This is what happened: my friend and I took a packed night train north from Florence, over the Alps to Munich. There were people sleeping on the luggage racks and in the aisles. My friend and I were crowded into the vestibule with at least twenty others. We rode standing, mashed shoulder to shoulder with strangers. I was against the door, on the metal scuff plate, which flips up when the door opens. If the train car door opened, there would be no place for me to stand.
Throughout the journey, I worked together with the other passengers at each railway stop. We pulled on the car door handle, against those on the platform, to prevent them from opening the door and getting on the train. There was snow in the mountains, though it was early October. We held the door against desperate and angry people banging on the windows and shouting, people no different from us—except that they were outside the train, not in, and there was no room for them.
We rode the night that way, drinking shared rotgut, swaying as one group of bodies, no room to sit. The Munich station into which we tumbled at dawn was cold and chaotic. A giant man came toward my friend and me with a big unwholesome grin. I remember his leather flight jacket, which squeaked as if it was new. He negotiated with my friend, who spoke German, and then we were slumped against the back seat of the man’s Mercedes. He drove us what felt like a long ways, into a large park with various roadways, and in the park was a huge futuristic glass structure: the Olympic Stadium.
We followed the man into a set of apartments near the glass structure, down a hall and into a locker room to which the man had a set of keys. The locker room had cots in it, lined up. We gave the man money in exchange for this lodging and put our things into the lockers and then the man drove us to Oktoberfest, our destination, where people drank beer, ate roast chickens, fought, sang, threw their gnawed chicken bones into the corners of the beer hall, and lined up to take very long pisses.
When we were finished with all that, we set out for “home,” a locker room of the 1972 Munich Olympics stadium. It was not easy to get there. We finally found the Olympic Park, where we stumbled and wandered. The park felt huge. It had no streetlights, or they were not on. The more we walked, the bigger and darker the place became, the longer this night. We skirted a large body of water. We thought we would never find the stadium, our overpriced cots in the locker room. We found instead a set of apartments and tried to break in, but without success. My friend climbed up a concrete wall that led to a second-floor balcony and tried the doors and windows of that unit, but it was also locked. Here my memory blurs. Did we get into these apartments? Or give up and eventually find our cots in the locker room? All I remember is the next morning, standing under water that was not sufficiently hot, in a chilly tiled room with a row of showers built for athletes, of which I was not one, and instead training only for another day of drinking beer and lining up to piss.
I was eighteen, about to turn nineteen, as I watched my friend scale the concrete wall and try to force open a door or window of those apartments. I knew nothing, not one thing, about what happened at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, but these were the infamous apartments where Israeli athletes were abducted before some were tortured and all were murdered. Stunned by my own youthful ignorance, I recently did a little research and came upon an image of rows of cots and thought I was looking at an image of the locker room of cots that the German man in the squeaking leather jacket had rented to us. Those are the cots! I thought, amazed. I had googled “Munich Olympics 1972.” This was on my phone. Looking closer, I understood that the cots in the photograph, what I thought were cots, were actually coffins, each covered with a cloth. The German man with the keys would have rented those out too; he wasn’t sentimental, so maybe I’m making too much of this.
When I heard the HMS Bounty had been destroyed, in 2012, I thought my favorite lounge and restaurant in Koreatown was gone. It’s on the ground floor of the Gaylord, a residential hotel with an old-fashioned lobby and an equally old-fashioned lobby clerk.
“No,” someone said, “the real HMS Bounty. The ship—it sunk. The crew had to be rescued by the coast guard. Two crew members drowned.”
But wasn’t the Bounty burned by mutineers some two hundred years ago? I’d asked.
The replica they made for the 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty, that was what sunk, it was explained to me.
The HMS Bounty that I knew, on Wilshire Boulevard, with its cozy booths, fish and chips, jukebox: Was it named after the model or the original? Which is the real HMS Bounty? If asked, although I have not been asked, I’d know the answer: the bar and restaurant, of course, on the ground floor of the Gaylord. I’ve been a patron there for twenty years. It has not sunk, but they took the omelet off the menu a few years back, just around the time my favorite waitress died of old age.
