Recently I saw "Man on Wire," the film about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the summer of 1974. I was slow to warm to the film's charms but the tale finally and completely won me over. Primarily, this is because Petit is an intriguing, exasperating, narcissistic, fairy tale figure. A little prince in many senses, he is both a singular personality and a caricature–as well as very very French. (Which is almost like being a caricature, anyway.)
What I didnt expect from the film was how emotional I would be over seeing so much footage of the World Trade Center: its construction, as backdrop against the city, sweeping aerial beauty shots.
For most of its existence I was indifferent, at best, to the WTC. I have no recollection of actually visiting the towers though I think there may have been a trip to the observation deck at some early juncture. They served a purpose as a visual anchor, a directional on which to get my bearings upon emerging from an unfamiliar subway stop. Other than that, I disliked their needlessly overscaled banality– their crudeness. I had been attuned to architectural grace notes and these buildings were power chords.
It was totally without context, then, that less than a year before they were destroyed I had an abrupt change of mind about the WTC. I was virtually struck in one epiphanic moment. The double towers in tandem, along with their uninviting windswept plaza were one conceptual gesture about scale, less about execution and finish than idea. A simple notion that, for some reason, I had not comprehended, and then I did.
Like lightning rods the WTC attracted Petit's fanatical curiousity. His nearly mystical draw to the towers began with an article he'd read in 1968 about their initial planning and was not extinguished even after completing his mission 6 years later. In the film, Petit recalls his high wire walk as spiritual, a "gift", "elation...I was actually venturing in another world.” The footage in the film shows Petit practically dancing on the wire, weightless, it seemed, and imparting an unexpected delicacy to the colossus he was so barely tethered to. He pulled off this caper, this coup, and managed to bring the building itself into the poetry of the moment.
When he stepped onto the roof after his 45 minute sojourn a quarter mile in thin air he was ambushed by police and reporters. Barraged by what Petit termed a "typically American question" he was repeatedly asked "why did you do it?" The disconnect between the question and the event itself was a sadly comical point in the movie.
Twenty-seven years later in the aftermath of a devastating surreal spectacle people were again asking, "why did they do it?"
Images from top: Tom Fletcher's New York City architecture; "before 9/11" by Baldwin Lee; from wikipedia; from Man on Wire.
"No one in this age of [expensive] flour and high rents can afford to be a nobody. Be somebody–biographically, poetically, or historically."– satirical editorial in The Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1855
Lately I've come across disturbing gaps in my education. Something will stop me short as I think, Wait, how do I not know this? Walt Whitman... Titan of American literature, Leaves of Grass, "body electric," repressed homosexuality, beard, that was nearly the sum of what I knew. So I got the Penguin Classics Collected Whitman and started on the first in my series of Why Don’t I Know This research missions.Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,
the scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer...
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it.
** ** **
Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch! Did it make you ache so, leaving me? Parting track'd by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan, Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward. Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital, Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden. ---Song of Myself, 1855
I do not like reading Whitman's poetry (prose, like Specimen Days, is much more agreeable). Considering the sweeping vistas and universalism he invokes I find the reading experience leaves me clammy and oddly claustrophobic. (I'm guessing that Whitman was a close talker. Pure conjecture...) He does however, conjure a mystical rawness, an uninhibited immediacy, blatancy even, that is astounding. Especially so when thought of as being published at a time when "Victorian" morality was in ascendance. (Emily Dickinson evidently wrote in a letter, "I have never read his book– but was told that he was disgraceful," which I find enormously funny.)
Professor Harold Bloom notes that it is paradoxical that Whitman "who proclaimed his love for all men, women, and children should be so solipsistic, narcissistic, and self delighting." I suppose it is partially just this that cemented my dislike of the poetry. The mono-maniacal quality fairly shouts out.
In Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, David Haven Blake places the self-styled "good grey poet" against the backdrop of America's developing intellectual identity and popular culture. A very good read. The 1850s was a time of lecture societies, and an expanding awareness of a specifically American intellectual identity. The search for a "native American" literary style, independent of European models, was a cultural imperative. Whitman felt he was the answer to that call. It was also the time of Barnum and the rise of consumer culture. Whitman offered himself, seemingly, as an entity (or commodity) that would effect happiness and harmony with the world.
Far more interesting to me than the poetry was Whitman's sheer audacity. He craved attention. He self-published Leaves of Grass then published reviews of his own work anonymously ("An American bard at last!"). Later he compiled various laudatory comments and reviews and included these as an addendum to later editions of the book. Throughout his life, it seems, Whitman was compelled to ceaselessly promote himself. "The public is a thick skinned beast," he confided to a friend,"and you have to keep whacking away it its hide to let it know you're there."
