Walter Benjamin described himself as “a man who has, with great difficulty, pried open the jaws of a crocodile and set up housekeeping there.” He managed to live most of his life drifting about like a minor character in the literature he preferred. Perhaps it was French literature that led him to his death, for he delayed leaving Paris until it was too late. Boys’ adventure books and the chronicles of the explorers would have better prepared him for his last years in the shadow of the Third Reich. When war broke out in September of 1939, he was rounded up with other German men in France and marched to a camp in Nevers, more than a hundred miles to the south. Now plump and afflicted with heart trouble that even on the streets of Paris had made him stop every few minutes, he collapsed several times on the march, but revived enough during his nearly three months of internment in the camp to teach courses in philosophy for a fee of a few cigarettes. His release secured by the P.E.N. club, he returned to Paris, where he continued to work on the Arcades Project, tried to secure a visa, and wrote the piercingly lyrical “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” After the Nazi occupation of France, he fled south and with several others walked the steep route over the Pyrenees into Port Bou, Spain. He carried a heavy briefcase with him containing, he said, a manuscript more precious than his life, and in a steep vineyard he was so overcome that his companions had to support him on the walk. “No one knew the path,” wrote a Frau Gurland who went with him. “We had to climb part of the way on all fours.” In Spain the authorities demanded an exit visa from France and refused to honor the entrance visa for the United States Benjamin’s friends had finally secured. In despair at his circumstances and the prospect of having to walk back over the mountains, he took an overdose of morphine in Spain and died on September 26, 1940—“whereupon the border officials, upon whom this suicide had made an impression,” writes Hannah Arendt, “allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal.” His briefcase vanished.
In the same essay, Arendt, who had lived in Paris herself in the 1960s, wrote, “In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafés which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians moves along. To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot, and more than any other city it is dependent for its liveliness on people who pass by in the streets, so that the modern automobile traffic endangers its very existence not only for technical reasons.” When I ran away to Paris at the end of the 1970s, the city was still more or less a walker’s paradise, if you discounted the petty lecheries and rudeness of some of its men, and I was so poor and so young that I walked everywhere, for hours, and in and out of the museums (which are free to people under eighteen). Now I know that even I was living in a Paris that was disappearing. The vast void on the Right Bank was the site where the great Les Halles markets had recently been eradicated, but I didn’t know that the spiral-walled pissoirs like little labyrinths for the mystery of male privilege were vanishing too, that traffic lights would come to the crooked old streets of the Latin Quarter and illuminated plastic signs for fast food would mar the old walls, that the old hulk on the quai d’Orsay was to become a flashy new museum, that the Tuileries’ and Luxembourg’s metal chairs with their spiral arms and perforated circular seats (in much the same aesthetic vein as the pissoirs) would be replaced by more rectilinear and less beautiful chairs painted the same green. It was nothing like the transformations Parisians experienced during the Revolution, or during Haussmannization or at many other times, but this small register of changes has made me too the possessor of a lost city, and perhaps Paris is always a lost city, a city full of things that only live in imagination. Most dismaying of all when I returned recently was the change Arendt had foreseen: the dominance of the streets by cars. Cars had returned Paris’s streets to the dirty and dangerous state in which they once had been, in the days when Rousseau was run over by a coach and walking the streets was a feat. To compensate for the automotive apotheosis, cars are banished on Sundays from certain streets and quays so that people might once again promenade there, as they always have in the gardens and on the wide sidewalks of the boulevards (and as I write, efforts are being made to take back more space—notably the great expanse of the place de la Concorde, which has in recent decades become a congested traffic circle).
