As senior curator, Doris takes the stage to begin her introduction to the exhibition. She speaks carefully, noting how difficult it has been to select the works, which represent so many countries and so many, often conflicting, points of view. She explains that the process was unbiased, and that the museum hopes that it will foster understanding and, more important, tolerance. There is a scattering of polite applause. Then she launches into her introduction of the speaker.
“Mr. Wakefield is a man known to many of you as one of this country’s best travel writers. He is also an accomplished speaker celebrated for his poetic insights and surprising improvisational style. What you may not know is that he is also a student of architecture and a sensitive observer of human societies. I saw on the noon news today that the symbolic Bridge at Mostar, said to connect or divide East and West, a bridge that withstood two world wars and many local conflicts, was blown up. You may wonder why we have hired a poetic travel writer to speak here tonight. The answer may or may not flatter Mr. Wakefield. We simply could not think of anyone better able to see our exhibition in the afternoon, relate its images to those we have seen in the news this week, and provide us, additionally, with his own impressions of travel in the Balklands. Some poets travel at the speed of light. I think we found one.”
Wakefield walks to the lectern and receives brisk applause. His bodyguards, wearing night-vision goggles, stand in the wings, scanning the darkened theater. He can’t see the audience, but he can sense its energy, a fifteen-hundred-headed beast holding its breath.
When the applause dies down, Wakefield addresses the beast.
“Comrades!”
Laughter, hissing, boos.
“Workers, soldiers, peasants!”
More laughter, louder hisses, an angry voice: “Fuck Communism!”
“The other day on the Nature Channel—
I always wanted to start a speech
‘the other day on the Nature Channel’
that being the only nature
we know these days
‘nature’ a channel among many
next to the People Channel and the Disaster
Channel that would be news
and the Sci-fi Channel and the Mystery Channel—
the other day on the Nature Channel
I saw that a perfect ball of iron
spewed by the earth on an island near Madagascar
several thousand years ago
was hollowed out by a man and his sons
who moved inside of it
and were promptly declared gods
by the natives who were allowed inside
the ball once a year to get drunk
and worship something called Aurak
which was a huge petrified fish
that zapped them when they touched it
and for having that experience
they paid the ball carvers in fish
goat meat grapes and lizard kebobs!
And that was not long ago
just after the Second World War
when American planes failed to deliver
Paradise and the local cargo cult failed.
It was at about the same time that in
faraway Romania
Professor Teleskou’s mother was in labor”
A murmur of stunned surprise at mention of this name. Voice: “Who killed him?” Wakefield has been counting on this reaction: the assassination of Professor Teleskou, though he was Romanian and not strictly speaking a party to the current conflicts in the Balklands, was considered by some in the Wintry City to mark the real start of the war. The issues of land, nationality, race, blood, ancestral rights, and religious feuds, explored in his writing, resonated for partisans of both sides. Teleskou had separated the myths and legends from the nationalist propagandists’ uses of them, and that was widely believed to have been the reason for his murder. Their superstitions unmoored, the fanatics killed him.
“In labor Mrs. Teleskou
watched a huge bomb
fall from the sky and level the Church
of the Immaculate Conception
where their neighbors had taken shelter
and she gave birth to a baby
who would survive the war
survive communism
become a world-renowned scholar
and nearly survive the twentieth century!
A miraculous plume of smoke attended his birth!
and the priest of the destroyed church
who also miraculously survived
blessed the baby in the Orthodox rite
and declared the baby divinely pleasing
and thanked the young mother for having delivered
beauty amid the ugliness of war!
He is a pleasant sight unto God, he said.
But under the smoldering church
there was the ruin of an older pagan temple
and beneath that chained to the bottom of a well
was a dying monster.
It was the Beast of Hatred
still alive and calling for the flesh of babes
from underneath the ruins.
Architecture, like Gaul, is divided into three parts
the part that comes courtesy of the Nature Channel
the part that comes thanks to the War Channel
and the part that comes from the Imagination Channel
and these three architectures
the architecture of nature
the architecture of ruins
and the architecture of the imagination
are the sons of Disaster.
The mother giving birth in the ruins
is my mother and your mother
our mothers who warned us not to go near ruins
when we were children but where else could we go
where else could you go
when the whole town was a ruin
and the whole country you lived in was in ruins
and the world you were born into was a ruin
and the school Professor Teleskou went to
the Elementary School of the Ursulines
renamed the School of the Red Star
was the ruin of a convent under which ran
tunnels connecting one ruin to another
tunnels that were also tombs
and that had been used in the Middle Ages
to escape from invaders
into the woods where one was safe in the arms
of the nature channel
and the shapes of those ruins
were as fantastic as the legends of your people
who sang them in the ruins of their hovels
to put the world back in some order
after the sky and earth gods the sons
of Disaster had their way with the world!”