David Haven Blake's point, which was a new angle to me at least, was that celebrity in the mid-19th century could be seen as a true democratic phenomenon. Fame (and possible subsequent wealth) created and bestowed by the people– rather than by birth, class or inheritance–was, in a sense, sanctioned by popular vote. The celebrity was the embodiment of a culture sanctioned by the people, and an affirmation of the great American experiment.
images: “a 2/3 length with hat outdoor rustic”--This 1877 photograph was Whitman's favorite and caused much to-do with acolytes and early scholars who argued about this butterfly. Whitman tried to foster the idea that the creature was real and had somehow alighted upon his finger... in the midst of a photo studio. In 1995, someone found the butterfly in a cache of Whitmaniana that had gone missing from the Library of Congress in 1942. If you look carefully at the mottled patterning of the paper wing, however, it does NOT match that of the wing in the portrait... Further mystery?
Addendum: The WW cultishness was bizarre. The New York Times ran nearly continuous bulletins of his health topped by absurd headlines:
"Walt Whitman Still Alive" January 4, 1892
"Whitman Helpless" January 6
"Walt Whitman Eats and Drinks" January 14
I recently finished This Republic of Suffering, the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, about this country's relentless confrontations with death during the Civil War and its toll on the collective psyche. (That title is taken from–of all people–Frederick Law Olmsted and his description of the wounded and dying at Union hospital ships.) An unreservedly glowing review in last Sunday's Times surprised me a bit. While the book is a great achievement – it is thorough and rigorously detailed without being exhausting, it is sensitively crafted and intelligently presented– I still expected more.
Background: The Civil War's final tally stood at approximately 620,000 military deaths (I believe that figure does not contain what we would now call "collateral damage"), out of a total national population of about 31.5 million. It is no wonder that a Confederate soldier, quoted in the book, felt that, "death reigned with universal sway, ruling homes and lives." Nearly every household would have been mourning someone. Faust demonstrates, dramatically, that the experience of living through those years was limned by the presence of death—materially, politically, intellectually, and spiritually. Geoffrey Ward, in the Times review:
When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them....Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives.... So did wives and mothers dressed in black.
“The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” says Faust. The lasting impact of that sacrifice “created the modern American union,” she writes, “not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.” It also, she posits, changed Americans' understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But the book largely documents, often in moving first-hand accounts, what I believe were immediate tangibilities of the time: the struggle to account for the losses, to attend to the casualties, to reconcile death with the act of dying "well" (ars moriendi, or the good Christian death). Faust even discusses the arcane rituals of mourning (though she doesn't define what the differences between "heavy", "full", and "half" mourning are). When I finished reading, though, I was left wondering why I didn't have a better understanding of the cultural and psychological impact of all this. (Perhaps I just need to read more about the war!)
America in the 1860s witnessed mass killing, assassination, racial enmity, political strife and rioting, what effect did that tumult have on literature, or social change or even religion? The shadows of events of that magnitude don't pass away quietly. They are absorbed, instilled, repressed, passed on or refuted. What did that generation of children without fathers grow up to think? This country was literally rent apart. What was Europe thinking at the time? That this Great Experiment was imploding, surely.
Americans saw actual photographs of war--the battlefields, the dead-- for the first time, not an artist's rendering. In 1862, Mathew Brady shocked the public with an exhibit in his New York gallery, "The Dead of Antietam." Within hours after it was confirmed on September 19th that the Confederates had withdrawn, Brady's cameramen Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson began to record the aftermath and within a month the results were hanging on the walls. The New York Times said that if Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it... he has brought home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war." 
(An interesting modern take on the "birth of photojournalism" on the battlefield at Antietam here.) How is it that religion and sentimentality became all the more entrenched in American society as a result? When the (mostly European, granted) wounded of WWI came back broken and disfigured 50 some odd years later their faces and bodies haunted painting, the graphic arts, and literature. Disillusionment, in some sense, propelled Modernity. How is it that this country faced the "terrible reality' of the Civil War and seemed to turn around.
The last Union body was recovered and reburied in 1871. The last Civil War veteran (though there is some dispute) died in 1956. In 2003 a man recounted stories about his father's experience during the Civil War for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It is history, but not totally out of reach. Faust's creates a vividness from a compilation of incident and fact. The book that traces the social and cultural legacy of those moments, that's the book I'd like to read next.
Images: from Library of Congress, a very romantic portrait of Confederate prisoners at Gettysburg, July, 1863 (detail; Union casualties at Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863; from old-picture.com, Civil War wounded, prepared by War Department, Surgeon General's Office.
If the Eskimos, as the old saw goes, have a hundred words for "snow," I must have nearly as many for "tired." I'm weary, enervated, blah. So it was no coincidence that I finally got around to reading American Nervousness 1903 which had been stalled in my mental books-to-read cue for quite a while. An exploration of neurasthenia, an affliction that took on epidemic proportions at the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, the book inspired my visual collection of ennui, above.
Neurasthenia was a nebulous mental and physical diagnosis that covered a lot of territory from hysteria, anhedonia, and "brain collapse" to premature baldness, fatigue and hot flashes. There was a whole constellation of debilitating symptoms for which fainting couches, air baths, nerve tonics, electric trusses and the like purported to relieve. The concept of nerve disease was introduced as a medical condition in 1869 but became more prevalent as the 19th century drew to a close. George M Beard published one of first full-length studies of neurasthenia in 1881 and called it “American Nervousness.” He and other neurologists of the time developed theories of health and disease which were based on folk beliefs of bodily energy, and were expressed 'economic' terms.
