* * *
YOUR MOST SECRET FANTASIES. She parks the car by a high gate. It could be a mansion on the outskirts of Paris. It is a luxury hotel. She glides through the lobby in her cinched black raincoat, on edge, aware that the women at the reception desk are watching her. She is someone who doesn’t need to say much to express her will. A key is placed on the marble counter and her fingers close over it. As she rises in a gleaming elevator, the pulsing reflection of the city lights below is like the pulsing of her heart. She leans against the side, holding in one hand a flask of perfume. Outside the elevator there is a very long hallway that is lit like a spaceship. She touches the walls with her fingers as she goes. She leans on the wall, fainting with anticipation and perhaps with desire. Before using the key to the room, she stands outside and presses her forehead to the door. Her lips are parted as if about to break into a smile tinged with expectation, with impatience, perhaps with disbelief at being finally there. Her trembling fingers turn the key in the lock and she opens the door. The man who was waiting for her is him. The room spins as they embrace. The windows and the lights of Paris spin with them and turn into a perfume flask, Trésor, the treasure of a love that stays forever like the first day.
ONLY A MASTER CAN TRANSFORM YOUR SKIN DURING THE NIGHT. He often has a dream in which a threatening figure is drawing near, a vague shape emerging from dark depths, drawing closer and closer while he remains paralyzed in the quicksand of dreams, incapable of acting. He can never tell if it’s a human being or an animal, or both at once, or something in between, a hybrid creature from the island of Dr. Moreau. Perhaps it comes from the beginnings of time, rooted in ancestral memory, a cluster of tightly packed neurons deep within the brain, in the tiny, almond-shaped mass of the amygdala. Perhaps it was already there when hominids sought shelter in the trees from carnivorous beasts that hunted them for prey. Even in his sleep, instinct warns him that something is silently approaching. Fear acts like a biological radar. It could be an animal that is drawing near, so stealthy and well adapted to the dark that it can only be discerned by the gleam of its eyes. Or it could be a human predator, faceless, or wearing a mask; a primitive mask in the shape of an animal or perhaps a cheap modern mask made of plastic or cardboard, stamped with the frozen, happy smile of a cartoon character. He is filled with terror by its approach and is unable to move, paralyzed like an ape before the gaze of a feline predator, like a rabbit or a deer in a car’s blinding headlights. He must move, but he can’t, and when he tries to speak or scream for help he finds his mouth and tongue will not obey him.
* * *
WE FOUND YOU. This time, in the dream, the figure is wearing a robe like a mandarin or a high Chinese official. Like the robe that Mao wore in some of his portraits. The robe reaches down to its feet, and on its head there is a monstrous, swollen mask. Or perhaps there is no mask, just a monstrous face, like the Elephant Man. It steps out of the darkness and the robe is blue, a muted blue. He manages to raise one hand as it draws near, to close it into a fist, like a prisoner struggling to free himself from his bindings. Then, while the rest of his body remains paralyzed, he gathers all his strength into his arm and brings himself to punch the air, causing a loud noise that frees him from the nightmare. He has punched the lamp on the nightstand and knocked it to the ground. But even now, as he lies awake in the dark, his sense of helplessness remains. The masked or monstrously deformed creature in the blue robe refuses to vanish completely into the surrounding darkness. Where does it all come from. Who wove together the scene in just a few seconds, selecting the costume, the mask, the dark background, the texture and color of the robe. He keeps his eyes wide open, trying not to fall back asleep. It would be like going back into the tunnel where his gruesome visitor awaits, a visitor that he himself has shaped and brought to life.
