jane dark's sugarhigh!

walk, drift, etc.

Last week, the estimable Lisa Robertson happened upon the recent reissue of Michele Bernstein's Tous les chevaux du roi and, by way of her temporary online journal, translated a couple passages just for fun and our good fortune, starting with this three-way chat:

—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .
—Reification, Gilles replied.
—It’s serious work, I added.
—Yes, he said.
—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.
—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.

Bernstein's roman a clef of early Situationist history, mostly of her relationship with Guy Debord (to whom she was funder, wife, and procuress), has never been translated — in English, on par with funeral orations of Bossuet, the book is notable for its absence.

And yet the book contains one of the most-famous and most-translated passages in French literature since Baudelaire. In 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg put out two pamphlets that would play a substantial role of the chain of history leading directly to the events of May '68. The latter was called "On the Poverty of Student Life." The former, "The Return of the Durutti Column," was a celebrated early example of what would eventually make Jim Behrle's blog possible: comic strips with new text written into the bubbles, blanks and balloons.

Somewhere in the middle of the comic, two cowboys (Pancho and Cisco) have a conversation on horseback — the very conversation from Bernstein that Lisa Robertson first translates. In the intervening forty years, the passage has appeared in English over and over, every time the Debord or the SI program is up for discussion (most notably the Greil Marcus article for Artforum, "The Cowboy Philosopher" and his following book, Lipstick Traces). Rod Smith quotes it in this interview. It's the last line of the bilingual French/English poem mentioned in this note by Juliana Spahr. And so on — the language is everywhere, including in the name of the Factory records band Durutti Column.

But what language? Robertston, in her translation, has made a quite peculiar (if not entirely unprecedented) choice to translate the celebrated punchline, Non, je me promène. Principalement je me promène, as "I walk. Principally I walk." This gets much of the line's self-ironizing tenor just right, after the big build-up about reification and the weightiness of theory — its deflationary quality, and its reminder that philosophy must be lived in the quotidian, not applied from above.

Still, it's an oddly flatfooted choice. This phrase is not meant simply to deflate theory, but to redirect it. Se promener is not the easy way to say "to walk," after all (marcher), though it does have that secondary meaning. It also has the flippant sense one hears in English when telling someone to buzz off, "go take a walk." Still, the choice by Bernstein is surely meant to invoke the Surrealist tradition ("the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones," as Breton decribed it in 1930). It must also have to do with SI practices — and, as surely as they recommended détournement of comic strips, their other program was the dérive, the drift through the city as a critical act. Given that there's no verb form of dérive, se promener is often taken as such. Indeed, the most-common translation of the last line, by far, is "I drift. Mainly I drift."

But that isn't quite perfect either — there are only imperfect translations. Robertson's version is useful because it makes this clear (in addition to looping the passage back to her own title). What does it mean to propose, as a fundamental activity, an action for which there is no verb? To what extent does the historical pressure of this passage — the way in which it exists un- and overtranslated at the same time, celebrated and unknown, presabsent — index the extent to which a new language is needed, not for infinitely subtle parsing, but for the most basic considerations? It is here that poetry and philosophy pass closest to each other...

further notes on cities

Is a city wall a quantity or a quality?

If one walks from the heart of Paris (the geographical center is here) toward one of the poorer banlieues — north to St-Denis, say — one will not necessarily pass any clear marking when one has left the city proper, clambering over the memory of a wall. That is, unless one passes through a last remnant of the 1845 wall, born with a price on its head. The city has had many walls, rising and falling as civic boundaries, and the needs for defense, for tolls and imposts, have changed; the 1860 expansion didn't come with ramparts, and the last wall was gone by 1925.

Against this absence, an experience: the northward stroll. If one pays attention, there are qualitative shifts as one leaves the center for the periphery: the tall buildings get taller, their designs more modern even as their physical condition grows more decrepit. The amount of sun that falls on the pavement decreases slowly, at about the same rate as the price of a coffee. The value of appearance changes, block by block. The maintenance of the downtown as a museum-city gives way to a more contemporary daily life — though this may be inaccurate, as who is to say whether the urge for preservationist ecologies is less modern than apartment towers or hardware stores? Either way, the tourist economy cedes pride of place to other forms of life (though not entirely, by any means).

But there is another way to quantify this radial stroll: one might rather note the steadily increasing percentage of darker skin, a geometric progression at least. This is the kind of quantity that is often experienced as a quality — difference rather than differential, often a difference charged and problematic.

The differentials of each quarter, the ratios, are calculable, knowable; this is the point. It's a set of quantities that describe one's departure from the Paris of postcards to the Paris of the news. And one of these quantities maps onto the city wall: a differential, a skin-tone palette, that means one has crossed a limit. However, it is not experienced as a figure, but as a feeling, a sense of place that poses as an abstraction and is exactly what is left of the material of the city wall.

