I dream with open eyes, p.3
I Dream with Open Eyes, page 3
The fact that both historically and in our own time single individuals had succeeded in stamping their ghastly visions over enormous modern states offered a kind of negative proof of the potentiality I wanted to explore. Not by projecting any one person’s illusions over society but rather by conjuring the potential for a shared, imminent elsewhere—what Camus called humanity’s “living transcendence,” the origin point of rebellion and art.
As I walked down a boulevard lined by monumental, sternly collectivist gray buildings, deeper into what had been East Berlin, I found myself recalling a line ascribed to the nineteenth-century revolutionary poet Heinrich Heine, who’d struggled to envisage a way forward in his own era of murky rebellion and bestial regression. “I dream with open eyes,” Heine declared. “And my eyes see.”
What would it mean to really live in that spirit of double consciousness—both steadfastly absorbing the reality before us, and unleashing our imagination’s capacity to conceive other worlds? Heine felt that in drastic times one had to resist a binary approach to perceptual modalities, instead making lucid observation conjunctive with the prospect of our most ardent fantasies. He saw unbounded reverie as central to this project—the wellspring of humanity’s miraculous creative ability. “Thought wishes to become deed; the word wishes to become flesh . . . The world is the signature of the Word,” he announced. As for “the proud men of action,” he warned them that they were only tools of the people of thought, “who, often in the humblest silence, have prescribed all your work.” For his own part, Heine resolved to let his thoughts run free, taking on “whatever terrible forms they will; let them storm through all the lands like a frenzied troupe of Bacchantes . . . let them break into our hospitals and drive the old, sick world from its sick bed!”
This image comports with the idea that if we can’t change anything systemic by ourselves, perhaps through our words and dramatic gestures, we may yet project beyond ourselves a kind of infectious presentiment of radical transformation, one that reorients the gaze of someone watching toward a vision of the future that’s not mere reduplication—toward hope. We have so much guidance about group activism, but little attention is given to the idea of cultivating our inner revolutionary spirit. Yet mightn’t such development be instrumental as a step toward conceiving an uprising that turns out differently from the failed collective revolts of the past?
There was one object from the Weimar show that lingered in my mind as an oddly inspiring work, though it didn’t fit easily anywhere on the conventional political spectrum. It was a portrait from 1927 entitled The Radionist, by the artist Kurt Günther. The painting depicts the upper half of a middle-aged man with fiercely pronounced bony features and huge, deep-set pale eyes behind rimless spectacles. He’s dressed in a natty brown suit and is planted before a table beside an ashtray, a bottle, and a glass. A thick cigar is jammed between his thin lips. But what grabs the attention is the pair of headphones he’s wearing, with long, spider-leg antennae jutting out from his skull at sharp angles; a large wooden box with lots of silver dials looms nearby on a second table. In one hand the man holds a small book from which he appears to have just glared up at the painter with an expression that suggests he’s taking offense at an intrusion.
The startling image became well known and a topic of conversation. Looking back at the picture over time, people saw the work as an indictment of the privileged middle classes: Aha, they said. A selfish bourgeois with his radio, cutting himself off from the real world and the miseries of the people.
In fact, however, the subject was a neighbor friend of Günther’s, a paraplegic, crippled in the Great War. Beneath the table, his legs were powerless. The radio was providing him access to cultural life, along with a live pulse of contemporary events that would otherwise have been unavailable to him. He was defiantly refusing to let his physiological confinement sever him from the world.
One truism that bears repetition in times of raging confusion is that the actual situation rarely matches our reflexive judgments, and we would do well to pierce through these to a more personally discomforting perspective. Sometimes, as in the case of The Radionist, reality not only belies appearances, it’s the reverse of what first seems to be the case: What looks most removed can prove to be the most engaged, while that which seems most plugged in may be hostage to the clamor of the times and, effectively, the most cloistered.
The limitation or lag in our capacity to appraise what we see need not be taken as a strictly negative phenomenon, however. We know so much about the world today that conduces to a petrifying despondency—political, cultural, and planetary. Sites of the unknown might be approached as a forensic challenge for those of us in quest of fresh prospects, not simply the ratification of facile denunciations and blind fear. “In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in a situation where he has to play detective,” Walter Benjamin once wrote. If we pause long enough to bring the requisite layers of context to what we’re looking at now, we may discover clues that can help us begin tracing where to turn next in our search for answers.
Recalling her experience of analysis with Freud, the poet H.D. remarked that it wasn’t the case that Freud summoned the past “and invoked the future. It was a present that was in the past, or a past that was in the future.” The notion evokes the quasi-kabbalistic approach to historical materialism espoused by Benjamin, who wrote of the imperative to “blast open the continuum of history.” Thinking comprises “not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well,” he proposed, calling for a new type of historian who would cease “telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.” Instead, he challenged historians to grasp the constellation that their own era formed with an earlier one. In this way, they might establish “a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”
Benjamin implies that history, too, possesses an unconscious and that—as with the individual—it’s possible to develop a more constructively dynamic relationship with this realm than the one we typically, passively accommodate.