STRANGE THIRTEEN-LEGGED CREATURE FOUND ON THE OCEAN FLOOR. Somewhat immodestly, though also accurately, he prides himself in having invented no less than three new disciplines in the already extensive field of the humanities. It’s true that several lifetimes would be required to establish their theoretical and methodological bases, as well as to complete a few research projects that would put their principles into practice and demonstrate their rigor, their efficacy, the wealth of new discoveries they could bring to light. The primary obstacle is neither the subject matter nor a proper access to sources, but rather the fact, irreparable at present, that he is the sole inventor and practitioner of these fields of study. At a time when science and the academic world in general are dominated by working groups and by increasingly complex crowdsourcing and management techniques, the realm of action for an individual is almost pathetically circumscribed. Not to mention that the individual in question lacks all academic credentials or connections, thus any access to adequate facilities or to sources of public or private funding for his projects. Even so, did not Santiago Ramón y Cajal work alone? As did Edward Gibbon, Louis Pasteur, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Frankenstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, when he was a young patent clerk in Bern. All those large, well-financed teams, all those brainstorming sessions, the whole tremendous apparatus of the universities not just in Spain but all over the world: How many concrete, verifiable, beneficial results do they usually produce? Lacking any academic affiliation, he will have to be entirely self-reliant. He will have to come up with the titles, programs, and qualifications. He will even have to print the business cards and diplomas for these new disciplines, being as they are entirely of his own invention and currently in a stage that is not so much preliminary as utterly chimerical.
* * *
WE ARE THE SOLUTION TO YOUR NEEDS. But in the end, he thinks, except in the physical sciences and in those that help people heal or that hasten their death, what’s the difference between an official university degree and one that is fictitious or apocryphal? Don’t we often see, he thinks, getting a little worked up, eminent academics adding to their curriculum by what would politely be called “borrowing” from other people’s efforts, their colleagues, their subordinates, sometimes with their acquiescence, whether remunerated or not, sometimes without their knowledge? Is there not in recent scandals, which nonetheless, to the relief of all but a few vindictive individuals, have not managed to permanently damage the good name or well-being of the alleged plagiarists; is there not an underlying notion of individual “authorship” that is antiquated, elitist, and obsolete? At a time when so many other innovative degrees are being promoted in the world of higher learning, from Event Management to Spiritual Coaching to Translation Science, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to him to launch these disciplines or fields of knowledge that he believes himself to have invented, or rather founded, just as much as Auguste Comte is thought to have founded sociology, or his cherished Erwin Panofsky is called the father of iconology. If UFO studies, political science, educational psychology, plastic surgery, communications, or literary theory are now fully acceptable fields, the academic community will no doubt soon embrace these new disciplines that have been inspired, and one might say pioneered, by him. He is too modest to imagine a future where he will be called “The Father of Instantaneous Archeology,” “A Pioneer in Topobiography” or in perambulation studies, or in the history of accidental art. Merely to arrive at a sketch of each of these disciplines (better not call them “sciences,” the term is already quite discredited in these circles) would require a lifetime of research, theoretical reflection, and documentation, not to mention all the activities related to fieldwork that in the academic world are comfortably delegated to assistants, graduate students, and postdocs.
* * *
BE YOURSELF, UNLESS YOU CAN BE BATMAN. New geolocation devices and techniques will allow for a huge leap forward in Perambulation Studies, similar perhaps to the one brought about in neuroscience by magnetic imaging, even if limited by the current inability to employ them retrospectively, that is, to the walks that people took in the past. As its name suggests, perambulation studies deals with the physical routes t
aken by writers, artists, scientists, lunatics, prophetic seers, and destitute madmen: whether it be the habitual paths they followed all their lives—Kant’s daily walks would be a classic example—or those sudden, irregular trajectories that only happened once. It remains unclear whether perambulation studies is an independent field or rather a branch of topobiography, whose end, as can be easily guessed, is the study of the various locations where these same figures live or lived, in order to establish, with the aid of detailed maps, the likely psychospatial or sociovital patterns involved. (The wholesale creation of a specialized jargon is another challenge beyond the powers of a single person.) Borges once referred disdainfully to those literary biographers who are “so enthralled by a change of address” that they have no time to look at the works of the authors they study. But topobiography can shed light on fundamental aspects of scientific and aesthetic creation, or simply of mental rambling, that have been little understood until now. No branch of knowledge, even in the humanities, can function anymore without a solid quantitative basis. In how many Parisian hotels, for instance, did Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin live? What is the ratio of changes of address per period of time? And the ratio of pages written per location? In how many places did Thomas De Quincey live in England and Scotland, or Edgar Allan Poe in the United States, if we take Boston and Richmond as the limits of his geographical displacement?
