Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Save the Wall

Save the Wall 171 When I began this, I imagined that the erotic zone was a meeting place. I thought the divagations through the forest of other people’s ideas would eventually bring me to a place where these different testimonies met. The mythological stories would at last yield a common pattern or motivation. Writing the book would be an act of seducing the readers, but I would remainincontrol:theshapeoftheoutcomewouldbeveiled—thelabyrinth we have had to pass through, the burden of being heir to millennia of interpretation , was a kind of initiation, a Dantean reminder that purgatory lies in the way of Paradise. But it would work out. There would be a public space, a common ground. The umbraculae, the winding dances, the recalcitrant topography of the earth, the endless devices we use to communicate in the absence of any sure knowledge of the other—these are symptoms of Eros’s irresistible desire to rejoin what has been separated, to gather what has been scattered. Somewhere, across the divide of history, of class, of gender , of war and poverty, I was signed up to the project of being together, of copresencing, of mutual respect, of exposure to the other, and an ultimate brotherhood and sisterhood that would exult. Enslavement was comprehensible . Like every other curtailment of freedom, it was a rung on thescala paradisi. The crowd would be transformed into a force for cooperation, politics deterritorialized and spiritualized, and solitude turned into a ringing , angelic community. But now I see this was a mistake. There is no meeting place. A meeting place would cancel out the meaning of the journey. The obstacles placed in the way of a simple narrative that led from question to answer were not like the flats of a stage set. There was not an ultimate void or theater where, at last, the underlying pattern would be discerned. They were not obstacles. 172 save the wall They were walls. Medea fleeing in her chariot or Antigone buried alive— these are the twinned environments of this world, cryptic incarceration or elemental transcendence. They were discontinuous fragments of a larger structure. They did not spring up in an empty landscape. They were places where the wall was in disrepair and wore the appearance of passage. They were like signposts. It was a painful memory of my own. It was a sexual image. It was a figure of speech. It was all of Socrates’ shadow cast across western metaphysics; a dash of voodoo, a lamentation for the excision of Eros from the American constitution. These pieces of cultural data looked like fingers pointing toward the place where the key to the jigsaw would be revealed. They were walls repurposed as signboards or posters, walls that disguised themselves as doorways and windows. But it was only a disguise, and the entire program based on their substance a dreamlike illusion. To track down Eros in this way is never to wake up to the actual wall, the darkness that constitutionally divides us from any object of desire. There is no getting there, and no getting past this. Our talk is of passage, of roads, routes, and journeys. Considerable ingenuity goes into classifying different types of path. Surfaces, width, deviations are all endowed with a symbolic power. The status of the window as a metaphor of illumination is obvious. Doorways do what windows dare not, translating the fantasy of passage into a physical possibility. Thresholds also have an immense literature, in which they are associated with all manner of initiation, transformation, shape-shifting, and personality change. Much poeticenergyisinvestedinkeepingthesechannelsofcommunicationlined with pleasing epithets, as if we are improvising enchantments against their closure. In this erotic environment of sculptured mobility, where the earth easily assumes human qualities, we celebrate every form of sensuous friction .Birthprovidestheprimarymetaphorofrebirth,andtheearth,dimpled with hollows that collect and recollect our homeless bodies, is addressed as if its sole object was to furnish us with a pleasant topography. Natural discontinuitiesarerepressedortalkedoutofexistence:whathumaningenuity did with boats, airplanes, and excavation equipment, erotic philosophy doeswithlanguage.Thinkofthenewcultsofthehumid,thepermeable,the transitional,theambiguous,theamorphous,thehybrid,andtheinbetween. Butthewalls,whetherinnature,whethererectedinbetweenus,orwhether designed as the sine qua non of buildings and cities, have no truck with this. They do not want to negotiate. They do not care where they end or lead. save the wall 173 They are a primary confrontation with the limits of freedom. They echo our dread of containment, death. Walls exist wherever the many is acknowledged...