“The idea of “dissipation” thus is based on a notion of dispersed rather then directed nerve force, spent without any possible return on the investment. Dissipation eventually led to “decadence,” the death and decay of nerve centers in the individual, and the death and decay of civilization at the social level.” The end result of processes of dissipation, or of any unwise nervous investment, was disease.
Conversely if patients were sensitive and refined enough to begin with, neurasthenia could be brought on by simple exposure to the hectic pace and excessive stimuli of modern life. Paradoxically, the disease could thus be a sign of moral laxity–or extreme moral sensitivity. It was seen as a particularly American syndrome, made manifest in this country as it roared into the 20th century-- straining at the continental frontiers, overrun by waves of immigration, stretched by imperialist expansion and bristling with industrial might. But certainly any thinking man (or woman) of the Mauve Decade could be struck by taedium vitae or acedie. I always saw it as the purview of European aristocratic families in decline, or Europeans anyway– from the relative vigor of Wilde's jaded drawing room wits, through Huysmans' languid decadents, to Egon Scheile's stricken husks...
-----
Some saw it as practically the natural given state for women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the worsening mental state of the narrator as she endures the "rest cure," enforced inactivity and seclusion based on real-life prescriptions of the well-known 19th century physician, S. Weir Mitchell. Gilman theorized that a proscribed daily existence made women feel their own backwardness–cramped and useless. "Confined to the home," Gilman says, "she begins to fill and overfill it with the effort of individual expression... and overfilling the house, like the overspending of energy is unhealthy." Hmmm. Interior decorating as neurotic displacement...
----
Next up in my mental book cue: the intriguingly titled "Philosophy of Disenchantment" by decadent wit and aesthete, Edgar Saltus.Images: Ennui, 1914 Walter Sickert; The Lute, 1903 Thomas Wilmer Dewing; CMS Reading by Gaslight, 1879 William Stott; Woman in Plaid Shawl, 1872 Susan MacDowell Eakins; Yellow Scale, 1907 FrantiĊĦek Kupka; Tree of Nervous Illness, 1881 George Beard.
For a while now I've been mulling over the hollowness of "You"-- the purported prime mover in the consumer chain. Design your own personal sneaker, Hummer, pizza. Express your personality through the oxymoronic doublespeak of "mass customization." The escalating illusion is that now, with technology at one's fingertips, the power is in your hands. As with niche marketing, innovations with just your slice of demographic in mind, one is told many times over, "you deserve it." You're so busy/ important/overworked/ worthy, you deserve 500 channels of 24-hr HD sports (or whatever), you deserve soup in a go-cup, a good night's sleep with AmbienCR. Here's a fat-free fudge-dipped caramel bite with extra calcium created expressly for your over-40 bones. Coach or L.L. Bean in your Lincoln Navigator? Your choice! This proliferation of specious choice-- the so-called American ethos of individualism ("freedom") distorted through a lens of consumption. All of this disingenuous catering (pandering?) to "you." And then last week Time made "you" the Person of the Year in one of the most oleaginous essays I've read recently:
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. ...Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
What about me? Despite both designations having to do with the individual, presumed solipsism, and implied atomization, the "Me" of the Me Generation (I believe it was Tom Wolfe who christened the 70s the Me Decade, with "generation" being an extrapolation from that.) strikes me as a different concept. At its most elementary level, the term is subjective: me, I. And I read the term, at very least, as active --seeking out self-definition, though not necessarily through consumption. This "You" moment conveys an object observed and defined by others: what you buy, what you own, your 'audience.' The you as consumer defined by age/income/race/ demographic...
---
I only just recently saw the Frontline show "The Persuaders" on the web, although the episode is more than 2 years old. It is a disturbing and utterly fascinating overview of the current culture of marketing and advertising and its societal influences. The web site for the episode is dense with interviews, transcripts, commentary--it is a must. Someone there (cant remember which person sums it up) distilled for me what had been ill-defined complaints and ravings: the danger of an atomized populace in a completely immersive, consumer-driven society is that there is no longer a recognition of "the common good," or civic duty; democracy itself comes apart. Media critic Mark Crispin Miller (whom I had not heard of before) delivers some of the most devastating commentary. Consumers are feeders. All consumers do is consume. ...They're being manipulated to think only about the grass that they're chewing and nothing else, and manipulated into thinking about ways to get more grass. They're not operating on a sufficiently high level to participate in a democracy…
---
So the Burger King "have it your way" campaign of circa 1974 (?) was a brilliant precursor to the mass customization model...
Recently I saw "Man on Wire," the film about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the summer of 1974. I was slow to warm to the film's charms but the tale finally and completely won me over. Primarily, this is because Petit is an intriguing, exasperating, narcissistic, fairy tale figure. A little prince in many senses, he is both a singular personality and a caricature–as well as very very French. (Which is almost like being a caricature, anyway.)
