Regarding the Time of the City: 12 Units of Text Time

1.

 “If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time,” wrote Georg Simmel. Big city life, its activities and arrangements, require an objective timetable. Urban life interferes with the organic cyclicality of our time perception – since all things in the city comply with the same uniform, external, and standardized rhythm, as dictated by the commotion of a mechanical body. It is thus that the clock – an external factor whose workings obey a mathematical order – deprives man of his inner rhythms.

2.

 In the opening pages of The Man Without Qualities, the epic novel by Robert Musil, a man stands behind a window. He studies the brown street, and for ten minutes he counts and measures with his watch all the hurried agitation that commands the retina: cars, carriages, trams, and pedestrians, all seemingly obscured by the distance. He assesses speeds, angles – all the mighty forces that pass before him. Everything attracts his gaze, possesses it, and then cedes, and for an indeterminate while those mighty forces impose themselves on his attention, attaching and detaching it, shifting it from one object to the next as in a race. After a while of busying himself with numbers and calculations he grins and returns his watch to his pocket, stating that all this is nonsense. These “racing voices of the open street,” as described by the poet Nathan Alterman, this jumble of irregularities, of time advanced and arrested, these clashes of things and dealings; this overall rhythm and myriad rhythms mixed together; this frenzied bubble of city streets is what brings man to an anguished feeling of loss.

3.

 Can one grasp the city? Can one study, measure, and assess the movement of streets? Can we make sense of all this clamor? The urban exterior, urban planner Kevin Lynch tells us in his classic book The Image of the City, constantly offers more than the eye can see, and more than the ear can hear; it offers sights that constantly await their revelation. Nothing is experienced autonomously, but only in relation to the things that surround it – in relation to the sequence of events that lead to an action and to remembrances of experiences past.

4.

 But is time necessarily a consistent succession of events? Is time about the duration of an action or a movement? Or is it about the attempt to contain these events within a fixed mathematical formula? Perhaps we should regard the city’s time, and especially that of this multicolored, multi-limbed vision, as the synchronized existence, side by side, of multiple elements? Maybe the time of the city is about synchronicity? Timing? Crossing? Fragmentation? The city is liberated of mechanized time only when each of its elements manages to create a time and a space of its own. Such a time experience is perhaps what Uri Bernstein intended in his poem “Give Time”: “Give me a time that passes with plenitude / that measures the shadows as their due / a time of old houses, with / trees, a time of trees / a time of those who sleep / wherever the night arrests them.”

5.

 I am reading an Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, “The Man of the Crowd.” The narrator looks outside from a café window and describes just a little of what he sees, and it seems that he can only tell it thus: “pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibitors, and ballad-mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artisans and exhausted labourers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.” The text is linear; language fails to express all that is present together, at one and the same time. The narrative logic of constructing a sequence is based on tracking a moving figure or an object through space; it is based on a conclusive description of a topographic layout, on moving from one object to the other, on the enumeration of items as in a catalogue. The order of telling and the characterization of what is told may contribute to our interpretation. But this inventory logic, this swift and fleeting manner of expression, this fragmentation may manifest itself both as a collection of separate details combined into a whole, and as the disembodiment of an ostensibly “uniform” spatial unit (“a house,” “a street,” “a city”) into smaller units and coexisting particles. We write down its parts so that we may attempt to grasp something of the street’s movement.

6.

 Baudelaire said that the city changes more quickly than even a man’s heart. To understand the city and figure out its transformations one must slow down, regard the time of the city and remember. In his novel Slowness, Milan Kundera establishes the link between rhythm and memory. A man who is walking down the street, says Kundera, if “he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him, automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.” One’s level of slowness stands in direct proportion to the magnitude of memory, while the level of speed stands in direct proportion to the magnitude of forgetting.

7.