Wakefield pours water from the carafe under the lectern into the glass and the sound is pure; every drop is felt by his listeners. Transcendent silence! He thinks he sees Milena’s long legs in the front row, luminous in their liberty, freed from the ruins of the Old World.
“So when the professor was a boy
he became an expert at making temporary
houses in the shadows of cemeteries and crumbling
walls where he took his first love”
Here Wakefield steps on the shaky ground of a biography he’s inventing, but no discontent greets him, so he goes on.
“and there they lived for hours safe inside each other
and that was the architecture of adolescence
which builds shelters of mystery for the unfolding
of its own mysteries
and that—to be perfectly honest—is the only
architecture I care for
and that—if you are honest—
is the only architecture you care for
that shelter-building adolescence pursuing only its love
away from governments police borders and pride of ownership.”
This utopian senti
ment is met with inaudible but palpable derision by a few, a very few souls in the room; possibly the artists who have traveled from Europe to present their work here; they have pride of ownership and are wary of utopias.
“I would like to see a collaborative
project of urban adolescents of all ages
and from all countries
describing the shelters they have made
for their desire from the ruins of their cities.
What is the eruption of the marvelous
if not the eruption of desire
that rearranges landscapes according
to its fancy
knowing that all architecture
is born of Disaster.
Within every building there is another
known only to desire-driven adolescents
even official buildings
of the state and of the police
where the tormented wait in endless antechambers
under great vaults with trembling forms in their hands
even there you will see a young sergeant or clerk
find a secret place to gratify her imagination
and there is no building on earth that has not been
rebuilt by the imagination to contain
shelter from bright lights nooks of darkness
chapels of selfhood chambers and vaults
for the song of axis mundi!
One year after the dictator Ceausescu
ordered the old center of Bucharest demolished
Byzantine churches and stately homes
the coldest winter in the history of the Carpathians
froze all the rivers and the lakes
and in the spring when they thawed
an intact fourteenth-century basilica floated
down the Danube and headed for the Black Sea
where it sank under the waves
joining Greek triremes and Roman warships
and Turkish galleons and Venetian galley ships
and that was the signal for the revolution
and the end of the dictator
and this we have from Teleskou now dead
who loved the stories of his country
and the miracles of love born of those stories
not often enough, alas!”
Wakefield can’t hold this ground much longer without an accent, a man born in security on a rich and hopeful continent. Time to retreat home.
“In America
we watch history floating by
and sinking under the waves of the present!
Here architectures ruin one another
almost as quickly as they rise.
Our country has grown up
free of Father Disaster
but in America all buildings are temporary
even the post offices and the churches
and the museums where artifacts barely recovered
from the shock of being moved across oceans
have to move again to a newer building!
Please look closely on these artworks, comrades!
Tomorrow they may move to a new building.”
Laughter. They don’t even mind being called comrades now. The speaker has moved on to something they all agree on: in America they are misunderstood because America has no history; it eats its own tail like a hyperactive serpent.
“In America a child can no longer
visit the place where she was born
a shopping mall
stands there instead.
In America a grown-up can no longer see the school
where she learned the art of growing sad
a freeway goes through there now an overpass
her memories of brick turn to glass
the suburb goes from white to black
and time speeds up so much she has
to stay young forever and reset the clock
every five minutes just to know where is there
and there is everywhere
because she lives in time and not in any space!
In our country here
the future is in ruins before it is built
a fact recognized by postmodern architecture
that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quotes
ruins from other times and places!
There are no buildings in America only passageways
that connect migratory floods
the most permanent architecture being
precisely that which moves these floods
from one future ruin to another
and the car is our only shelter
the architecture of desire reduced to the womb
a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!”
Saddened by his own vision, and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is betraying his own country now for the sake of … what? Applause? There isn’t any. He veers down another path.
“The miracle of America is of motion not regret
in New Mexico the face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla
in Plaquemine a Virgin appeared in a tree
in Santuario de Chimayo the dirt turned healer
a guy in Texas crashed into a wall when God said
Let me take the wheel!
And others hear voices all the time
telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff
or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster
to throw at the videos
the voices of God are everywhere heard loud
and clear under the hum of the tickertape
and all these miracles and speaking gods
are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture
of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!”
Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.
