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.
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| 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.”
“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.”
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