 In his street exercises, Georges Perec recommends giving oneself slowly, and almost absentmindedly, in to observation. He wishes to detect some sort of rhythm, “to read what’s written in the street: Morris columns, newspaper kiosks, posters, traffic signs, graffiti, discarded handouts, shop signs.” Perec asks us to “carry on until the scene becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for the briefest moment, that you are in a strange town [...] until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavement…” He asks us to conceive the street. The effort to organize the fleeting, ephemeral urban reality within a single image recalls (how else?) the unforgettable scene of one such heroic attempt in Paul Auster’s film Smoke. Auggie, the owner of a cigar shop, installs his camera each morning at a fixed spot on a street corner in Brooklyn, and for years he shoots one fleeting moment at exactly the same time. In response to Paul Benjamin, his author friend, who when looking at the dated images says they all look the same, he says: “They’re all the same, but each is different.” And indeed, as Paul Benjamin leafs through the hundreds of “identical” images they say nothing to him, until he reaches one particular image, apparently the same as the rest, where he recognizes a figure seen passing at the street corner – his wife, on the morning of the day she was killed. No two moments in the city are alike; each fleeting moment is singular. How can we conceive of the street? The place we return to time after time, within a day or a second, is no longer the same; it cannot be.

8.

 “How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured,” writes Virginia Woolf in an essay called “Street Haunting.” The view of the street is one of disclosure and concealment, of partial exposures, of a system of spatial gaps that compels us to reconstruct the missing parts in our imagination – to constantly reinvent the street, the city, and our reading of them. This is the time of the street.

9.

 Virginia Woolf goes outside one evening in a wintery London to buy herself a pencil. Surely the pencil is only an excuse for strolling in the streets. In winter this is the greatest adventure, and the built environment is a reservoir of stories. Observing the streets, joining this crowd of anonymous pedestrians, and the momentary glimpses into the lives of passers-by – all these are enough, says Woolf, “to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” It now becomes obvious that the pencil thus extracted from the big city’s treasures is about to stain the city’s life and texture with its lead. The primary form of urban existence, the bodies of those who walk the city streets, tells us Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, “follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.” The changing itineraries, the traffic, sights, contingencies, and street encounters construct a multifaceted story, one that is often barred from the eye.

10.

  Author Reuben Wallenrod, a central figure in Jewish-American literature, opens “Hotel,” a short story of his, by reflecting on the experiences of loss, fragmentation, and a possible reconstruction: “A haphazard gaze, a conversation cut short, he and she in a car passing by, the windows of trains converging and parting – these are fragments, the beginnings and endings of the stories of gigantic New York. This extended hollow of the in-between, these blemished insides – who can perceive them, who can know them by means of a fleeting gaze […] yet the human mind, it longs for complete knowledge. These fragments haunt man, and all his days they move and fuss about, troubling him in their search for resolution. One more glimpse and suddenly the lost space reappears – or another one perhaps, a different insides.” The longed-for fusion turns out to be impossible, a chanceless ideal. Years later a gaze completed cannot reconstruct the original segmented picture, a picture that probably was never taken-in whole in the first place. After a while, this fusion becomes the illusion of a space reconstructed – which is, in fact, a new space.

11.

 “All that I bring from the outdoors stands on the tip of my tongue,” wrote the poet Avoth Yeshurun his “Circular Time.” The outdoors and the onlooker express themselves in speech, in language – be it a language of words, lines, color patches, or shapes. Each street has its story, the one already written down and told. But every venture into the street and every gaze unravels a new story, a unique combination of experience, consciousness, and memory. 

"The city,” Marco Polo tells us via Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities, “soaks up like a sponge and expands,” and should contain its past. Its past is “written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” 

“To depict the city as a native would call for other, deeper motives – the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather than to foreign parts,” wrote Walter Benjamin in “The Return of the Flâneur.” In the encounter with childhood streets, the road extends into depths. The walk down memory lane converts spatial distance into a distance in time.

Photo by Yotam Menda Levy

12.

 Back to the clock. Or its absence. Here is an experiment suggested by Roger-Pol Droit in his 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life: to remove your watch, and to do it slowly. It requires a certain boldness, and here the ambiguous effect is explained in words so enthralling that we must cross their path with that of the city:
“You will feel the strange bareness of your wrist, and the mild dizziness of not knowing what has happened to…but happened to what? The sense of security provided by chronometers of all kinds? The alibis of accuracy? You feel, more or less intensely and more or less lastingly, a sense of unease. The world is not its normal self. It has slipped its frame, and floats, out of time. If you persist, if you discipline and habituate yourself to going watchless, you should discover another form of perceiving time: internal and organic, relaxed, exact but not neurotically so. You will end up by learning to tell the time by your internal clock, without needing even to think about it. This in turn may lead you to mediate on the particular – and completely relative – form of violence and constraint imposed on us by dials, clock-hands, and timetables.”