“Which is not to say that I prefer to wait
for others to turn my house into a ruin
I would rather do it myself the American way
with a second mortgage and a wrecking crew
that way I can say that I am the author of my own ruin
that’s the American way
we don’t whine or complain
well some of us do”
The Devil can’t stand, being lectured to, not since he was made to stand in front of the heavenly throne before being hurled flaming through space. His ears turn red, the pointed tips glow with anger, and he feels an urge to cause the speaker to have a mishap. He’s made lecturers choke on a sip of water, have a heart attack on stage, or be hit inexplicably by a falling prop. So he’s only half listening to Wakefield, enjoying his client’s evident discomfort and self-disgust. He really loves it when people wrestle with themselves over self-created problems. You dig your own pit, he sometimes tells them, then you come to me for a solution. Or worse, you address your sleeping God and end up killing your neighbor. As long as Wakefield is caught in contradiction and self-doubt he’s safely in the Devil’s hands, no need to worry that a purer, angelic creature—an innocent Wakefield—will suddenly burst to the surface. He takes a nap and turns his attention to the increasing number of dream figures that are crowding the dream fields. In his opinion, this sudden surge of dream figures has something to do with the unsettling of tribal boundaries; as people become angrier they release demons safely bound until then in layers of storytelling, bound with ropes of narrative. The Devil sees these ropes snapping and the layers flying off, leaving exposed malignant medieval creatures that even he shudders to gaze on.
Wakefield is fully aware that he’s digging himself into a hole. He decides to change the rhythm—he’s a performer, after all. He’s going to chant the mantra of self-reliance, which these foreigners can use, that’s for sure. In America we value self-reliance as well as cooperation, and this is what we say: “If yo
u do it for me, I’ll do it for you.” He chants in a singsong voice:
“If you do it for me, I’ll do it for you!
Now everybody say it:
If you do it for me, I’ll do it for you!”
A few multiaccented voices repeat: “I’LLDOITFORYOU!” More voices: “YOUDOITFORME!” Laughter, applause. Milena shouts: “DOITTOMEBABY!” and Tiffany: “SOCKITOMESOCKITTOME!” Others are just calling: “GETONWITHIT!” Self-reliance has taken on a not unpleasant erotic twist. Pleased, Wakefield begins again his poem.
“Each home houses
an inner demolition dictator
a household god chomping on
his cigar of cash and impatience
who is not content
until everyone is in a car
driving from Nowheresville to Nowheresville
in search of therapy and desire!”
One strong, chilling female voice emerges from the darkness. “Wakefield, your therapy is just beginning!” Heads turn, looking for the source of this challenge, and a small, neatly dressed woman stands up. “You made a ruin of my desire!” Wakefield realizes that the woman is his ex-wife, making good on her threat. Marianna, who when she got her first look at New York City from the window of a taxicab, cried out, “This is what I always desire!” Wakefield takes a sip of water and forges ahead.
“Which brings me to you, Marianna,
my wife from the land of Teleskou.”
A whisper: “That’s his ex-wife!” Some laughter here and there. The crowd seems to lean forward to better hear what will happen next.
“My America-loving wife
born in an old-world city
the Little Paris of prewar Europe
a country you once denied.”
Marianna is silent. What the hell, he might as well tell everybody everything while she ponders her next outburst.
“Then we lived in a city without a plan
a place even the gods
of demolition had left out of boredom
a city like many that spreads everywhere
complacently sprawling
and you loved it.
Wasn’t that the place where
at least in the beginning
the architectures of nature
ruins and imagination met?”
“You owe me a better explanation than that, Wakefield!” Angry male voice chides: “Be quiet lady! Work it out after the show!” but others call out: “Let her speak! This is America!” In the wings the bodyguards begin to react. They step out onto the stage and one of them speaks into his lapel sotto voce. There’s a commotion in the dark, and Marianna is hustled away from her seat. “He is the father of my child. Asshole! Let go!” Wakefield leans forward over the lectern, trying to see what’s going on. “Whoever you are,” he shouts, “leave her alone! That is the mother of my child!” Someone shines a flashlight on the scene. Wakefield sees Marianna being pulled down the aisle by uniformed cops; there are angry shouts from the audience, and several men rise from their seats, as if to defend her. “This is crazy!” Wakefield shouts. “Stop now!” and like divinity intervening, Doris appears on stage and says calmly: “Security! Release Mrs. Wakefield. Friends, return to your seats!” The policemen obey, and Marianna straightens her blouse, smooths her hair, and spreading her arms wide, says, “This is how America treats the foreign-born!” There is a rumble of argument in the crowd, and Wakefield appeals to Marianna, “Can’t we talk later, my tigress?” There’s laughter at that, and Marianna takes her seat. The crowd applauds.