I dream with open eyes, p.12
I Dream with Open Eyes, page 12
How had it come about that the governments of two major centers of Western civilization had more or less declared open war on large parts of their own populations?
After leaving our son at the school entrance, we walked back down Willoughby Avenue, past the august façades of perfect mansions to the park, and began circling the buckling dark rivers of its asphalt paths.
“What’s going to happen?”
“I can’t stop thinking about that poor girl.”
“What are kids going to be saying to each other in school? From now on—”
“How will the teachers respond?”
“I feel so sad.”
Over and over, repetitions of the same questions, iterations of the same disbelief and disillusionment, threaded with faint reassurance. Vows of resistance mingled with abject fear for the young.
We walked down to the northern end of the park bordering Myrtle, glancing across to the dim brick huddles of the Walt Whitman housing projects, veering around toward the west side and its views of jabby glass condos soaring downtown, with their fitness centers and elevated party spaces, past the lonely, shady playground, up the rise bordered by the bleak hospital compound with its tower that would be sold for a hundred million dollars to become more luxury condominiums, and around to the park’s southern edge, bordering pristine streets of enormous brownstones, and around again to Washington Park with its own giant homes, and on Saturdays the Farmer’s Market: strollers, dogs, butchers, apples, toddlers, lumpen vegetables, lines for bread, eco-leaflets, friendly bump-ins, annoyed squeeze-bys, donuts, donuts, cider, cider donuts.
“If things ever got really dire, we could move.”
“Where? How?”
“Somewhere in Europe, I guess.”
“On what passport? With what money?”
“We could rent out the house for a year—at least to expose Rafael to some other culture—”
“And then you lose your job and our health insurance for good. Where in Europe?”
“What are we going to do?”
“What can we do? This is just the way it is now. Anyway, our house is falling apart, we can’t rent it.”
“We have to believe it can change—that this situation will change . . .”
A friend came running toward us, across the broad expanse of grass used as a soccer field at the base of the hill crowned by the monument. The mother of our child’s best friend. She came toward us as though she’d just heard one of us had lost a person dear to us in an accident, bounding over the rutted grass beside her little brown and white dog. It seemed as if the whole scene were in slow motion, throwing her arms wide . . . hugging us, weeping.
“What’s going to happen?” she said sniffing.
It wasn’t a question any more than it had been when we said the same words, and we let her simply repeat them.
After we said goodbyes, we cut across the flat earth, up the slope to the plain granite column monument at the summit, the memorial Walt Whitman had campaigned for to honor the Prison Ship Martyrs: men and boys who’d been seized by the British for disobeying the sovereign’s decrees and stuck into the holds of old ships bobbing off Wallabout Bay. In one of the most brutal episodes of the conflict, without any overt strategic decision being made to torture the prisoners, essential resources were simply not supplied to them. Food and water were otherwise allocated. More and more people were thrust into the holds until there was no more living space. Hygiene was impossible. Disease ran rampant. Eventually, Whitman wrote, the British themselves grew ashamed, even shocked, at the proceedings of their officers, but meanwhile the ships had served their purpose.
More than 11,000 individuals perished in the hulks—many not even rebels, but people from all walks of life captured in random sweeps by the English after the Battle of Long Island, when soldiers began arresting anyone who declined to fight for the crown. Buried in shallow pits along the East River, their bones washed up for years along Brooklyn’s shores. Youths playing on the banks would kick the skulls for fun, while wind blew the loose sand off bleached skeletons. Old atrocities coarsened the sensibilities of new generations.
Whitman felt it was vital that the dead be commemorated lest the path to our present-day liberties become obscured. These figures with their suffering and sacrifice were, he wrote, “the stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.” But he never envisioned the monument as a site of strict mourning, let alone jingoism. Rather, he conceived of the memorial conjoined with a refuge where the public could take nurture from the natural world; the two purposes were linked.
