2022

Published in Issue #1 of Divagations Magazine

Dreams, they have a concave shape. It’s as if to say: I will record your movements and present a report on my findings. I recognize that you differ from my other patients, having an aversion both to vast and confined spaces. To help you, I’m writing a prescription for a sense of solitude in the middle of the desert. A desert that’s also a beach. Waking up in one of the caves on its cliff face a camel in a violet suit hands you a tablet that reads в единстве сила, which in Russian means strength through unity but to you, the erudite hermit reader you, you know what’s really written. The camel takes off his sunglasses as he enters and his shoes, of which there are only two, are traded for a set of crimson slippers embroidered with the icon of Versace in a silken gold thread. On your knees you both rather quickly pray to the god of the sea and he, the camel, sitting on his folding metal chair, lights a cigarette and asks if you’d like to read it out loud. But he asks like your boss asks you if you’re willing to stay a little later just to wrap things up (just this one time), so you nod your head tired and pick up the stone tablet and open your mouth to speak and in a perfect Petersburg accent read the archaic Cyrillic typeface as he, legs crossed eyes closed silently nodding his exceptionally long face, as he looks at you as he looks at the sea and the tablet. Your mouth is shaped like all those in Eastern Europe with your tongue resting against the floor instead of the roof. As you cast from this seaside grotto a force of harmony that transcends border and nationality you remember the similarities between the shapes of waves in the sea and in the sky when the gulls fly in the form of a ‘v’. And as your voice pulls from its depths this galvanizing string of syllables you hear, or rather you feel that instead of strength through unity in Russian you’ve said, in English, that the end of arts and sciences will come in the next three years. The camel, whose name you understand to be Joe, smiles as he watches the approaching storm and says That’s right buddy, she’s a-comin', she’s a-comin' fast... 

Dreams, like music, they have a concave shape. They undergo several mutations before they must be made into pieces and put back together like a broken vase. You can use glue and spray paint, or if you had a few extra dollars some gold leaf and insist that you are treating the breakage of the object as part of its history; that you’re practicing kintsugi, whose beauty comes from understanding the doppler effect of memory but (if we’re being honest) you had seven rough new objects with pristine jagged ignorant juvenile edges and instead of relishing in this rarity for even a moment you’ve chosen to put it back together with its self left spilled all over the floor. You’ve succeeded in making something new not despite an unfortunate event, but because you have no place for edges like these lying around the house. Your dog could get it, or your kid could put it in their mouth or, god forbid, you live alone and lose track of it and a few years later you get a raise for all your hard work at the company and when you slide into bed and shut your eyes and cross your t’s and dot your i's you feel, right against your little toe, the acrimonious denouement of this ravenous porcelain fragment. It opens its mouth and places right along a set of sharpened canines your tired leather paws, preparing a little keepsake, a small memento of your choice, your decision to recompose that forgotten composition which you so unceremoniously fractured. 

Forthcoming publication.

Written as a performance piece, accompanied by sound:

Part I:

When I was at my youngest, the bathroom window of my family apartment looked out upon a bridge that carried trains. During the day, passenger rail thundered by, echoing off the tiles, through the hallway and into the living room where whomever fell under its grace would turn their head to make sense of the sound, like an animal.  

The bridge was opened on March 5th 1917. On March 5th, 1917, the city passes a bill requiring all dogs to be registered to their owners. In signing this, City Hall nullifies a previous law requiring punishment upon any canine found chasing sheep—as of now, the owner shall be punished in their place.  

The rumbling of the bridge is the soundtrack to my upbringing. It was constant, though often when the drone would clarify it revealed itself as a low-flying plane or a helicopter. On three occasions, it was punctuated by an explosion — two of those came from the power plant a few blocks away, while the other was a manhole cover ripping through a double-parked car. 

March 5th, 1917: 13-year-old Richard Hippe confesses to the authorities that indeed it was he who tried to burn down Public School 10 four times over the past three weeks. He worked out the plan while lying in bed, he says, hoping that it would get him out of having to do schoolwork. 

During the day, a passenger train passes over the Hellgate Bridge, on average, once every twelve minutes. At night, the number drops to around one per hour, as passengers are exchanged for freight. This happens for the first time between one and two a.m. They do not have a tilting mechanism. They travel slowly, and as they come around the bend they scream.  

Around noon on March 5th, 1917, a man named Gustav looks on with a smile as the bridge he designed opens for its first traverse. Three years prior, his employer recommended he fill the 15-foot gap between the arch and the terrestrial masonry towers, as they feared people would question its integrity. He decided to attach them with two steel waves at each end, forming an unbroken steel connection between Long Island on the East, and Ward’s Island on the West. 

