Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  As senior curator, Doris takes the stage to begin her introduction to the exhibition. She speaks carefully, noting how difficult it has been to select the works, which represent so many countries and so many, often conflicting, points of view. She explains that the process was unbiased, and that the museum hopes that it will foster understanding and, more important, tolerance. There is a scattering of polite applause. Then she launches into her introduction of the speaker.

  “Mr. Wakefield is a man known to many of you as one of this country’s best travel writers. He is also an accomplished speaker celebrated for his poetic insights and surprising improvisational style. What you may not know is that he is also a student of architecture and a sensitive observer of human societies. I saw on the noon news today that the symbolic Bridge at Mostar, said to connect or divide East and West, a bridge that withstood two world wars and many local conflicts, was blown up. You may wonder why we have hired a poetic travel writer to speak here tonight. The answer may or may not flatter Mr. Wakefield. We simply could not think of anyone better able to see our exhibition in the afternoon, relate its images to those we have seen in the news this week, and provide us, additionally, with his own impressions of travel in the Balklands. Some poets travel at the speed of light. I think we found one.”

  Wakefield walks to the lectern and receives brisk applause. His bodyguards, wearing night-vision goggles, stand in the wings, scanning the darkened theater. He can’t see the audience, but he can sense its energy, a fifteen-hundred-headed beast holding its breath.

  When the applause dies down, Wakefield addresses the beast.

  “Comrades!”

  Laughter, hissing, boos.

  “Workers, soldiers, peasants!”

  More laughter, louder hisses, an angry voice: “Fuck Communism!”

  “The other day on the Nature Channel—

  I always wanted to start a speech

  ‘the other day on the Nature Channel’

  that being the only nature

  we know these days

  ‘nature’ a channel among many

  next to the People Channel and the Disaster

  Channel that would be news

  and the Sci-fi Channel and the Mystery Channel—

  the other day on the Nature Channel

  I saw that a perfect ball of iron

  spewed by the earth on an island near Madagascar

  several thousand years ago

  was hollowed out by a man and his sons

  who moved inside of it

  and were promptly declared gods

  by the natives who were allowed inside

  the ball once a year to get drunk

  and worship something called Aurak

  which was a huge petrified fish

  that zapped them when they touched it

  and for having that experience

  they paid the ball carvers in fish

  goat meat grapes and lizard kebobs!

  And that was not long ago

  just after the Second World War

  when American planes failed to deliver

  Paradise and the local cargo cult failed.

  It was at about the same time that in

  faraway Romania

  Professor Teleskou’s mother was in labor”

  A murmur of stunned surprise at mention of this name. Voice: “Who killed him?” Wakefield has been counting on this reaction: the assassination of Professor Teleskou, though he was Romanian and not strictly speaking a party to the current conflicts in the Balklands, was considered by some in the Wintry City to mark the real start of the war. The issues of land, nationality, race, blood, ancestral rights, and religious feuds, explored in his writing, resonated for partisans of both sides. Teleskou had separated the myths and legends from the nationalist propagandists’ uses of them, and that was widely believed to have been the reason for his murder. Their superstitions unmoored, the fanatics killed him.

  “In labor Mrs. Teleskou

  watched a huge bomb

  fall from the sky and level the Church

  of the Immaculate Conception

  where their neighbors had taken shelter

  and she gave birth to a baby

  who would survive the war

  survive communism

  become a world-renowned scholar

  and nearly survive the twentieth century!

  A miraculous plume of smoke attended his birth!

  and the priest of the destroyed church

  who also miraculously survived

  blessed the baby in the Orthodox rite

  and declared the baby divinely pleasing

  and thanked the young mother for having delivered

  beauty amid the ugliness of war!

  He is a pleasant sight unto God, he said.

  But under the smoldering church

  there was the ruin of an older pagan temple

  and beneath that chained to the bottom of a well

  was a dying monster.

  It was the Beast of Hatred

  still alive and calling for the flesh of babes

  from underneath the ruins.

  Architecture, like Gaul, is divided into three parts

  the part that comes courtesy of the Nature Channel

  the part that comes thanks to the War Channel

  and the part that comes from the Imagination Channel

  and these three architectures

  the architecture of nature

  the architecture of ruins

  and the architecture of the imagination

  are the sons of Disaster.

  The mother giving birth in the ruins

  is my mother and your mother

  our mothers who warned us not to go near ruins

  when we were children but where else could we go

  where else could you go

  when the whole town was a ruin

  and the whole country you lived in was in ruins

  and the world you were born into was a ruin

  and the school Professor Teleskou went to

  the Elementary School of the Ursulines

  renamed the School of the Red Star

  was the ruin of a convent under which ran

  tunnels connecting one ruin to another

  tunnels that were also tombs

  and that had been used in the Middle Ages

  to escape from invaders

  into the woods where one was safe in the arms

  of the nature channel

  and the shapes of those ruins

  were as fantastic as the legends of your people

  who sang them in the ruins of their hovels

  to put the world back in some order

  after the sky and earth gods the sons

  of Disaster had their way with the world!”