Perhaps this is what certain feelings are: the traces of calculations that can no longer be made, or that one wishes not to make. Certainly this describes something about the experience of excess; certainly this informs the seemingly mystical complexity of modern markets. One suspects further that critical moments in history are defined by a welter of conversions between quantity and quality.

Meanwhile, one could do worse than to imagine what it would be like for another, differently-colored, to walk from St-Denis inward, toward downtown, quarter by quarter and block by block.

further notes on cities

"Psychogeographical zones" and "ambience" are necessary abstractions — or, not abstractions, but qualitative terms when the quantitative finally won't suffice. And there is a way within these ideas to understand the city as a not-unsubtle instrument of self-detection.

Ambling around a city which is specifically unfamiliar but filled with legibilities that thus feel familiar — a North American city for one who has spent years in North American cities — one can realize certain things measure of response to certain regions, neighborhoods, zones.

That is to say, when one comes to the neighborhood never-before-seen and feels at first an ease, a satisfaction...proceeding to the sense, the distant certainty that this is likely the place in which one would live if one lived in this pleasant city, one has discovered far less about the neighborhood than about oneself, about how one's tastes and pleasures and self-regards have become fixed.

Life is not on the side of the mute acceptance of this, alas.

...the cigarettes taste so good

Berkeley: on the diagonal corner from the coffee counter, two men in their fifties smoking a joint and chatting over coffee in the weak sun, eleven on a Sunday morning, as if serenely confident that the steps of the Quaker meeting house where they sat was a diffrent country, where California laws held no dominion. Crossing the street downhill, passed in front of theformer travel agency and thought, as I often do, at a level that seems to be underneath the mind, the last place I saw him alive, which is strange in that as far as I know, he persists, and it's really just the last place I saw him, sitting on the sidewalk and talking with his grown son; have not heard that he is dead and have no reason to think so, beyond the usual.

on the train

...between two stations it became known that there was a bird in the car, loose. A bit of hubbub ensued, with everyone talking or half-talking and quarter-exclaiming to the person next to them. Some sounds were bird sounds. A short man with a serious expression who seemed not to speak English well he was the one who caught the bird. He did this as if he did such things every now and then. First he was sitting and then it was in his hands, a pigeon. He sat there holding the pigeon, which grew quiet as the train grew quiet. The man made little expression and mostly looked straight out the window at the tunnel lights as they passed and held the bird with two hands. He held the pigeon with a kind of graceful indifference the pigeon seemed to respect. At the next station when the doors opened he handed it off to an exiting woman without a word; as the new passengers got on, they saw a short man passing a bird to a woman who carried it off the train and onto the platform. We believed she would take it up the escalator and throw it into the town, indeed this seemed exactly as predictable as the whole event would have been difficult to predict.

journal, 7 February 2001

The horror of recalling in detail some day of no particular import from twenty years ago should not be confused with vertigo. The vertigo comes from the skewed perspective of double vision: one sees suddenly the street down which one walked some day long ago laid over the boulevard along which one walks at this moment; those passing buildings laid over these; those unknown passersby over the present bustle of equally anonymous citizens, going about their equally opaque business; and feels like one could fall from one scene to the other without effort or notice. But the horror is something else entirely; it comes with the effort of suppressing the awareness that, some day twenty years in the future, you might recall this day with just such material force, and be equally shocked to discover the absence of important or even meaningful events in your daily life. It is the threat that any future moment might return you to today and you will finally come to know, really know, your own banality.

sic transit

The confluence of the Bay Area and the northern Central Valley is the historical wellspring of outlaw biker culture; living here means finding oneself rolling down the freeway next to a leather-vested dude on a chopper regularly. The thing is, these guys are old; no less common than the pointedly undersized fuck-the-man helmets are the fluttering handlebar moustaches and beards, in rebel gray.

There's always some easily-mined irony in any circumstance of a youth culture grown old. Yet it's not the historicality of an idea which staked everything against the clock and in favor of presence that's so powerful to me, it's how recent it remains. It seems amazing that such people are in fact still alive, that it was in their brief lifetimes — mine too — that this vision of freedom seemed possible as a material fact, abetted by individual high-speed transportation, and supposing spaces, empty spaces, as a fact of the nation. The nomadic myth, escape into the unregulated interior — these romantic ideas were more immediate than myth recently enough that the believers are still riding pillion past my town in their original bodies.

Seen also in the town where I was born, an enduringly adorable scene: two girls; maybe seven years old, sharing a single pair of rollerskates, each with one sneaker and one set of wheels, balancing for brief runs along the sidewalk.