Topping each tower is an open-air room with windows to the outside world. They were designed to emulate the triumphal towers of Rome, complete with thin slits below each window where an archer could feel at home. The headlight of the passing train is faster than the engine—when it arrives, it illuminates the four great arches, signaling that it’s time to wake up. As the engine enters, the towers glow like a furnace, and then go dark.  

Gustav was a successful bridgeman. According to friends, he was greatly affected by his pursuit of perfection and his love of art. When the Pennsylvania Railroad Company asked him if he could remove the planned embellishments from his great Roman towers, he was disappointed. But he gave in when they argued that patients at the asylum on Ward’s Island might try to climb them seeking an escape.  

The towers are square at the base, rising as an obelisk that reaches into space. Inside, a circular staircase climbs along the walls, attached every few steps by a pair of bolts, screwed into holes that have long since been worn down. When the freight train pulls its horn to announce its arrival, you can hear the bolts rattle in their sockets. It’s a poor design, but necessary since there was a shortage of iron when the interior was built out.  

The Hellgate Bridge was named for the strait over which it passes, given to it by a Dutch explorer who in turn got it from the Hellespont, in Greece. On the East bank, there is a playground named Charybdis Park, and its sister park on the West is named Scylla. The East side of Hell’s Gate is now a Greek neighborhood, the West side is now an athletics complex, in addition to an asylum. 

On March 5th, 1917, city newspapers did not mention the opening of the new bridge, but in 1939, it was reported that an act of sabotage by the Nazis to destroy it had been foiled. Fiorello LaGuardia, the city’s mayor, said that this did not concern him. The bridge was privately owned, he said, it is not city property. The bridge is the city’s only above ground rail connection to the continental United States. 

In the 17th century, three Dutch ships struck the same rock under the bridge. During the Revolution, a ship carrying wages for the British army avoided the rock, but got caught in a whirlpool and was tossed into another. It sunk, carrying gold coins to the depths.  

Large ships were recommended to avoid this strait as a back door to the city’s ports, but for the centenary of the Union in 1876, City Hall sunk 15 tons of dynamite to the floor and triggered the largest explosion until the atomic bomb. Gustav was 26. On the East side of the river, workers at the Steinway piano factory watched with their families from the grassy shore. On the West side, patients in the asylum were invited to spectate. Gustav was born in a city called Brno, in Czechia, like the novelist Milan Kundera.  

When I was young there was a paralyzing blizzard in the city. My parents took me for a walk in the park and we watched a barge weighed down by its cargo cut through the cascading plates of ice jockeying for position in the river.  

In 1913, when construction on the bridge began, the writer Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, a city in Czechia. Among his most notable works are the novels Closely Watched Trains, and The Train was on Time. 

My father’s grandfather, living about one mile from the bridge, watched its construction over four years. He was born by the site of the bridge, like his son, who would going on to marry a woman from a city in Ukraine, not Czechia. A series of arches to carry the tracks were the first placements, going up to Woodside, where the land rose and their dramatic height subsided. Houses were later built in the shadow of these constructions, whose backyards are framed by the arches. The towers were born after a year, and each sent out half of an arch until they met in the middle. A ⅝ inch gap was all that remained at the end which was easily made zero. 

As a kid I would play sports on Ward’s Island. Often there were spectators to our events whom nobody knew. When the game was over and we would all leave they would stay, a distant look in their eyes, hands clasped on their lap.  

The Czech poet Ivan Blatny was born in Brno. Most of his best-known poetry was written in the 1980s, when he lived in an asylum, suffering from paranoia.  

My father worked at a steel manufacturing plant three miles from the bridge. One day, he lost his finger there in an accident (but would quickly get it back). They cast phone booths that were shipped throughout the country via the bridge.  

The movie Serpico was filmed under the bridge. If you swim in the city’s largest pool, you can look at the bridge. There was a user’s community campsite under the bridge, but now there’s a community garden under the bridge.  

The year I was born the painter Benjamin Moore painted the bridge a deep crimson they called Hell Gate Red. When I was young and had to be taken home from school, my teachers and my parents seemed anxious. I did not understand why. When we got back my mother closed the windows and turned on the TV, telling me that I couldn’t watch, to go play in the other room instead. I saw the bridge from the bathroom window and it was not Hell Gate Red, the visceral red of memory. It was faded in patches to a series of sad pinks, the lightest being the first areas painted. I was six. In hindsight, there were more cameras in the city after the bridge became pink. The frame shop closed, too. There were more police under the bridge. Thankfully they didn’t seal in concrete the door to bridge until after I had grown up and paid a visit. 

