a practiced walk home

from Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) trans. Alfred Birnbaum

Then, gathering up the pieces of my mind, I started off on the sixteen steps down the hallway to my apartment door. Eyes closed, exactly sixteen steps. No more, no less. My head blank from the whiskey, my mouth reeking for cigarettes.

Drunk as I get, I can walk those sixteen steps straight as a ruled line. The fruit of many years of pointless self-discipline. Whenever drunk, I'd throw back my shoulders, straighten my spine, hold my head up, and draw a deep lungful of the cool morning air in the concrete hallway. Then I'd close my eyes and walk sixteen steps straight through the whiskey fog. 

Within the bounds of that sixteen-step world, I bear the title of "Most Courteous of Drunks." A simple achievement. One has only to accept the fact of being drunk at face value.

No ifs, ands, or buts. Only the statement "I am drunk," plain and simple.

That's all it takes for me to become the Most Courteous Drunk. The Earliest to Rise, the Last Boxcar over the Bridge.

junk to junk

from Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth (2007)

David didn't say all that much about depression. He thought that one of the central diseases of our culture was that meaningful work was available to so few. He said it was obvious that I didn't think my university studies were meaningful work but there were certainly ways of making them so if I followed my own curiosities rather than the prescribed university programs toward making me fodder for the economy. He also thought I should walk a couple of hours a day because the primitive rhythm of walking tended to delight the mind. Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned in it. However, I neglected a clue to other minor slumps to follow when on the plane home from Tuscon to Detroit David advised that as much as possible I should avoid the junk of our culture. He said it was hard enough to live with what we know without drowning in this junk. It was a year later, when I visited a friend in Los Angeles, that I began to understand what David had said. In defense of L.A., it is essentially no junker than the rest of our urban centers, it's just more on the surface. In New York City the endless blocks of huge buildings say to us, I'm serious and within me serious people are doing serious things, even though five thousand people in a building might only be playing with the market edge. In L.A. they've largely dispensed with the delusion of seriousness. In a rather radical economics seminar at the university we collectively decided that ninety-nine percent of the products of the culture were junk and this included books, movies, television, art, new food products, political speech. This was temporarily distressing because all of the twelve students were deeply immersed in this junk and were perhaps doomed to earn our livelihoods buying and selling junk. Our young professor, a gay princeling from Harvard, thought it all quite funny and disappeared into Europe after a year at the University of Michigan. When I went north that June to spend the summer working for Donald, a job on which my sanity depended, the bleakness disappeared in the exhaustion of manual labor, but not the overwhelming sense that everything was a generic mistake. When David sent me to France and Spain as a graduation present the following year I felt sorry for the young intellectuals I met because the option of manual labor over there was unthinkable for the educated class. For better or worse, I was the only one who knew how to build a house. I fixed a number of faucets, toilets, and sink traps for Sorbonne students that summer.

above and amidst the city

from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) trans. Steven Rendall (1984)

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future [...] On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.

[...]

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place - an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens' positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.