I have to write it really fast today though as Elizabeth Bishop wrote “it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
I will dispense with my usual disclaimers and do my best to jump in.
I started reading Doreen Massey’s book For Space just after I got back from the space center in Kiruna, Sweden. Of course Massey’s “space” is not the same as the “space center” but hey, English is fun that way. And I just keep trying to find threads through all the things that are coming up as a result of exploring this literary and stratospheric space I’m floating around in.
In the first chapter of For Space, Massey talks about the conquest of Tenochtitlán and how space, imagined by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men in the 16th century, was envisioned as an open field, a place to move across, to conquer everything in its path, space as a distance to be traversed, a start-from and a get-to.
She describes the ways in which the Aztecs mapped their space, their extraordinary metropolis, as a landscape of multiplicities, weaving time, movement, experience. And then there’s the map in the book of the way that the Spanish drew Tenochtitlán and it’s all right there for you.
This city, that city of stories, a vision spreading out through the waters, built on movement, a space-time of culture, of ritual, of generations, of writing, of complex histories, the conquistadors drew it like they drew their own cities, their own imaginations, as a fortress, as a wobbly circle surrounded by water, then land. From above. A flag. Rocks. Barricades. Points of access. No people. Names and descriptions of what’s inside, what you might be met with, what might be ravaged, what might be taken back to another city like that one drawn, built up as a fortress, across the Atlantic.
And Massey writes or implies or I read into it because it’s coming to my next topic in this text that this framing of space as the place (yes, I know) one must traverse across, this unchanging thing that gets written upon and described in time and understood as other, it’s a space that is fully and completely misunderstood. Not just linguistically, not just in terms of who gives what until the niceties stop and the horses charge in, but that because the conquistadors can’t fathom a space that is also emerging and moving within time, suffused with simultaneity, there is a full and complete misunderstanding. A total misapprehension to be learned with and from rather than squashed in a relentless moving across of the space that must be taken.
Side note: thinking about the word misapprehension. In my limited knowledge of several other languages in which I can fake it pretty well, I think about these words jammed together, mis (bad, insufficient, failed) and apprehension, which in English I understand as fear, hesitation, a holding back, but which if I’m not mistaken (and I don’t feel like digging into the OED here, I just want to write it all out) would come from apprendre, to perceive, or something Latin like that. Or prendere, in my limited Italian, to take, to have, to hold. (I will probably look this up in a minute). So misapprehension, a bad holding, a bad perception, an inability to have or truly see. Things unfamiliar are invisible, empty.
So as I’m reading this I get excited because of my last year’s reading of William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, which I’ve written about before. It always bothers me that the things I find to read are found by chance, there is no syllabus, nobody’s suggesting things and even if they did I would probably get them and not read them (happens often). I think why didn’t I find this before or what would this project have been like if I hadn’t found this book because I went to my local favorite bookstore and was standing spaced out in front of the poetry section and then my eyes caught the words on the slim spine. Now I’m sure I’ve been primed to apprehend things like this. Love Williams and am always wrestling with the question of America for all the manifold reasons I’ve written about and will continue to write about. So it stood out. In the American Grain was published nearly 100 years ago.
Once you start reading it you cannot stop. Each chapter is a poetic prose intense unpacking of an aspect of the myth-building of the Americas. It starts with the story of the failed settlement of Erik the Red, first Iceland, then Greenland, then the New World. That chapter ends three pages later in slaughter, infighting, and a curse. The second chapter is a reading of “The Discovery of the Indies” that upends the heroic arrival in a way that nothing I have ever read has done. Chaos, storms, political infighting, loss. Then the chapter shifts to first-person followed by excerpts from Columbus’s diary, misery, confusion, doubt. Followed by calm seas, a combination of sail and drift and arrival in a place the most beautiful he had ever seen. The chapter ends with a series of ellipses…and a prayer in Latin. As we know the rest.
Williams’ following chapter, “The Destruction of Tenochtitlán” is what I want to talk about because it corresponds so well (to me) with Massey:
And bitter as the thought may be that Tenochtitlán, the barbaric city, its people, its genius wherever found should have been crushed out because of the awkward names men give their emptiness, yet it was no man’s fault. It was the force of the pack whom the dead drive. Cortez was neither malicious, stupid nor blind, but a conqueror like other conquerors…He was one among the rest.