* * *
THE PLACE YOU WERE DREAMING OF IS HERE. Madame Bovary was written over the course of five years in the same room of the same house. This sedentary state must somehow be part of the novel’s DNA, to employ a distinguished though perhaps entirely useless term, just as Baudelaire’s unsettled life during the years when he wrote The Flowers of Evil must have had strong creative implications, heightened by the fact—we trespass here on the territory of perambulation studies, given there is no cadre of specialists yet to jealously guard it—that Baudelaire composed his poems mentally as he walked. In how many rooms, on how many kitchen tables, in how many cafés, houses, and cities did Joyce write his Ulysses? A traveler just arrived in Trieste is excited to find a little plaque marking a house where Joyce once lived. But nearly identical plaques can be seen on corners all over the city, since Joyce moved houses with the same disastrous frequency as any of his fellow literary wanderers. Needless to say, a great deal of research has already been done and a wealth of materials is available. But a theory is missing, a method, a set of quantifying tools and of conceptual or maybe even neurological principles to really shed light on the likely correspondence between, on the one hand, the tangle of routes and locations that one can draw on a map, and on the other, the blazing neuronal connections that gradually gave rise to those rambling works of the imagination.
ALL THE SPACE YOU NEED IN YOUR LIFE. Each morning I am astonished to be back. Every single morning. Whether I am calmly making breakfast or whether I go out and see the great puddle of light on the sidewalk and the swaying shade of the locust tree that scatters its small white blossoms everywhere, dry as confetti in the summer heat. There is a sacramental quality to making breakfast, to the propriety of each necessary step in a ritual involving all the gifts of nature and of human labor, of plants and animals, a ritual that is best carried out in silence and that seems imbued with a tacit sense of gratitude: the cow, the grass, the bee that pollinated the flower of the orange tree from which the juice was made, the grain of wheat, the cup of water, the burnt coffee bean. And then, too, the biochemical, pharmaceutical, eucharistic sacrament of our daily pills, taken with a glass of water. I step out on the street, freshly bathed, absolved, prepared, alert. I have my backpack on one shoulder, my phone in one pocket, a small notebook in another, and a spring in my step. I walk down the street like water flowing downhill. My own steps carry and guide me as they please, my dusty hiking boots, my seven-league boots whose thick soles are worn along the edges and with which I’ve taken who knows how many steps in the past few months, mile after mile through different cities. I could know the actual number if I had downloaded an app for counting steps or if I wore one of those smart watches that take your pulse and calculate your breathing rate. Perhaps I feel a special attachment to these boots because I was wearing them when I lost my way in the world, and also when I found my way back. They carried me through those months when I was just a shadow, when a sense of dread weighed down my head and lay on my shoulders like a heavy burden. They carried me when every street was a dark tunnel and every room a suffocating cell. Anxiety would force my eyes open at dawn like the prodding muzzle of a creature, a faithful vampire waiting at the foot of the bed to feed on my fear. A clot of darkness would adhere to my back as soon as I found the strength to get out of bed, gathering the small bit of courage required not even to face the world but simply not to stay hidden in my room all morning with the curtains drawn, or look through the peephole to make sure no one was in the hallway before stepping out, or go out on the street to be instantly dazed and cast down by the blinding light. The same dark shadow that forced me awake robbed me of the strength I needed to leave my bed.
* * *
YOU’LL WANT TO HOLD IT IN YOUR HANDS. I made it back, seemingly intact, and each morning I realize with gratitude and incredulity that the old terror is gone, that it vanished in the air without leaving any traces on all the things it used to pollute. It went away as suddenly as it first came, as it had come at other times before. Or even faster, from one day to the next, like someone who used to take up the whole world but now is gone. I came out of a citadel and the enemy that was laying siege to it turned out to have withdrawn silently during the night. I breathe again, like an asthmatic who can suddenly inhale, marveling each time at just how clean the air is, and plentiful, and at the strength and clarity he feels as the oxygen spreads through his brain. What used to be impossible is now entirely natural. In the bright air I can distinguish colors again. Sounds and smells are extraordinarily sharp, as when someone stops smoking and one day the scent of a tangerine being peeled across the room bursts into his brain. It is my own face in the mirror that reminds me of how long I spent in the dark. There is a trace of fear deep in my eyes, a faint dread of the visitation of darkness. When the subway comes into the station I no longer watch it approach with a kind of morbid magnetism. But I am not entirely at ease. I go out every morning just in case, to get away from a threatening presence to which my nervous system has become habituated, the small nucleus of the amygdala releasing deep within the brain the chemical signals of fear. Sometimes I’m able to forget it for days, even for weeks at a time. But I know it too well to be entirely unafraid. It has disappeared before only to come back gradually, like a faint sound of steps I can recognize from afar. I’ve felt it drawing near without being able to move or to defend myself in any way, yielding to it in advance.
