To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  SPECIALIZING IN ALL MANNER OF OCCULT WORK. In the end, he would settle for just putting on a pair of large headphones, like a sound engineer, and listening to the past, acoustically exploring it as he explores the present when he listens through white earbuds to the recordings on his iPhone. There would be a faraway sound, as when you put a seashell to your ear, in this case the faint rumor of time rather than the sea or the circulation of the blood. The neighing and clopping of horses, the bugle of a stagecoach, the cries of street vendors, the barrel organs that made De Quincey shiver with grief each time he went back to London. “The rolling clamor of the omnibus,” as Baudelaire says, the footsteps of a lonely figure on an empty street, and then suddenly other sounds as well, as he slowly turns a knob on the control panel or touches an icon on the screen and the numbers begin to rise on the display: the ring of a streetcar, the horn of an early automobile, the growing roar of traffic drowning out sounds that used to be habitual not so long ago.

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  IT WILL TAKE YOU TO AMAZING PLACES. It would be a reductive view of perambulation studies to suppose it concerned only with tracing out physical paths, even if that in itself is already an inexhaustible field of inquiry. Something glimpsed at random during a walk can be the crucial stroke of inspiration for a poem or a novel. Max Planck, walking hand in hand with his son through the Grunewald in Berlin, suddenly intuits the principles of quantum mechanics. Darwin pieces together the theory of evolution as he walks each morning on the gravel path around his house, etc. Also within the purview of our discipline are issues such as the swiftness or slowness of a person’s walk at different stages of life or of a creative process; types of footwear and their virtues and deficiencies; the posture and attitude of the body when it walks. None of these matters are superfluous, none are irrelevant when considering a particular set of stylistic or imaginative traits. “Style is the man,” says Buffon, who as it happens used to walk with vigorous solemnity through the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Style is the entire man, the person, not some nonexistent (if highly celebrated) disembodied quality of mind or “ghost in the machine.” Style is the entire body: its height, the way it leans, its heaviness or lightness, the particular force of its steps, the way the heel strikes the ground.

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  NIGHT DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN THE DAY IS OVER. Proust writes about the way that certain men, on leaving a place of ill repute, a brothel or a gambling house, walk in a rapid sideways motion to present the least visible surface to those who could be watching, like infantrymen trying to elude the enemy’s sharpshooters. Science is distinguished exclusively by the capacity to make predictions. The ideal aim of perambulation studies is to analyze a literary text and be able to deduce, in a manner subject to verification, the height, age, health, and way of walking of the person who “produced” it, to employ a respectable academic term. By reading one of Frank O’Hara’s rambling New York poems you will be able to develop a virtual model of O’Hara’s walk, to be then confirmed by looking at films that actually show him walking. By watching a short film of Cartier-Bresson walking through Paris and by noticing how he holds his camera (discreetly, but not covertly) you will learn more about his style than from any number of lengthy monographs—at least those written prior to the rise of perambulation studies in colleges and universities, a rise which will perhaps be even more sweeping than that of structuralism or of semiotics once was.

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  YOU’LL GET SHARPER PICTURES. A great step forward will take place when different routes are juxtaposed. From 1846 to 1849, Poe, Whitman, and Melville are all living, working, and walking simultaneously through New York City, orbiting around a small number of magnetic poles: a particular bookstore, the offices of a handful of literary journals, the houses of a few cultured people that hold soirees. The study of the ways in which their paths meet, cross, or collide, all within the map of a city that barely rose above Twenty-Third Street, can be as rich as tracking a set of elementary particles in a linear accelerator. There is no evidence of any personal relation. But we know that Melville and Whitman read Poe. They must have known people in common, and they must at least have recognized one another when they crossed paths. Did Melville, Dickens, and De Quincey walk past each other or collide in London during the winter of 1849? Melville then traveled to Paris, leaving London after witnessing a public hanging. Did he ever walk past Baudelaire? What we need is facts, not hypotheses that cannot be verified experimentally.

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  OUR GREATEST GIFT IS KNOWING YOU. In Paris, among millions of footsteps and by using cutting-edge perambulation techniques, he will search for Walter Benjamin’s clumsy tread. His geolocator shows the streets where Benjamin used to walk. His audio-chronoscope is set to June 1940. Suddenly every needle on every gauge drops to its lowest level. The city is silent. Measurements can be imprecise for periods of less than twenty-four hours. It could be daybreak, since a great concave clamor of birds is heard, a sudden irruption of eternity that seems to do away with history. Then his instruments begin to pick up a signal, a faint and nearly indistinct rumor beneath the frequencies perceptible to human hearing. Little by little it grows into a tremor that delicately shakes the needles of his most sensitive gauges, a vibration that travels deep beneath the ground and up the walls and window panes, to the jug of water on a nightstand by a sick man’s bed, or a small spoon resting on a saucer. It’s the armored cars, the trucks and motorcycles, the gun carriages, the rhythmic strike of German boots entering Paris, parading in front of no one in the glorious light of an early summer morning. In the apartment that Walter Benjamin hastily vacated a few days earlier, some of his belongings can still be seen. Papers and books; clothes in the drawers; a gas mask on a shelf like some kind of brutal idol, with its ribbed hose like a rubber trachea and the leather straps, the metal buckles, and the round pieces of glass to look through—a mask out of an old black-and-white horror film.