A second chance at making the times speak their mind, the gallery is in the basement of a brownstone—it has ambience. It is within the fortress. It is in a location where one could saunter accidentally through its doorframe, into a collection of rooms somehow more windswept than the village outside. It is near the beach, or at least it smells like the sea, and the driftwood on display feels like it has, at one point, spent its life in the sand.

In the gallery women hold flutes that melt as they speak. They wear, among other things, dark dresses that rustle as they take quiet steps. Their gentle wrists are weighed downward not by earthly pull but by a respectable demeanor; a façade whose edict includes a clause requiring elbows, when attached at the arm, to nestle atop the hip bone, however slight it may be. When it is time to touch the art, as it is, the process has to be done with knowing contrast. It has to be done knowing that pearls and driftwood have the same mother. But knowing should only pass as a thought does to a labored mind. It should drift by, imperceptibly, and not be spoken.

A gentleman should never wear a tuxedo in a gallery within the fortress that smells of the sea. This is because the exhibition may be titled Degrees of Contrast, or Levels and the Procession of Light. The title tells us everything we need to know about the dress code. The women wear, among other things, black dresses, while the men take on camouflage within the context of the art. They wear moleskin, a cravat, suede loafers with a monogram. They carry a stylo, and their hair must pass through the same process of aging as the object they are about to engage with. The object they are about to engage with, of course, is the driftwood.

There are four speakers in corners of the room that comprise the entire gallery, and two subwoofers along the two short ends of the space. They emit the sine tones of 600 Hz, 600 Hz, 470 Hz, 469 Hz, with the resemblant numbers placed diagonal to one another. The subwoofers should emit the power frequency of 60 Hz. They should all be discomfortably loud.

The effect is a simulation of the sound of multiple siren tests overlapping. As the audience meanders about they will feel as if they are on an island between two peninsular communities that on the first Tuesday of every month sound air raid sirens that are of slightly different opinions. Their corporeal drift will emulate the orbit of flotsam around said island, and resonant tones will overlap in harmony as they do on the near horizon.

Though the provocative décor would suggest that a kind of dancing might be welcome, one would be loath to assume a partner is readily available. In the center is a small shape reserved for a rendez-vous among former friends who have known one another in any capacity, including the most extreme. As the schematics dictate, this is a muted realm of acoustic imperfection.

On all its sides tones float by, but never do they pass through.

On all its sides tones float by, but a splintering may have already occurred, where a handful of participants have grown uneasy about the poor acoustics in the gallery. They call themselves the collective engagement on high-frequency speculation, and it is their self-assumed role to scrub clean the center of the room from its organic and particulate matter.

Without consultation their engagement is brought into the now very sterile center of the room, into the shape that has formed, where they are rung together as a single bell by a mallet wrapped in drapery by a figure wrapped in drapery. The collective engagement on high-frequency speculation speculates but nonetheless emits the collective high-frequency of 810 Hz, swinging to project its vibrations around the space through its resonant opening.

Despite a spectacle, the driftwood drifts much to the overcast delight of its audience.

Did you know? Said one of the voices.

Did you know

I was a dancer?

fluid

fluent in

a passive glance?

adore movement

submission

and repetition?

This is not a harmony, a hesitant fugue, but a promise of clarity and the need to establish best practice in distincting the nature of the chord from its three dissonant tones walking in step.

The brass nature of our single bell gives the appearance of completing the gallery tritone. falling just short.

My intention was straightforward, the bell echoed.

So it was certainly not from paralysis that we sat sedate within Heart Harmonics, a study of low frequency power tones on the internal process of the human body, august and forthright instead of the collect them at the foot myriad of voice. At a certain point… without fail… thankfully… and there’s wasn’t any pressure, per se… an argument that it was all loosely defined by the principles of color…

Our harmonics test the tone at which vertigo is provoked, the note of discomfort, of physical effacement of the acoustic properties of a crashing wave and its reliance on birdsong. This is to convey that the siren should not be hidden from or behind a layer of wax, that the siren should be embraced and feared as its mother, the sea.

Could you imagine the repulse of the room of the fortress of the sea with an audience, when an audience walked our bell pier down through the sand and cast away as an ocean-bound sea-ready vessel?

Could you imagine the hard to believe when you, my sonic prisoner, showing off your favorite shapes imprisoned me, your listener?

The brass nature of our single bell gives the appearance of completing the gallery tritone. Falling just short just, falling… to the collective engagement that speculates but nonetheless emits the collective high-frequency value of 810 Hz, while the room as now cast in plaster echoes the gossamer frequencies of 469 Hz, 470Hz, 600Hz, 600Hz.