YOU WILL GLOW WITH AN INNER LIGHT. Literary wanderers make a living as best they can by writing for the newspapers. They have no other job. They have no private means, or they lost them if they ever had them. No patron to protect and support them. They give up the rights to their work as soon as they accept whatever amount some editor is willing to pay. They earn so little that they must write as fast as possible. The medium in which their writing appears is as new as the world they describe or as the literary forms they must create to recount things that have only recently come into existence. The newspaper and the modern city explode in tandem. Both are part of a general conflagration unleashed by ceaseless growth. Growth in the population, the size of cities, the goods that are sold in their markets, the factories that rise around them, the number and the circulation of periodicals. Poe comes up with made-up news that drastically increases the sales of the papers he writes for, but receives no compensation for the benefits their owners accrue. One of his stories claims that a new and incredibly powerful telescope has revealed cities and fields on the moon, and even what look like inhabitants. Thomas De Quincey, who writes for magazines in London and Edinburgh, collects newspapers from all over the
world. He stacks them in piles in his rented rooms and moves among them as through a swamp or a wasteland of printed matter. Poe discovers De Quincey in the pages of English periodicals that reach the United States, and begins to imitate his style.
* * *
WHEN ITS END APPROACHES. The tempo of the city and of the newspaper gives rise to a literature of frantic urgency. The urban wanderer writes for a pittance and as fast as possible. Their work does not appear on the refined pages of a book but on a sheet of newsprint, in tiny type, lost in a sea of advertisements and random stories. Its reading audience is composed of the same strangers who furnished the subject matter. De Quincey says that the street is a pageant where a writer procures his characters like a farmer looking for cattle at a county fair. De Quincey’s readers cross paths with him on the street without knowing it and pay a few cents for the newspaper that prints his stories. Baudelaire tries desperately to get his pieces in the papers while at the same time despising their vulgarity, just as he despises photography, gas lights, advertising posters, and the long, straight boulevards that are changing the face of Paris. “I do not understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust,” he says. The urban literature of the newspaper spreads swiftly and contagiously, like the deadly epidemics brought about by poverty, overcrowding, and a lack of public sanitation.
* * *
EVERYTHING REVEALED. The paths of literary influence spread as quickly as the growing network of roads, railways, telegraph lines, and steamship routes that are gradually covering the globe: star-shaped patterns of frost spreading and converging on the surface of water when its temperature drops beneath a certain point. In his youth, De Quincey traveled by stagecoach or went on foot from one city to another. In his old age he took the train. In Baltimore and in New York, Poe reads De Quincey’s writings and contracts the virus of his dark imaginings, his visions of nocturnal cities that are theaters of crime and delirium. In Paris, Baudelaire reads Poe and De Quincey in periodicals sent from England and the United States. He translates their work out of admiration and also to earn some money. He seems to recognize in Poe a fellow soul, as if his own life had been prefigured by another man. In De Quincey and in Poe he finds a fellowship of restless urban wandering, of doomed writers and opium addicts who must barter away and even degrade their talent in order to make a living. In Berlin, Walter Benjamin translates Baudelaire. Unable to find a teaching post, and having lost to the convulsions and the raging inflation of the early twenties the secure bourgeois existence into which he was born, he finds that he, too, must write for the papers. The future of the works these men compose is as erratic and uncertain as their lives: scattered essays in the most unlikely publications, in periodicals of such obscure or short existence that every single issue was lost; essays submitted by post or by hand that were never published because the newspaper in question had already gone bankrupt. Baudelaire died without seeing his prose poems gathered into the book he always dreamed of. Walter Benjamin conceived immense works for which he never had the time or the peace of mind. He had to write short pieces to pay the rent, to buy a little food. He kept changing address or moving to another city, another country, never able to gather all his notes and bring forth what already existed in all its dazzling completeness within his mind.
To Walk Alone in the Crowd Page 9