The HMS Bounty is across the street from where the Ambassador Hotel stood. Robert Kennedy was assassinated there. It was demolished in 2006. In the years before (it had closed as a hotel in 1989), you could go inside only if you were part of a film or TV crew staging a production on its grounds. People used the backdrop of the Ambassador, which had been gorgeously renovated in 1949 by pioneering black architect Paul Revere Williams, to represent all manner of lavish surroundings, but never to represent the Ambassador Hotel itself. If you were part of a team disguising the hotel as a fictional setting, and you were willing to pay, they would let you in to wander the place.
“Salt water on the tennis courts can be quite a nuisance…”
“All our love, scribbled down
On a cardboard box before drowning…”
“We are still alive, one of us said.”
Those are lines I’ve pulled from “The Sinking of the Titanic” by the renowned German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
“Sometimes I don’t know ‘myself.’ I am second-rate.
My hand trembles. It is not the gin.
It is not fame. It is history
with its unending sham and duplicity.”
“True, the reproduction of a lifeboat
does not save anybody, the difference
between a life jacket and the term life jacket
makes the difference between survival and death—
But the dinner is going on regardless…”
Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a chain-smoking dandy who wears seersucker in the summertime. His eyes are blue crystals that emit rays of light and seem to put him at godlike counterpoise to the sentimental and false. I met him a few years ago, in Denmark. He outdrank and outlived me every moment I was near him. At the time, he was eighty-five. A group of us toured the house of the writer Karen Blixen, now a museum, which was adjacent to our hotel. Some knew her as Isak Dinesen. Her friends called her “Tania.” But only Carson McCullers decided to address her as “Mac,” when they lunched together on champagne and oysters.
One night I said something banal to Hans Magnus that I didn’t really myself believe, about admiring the Danish design in the lobby of our hotel, relentless Scandinavian design, which neither of us had found any way to escape that whole week in Denmark. I pretended I liked all this blocky furniture and the square-shouldered women’s clothes, the Lucite umbrella stands. I praised the design for no reason except that its omnipresence had seduced me into thinking these weird objects in every room were superior to normal life. As I spoke to Hans Magnus, the only thing in my sight line that wasn’t a gleaming Lucite cube or ceramic cube or a white leather cube was Hans Magnus’s dirty cigarette. He looked at me and said, about the Danish design, “But would you want to live with it?” His cigarette smoke curled. That curl was the promise of the other world, lived without it: a bare room in Germany, soot coming down in flakes. He’s right. I want the bare room, the blank starting point for seeing.
Smoke from a cigarette is often called blue. We know just what they mean when they say the smoke is blue. It’s literal—it is bluish—but a specific blue that is the compression of reality into sign.
Photography is cataloged as mimesis, unlike painting or sculpture, which produces only likeness or abstraction. The art historian Rosalind Krauss wrote famously that the achievement of surrealist photography was in the paradox of capturing a faithful trace of a reality that is already constituted as a sign, so that the reality-trace of the photograph reveals a real that is actually a symbol, or wavers between symbol and real, such as in Man Ray’s famous Ingres’s Violin, a photograph of a woman’s back with two f-holes overlaid, connecting the shape of her body (“reality”) to the shape of the instrument (“sign”), and convulsing the image.
But what about the paradox of reality constituted as sign—a photograph—of a sign constituted as reality? That’s the tension in an image by the German artist Thomas Demand, who reconstructs photographed scenes out of paper, for instance a violin workshop, or the exterior of a modest house with a view behind it of blooming cherry trees, and then he photographs this reconstructed, paper simulacrum. The special connection to reality, “with which all photography is endowed,” according to Rosalind Krauss, does not quite apply. It does and does not apply. Krauss likens photography to fingerprints. To the rings that cold glasses leave on tables. A photograph, she writes, is closer to a death mask or the tracks of a gull on a beach than it is to a painting or sculpture. It’s the residue of things we see, rather than a reconstruction of things we see. But the photographs that Thomas Demand takes of the photographed scenes he reconstitutes from paper do not present a straight trace of reality, the glass ring on the table, the track of the gull on the beach. They offer, instead, a trace of a model of a trace of reality.
Another German artist, Hanne Darboven, inscribed human time—via music—onto the picture plane, onto paper. “Timeswings,” she called these marks. They are human breaths, the life she spent working. Darboven worked eighteen hours a day, slept little, smoked constantly. It’s all there in those timeswings. Thomas Demand uses paper to make images that exclude time. He tombifies reality. It is not made dead but made impossible. The images are vacuums. They do not suffocate us, since we are only looking. But much can be felt through the eyes. I don’t know about you, but a whiff of suffocation is enough suffocation for me.