One glory remains to Paris, that of possessing the chief theorists of walking, among them Guy DeBord in the 1950s, Michel de Certeau in the 1970s, and Jean Christophe Bailly in the 1990s. DeBord addressed the political and cultural meanings of cities’ architecture and spatial arrangements; deciphering and reworking those meanings was one of the tasks of the Situationist Internationale he cofounded and whose principal documents he wrote. “Psychogeography,” he declared in 1955, was a discipline that “could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals.” He decried the apotheosis of the automobile in that essay and elsewhere, for psychogeographies were best perceived afoot: “The sudden change of ambience in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of the city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the contour of the ground)” were among the subtleties he charted, proposing “the introduction of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations” to “clarify certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit).” Another of DeBord’s pugnacious treatises was the “Theory of the Dérive” (dérive is French for drifting), “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. . . . In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” That flâneury seemed to DeBord a radical new idea all his own is somewhat comic, as are his authoritarian prescriptions for subversion—but his ideas for making urban walking yet more conscious an experiment are serious. “The point,” writes Greil Marcus, who has studied Situationism, “was to encounter the unknown as a facet of the known, astonishment on the terrain of boredom, innocence in the face of experience. So you can walk up the street without thinking, letting your mind drift, letting your legs, with their internal memory, carry you up and down and around turns, attending to a map of your own thoughts, the physical town replaced by an imaginary city.” The Situationists’ combination of cultural means and revolutionary ends has been influential, nowhere more so than in Paris’s 1968 student uprising, when Situationist slogans were painted on the walls.
De Certeau and Bailly are far more mild, though they see futures as dark as DeBord’s. The former devotes a chapter of his Practice of Everyday Life to urban walking. Walkers are “practitioners of the city,” for the city is made to be walked, he wrote. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go, “since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Further, he adds, “the walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures.’ ” De Certeau’s metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risk
s becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives. Bailly lives in this car-choked Paris and documents this decline. In the words of an interpreter, he states that the social and imaginative function of cities “is under threat from the tyranny of bad architecture, soulless planning and indifference to the basic unit of urban language, the street, and the ‘ruissellement de paroles’ (stream of words), the endless stories, which animate it. Keeping the street and the city alive depends on understanding their grammar and generating the new utterances on which they thrive. And for Bailly, the principal agency of this process is walking, what he calls the ‘grammaire generative de jambes’ (generative grammar of the legs).” Bailly speaks of Paris as a collection of stories, a memory of itself made by the walkers of the streets. Should walking erode, the collection may become unread or unreadable.
Chapter 13
CITIZENS OF THE STREETS:
Parties, Processions, and Revolutions
I turned all the way around to see that it was his wings that had made the angel just behind me look so odd out of the corner of my eye. At least, he was dressed as an angel, and various space aliens, tarts, disco kings, and two-legged beasts were all streaming down the street in the same direction, toward Castro Street, as they do every Halloween. The night before I had taken my bike down to the foot of Market Street to ride in Critical Mass, the group ride that is both a protest of the lack of safe space for bicyclists and a festive seizure of that space. Several hundred bicyclists riding together filled the streets, as they have the last Friday of every month since the event began here in 1992. (Cyclists stage Critical Masses around the world, from Geneva to Sydney to Jerusalem to Philadelphia.) Some of the more righteous bicyclists had taken to wearing T-shirts that say “One Less Car,” so a trio of runners accompanied us wearing “One Less Bike” shirts, and in honor of the impending holiday some of the cyclists had donned masks or costumes.
Halloween in the Castro is a similarly hybrid event, both celebration and, at least in its origins, political statement—for asserting a queer identity is a bold political statement in itself. Asserting such an identity festively subverts the long tradition of sexuality being secret and homosexuality being shameful—and in dreary times joy itself is insurrectionary, as community is in times of isolation. Nowadays, the Castro’s Halloween street party is a magnet for a lot of straight people as well, but everyone seems to operate under the aegis of tolerance, campiness, and shameless staring in this event that is nothing more than a few thousand people milling along several blocks of shut-down streets. Nothing is sold, no one is in charge, and everyone is both spectacle and spectator. Earlier Halloween night, several hundred people had marched from Castro Street to the Hall of Justice to protest and mourn the murder of a young gay man in Wyoming, a pretty routine demonstration for San Francisco and for the Castro, which is both a temple of consumerism and home base for a politically active community.