This idea leads back to the question of my own self-expulsion from America, with its commingled public and private dimensions, for one thing I knew as the move began happening was that I didn’t fully understand what I’d done. Sometimes I wondered whether the words I did find to talk about it might not have constituted an elaborate evasion of some more chthonic explanation for this decision to abandon a life rich in family and friends, in an objectively beautiful, socially congenial, progressive, leafy Brooklyn neighborhood—along with an awfully nice home near Fort Greene Park, all those great theaters, restaurants, and the ebullient, multiethnic swagger of urban America—for the ever more dis-United Kingdom of Brexit, morose public resignation, and a profoundly disembodied body politic.
Moving to Jerusalem in my twenties might have been mad, but at least one could discern the shimmer of high ideals: Jerusalem is a perfectly reasonable place to go if you’re delusionally seeking to track down God at the source. But try framing some such project with England in the place of the Holy Land and I can hear the explosion of laughter through my hammering keys.
Yet had the move, in truth, been quite so mundane or arbitrary? Lines from the last stanza of an Elizabeth Bishop poem tolled through my mind: “Continent, city, country, society: / the choice is never wide and never free. / And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, / Wherever that might be?”
Perhaps there’s a different understanding of place and home than that conveyed by the names flag-pinned across the maps of our stories. If there were a more fertile approach to thinking about this decision, I came to suspect that its secret lay precisely in the difficulty I encountered in trying to explain myself. For the way I would invariably find my voice stumbling and subsiding toward silence when people asked why I’d moved came to seem symptomatic of the degree to which I’d acted unconsciously. I would need then to turn back to the figure who remains the most evocative explorer of that realm in modern times. For all that I’d delved into Freud’s work and life story in the past, for all the flaws in his arguments and the problems with his handling of specific cases, I knew there were truths in his vision that I’d not yet plumbed the depths of, and I sensed a new urgency in the pursuit they impelled.
This return to the unconscious was surprising because the plan to leave America had been born out of what felt at the time like such an abundance of conversation repetitively analyzing our situation that the vessel which brought us away might have been assembled from verbal self-consciousness. Yet in truth my unpremeditated outbursts on the subject were often the most telling.
I remember being at dinner at an apartment in Chelsea with a couple of friends the week before we left New York. A livid thunderstorm rumbled and snaked behind the rooftop water towers perched outside the windows. One of my hosts asked what I felt like now, on the eve of the event, whereupon I exclaimed, “Somewhere between a rat fleeing a sinking ship and a monk setting himself on fire!”
The answer just came from me, cast up from the depths.
My friends broke out laughing—a little too hard, exchanging uncomfortable glances.
The moment also laid bare another element of the decision to leave America, one of which I’d been initially oblivious: For all the gravity with which we felt we were acting, there was also something performative about it—a flamboyant quality that, looked at in certain lights, might be taken as comic. We’d made a spectacle of ourselves!
To whatever extent we’d acted unconsciously, this also meant there was still a great deal to learn about the whole escapade. Perhaps our state had parallels with those pregnant spaces of the unknown I invoked earlier. Having finally settled in London for “the foreseeable future,” it seemed as if over the past several years we’d been acting as if in a dream. Spinning Marx upside down, I found myself thinking that hitherto we’d only changed our world; the point was to interpret it.
The process of transferring our lives had often felt as if we were winding our way through a labyrinth. Different texts and artworks gleamed along the way like strands of the thread Ariadne gave Perseus to navigate his return from the Minotaur. Indeed, like my God-haunted, radical ancestors who’d sailed away from Europe, the idea struck me that in some manner I had yet to reckon with, I too had acted in response to the urgings of old holy books, even if my own gospels were written by profane artists, philosophers, and poets. It was in some fashion their call that I’d heeded when we packed up our American life. To reflect on what we’d done meant to contemplate afresh the lives and works that composed my cultural pantheon.
Gershom Scholem, the humanist scholar of Kabbalah, described periods when the elements of the old order become unfixed as history’s “plastic hours.” For all the danger of these times of disorienting flux, they are also “crucial moments when it is possible to act. If you move then, something happens,” Scholem wrote. By his criteria, we inhabit one of those hours now, and cannot be certain of its outcome, in part because we ourselves might abruptly elect to do something wholly unexpected. Deprived of the familiar economic and political superstructure, we are cast back on ourselves for the conception of promise.
Yet this need not be a solipsistic endeavor. Writing about the philosopher Karl Jaspers as an exemplary figure in dark times, Hannah Arendt asserted, “He need only dream himself, as it were, back into his personal origins and then out again into the breadth of humanity to convince himself that even in isolation he does not represent a private opinion, but a different, still hidden public view—a ‘footpath,’ as Kant put it, which someday no doubt will widen out into a great highway.”