  CITY OF NINE MILLION EVACUATED BY ORDER OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. Empty streets, dark buildings, shuttered shops. What is happening in Hangzhou, one of the most flourishing and populous cities in eastern China? The Chinese government, wishing to prevent disturbances during the G20 summit it is hosting as rotating president of the group, has taken measures that would be unthinkable in a Western democracy. Picture a city as densely populated as New York emptied from one day to the next. No cars on its wide avenues except for armored vans carrying soldiers and police. The wail of their sirens is louder and seems to last longer and carry farther in the surrounding silence. Every traffic light blinks amber and red. In the city’s newest neighborhoods, where identical buildings rise fifty stories high with empty plots of grass between them, every window is dark, though there are blinking red lights at the top, on lightning rods and helicopter landing pads lit by floodlights. Nine million people have abandoned the city in perfect order in just a few days.

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  WE LOOK AFTER EVERY DETAIL. In cars, buses, and trains. In slow, massive traffic jams that blocked every highway out of the city. The government wants to make sure there are no disturbances during the stay of the G20 dignitaries. Helicopters fly through the glass canyons of the business district and over peripheral neighborhoods and flat expanses of factories and shopping malls. Their floodlights sweep the darkest alleys, the entrance to a tunnel, the upper floors of a skyscraper. Army trucks are posted at large intersections or move slowly on patrol along the sidewalks, the barrel of an assault rifle jutting out the window or from the tarp in the back. In the nightlife district, glowing theater marquees and digital displays show advertisements for musicals, cell phones, luxury cars. Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King: images of pseudo-African masks and dances followed by Chinese characters. Men fly over an abyss in motorcycles. Languid teenage girls gaze vacantly with parted lips. Brand names glow in the dark like constellations. Huawei. Vuitton. Max Mara.

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  YOU ARE THE FOCUS OF OUR ATTENTION. Thirty stories up in the air, a y
oung woman in a tight skirt and high heels walks down a red desert road carrying a Louis Vuitton bag. A caravan of limousines and of black armored SUVs drives down the highway from the airport into the city, very much like cars in an advertisement, racing toward the horizon or down an empty road between tall mountains. They are preceded and followed by military convoys and flashing police cruisers; by policemen in white helmets on enormous motorcycles, like high-tech Transformers in which all distinction disappears between the human body and the machine that carries and engulfs it. There is no one to watch this fearsome parade, this triumphal procession of the lords of the Earth and their praetorian guards. No one will be able to see the people riding in the back seat, behind dark bulletproof glass, sitting in leather interiors aglow with the light of cell phone screens and security cameras, surrounded by Herculean bodyguards with massive necks and military haircuts, dressed in dark suits and wearing dark glasses even in the gloom of the vehicle, a wireless receiver in one ear, a microphone on the lapel.

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  WE HAVE A PLAN FOR YOU. The convoy moves at full speed so as to reduce even further the risk of an attack. Police and army units in gas masks and combat gear patrol the great labyrinth of sewer pipes beneath the city, shining their headlights into every corner. Furtive animals venture out onto the asphalt near the shuttered parks. In a room as large as a space-flight control center, high-definition screens display simultaneous video feeds of streets, highways, empty parks, subway stations, parking lots, pedestrian underpasses. For a few seconds a lone figure traverses one of these images like a furtive shadow. A moment later it is gone. They search in vain for it on every screen, on every camera pointed at a street corner or a bank. They freeze the image, enlarge it, enhance it digitally as much as possible. All they can make out is the shadow of a human being. The more they expand the image the fuzzier it becomes, blending into the darkness of the empty city.

  FIND THE PERFECT CONTENT FOR YOUR NEXT CREATIVE PROJECT. “… the great poem of our century can only be written with rubble and debris,” he said to me on our second or third meeting, after setting down his heavy satchel by his side. We were at the Café Comercial. He kept his eyes on the marble tabletop and spoke quietly, in a measured tone that stood in contrast to the vehemence of his words. “With the waste products of language: the mistakes and mistranslations of a poorly dubbed American film or series; the cheap language of consumer advertising and of public relations and politics; the nonsense of technical jargon; the pseudopoetry of perfume ads and the language of self-help, of horoscopes, of flyers offering girls, massages, bank loans, mortgages; the grand compendium of food products in a supermarket flyer or of daily specials on a sign outside a restaurant at noon.” Only garbage itself can give a proper account of such an overabundance of garbage. “I kneaded mud and turned it into clay,” poor old Baudelaire used to say. With all due respect, that is not a great achievement. Mud is a noble material, or at least it used to be, before it was polluted by chemical and radioactive residues. Some of the greatest works of mankind were made out of mud. In one of your many former lives you were a child and played with fresh mud in the streets after the rain. People throughout history have done what needs to be done with the materials they have at hand, and what is presently most at hand is garbage, junk, detritus. So that is what will have to be used for the poem. It will perhaps be very long, an immense amount of material will be required, but there’s no risk of it ever running out. On the contrary, the more time passes, the richer we become in that particular form of wealth. It piles up in mountains, Everests of trash reaching higher at every moment: a vast midden of words, a landfill as large as the ocean, which has itself become a dump, filled with tides and currents of trash that will soon be visible from space like storms and cyclones. The poem will require long dedication, perhaps a lifetime. A lifetime to make and a lifetime to read. It will probably be anonymous and cumulative, like the Homeric poems. None of its verses, phrases, or words will be the creation or personal contribution of its author, or authors, if such a term really applies in this case.”

