The Body of Brooklyn

White Car

WhiteCar I No, you’re going too far. . . . Yes. I’m staying very near, and you know it. — Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood Motor-cars are easier to steer on asphalt surfaces, but also harder to bring to a stop. Especially when the gentleman at the wheel, taking advantage of the wide streets, the beautiful day, his light motor-car and his skill as a driver to make a little business trip, at the same time weaves his car in and out at crossings in the manner of pedestrians on the pavements. — Kafka, Diary f I could stop that car, see what was inside it. When I was young, I used to indulge in a fantasy borrowed fromThe Twilight Zone (or was itThe Outer Limits?). I still go into it involuntarily sometimes, but shake it off guiltily. I am in a room full of people, a party, an auditorium, on the street. I can stop time, and in so doing all movement, all but my own, that is. I wander around the still bodies, looking into the frozen eyes, browsing through the cabinets ; the inanimate world yields to my manipulations. But I never touch any flesh. It is a voyeuristic fantasy. However, there are no salacious scenes; there is no dramatic process. Simply a frozen tableau. But there is great drama in it, in the small gestures, expressions, postures, stopped in their specific inflections. It is a fantasy of complete social comfort, since this is the only social scenario I can imagine that is completely safe. Sure, it’s sterile. But also fascinating. What great power I have, to do such a thing! But the power contains its undoing. To freeze I must also restore, and to restore is to return myself to a general sense of social discomfort, if not ubiquitous powerlessness. Memory, too, is the stopping of time, a process of wax coating, lamination. Bronzing. We look back attempting to turn complicated, ......................................................................... fluid events into photographs, heavy with specific emotion. In so doing , memory turns static, atrophies into comprehensibility as we weary of interpretation, the shifting selection of detail. In memory, we urgently seek reconciliation, closure. It is a death wish; it hates the dialectical procedures of remembering, its questions and enigmas. Memory wants to understand, yet stagnates when it understands, settling on a verbal and visual picture. Therefore, photographic memory is nothing to be proud of, especially when the picture is clear. Perhaps only the blurred memory approaches honesty, because within it remembering still lives, shifting and sorting, posing questions that are layered like multiple exposures. Hovering over possibilities is unsettling. And sometimes possibility is all that I want. When we begin to remember, the memory will not settle. The photographic print is blurred and the negative is lost, but we keep peering closer, shooting for clues we may have missed, trying to make out the figures. We are confronted by the need to interpret in the face of indeterminate images. But we keep circling back as if answers were possible . Finally, in frustration, we resort to words, to locutions, to the anecdote . That language is finite is, at times, a consoling idea. It is a hope against hope, the peaceful promise of tautologies. When language meets its double, it seems to confirm itself. When experience is settled into language, they become twins. Fraternal or identical? I’ve never distrusted language before, never seen it as the enemy. I remember The Lady from Shanghai. If language is a hall of mirrors, it’ll do no good to enter with our guns drawn and start shooting. We need to get close to the glass, examine the angles, see which textures are real, and which are reflections , distortions. It was July, July in Brooklyn, July in Brooklyn in, say, 1963 or ’64. I can never fix my age exactly in this. Summer vacation. Sometimes we went on short trips, to Washington, Philadelphia, Bear Mountain, New Hyde Park. But my brother and I mostly spent our time “around the corner,” meaning Manhattan Court. Sometimes we played street games in front of our house, on the service road, a name I never understood . I have always had trouble understanding certain very simple things. When I was about twelve I came across some mews in . . .David Copperfield? I looked it up, but cognition somehow failed me for years. Perhaps the association of alleys and cats threw me off the scent. The baby boom had visited our neighborhood with...