Tallulah Bankhead is the first one into the lifeboat in the 1944 Alfred Hitchcock movie Lifeboat, after a German U-boat blows up a merchant marine vessel on which she was a passenger. Rescued, she is the foundational conditions of the lifeboat and movie: woman, fur coat, brandy, typewriter, diamond bracelet, sarcasm, wit. She is the tennis court with salt water on it. Things float past: flotsam. People climb on, the other few survivors, and coalesce into a movie cast. A stranger, the last one pulled on board, is the great conceit of the film. “Danke schön,” he says to the rest. He turns out to be the captain of the U-boat that blew up the ship all these survivors were on.
There is a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice that I remember as a melting ship, a melting clock, one side sinking, the other shored up and restored. It’s called the Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni. The Contarini family owned it. Scrigno means “casket,” which is a container for bodies or gold. The Contarini family employed Palladio. I cut my hands making my Palladio Rotonda from foam core as an undergrad. I was a student passingly interested in architecture on account of a charismatic teacher named Lars Lerup. My rotunda was empty of people and ideas. It was a copy, and a copy can make a volume that might be filled with ideas but mine, as I said, stayed empty.
In Alexander Kluge’s film about Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “The Sinking of the Titanic,” an image flashes by, a still that is a colored illustration of people in a movie theater. On the screen is a sinking ship, peril in progress. A woman in the back of the theater is standing, her arms thrown high in fear and anguish for those who are drowning. She is watching a movie of a sinking ship. It is a fiction, but her terror is real. Except her terror can’t be real, since she is drawn. She’s just a drawing.
I am not quite afraid of the act of dying, of transition. There is a motor lodge called the Portal Motel and I thought it was in Lucerne, but it’s in Lone Pine, the town of Lone Pine, unless there are two. Two portals. The Portal Motel seems like a good place to go. I am not afraid of dying, like I said. What I fear is to be dead. I dread the end. Not coming, but arrived.
In the work of Thomas Demand, “Do not disturb” is not a phrase but a shape—a vertical rectangle with a hole at the top for a doorknob. Also, it’s a relation: a tag that sits on a doorknob or latch. It can be any color and still be recognized, even red, which is what he makes it. In a ship novel I’m fond of, couples licit and illicit are always sneaking off to staterooms. The novel’s narrator walks past a door wedged open. He sees a girl in postcoital glow ironing the white uniform pants of the ship’s wireless operator. The wireless operator lounges on the bed, nude. Do Not Disturb.
Thomas Demand re-created the exterior of the Cambridge apartment where Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived, its drab vinyl siding and, beyond a fence, a peek of blooming cherry trees. It’s an exterior that is typical and drab. It’s a house of no distinction. One could say this house would not “exist,” certainly not as a photographed place, were it not for the fact that the person who lived there bombed the Boston Marathon. When power and history each shines its light, to say, This ordinary and glum house is where a terrorist lived, a source is born, an image that is created in the wake of destruction, a properly Hegelian birth. As an ordinary and glum apartment house, it’s just one among millions of others.
The blossoms of cherry trees, like the ones that fill the background of the image of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s house, are the manifestation of an eternal return, but a simple one: spring. I’d rather live among trees than in the part of the mind that contemplates eternity. Seasons take place in time. Eternity means “outside of time” rather than endless. We do not know that cherry blossoms will eternally bloom. Each time they bloom gives joy that feels like a miracle. Feels, in other words, like a singular event.
Snow, another cyclical wonder, is the world’s attempt at self-burial. Then it melts.
I really don’t like it when I have one ear pressed against the pillow and I start to hear my heart beat, who can sleep with all that noise
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tweeted this before he followed his older brother, Tamerlan, over a cliff. Got a death sentence. Apologized, privately, to a Roman Catholic nun.
