Erik Anderson
————————— ≈ ½ mile
But is not this, too, the city: the strip of light under the bedroom door on evenings when we were “entertaining.” --Walter Benjamin
For country, read curve. For city, read corner.
Thinking my rounded, lowercase “a” more countrified than the sharp apex of my capital one, I carved an “a” twelve blocks wide and eight blocks high.
I saw a desk someone set out in an alley. It had no drawers and was covered for some reason in scotch tape, but I thought if I could saw it in half it would make a decent pair of matching nightstands. The desk as bookends for the bed.
I saw an old oven and two neatly rolled-up rugs near a dumpster, several arched brick doorways that once opened onto gardens but which have since been walled off with cinderblocks. There was an old pedestrian bridge over another alley, the sort you still see on Cannery Row.
On a nearby wall, kids’ clothes covered in snow.
Crossing Colfax, I thought of Agnes Martin, who, beginning in the late 1950s, painted nothing but lines, vertical and horizontal lines like Venetian blinds, slatted shutters, the alternating solid and dotted lines on the pages of a child’s exercise book. For Martin, all spaces are zoned: every act of seeing overlays the seen, as with a veil (no matter how thin), and is itself a meditation on sight. And yet how different each of her endless squares, like city blocks, manages to be. From the varied quality of the lines that enclose them to the gradations of color within, how little, seen from across the room, her squares have to do with grids.
Later, as I cut through the ground floor of a parking garage, I thought of the grids Paul Klee painted: aerial views of farms like patchwork quilts, where the country keeps becoming the city, can't help but revert to avenues, streets. Corners betrayed by curves, curves betrayed by corners. The country hiding the city. But in the city there’s also the possibility: the country.
***
There was once a landfill in lower Manhattan. Built on the remains of old piers, the site was just shy of a hundred acres. In the early 1980s, the artist Agnes Denes planted two of the acres with wheat. The yield was a thousand pounds of toxic grain, which when harvested toured the world as part of a campaign against hunger. In one of the famous photos from the project, nothing is visible except wheat and sky—and, in the upper left hand corner, the Statue of Liberty.
In another of the photos, the city proper rises above the wheat: the World Trade Center towers dwarf the surrounding buildings.
Denes called the work “Wheatfield—A Confrontation,” but while it’s the wheat that sparks the confrontation, the city gloats, glowers. It seems responsible for the stand off, culpable in a way wheat could never be.
Not long after Denes’ project was over, real work on the multi-million dollar development known as Battery Park City got substantially underway. Today the site is unrecognizable: parks, condos, restaurants, yachts, and an esplanade that runs from Battery Park itself, on the southern tip of Manhattan, all the way to Chambers Street. You can now dine in a restaurant that charges six dollars for a bottle of Bud and think quietly to yourself that you’re eating on the remains of millions of meals, themselves eaten in the seventies and eighties—that the present is less predicated on the past than on the past’s trash.
***
Home from my walk, I see that someone has spray-painted a large orange X on the old and recently exposed foundation of the house next door. 15 feet wide and at least as tall, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to indicate to the remodelers, but it might have something to do with the small square hole cut in the sandstone above it, in which a 2x4 has been stuck at an obtuse angle. Maybe it marks the oldest part of the original construction—maybe X indicates the building’s DNA. Or maybe it reminds the new builders of the old ones, most of whom, based on the house’s age, have been dead for some time.
I’ve been thinking recently about DNA, about the prospects of a building, or a city, passing along its genetic information, about language as recombinant, and about the tiny ladders of the double helix, uncannily echoed in the practical implements leaning against the walls at the construction site next door. As if our genes were nothing more than ladders on which we climb through our histories or towards our successors.
But, in looking up James Watson (who with Francis Crick developed the double helix model of DNA), I come across the work of James Watson Cronin, who also won a Nobel Prize but for his work on subatomic particles called kaons. A kaon is actually shorthand for what is known as a k-meson, which itself means heavy meson. It seems at first that kaon comes from a sort of simple genetic exchange—the letter k merges with meson—but this isn’t true. The root of meson is negated altogether: the meso-, which ironically comes from the Greek for middle, disappears from the center of the newly minted word. Etymologically speaking, as the former word merges with the future, it annihilates the present. As if having climbed the ladder to the top of the house, one sets it on fire.