“The unerring instincts of the masses” had already fixated on the grounds of the old fort as “a Place of the Ideal,” Whitman reported—because of its history, spaciousness, and the views it commanded. He described being up on the site one Sunday just before dusk and finding a thousand people gathered, hundreds of children among them, and being struck by the grace and amplitude of their leisure. The young frolicked in the grass. Women and men promenaded to and fro, while at their feet lay “a surprisingly splendid scene” embracing six counties, along with “a sweep of noble river, with the metropolis like a map beyond.” Whitman had been moved by the “genializing influence” of the physical place, which he said destroyed all the objectionable qualities often found in crowds, rendering the populace mild and beautiful. The site demanded a park, he argued in his newspaper, along with a cenotaph honoring the victims of England’s imperial cruelty, which the public, under the dignifying influence of nature, would help consecrate.
Rebecca and I stopped by a fierce bronze eagle planted at one of the quadrants of the hilltop platform, looking over the broad set of stairs, across the treetops toward the gray wall of mist hiding Manhattan. Almost exactly eight years earlier, in mid-November 2008, we’d been strolling at the same spot when we chanced on preparations for a ceremony to be held in honor of the reinstallment of these sculptures (they’d been locked in storage for decades after repeated vandalizations), along with the relighting of the lantern atop the Doric column. We got to talking with one of the men organizing the event. Rebecca told him that I was a descendant of General Putnam, for whom the original fort had been named.
The man latched onto this as serendipitous and invited me to take part in the program that evening. He asked me to make a short speech. My participation would make a living connection to the historical roots of the commemoration, he insisted. I felt misgivings. Of course I understood the superficial attraction of putting me on display. But what did I really have to contribute simply by virtue of a remote genetic connection to the man who’d been partly responsible for the star-shaped fortification with five cannons first built at this position—a fort which had to be abandoned when General George Washington was defeated in the Battle of Brooklyn? This Putnam himself, after the war, became involved with massive land acquisitions in Ohio and the Northwest intended to cater to the hunger for living space of the young men of New England, where generations of middle-class settlement had made affordable property scarce. After the purchases, Putnam then served as brigadier general in a successful, devastating campaign against the Shawnee, Lenape, and Seneca nations who were pushed off those huge tracts of territory by the settlers’ approach. What could I say about him that would neither gloss over his colonialist depredations nor cheaply advertise my own evolved ethical character by way of pious, unenlightening indictments of the dead?
But we were still in the initial euphoria of Obama’s election then, and I wanted to demonstrate civic spirit. So I consented, trusting that something worth communicating would come to me in the moment.
“That’s wonderful. It’ll be great,” the man said. “Honoring the revolutionary past . . .”
Truthfully, even he seemed unsure what specifically I would bring to the occasion.
The night was autumnal and windy. When we climbed up the hill to the base of the pillar on top of the vault where bones and ashes of the martyrs had been deposited, the ceremony was already underway. Hundreds of people, luminous in the brilliant lights, were clustered around the platform and down the steps of the wide staircase. As different speeches rolled on about the terrible suffering of the colonial rebels and the long fundraising struggles to restore the monument, I kept waiting for inspiration to knock, but the door of my mind remained silent. I felt increasingly nervous. Then I heard my name being called.
I stumbled toward the speaker’s spot, took the microphone from the hand of some beaming dignitary—and found myself utterly tongue-tied. I’d been paraded on stage as a kind of freak from a time machine, a Coney Island sideshow: The Past Incarnate. But I looked at all the people waiting for my speech, many of them student age, and longed to say something that would speak to the world opening before them, to what Henry James called “the hungry futurity of youth.”
My hair whipping around my head in the gusts like torn sails, I raised my hand in an oratorical manner, trying once more to summon my thoughts, but suddenly the pause felt too long, and I began gushing inanities about the beauty of the occasion, the long history of historical occurrences at this location, and how wonderful it was that the eagles had been recovered, the light rekindled, and time and family—the endless struggle for freedom that we were all indebted to and somehow a part of . . . The wind surged. My eyes lifted to the tree branches writhing overhead and I felt momentarily mesmerized. Then I handed the mike back to the moderator.