November 2, Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, was celebrated on Twenty-fourth Street in the Mission District. As always, the Aztec dancers—barefoot, spinning and stamping, clad in loincloths, leg rattles, and four-foot-long feather plumes—led the parade. They were followed by participants who bore altars on long poles—a Virgin of Guadalupe atop one and an Aztec god on the other. Behind the altars walked people carrying huge crosses draped in tissue paper, people with faces painted as skulls, people carrying candles, perhaps a thousand participants in all. Unlike bigger parades, this one was made up almost entirely of participants, with only a few onlookers from the windows of their homes. Perhaps it is better described as a procession, for a procession is a participants’ journey, while a parade is a performance with audience. Walking together through the streets felt very different than did milling around on Halloween; there was a more tender, melancholic mood about this festival of death and a delicate but satisfying sense of camaraderie in the air that might have come from nothing more than sharing the same space and same purpose while moving together in the same direction. It was as though in aligning our bodies we had somehow aligned our hearts. At Twenty-fifth and Mission another procession invaded ours, a louder one chanting against the impending execution of a death-row inmate, and though it was annoying to be demonstrated at as though we were the executioners, it was useful to be reminded of the reality of death. The bakeries stayed open late selling pan de muerto—sweet bread baked into human figures—and the holiday was a fine hybrid of Christian and indigenous Mexican tradition, revised and metamorphosed at the hands of San Francisco’s many cultures. Like Halloween, the Day of the Dead is a liminal festival, celebrating the threshholds between life and death, the time in which everything is possible and identity itself is in flux, and these two holidays have become thresholds across which different factions of the city meet and the boundaries between strangers drop.
The great German artist Joseph Beuys used to recite, as a maxim and manifesto, the phrase “Everyone an artist.” I used to think it meant that he thought everyone should make art, but now I wonder if he wasn’t speaking to a more basic possibility: that everyone could become a participant rather than a member of the audience, that everyone could become a producer rather than a consumer of meaning (the same idea lies behind punk culture’s DIY—do it yourself—credo). This is the highest ideal of democracy—that everyone can participate in making their own life and the life of the community—and the street is democracy’s greatest arena, the place where ordinary people can speak, unsegregated by walls, unmediated by those with more power. It’s not a coincidence that media and mediate have the same root; direct political action in real public space may be the only way to engage in unmediated communication with strangers, as well as a way to reach media audiences by literally making news. Processions and street parties are among the pleasant manifestations of democracy, and even the most solipsistic and hedonistic expressions keep the populace bold and the avenues open for more overtly political uses. Parades, demonstrations, protests, uprisings, and urban revolutions are all about members of the public moving through public space for expressive and political rather than merely practical reasons. In this, they are part of the cultural history of walking.
Public marches mingle the language of the pilgrimage, in which one walks to demonstrate one’s commitment, with the strike’s picket line, in which one demonstrates the strength of one’s group and one’s persistence by pacing back and forth, and the festival, in which the boundaries between strangers recede. Walking becomes testifying. Many marches arrive at rally points, but the rallies generally turn participants back into audiences for a few select speakers; I myself have often been deeply moved by walking through the streets en masse and deeply bored by the events after arrival. Most parades and processions are commemorative, and this moving through the space of the city to commemorate other times knits together time and place, memory and possibility, city and citizen, into a vital whole, a ceremonial space in which history can be made. The past becomes the foundation on which the future will be built, and those who honor no past may never make a future. Even the most innocuous parades have an agenda: Saint Patrick’s Day parades go back more than two hundred years in New York, and they demonstrate the religious convictions, ethnic pride, and strength of a once-marginal community, as do the much more glittering Chinese New Year’s Day parade in San Francisco and colossal Gay Pride parades around the continent. Military parades have always been shows of strength and incitements to tribal pride or citizen intimidation. In Northern Ireland, Orangemen have used their marches celebrating past Protestant victories to symbolically invade Catholic neighborhoods, while Catholics have made the funerals of the slain into massive political processions.
On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—
we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day. Walking, which can be prayer, sex, communion with the land, or musing, becomes speech in these demonstrations and uprisings, and a lot of history has been written with the feet of citizens walking through their cities. Such walking is a bodily demonstration of political or cultural conviction and one of the most universally available forms of public expression. It could be called marching, in that it is common movement toward a common goal, but the participants have not surrendered their individuality as have those soldiers whose lockstep signifies that they have become interchangeable units under an absolute authority. Instead they signify the possibility of common ground between people who have not ceased to be different from each other, people who have at last become the public. When bodily movement becomes a form of speech, then the distinctions between words and deeds, between representations and actions, begin to blur, and so marches can themselves be liminal, another form of walking into the realm of the representational and symbolic—and sometimes, into history.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 29