A few years ago I was in Eufaula, Alabama, for a family reunion, not my own but my in-laws’. I stopped at a thrift store. Walking the aisles, I came upon a dollhouse with a yellow plastic roof. I know that roof, I told myself. I know that house. The blue tulip silhouettes on the window shutters. I knew everything. I peered in the little windows at the little kitchen and the tiny bathroom and the photograph of wood grain papering the “den.” (Did anyone ever have a den, or just fictional people on television shows, and the implied fictional people whom dollhouses bespeak?) This dollhouse was stained and dirty—it had a layer that marked it as not mine—but its rooms were primal scenes to which I held claims, to which I was returning, inside this thrift store in Eufaula, Alabama. I had owned this model of dollhouse—a menagerie, as I understood, peering in the windows, of everything that grips me and won’t let go.
Since the little house already owned me, there was no need to buy it.
It is amazing what, from the past, you can drag into your net, only to find that it has never left your net.
At a restaurant in Venice the old waitress insisted we not order, and instead, she commanded that we be served “the catch of the day.” The catch of the day were these burglar-mugged fishies, bottom-feeders that looked like cartoon drawings of bank robbers, proletarian faces, deep-fried. As a bourgeois, my decency was offended. Or maybe I was offended that these little scofflaws got caught in a dragnet, and I felt for them. Anyhow the waitress forgot to bring silverware.
It’s said that capitalism relies on a system of selling something you don’t own to someone who doesn’t want it. Which is identical to how a Lacanian defines love. The lover makes a gift of his banality as if it were a wonder. He pretends to offer something more than his banality, a piece of the world that reflects his love and that he does not, in reality, possess. In both cases, love and futures, you force something you don’t own onto someone who does not want it.
Capital requires the confidence that you can do business with time. Alain Badiou says the revolution to come seems impossible only if you swallow the lie that the present is viable and coherent. Once you see how impossible life already is, then the chance for a real, true, actual emancipatory horizon comes into view. Got it?
Many want to speculate on the future, the after-capitalism, but first we must define what capitalism is. If we don’t define it, we cannot know its properties, or declare its death or its triumph, or even identify its health, ailing or robust. You have to understand capitalism perfectly to know if the universe of free markets is shaped like a cake donut—a three-torus topology—or is, in fact, a limitless reality, as it wants us to believe. Just to be clear, I don’t count myself among those who do understand it, not even imperfectly.
The robotic arms on an auto assembly line work together so smoothly, they are almost intimate. They can achieve maximum closeness, one machine part to another, without any touching. They are not like humans. A shop floor of robots needs no bathroom booze, no love in a closet, no fistfights with labor bosses. Each time the machines pause their perfect movements, we see a still life. They become fixed, inanimate, in their tiny pauses. We know a little about those who suffered, lost jobs, when the robots came. Those who lost jobs do not lurk at the factory gates. They went into the service industry. The service industry is not actually “an industry.” It is everything that is not manufacturing or agriculture. It is a not-thing.
I’m not the first to assert that reality itself has become false, an ideology, a fiction, a novel. Many understand this, that reality is an argument for itself and not a real, true thing.
God was ejected when we traveled from the closed world to the infinite universe. We were also ejected. Everyone was suddenly homeless, no longer happy in those ages when the starry sky was “the map of all possible paths,” as Georg Lukács half-laments. The stars remained the same, except moving and not fixed, no longer part of our world, no longer part of us. Marguerite Duras says either God rules over a void—a universe in which we are the sole accident—or He only rules over us, which makes Him merely a “regional” God. A local. A townie.
What is objective and definite? Or rather, what is the sound of what is objective and definite? Feminine screams, and the breaking of glass.
In the Doge’s Palace in Venice there is a room that was once the largest indoor gathering place in all of Europe. Capacity was two thousand important men. The doges ruled Venice for one thousand years. There were 120 of them. The term of service was life. Around the upper edges of this grand salon are painted portraits of the first seventy-six doges. All, that is, but one, a single Venetian doge who is represented by no portrait and instead a black banner, and on the black banner, text in Latin that reads: Here is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, decapitated for crimes.
Marino Faliero was doge for only one year. One year of one thousand. One doge of 120. And yet: anyone who has ever been in the grand council chamber of Venice, once the largest indoor gathering space in all of Europe, in fact anyone at all asked to name a Venetian doge, a single one, any doge of Venice, will name Marino Faliero. Or, if they don’t recall his actual name, when asked if they can name a Venetian doge, people will answer, “The one whose memory they tried to erase. That’s the one I know.”