On a blustery, gray September morning more than a year after we’d left America, something compelled me to open the very last of the boxes we’d brought with us across the ocean. Why had I kept that solitary box untouched for so long? What urged me at that moment to tear it apart?
I can say only that, overcome by despair as the slide toward chaos accelerated on both sides of the Atlantic, I felt as if I were physically seized and led to this act. There, inside the final container, wrapped in white paper, was a light-brown volume with the words “Work on Ancestors (Beginning only)” written in my grandmother’s spidery handwriting—the manuscript I’d been searching for all these months. Pure coincidence? A glimpse into some occult order? Whatever the process, I surrendered my conscious search for the object, and the record of my family history rematerialized.
That autumnal day, I read again my grandmother’s opening words, dated March 1937, in which she described how changes in the conditions of church and state under the Empress Elisabeth’s reign dramatically unsettled the living conditions of the “less well to do people.” Together with this destabilization, there arose a new curiosity about the world across the ocean. “These conditions combined with the discontent of many of the people caused them to consider getting out,” and the consequence of this was the start of the migration to America, she wrote.
I traced my finger once more over her words about our ancestor, Mary Chilton with her “lively personality,” and about Mary’s tailor father, James, a separatist, who’d sold everything the family owned to make the arduous journey, then had died on board the boat after it dropped anchor, in sight of land. Later that same morning, I came upon a nineteenth-century etching made of “Mary Chilton’s Leap,” which I’d never seen before.
In this image, the girl stands at the prow of a skiff that’s been rowed into Plymouth Harbor from the Mayflower. One foot remains on the boat, the other hovers in midair. She leans forward, braving gravity, while a man gripping the sides of the boat behind her stares on, mesmerized. The next instant it appears the girl must either fall, or spread her arms and be airborne. It’s as if we the onlookers can determine by force of vision which it will be; her act may yet become ours. What choice have we but to leap, seeing where we stand now?
1
· Furies ·
How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to civilization?
—SIGMUND FREUD
Our house in Brooklyn was a gathering place, and on election night we invited a number of friends around to watch the results come in. Another get-together of dear companions in our tall, ember-orange brick home, with its treasures and clutter, its old shadows and tree-filled windows. The building on Cumberland, right next to the derelict little car service place with its worn notices soliciting drivers and welcoming corporate accounts, almost directly across the street from the residence that Marianne Moore moved into in 1929, and where she lived for many years in what Elizabeth Bishop, a frequent visitor, described as a narrow, cramped apartment arrayed with books and pictures of birds done by friends.
While occupying that fourth-floor flat, Moore crafted a distinction between the work of “half poets,” whose verse was important only on account of the “high-sounding” gloss that could be put upon it, and those whose words mattered because they were “useful.” We will only have poetry, she wrote, when the poets among us “can be / ‘literalists of / the imagination’—above / insolence and triviality and can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
The staircase railing outside her front door held a deep scorch mark that Moore’s mother blamed on Ezra Pound. “He came to call on Marianne and left his cigar burning out here because he knew I don’t like cigars,” she said; though when Bishop queried Pound long afterward, while he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, after being taken into custody in Italy by the Allies for his radio broadcasts praising Mussolini and the Fascists, he laughed loudly and said he hadn’t smoked cigars since he was eighteen. Pound was a poet who placed actual toads in imaginary gardens, and sometimes I pictured him with his long razor face shambling along Cumberland Street toward Moore’s place in the 1930s, quoting Yeats to himself, “Byzantium”; hard, skeptical eyes shifting right and left, dreaming of ideal, ruined civilizations and a world without Jews. A reminder that art is no amulet against moral atrophy. “I hail the superhuman; / I call it death-in-life and life-in-death,” Yeats had chanted.
We’d slid several bottles of champagne into the refrigerator; they lay wedged along a narrow middle shelf, sleek, algae-green fish with gold snouts and no fins. But the bubbly was ritualistic, not festive. It would be a poignant milestone to have a woman in the White House, yet she hadn’t been our choice among the Democratic contenders. Her politics presented no challenge to the American economic model, hinted at no need for a reassessment of the country’s bigger-and-more-of-everything-is-better ideology, with its flip-side theme of snuff-the-phantoms-who-preach-otherwise-before-they-can-singe-you.
Below the bottles was a shelf of food bowls covered with cellophane, and on the silver refrigerator door were silly magnets stuck to curling photographs of our life through the years here. My three older children, now grown, who’d left home long ago. Parents beaming, who’d left the world altogether. Backgrounds of flowers and faraway oceans.
Beyond the symbolic triumph of a female presidency, what we were preparing to celebrate was the release her administration promised from the nightmare circus of the election. She would return the country to business as usual. If it wasn’t what we wanted, we just might find we’d get what we need. The livid throng of leering ghouls unstoppered in the race would slither back into darkness. Our private, inner tour guides could still point to a vague, sloppy arc of national progress, indicating the sights that made this place home, despite everything.