I might not have descended so low as to say, “I’m sure my ancestor General Rufus Putnam would have been very moved by this gathering,” but I had not risen to the occasion. And a terrible sense of incompleteness haunted me. I felt certain there was something I ought to have said, a gesture I might have made, but the message remained locked inside me.
Standing at the place now, the day after the election, the shame of that night burned in me again.
“I’m cold,” Rebecca said. “Let’s go home.”
We wandered slowly back down the path. On Dekalb, a man in a suit barged by us, barreling toward the bridge to Manhattan, yakking excitedly into his cellphone.
That was the first time I found myself wondering how many people who’d voted Democrat woke up after the election and thought, Well, we didn’t elect him, and of course we’ll vote that clown out of office next chance we get, but meanwhile, regulations and taxes are going to be slashed to the bone. The market’s going to be on fire . . . Boys, roll up your sleeves and hold your noses!
Over the ensuing days, we saw friends from time to time, and discussed meeting up at various rallies. We talked of “being there” for one another, whatever that meant in the context of our already unmanageably overstretched lives and our lack of clear presence on a day-to-day basis, even to ourselves. We spoke to our son about the history of protest in America, and the principle of political resistance. At one point I caught myself saying something to the effect that he should always remember how the true spirit of America was not represented by this man, but by the diversity and freedoms he despised—and felt dismayed by the ways what I’d said seemed merely to mirror in reverse the president-elect’s own rhetoric about defending true American values on behalf of real Americans.
We went to work. We rode the trains, their shrieking, tortured, infrastructure acoustics like old amusement park rides. I pumped and jerked back and forth on elliptical machines, watching panels of talking heads in studios at Rockefeller Center bat the headlines about while getting mad and cracking jokes, waxing patriotic or folksy-philosophical, rolling their eyes, growing nostalgic, quoting history wistfully and prophetically, defiantly denouncing and sententiously aggrandizing, expressing disbelief, certainty, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, humor, humor, and horror, until all their sloppy emotions and opinions sloshed together; sipping coffee from fat mugs emblazoned with their network logos, grinning, sighing, revolving to the topic of last weekend’s big ball games, spinning in their chairs, laughing uncontrollably, and getting silly just before it was time to say “Okay, we’re gonna take a short break,” just like real people living in real, comforting normal-normal-normal Americas even if the times were craaazzy—cutting away to commercials of happy-forever moms in bright, clean kitchens and sleek execs emerging from silver the-future-is-now cars.
We made meals, exchanging todays and tomorrows in broken phrases. Pouring cups of tea and teaching our son Scrabble. The black and gray kittens we’d gotten from a shelter the week before the election rolled on the maroon carpet. Their obliviousness to the news was therapeutic.
One afternoon, a friend of mine whose girlfriend had previously been married to an investment banker called me to lament the election. He began groaning about what a slimeball Trump was, then abruptly swerved and began speaking about a hedge fund guy he’d come to know through his girlfriend’s circle who, having formerly been an active Clinton supporter, was now pocketing tens of millions of dollars on different bets based on predictions of how Trump’s presidency would “turbo-charge” the economy. My intimations the day after the election, about Democrats deciding to make the ugly best of their situation, seemed jeeringly validated. As he spoke about this man, the pitch of my friend’s voice began rising manically. “Oh yeah, it’s all working out for Steve and his dudes! They don’t give a fuck what happens at this point! They’ve made their killing.” The note of outrage and envy were equally hypertrophied. “Fucking frat-boy swine! They’ll park the money in real estate and offshore accounts. Another car. Another fucking jet ski. Another 10,000-dollar-a-night whore. Another dumb-ass beach villa. Another private fucking plane. They’ve got no imagination. No sense of public responsibility. So they’ll just keep buying more and more of the same shit until they burst. What do they care now if all the coming migrants get machine-gunned at the border, or if Trump declares martial law? They got in under the fucking Nazi radar!”