Wiliams describes in great shining detail the city, its goods, its edifices, its animals. He does not describe people in detail. He only tells how Moctezuma welcomed Cortés and there is no explaining why. Cortés, expecting violence, is inside a space and a time and a way of being that he cannot recognize or fathom.
Streets, public squares, markets, temples, palaces, the city spread its dark life upon the earth of a new world, rooted there, sensitive to its richest beauty, but so completely removed from those foreign contacts which harden and protect, that at the very breath of conquest it vanished. The whole world of its unique associations sank back into the ground to be reënkindled, never. Never, at least, save in spirit; a spirit mysterious, constructive, independent puissant with natural wealth; light, if it may be, as feathers; a spirit lost in that soil.
Three pages later, Cortés’s demands for gold. Unceasing. Rampages. Destruction. Burning the most beautiful palaces ever beheld. Starving the people. Winning.
Later the Conqueror tried to rebuild the city. Viva quien vence!” (Long live he who conquers!)
The biting irony of the last two sentences end this chapter and the facing page, titled “The Fountain of Eternal Youth,” begins:
History, history! We fools, what do we know or care!
And what does this win leave: scorched soil, smoking rubble, wailing people. Space is taken, ripped from time. Bound, drawn, packaged, shoved into the hold of a ship and delivered back to a fortress on the other side of the world.
William Carlos Williams published this incredible book two years after Spring and All, one of his masterworks. In the American Grain hardly circulated at all. He was born and died in Rutherford, New Jersey. Raised by an English father who had grown up in the Dominican Republic and a Puerto Rican mother whose background was French. His primary language was Spanish.
Williams studied pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany before the first world war and returned to New Jersey just a few years before my grandfather and his entire family came through Ellis Island, fleeing southern Poland for reasons I imagine but don’t know. My grandfather’s languages were Polish and Yiddish and later English. Later, he and my grandmother moved up a little in the world, out of the tenements and over to New Jersey.
You can see where I am going from here.
I spent a lot of a very early recent morning reading about the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in which Jewish fighters and civilians resisted forced deportations to concentration camps. The Warsaw Ghetto was at that time one of the most densely packed places in Europe, 400,000 people collected and fenced into a small section of the city.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted one month and when the SS finished winning this unexpected battle, using masses of weapons, poisons, and fire, over 13,000 Jews had been killed in the urban open-air prison. This uprising is considered one of the most heroic acts of resistance by the oppressed people, whose rights and dignity and freedom of movement had been systematically dissassembled by the German state over many years.
I will not equalize or compare or normalize or excuse. I want to hold, to notice, to sit with, to allow in time and space in myself.
Tell me what you see in Gaza. Tell me about the walls around villages in the West Bank, the checkpoints, the razor wire. Tell me what is seen as space to have, to take, to bomb, to raze. Tell me of suffering and whose story gets told and by whom. Tell me of governments from far away feeding endless weaponry to perpetuate pain everywhere. Tell me of thousands of peoples’ stories enmeshed with yet more stories now gone.
Tell me that anybody can unravel the richness of a lived fabric that is space woven with time - weft and warp inextricable and essential - without ending up with a pile of shredded thread in the dust at the end.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. For an extraordinary cinematic document about misapprehension and image production, if you haven’t seen it already, you should really watch Harun Farocki’s 1988 film Images of the World and the Inscription of War.
P.P.S. I had to check the OED:
mis: A word inherited from Germanic. Prefixed to verbs, with sense ‘badly’, ‘wrongly’, ‘perversely’, ‘mistakenly’, ‘amiss’.
apprehension: ? through French appréhension, 15th cent. in Littré) Latin apprehensiōn-em, noun of action < apprehendĕre to seize upon: The action of seizing upon, seizure, grasp.
You can watch my feature documentary BUNKER on Amazon or on Projectr.tv. Starting November 1 the film will also be featured on MUBI.