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  THINK DIFFERENT, CHOOSE TACO BELL. “It will be like the first naves of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, built purely from pillaged materials, disparate columns, random capitals found here and there, taken from masonry dumps or salvaged from demolished buildings. The poem will doubtless consist of thousands of lines and every one of them will have been plundered and stolen. Not from other poems, or literature, or anything else that is respectable: only from the purest garbage. Great discipline will be required in this respect. No style at all, my friend. As for your ‘personal sensibility,’ ladies and gentlemen, stick it wherever it happens to fit (with all due respect). Your personal sensibility is fully known to data collectors, most of it from information freely furnished by yourself. Any computer program can decompose in a few minutes, one by one and with the utmost quantifiable precision, the celebrated traits of anyone’s “personal style,” and I apologize if my hands rise on either side to form a pair of air quotes. Any day now some start-up will offer to design your very own personalized literary style. So let’s get off the high horse.”

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  READERS ALL OVER THE WORLD WILL KNOW YOU. “As to the poem’s length, I’m afraid there can be no middle ground. Enormities or miniatures. The Aeneid or a haiku. You will understand if I cite your respected pediatrician, Dr. Williams. It’s either four verses about a red wheelbarrow and some plums in the fridge, or the three hundred crowded pages of Paterson. Dickinson or Whitman, a bacchanalia or a Buddhist fast. In times of upheaval one must make urgent and radical aesthetic decisions. The poem must be contemporaneous and extemporaneous; of this world and out of it; for a select minority and for the masses; yours and anybody else’s. It will be explosively original and strictly impersonal without ever putting on stylistic airs. Just pillage, plunder, and hoarding. A giant sack where anything can fit, like those sacks of ultra-strong plastic fibers used to carry rubble, or those metal containers where for several weeks they dump anything that comes out of a demolished house, and which the neighbors use as well to discard whatever they please without a second thought: a door torn off its frame, with the hinges and peephole intact; a wheelchair-accessible toilet; a metal filing cabinet with folders stuffed with X-rays; a bag of rotting garbage. The poem will be like one of those landfills that after a few years are covered in plastic sheeting so they can be topped with fertile soil and turned into parks. Except this park will remain a landfill.”

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  THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO TELL YOUR STORY. “What is the most outsize piece of contemporary art you know? What is our equivalent to the Ring of the Nibelung, the palace of Knossos, or the St. Matthew Passion? The most immense. The most colossal. I’ll tell you what I think. It’s The Clock, by Christian Marclay. An artist of debris. A Michelangelo of refuse and remnants. A Cologne cathedral, a Himalaya of recycled materials. The Clock is a movie that lasts twenty-four hours. Not a minute more, or less. It’s made of very brief fragments taken from over three thousand films. Masterpieces, blockbusters, failed movies that no one saw, horrible pictures, forgotten TV shows, crime movies, disaster films, Westerns. Movies of all kinds and from all periods; the entire history of film, surveyed and plundered. None of the fragments lasts for more than a few seconds. There is just one organizing principle, which is quite simple and which generates the entire work in an immutable manner that, like a process of nature, can nevertheless be performed with great variation. Like bacterial reproduction or the development of a baroque fugue, or a piece by Steve Reich that never becomes monotonous. There are two conditions: the first is that a clock appear in every shot; the second, that the time on the clock coincide exactly with the time of day or night in the location where the film is being projected. You go into a dark room and find a screen as large as that of an old movie theater. You go in one morning at eleven o’clock. Four minutes past eleven, to be precise. On the screen, you see a movie fragment showin
g a clock that points to four minutes past eleven. A little later, when you take out your cell phone mechanically to look at a text message, the time on the small screen of the phone is the same as on an alarm clock on a nightstand next to a bed where a woman is being strangled. Now you’re caught. You can’t look away, and decide to miss whatever appointment you were heading to when you happened to walk by the art gallery. You fall asleep exhausted after looking at the screen for two or three hours. You wake up with a jolt, not knowing where you are, thinking you’ve woken up in a movie theater where your mother used to take you at four o’clock on Sundays all through the winter, a theater that was demolished and that’s now a hole in the ground fenced in with large cement blocks. Out of sheer habit you tap the screen on your phone to check the time. But there’s no need. The time is always the same in the room and in the film. Godzilla rears over buildings that are clearly miniature models, crushing them beneath its webbed feet. With one swipe of its hand it destroys a tower on which a clock marks the very same hour and minute of your present life.”