Finally I couldn’t take any more of the diatribe. I cut him off as tactfully as I could and went outside. Feeling nauseated, I walked down the street to the park. Before the entrance, a woman was pivoting in place, speaking into her cellphone. “Yeah, well you know what I’m telling white people in my office? I’m saying, welcome to my world. Welcome to my fear! Welcome to the feeling Black people’ve been living with forever. You scared and sad? Oh boo-hoo!”
The static bourgeois melodrama of the immediate post-election period, with our sanctimonious, vacuous repulsion, plans for support groups, and a bottomless brunch of solidarity in brownstone Brooklyn, shattered. It was cold and mean out. The sky was blanked in pale haze. The feet of a jogger slapped the asphalt like pistol shots. A black SUV didn’t bother swerving around a madly pedaling biker and missed him by a hair. He screamed curses from his entrails into the thick air.
I recalled a dinner a few nights earlier at which someone had started going on about how unspeakably alien the whole Trump phenomenon felt to him. “New York is just a different country,” he said, shrugging. “I really feel it’s true. The level of culture, the kinds of conversations you have here, the political engagement, the investment in the arts and the—you know, just the spirit I guess of social, intellectual . . . Well, you know what I mean.”
“Actually,” my friend Michael, a journalist, said with a smile, “I’ve been thinking about things from a different angle. If you take the three great debacles of recent American history: the Trade Tower attack and our response in 2001; the financial crisis in 2008; and Trump today, what they’ve got in common is that they’re all totally New York phenomena.”
“Media capital of the universe!” someone snickered.
“It’s true,” someone else said. “We’re the heartland of darkness.”
People chuckled, but the laughter rang hollow and quickly fell off.
I strode out again across the dirt and wan stubble of the soccer field, up the hill to the monument, returning to the place beneath the column above the steps that overlooked the shining buildings and gray elevated highways of Brooklyn toward the band of dull water, and onward to the cluttered glare of Lower Manhattan scrapers. Once more, I felt that November night in 2008 rising around me, the lights, the crowd, and the wind—the moment when the microphone was passed into my hands . . .
Of course what I ought to have spoken about that evening was the reason why Whitman began rhapsodizing in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle about the need for a memorial and park in Fort Greene. It was no spontaneous effusion at the sight of the public taking refreshment on the hilltop, but a response to escalating danger.
Whitman broached the subject in July 1846 as part of a screed prompted by an editorial in the New York Tribune, which was itself responding to a correspondent who’d written to oppose plans then being drawn up for the “leveling of Fort Greene.” While the paper claimed to agree with this writer that the development was unfortunate, it added that objections were hopeless. “Trade and commerce are an irresistible power,” the editors wrote. “The requirements of the rapidly flourishing city for ‘more room’ are constant and clamorous; and her citizens are justly proud of the rapid growth even while lamenting that in her progress a spot so haunted with lofty associations must be despoiled.”
Whitman accused the Tribune itself of being the source of this letter, which provided an opportunity for its reporters to trumpet the glories of Manhattan’s dynamism. He attacked the whole notion of the city’s robust appetite for more space, especially insofar as this hunger was intended to legitimize encroachment on the room of others. “Must be despoiled,” Whitman seethed. “What for, pray? Is the Dollar-god so ruthless that he grudges a few poor acres, (which the Spirit of the Beautiful, in fear as it were of his groveling fingers, has lifted high up above the level where he is accustomed to plod,) to the service of health, of refinement, of religion? Is nothing to be thought of on earth, but cash?” he fulminated. What injustice to “deliberately crush” the higher faculties we’ve been blessed with in the name of some pragmatically indispensable “desecration”!