  Wakefield pours water from the carafe under the lectern into the glass and the sound is pure; every drop is felt by his listeners. Transcendent silence! He thinks he sees Milena’s long legs in the front row, luminous in their liberty, freed from the ruins of the Old World.

  “So when the professor was a boy

  he became an expert at making temporary

  houses in the shadows of cemeteries and crumbling

  walls where he took his first love”

  Here Wakefield steps on the shaky ground of a biography he’s inventing, but no discontent greets him, so he goes on.

  “and there they lived for hours safe inside each other

  and that was the architecture of adolescence

  which builds shelters of mystery for the unfolding

  of its own mysteries

  and that—to be perfectly honest—is the only

  architecture I care for

  and that—if you are honest—

  is the only architecture you care for

  that shelter-building adolescence pursuing only its love

  away from governments police borders and pride of ownership.”

  This utopian senti
ment is met with inaudible but palpable derision by a few, a very few souls in the room; possibly the artists who have traveled from Europe to present their work here; they have pride of ownership and are wary of utopias.

  “I would like to see a collaborative

  project of urban adolescents of all ages

  and from all countries

  describing the shelters they have made

  for their desire from the ruins of their cities.

  What is the eruption of the marvelous

  if not the eruption of desire

  that rearranges landscapes according

  to its fancy

  knowing that all architecture

  is born of Disaster.

  Within every building there is another

  known only to desire-driven adolescents

  even official buildings

  of the state and of the police

  where the tormented wait in endless antechambers

  under great vaults with trembling forms in their hands

  even there you will see a young sergeant or clerk

  find a secret place to gratify her imagination

  and there is no building on earth that has not been

  rebuilt by the imagination to contain

  shelter from bright lights nooks of darkness

  chapels of selfhood chambers and vaults

  for the song of axis mundi!

  One year after the dictator Ceausescu

  ordered the old center of Bucharest demolished

  Byzantine churches and stately homes

  the coldest winter in the history of the Carpathians

  froze all the rivers and the lakes

  and in the spring when they thawed

  an intact fourteenth-century basilica floated

  down the Danube and headed for the Black Sea

  where it sank under the waves

  joining Greek triremes and Roman warships

  and Turkish galleons and Venetian galley ships

  and that was the signal for the revolution

  and the end of the dictator

  and this we have from Teleskou now dead

  who loved the stories of his country

  and the miracles of love born of those stories

  not often enough, alas!”

  Wakefield can’t hold this ground much longer without an accent, a man born in security on a rich and hopeful continent. Time to retreat home.

  “In America

  we watch history floating by

  and sinking under the waves of the present!

  Here architectures ruin one another

  almost as quickly as they rise.

  Our country has grown up

  free of Father Disaster

  but in America all buildings are temporary

  even the post offices and the churches

  and the museums where artifacts barely recovered

  from the shock of being moved across oceans

  have to move again to a newer building!

  Please look closely on these artworks, comrades!

  Tomorrow they may move to a new building.”

  Laughter. They don’t even mind being called comrades now. The speaker has moved on to something they all agree on: in America they are misunderstood because America has no history; it eats its own tail like a hyperactive serpent.

  “In America a child can no longer

  visit the place where she was born

  a shopping mall

  stands there instead.

  In America a grown-up can no longer see the school

  where she learned the art of growing sad

  a freeway goes through there now an overpass

  her memories of brick turn to glass

  the suburb goes from white to black

  and time speeds up so much she has

  to stay young forever and reset the clock

  every five minutes just to know where is there

  and there is everywhere

  because she lives in time and not in any space!

  In our country here

  the future is in ruins before it is built

  a fact recognized by postmodern architecture

  that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quotes

  ruins from other times and places!

  There are no buildings in America only passageways

  that connect migratory floods

  the most permanent architecture being

  precisely that which moves these floods

  from one future ruin to another

  that is to say freeways and skyways

  and the car is our only shelter

  the architecture of desire reduced to the womb

  a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!”

  Saddened by his own vision, and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is betraying his own country now for the sake of … what? Applause? There isn’t any. He veers down another path.

  “The miracle of America is of motion not regret

  in New Mexico the face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla

  in Plaquemine a Virgin appeared in a tree

  in Santuario de Chimayo the dirt turned healer

  a guy in Texas crashed into a wall when God said

  Let me take the wheel!

  And others hear voices all the time

  telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff

  or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster

  to throw at the videos

  the voices of God are everywhere heard loud

  and clear under the hum of the tickertape

  and all these miracles and speaking gods

  are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture

  of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!”

  Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.

