike out. It’s a grievance against ghosts, a grievance against what’s gone—or even, more accurately, against the sheer “going” of life everyone suffers. No wonder that in these ruined Western towns you so often find revivals along the lines of Hawthorne’s legend prolonging itself, the sorry romance of the spurned, yearning to occupy the dramatic center once more by suspending time. The main drag in Philipsburg is either ruined or vacant or shabby or somewhat tartly gussied up, but these are all guises of the same settled arrangement, the same hierarchy. Hatred’s destination is boredom, and boredom is perhaps a rebellion against time; it’s the finished putting up a fight with the end. Boredom is, at any rate, a more habitable space, long-term, than history.

The British psychologist Adam Phillips calls boredom “that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish
for a desire,” and defined as such, boredom isn’t fixed by distraction, by bars or restaurants, but by the arrival of a feeling of anticipation. I know for myself boredom involves a spatialization of time; the forwardness goes out of life, and I wait, and in waiting time becomes a place—not a particularly good one, but a place nonetheless, with the minutes and hours, the days and months piling up indifferently. For phenomenologists, this kind of repetition isn’t a property of time but of space, and then it’s more aptly called “redundancy,” when things exceed what’s necessary. In boredom you take on some of the character of an object, becoming lifeless and inanimate, lacking flow, and the more the time sense is rendered into space, the more isolated you become—isolated by becoming extraneous. The spooky intimation behind boredom, the whispered secret of it, is death, a final draining of time, when at last all the living belong exclusively to space. In boredom, we become victims of a sameness within a hierarchy whose original principle of design was a now-forgotten, vestigial loss of proportion—which is an aesthetic problem, the problem of arranging parts harmoniously within a whole.

What is worse, time, always strongly spatial, has increased its spatiality; it has stretched infinitely
back out behind us, infinitely forward into the future toward which our faces are turned. . . . Today I cannot deny that in the background of all my thinking there is the image of the “chain of development”—of gaseous nebulae condensing into liquids and solid bodies, a molecule of life-begetting acid, species, civilizations succeeding each other in turn, segment added to segment, on a scale which reduces me to a particle.

—Czesław Miłosz

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it,
submerge, hit bottom
. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. [Italics mine.]

—Joseph Brodsky

To fall and hit bottom life has to give up its hold on the horizontal, its restriction to the same level in a now-tedious hierarchy. For this, there’s no choice but to descend, if only because hatred, that forgotten structure inside boredom, has already failed in its attempt to rise above history and circumstance. Upward progress is a social or economic idea, but from literature and, to
an extent, religion, we know going down holds a lot of life’s interesting possibilities. If up isn’t an option, then down is the obvious alternative; it’s even desirable. Down is the direction poetry travels on the page, anyway, and poets have tended to follow their pens. For contrast, the etymology of the word
prose
means to go forward, generally straight forward, and there’s nothing internal to a sentence that limits its length or sideways nature. Paragraphing arranges ideas logically, but for that one could imagine a codex like an accordion, the folds expanding laterally. Even punctuation isn’t really about organizing or shaping the inherently horizontal character of prose. Periods, commas, and colons regulate the breath, and well-written prose always includes, in its long or short rhythms, a kind of pulmonary function; reaching into these vital rhythms, good prose can, like breathing exercises in yoga, inhabit the visceral life of a reader. Conceivably prose could be written on ribbons hundreds of yards long, winding the reader and testing his lungs in another way, but we bind and store it in books, mainly, so that doesn’t happen. The quotidian tendency of prose is either to satisfy an immediate disposable need or to point beyond itself, toward a distant, receding horizon of information. It’s the
écriture
of choice for assembling bicycles and analyzing wars, and the difficulty for a writer, the
danger, is that his words, failing to capture a cadent, living pulse, will lose meaning in the vastness of other words. If a piece of prose aspires to art, it must close itself off, setting in motion sympathetic vibrations and gaining, as with any enclosure, resonance.

Poetry’s orientation is not primarily horizontal but vertical. It goes across, left to right, but mostly it goes down, top to bottom, and that descent is dictated from within. Though our language for prosody has largely shifted to a discussion of stresses, we still listen for feet and measure in meter the distance a line travels. The syllables in a haiku might be the exception to this idea of poetry’s descent, but you’d lose the stillness in space if all seventeen were strung like clothesline across the page. While a haiku hangs, suspended in air, hexameter hits its beats and heads down, line by line, and it’s easy to imagine an idea of descent and depth coming to a stymied poet by simply staring disconsolately at the page. The etymology of verse means “to turn” or “return,” and if the trick in prose is to overcome its diffuse and vague and ubiquitous presence, the trap for poetry is hermeticism, its tendency toward the occult, the ease with which it turns in on itself and, going down, abandons or forfeits its participation in the upper world. Still, poetry has no choice about its generally chthonic direction. Even a democratic poet like
Whitman, resisting hierarchy’s vertical axis with his broad, barbaric yawp, eventually descends. Down is where poetry is, and whatever poetry has to say, whatever it can deliver, is down there too.

In a trope typical of him, at least in this poem, Hugo monkeys with the expected syntactical arrangement, wrenching new emphasis from fairly accessible language; playing with inflection is a way he has of torquing a phrase, and he does it twice in the second stanza. Let me look at the second instance first. The mill “in collapse / for fifty years that won’t
fall finally down
” gives us the adverb in its most active form.
Finally
doesn’t idle in an ancillary place, taking up slack because the right verb wasn’t available. In fact, for a word without a verbal form (except the somewhat bureaucratic
finalize
),
finally
, as Hugo writes it, is as close as you’re going to get to a sense of the desire inside the downward trajectory of falling. Somehow the
down
here, the collapse, is being propped up, penultimately supported by an old, useless structure, and
finally
is the hope or possibility of falling, the fulfillment of fifty years of need. Positioned just above a stanza composed entirely of questions, the line suggests that the mill, slumped in desuetude, must give way before a bottom can be revealed. The end of Pburg (as locals call the town) or history or gray isn’t really the end—there’s
something below. But to get to it the landscape’s first got to be leveled, the kilns and the mill razed, the horizontal world abandoned.