And yet, this is in keeping with the nature of mesons, which form a sort of X across the paradox of being. Consisting of one part matter and one part antimatter, they beg the question: how does something exist without existing? What does one make of the space where this happens, the intersection that is both the present moment and a space outside of time—where existence coincides with annihilation, where being abides in brokenness?
***
I have, quite by accident, substituted X as the subject in this essay titled “a,” but suppose I designate this text by the variable a, and the wound that haunts me here by the variable x. If it is true—as it was for Thoreau—that my writing and my living manifest each other, then text a sits beside person x, who is an unwritten text, or who, as text, is unwriteable. In him, letters verge on illegibility. Each semicircle, each arc is jagged, like the edge of a saw (but uneven).
One cuts oneself on this text, as one cuts oneself on a person. That is to say, this text (a) cuts itself on my person (x), which has cut itself on another—I mean the fist of another. Or is it the other way around?
***
Prior to its establishment as a branch of mathematics, algebra (from the Arabic al-jebr) denoted the treatment of fractures. Bone-setting—the reunion of broken parts of the body—became the metaphor for a way of balancing what we know with what we do not know. In algebraic equations, the letter X, like the letter A, often stands in for an unknown quantity, or the first of such quantities; it is a place-holder for the fracture in our knowledge. A symmetrical letter, it represents the asymmetry in our thought—the rupture, or wound, of our thinking.
When it comes to kaons, however, the X carved over being is an asymmetrical one: their matter/antimatter makeup has been most important—though I start to lose the science here—for suggesting that nature’s fundamental symmetry can be violated. Theirs is an X that curves.
Or is it that symmetries are made to be violated, and thus a corner is always a lie? As with the paintings of Martin and Klee, the city can’t help but revert to the country—corners to curves—even as the country is transformed into the city. It may be this tension between symmetry and asymmetry, between corners and curves, between the known and unknown, that animates each, but is an asymmetrical city “truer” than a symmetrical one? Is there even such a thing?
While it’s true that children have equal portions of their parents’ genes, it’s also true they tend to look more like one than the other. Genes curve in a helix, but, embodied, they also curve. There can be no broad avenue paved through the past; no genetic ladder moves in a straight line. And what’s strange about the algebraic use of X is that the letter so frequently betrays the human: not the unknown, but the imposition of the known. In this light, a street corner not only marks the spot, it serves as a flag to designate, as though placed on an alien planet by some intergalactic explorer, the land as ours, irrevocably.
Under such auspices the earth crusts over, like an infected wound.
***
In 1969, Dennis Oppenheim created a giant X with a harvester in a wheatfield in Finisterwolde, Holland. He planted and harvested the seed himself but never processed the grain or sold it. He called the work “Cancelled Crop,” and it serves as a reminder that X also negates, that a single intersection marks a patch of land crossed out.
But what of a city wholly comprised of such negations, what of a world crossed out?
In his explanations of the project, Oppenheim says something reminiscent of mesons: “Planting and cultivating my own material,” he says, “is like mining one’s own pigment (for paint).” When I read that I thought this means there is no middle, no medium independent of the maker, no being separate from its absence, no knowledge that excludes the unknown. A mason without bricks, Oppenheim builds through negation, and as with those tiny mesons—consisting of material and grammatical oppositions—what he produces is something of a riddle: how can a crop not be a crop? And what remains at the site of its annihilation?
As I read Oppenheim’s words, I thought that if the present is the medium through which time makes itself known, it is contingent on a past we mine to make a future, and that this process makes our mark, like a little X, on time.
But also as I look at the pictures of Oppenheim’s field (and Denes’), as I stare at the point where the two legs of time converge, like matter and antimatter hovering just over or just beyond our history—like an X scrawled over the present—I seem to hear a voice saying Swing your hammers here.