  “Which is not to say that I prefer to wait

  for others to turn my house into a ruin

  I would rather do it myself the American way

  with a second mortgage and a wrecking crew

  that way I can say that I am the author of my own ruin

  that’s the American way

  we don’t whine or complain

  well some of us do”

  The Devil can’t stand, being lectured to, not since he was made to stand in front of the heavenly throne before being hurled flaming through space. His ears turn red, the pointed tips glow with anger, and he feels an urge to cause the speaker to have a mishap. He’s made lecturers choke on a sip of water, have a heart attack on stage, or be hit inexplicably by a falling prop. So he’s only half listening to Wakefield, enjoying his client’s evident discomfort and self-disgust. He really loves it when people wrestle with themselves over self-created problems. You dig your own pit, he sometimes tells them, then you come to me for a solution. Or worse, you address your sleeping God and end up killing your neighbor. As long as Wakefield is caught in contradiction and self-doubt he’s safely in the Devil’s hands, no need to worry that a purer, angelic creature—an innocent Wakefield—will suddenly burst to the surface. He takes a nap and turns his attention to the increasing number of dream figures that are crowding the dream fields. In his opinion, this sudden surge of dream figures has something to do with the unsettling of tribal boundaries; as people become angrier they release demons safely bound until then in layers of storytelling, bound with ropes of narrative. The Devil sees these ropes snapping and the layers flying off, leaving exposed malignant medieval creatures that even he shudders to gaze on.

  Wakefield is fully aware that he’s digging himself into a hole. He decides to change the rhythm—he’s a performer, after all. He’s going to chant the mantra of self-reliance, which these foreigners can use, that’s for sure. In America we value self-reliance as well as cooperation, and this is what we say: “If yo
u do it for me, I’ll do it for you.” He chants in a singsong voice:

  “If you do it for me, I’ll do it for you!

  Now everybody say it:

  If you do it for me, I’ll do it for you!”

  A few multiaccented voices repeat: “I’LLDOITFORYOU!” More voices: “YOUDOITFORME!” Laughter, applause. Milena shouts: “DOITTOMEBABY!” and Tiffany: “SOCKITOMESOCKITTOME!” Others are just calling: “GETONWITHIT!” Self-reliance has taken on a not unpleasant erotic twist. Pleased, Wakefield begins again his poem.

  “Each home houses

  an inner demolition dictator

  a household god chomping on

  his cigar of cash and impatience

  who is not content

  until everyone is in a car

  driving from Nowheresville to Nowheresville

  in search of therapy and desire!”

  One strong, chilling female voice emerges from the darkness. “Wakefield, your therapy is just beginning!” Heads turn, looking for the source of this challenge, and a small, neatly dressed woman stands up. “You made a ruin of my desire!” Wakefield realizes that the woman is his ex-wife, making good on her threat. Marianna, who when she got her first look at New York City from the window of a taxicab, cried out, “This is what I always desire!” Wakefield takes a sip of water and forges ahead.

  “Which brings me to you, Marianna,

  my wife from the land of Teleskou.”

  A whisper: “That’s his ex-wife!” Some laughter here and there. The crowd seems to lean forward to better hear what will happen next.

  “My America-loving wife

  born in an old-world city

  the Little Paris of prewar Europe

  a country you once denied.”

  Marianna is silent. What the hell, he might as well tell everybody everything while she ponders her next outburst.

  “Then we lived in a city without a plan

  a place even the gods

  of demolition had left out of boredom

  a city like many that spreads everywhere

  complacently sprawling

  and you loved it.

  Wasn’t that the place where

  at least in the beginning

  the architectures of nature

  ruins and imagination met?”

  “You owe me a better explanation than that, Wakefield!” Angry male voice chides: “Be quiet lady! Work it out after the show!” but others call out: “Let her speak! This is America!” In the wings the bodyguards begin to react. They step out onto the stage and one of them speaks into his lapel sotto voce. There’s a commotion in the dark, and Marianna is hustled away from her seat. “He is the father of my child. Asshole! Let go!” Wakefield leans forward over the lectern, trying to see what’s going on. “Whoever you are,” he shouts, “leave her alone! That is the mother of my child!” Someone shines a flashlight on the scene. Wakefield sees Marianna being pulled down the aisle by uniformed cops; there are angry shouts from the audience, and several men rise from their seats, as if to defend her. “This is crazy!” Wakefield shouts. “Stop now!” and like divinity intervening, Doris appears on stage and says calmly: “Security! Release Mrs. Wakefield. Friends, return to your seats!” The policemen obey, and Marianna straightens her blouse, smooths her hair, and spreading her arms wide, says, “This is how America treats the foreign-born!” There is a rumble of argument in the crowd, and Wakefield appeals to Marianna, “Can’t we talk later, my tigress?” There’s laughter at that, and Marianna takes her seat. The crowd applauds.