Notes on a Cold Civil War, East River Park, Earth Church, and a City of Friends.
"Whose too good for a free banana now?" says james.acaster, my favorite new comedian. I chuckled along, high on Oxycontin after my surgery, drafting these first lines for my obligatory oversharing, social media post. The next day I threw the pills out, but kept on thinking, reflecting on the human comedy of aging and health. I exercise a lot, bike, yoga, hike because of my hyperactivity and family history of heart disease, trying to keep things pumping, overusing my joints, popped meniscus, recovering from knee surgery...on left knee, cortisone shot on my arthritic right from knee surgery from GHS football two a day practice injury from August 1985. Trey Johnson RIP. The body keeps the score. And 16 stitches removed from my right ankle from a stupid self inflicted bike injury on the way home from @emilyassembly campaign party and celebration of austins 4oth bday... laughing with my besties thinking about tim and hunter, whose obit was in the times today...All the while, I’m glad to be alive and laughing about it as much as I can. These days are precious, hanging with my besties @seashipsailing and co. Cheers.
Friends dropped by all week.
Most of it, I sat, biking a little bit here, hobbling to physical therapy, or off to see friends’ plays, running into surfers at the beach, skaters in the Lower East Side, joining @monicahunken climbing Mount Everest on South Oxford Street, thinking about the Cold Civil War.
@ministererik dropped by to catch up and chat about our movements and the poetry of the chance encounters between them, the rebel friends we make along the way.
Poems and stories followed. He read “Unbundling an Idea” by El Padre Héctor de Cárdenas:
“We often thought in terms of "things" for gifts. We forget perhaps that every man, every woman is a gift. A gift for someone, because we were created to give ourselves, mutually to each other.
…
Every human encounter is always an exchange of "gifts". Don't be afraid to let your first wraps be opened
because what it is inside never runs out and is renewable forever. Friendship is a gift from person to person,
perhaps under different expressions and symbols, but in essence it's the delivery of my "self" to you, pure and simple.”
Each day, we read different poems.
Sitting in our stoop, @brennan_cavanaugh reminded that .. "poetry is a living beam - a crushed tendon - it will knock your teeth infi you are not careful -it will arm wrestle you drunk..."
The poems seeped through me all week long, thinking about the space where strangers converge, waves of ideas crash on the beach.
I couldn’t swim but I could still sit by the water, making my way to Rockaway Beach day... hanging with the surfers and skaters on 90th, enjoying the summer. Greg is monster surfing, @mothtreee skating, Jean Francois talking the cold US Civil War... others don't want to talk about the Russian conflict. It's everywhere.
On the way back, Gary Panter posted a note on facebook about the cold war Jean Francious was talking about:
“First off, I love Texas. I left Texas in 76 and always enjoy going back. A thing that has surprised and disturbed me, though, is that every time I go back there is more Jesus. There was already a lot lot of Jesus. I think Jesus would freak out about how that. And there are more guns. There were already a lot of guns. And there is more fear and distrust of outsiders. There was already a lot of that. Someone is making money off selling fear— the gun companies for sure. A funny thing about moving to the big cities. My grandma told me to never go into an alley with a stranger in Dallas—that they would hit me on the head with a 2x4 and rob me. So I never did that. In the big cities I met lots and lots of people. Cities are full of people— all kinds of people. And I met tons and tons, many tons if you put them on a truck scale, of people who grew up with no religion at all. And these people with no religion are, by and large, very nice people. There are jerks in any community, but most people are nice, one on one. These tons of folks, with no religion, are nice and helpful and truthful and smart and they have no hope or notion of going to heaven or anything like that. They are nice because niceness is nicer. They do it to be nice. And they are not coming to your town to kill you and burn your churches and you don’t need to fear them and buy more guns to kill them with. They don’t need killing. Jesus didn’t say much about shooting your neighbors because they dress funny or don’t show up at Sunday school and Wednesday night singing and all the revivals. I remember all the songs. Trust and Obey. Onward Christian Soldiers. Abide With me. Low In the Grave He Lay. Just As I Am. I have a certain nostalgia for them and I know these songs and gatherings are a comfort to lots of people. I know the sermons. I heard them for a few decades. Jesus didn’t say much about lording it over people and killing them if they don’t agree with you or about ruling them with an iron fist. He said not to throw the first stone and probably the second stone though he never mentioned that. Whatever Jesus was up to has been filtered through a few thousand years anyhow. If your faith is a comfort— great! So relax. And mind your own business. Now some atheists are going to jump in to comment about how great their atheism is and that is boring and unwelcome—as bad as militant Christians to me. The post is for christians alarmed by not knowing what is out there. What is out there are regular nice people. And a few jerks. Don’t be one of the few jerks.”
Reading Gary’s post, I commented:
I agree, lived there ‘79 to 89. It used to be fun, good times, no bullshit, even anarchistic. Now it seems like the religious, right wing, repub, red necks have taken over. Have the fun police won?
My mind turned to Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman. Born on the 31st of May 1819, his life contended with many of the contractions of our first civil war and struggle for democracy. The simmerings of civil war were there from his earliest days.The Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a non-slave state concurrently, came to be the year after his birth, in 1820. It established that enslaved Americans would be counted as three-fifths of a person for taxation and representation purposes.
By the time of his death in 1892, New York’s population increased exponentially, from 122,000 in 1820 to 2,693,000 in 1890.
He embraced the flow of immigrants, the outsider, the strangers, seeing neighbors as himself.
His poem, “To a Stranger” from 1860 addresses this unknown figure:
“Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
…I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”
“The Civil War changed everything for Whitman,” says Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price.
His poems about the war, Drum Taps, address the conflict.
There was conflict and there were friends. Writing about Brooklyn, observing the immigrants and sailors, Whitman imagined democracy as a sort of city of friends. I have often felt that way walking down my street to the bike shop and to the wine store and to the bodega. A lot of my students work at the grocery store down the street. Imagine a social movement as a constellation of friends? For the last few years, I’ve asked others about this, wondering, where do friends fit in? To what extent is it a city of friends? Is Whitman right? What's your thought about what he was saying there?
Dragonfly, a Brooklyn based performance artist, and Texas implant, had an apt answer.
“I'll give you an anecdote to answer that. I've done it for this building and I've done it from my Bed-Stuy apartment where I created a WhatsApp group for the neighbors and I was most likely the oldest person living in the building. I know I pass for much younger, but there's that. Whenever I would see someone new in the hallway, I would introduce myself. ‘Hi, do you live here?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I'm like hi, yeah, I live here too. I'm your neighbor. I’m on the fourth floor. It's important that we know who our neighbors are. If they seem stand-offish, sometimes they are, I usually say this. ‘So you choose to move to Brooklyn?’ ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘Okay, so you know what makes Brooklyn neighborhoods so awesome?’ They're like, ‘What?’ ‘Knowing how to be a neighbor,’” says Dragonfly. “‘You chose to live in Brooklyn because people are neighborly.’”
I love it, but not everyone feels that way.
People have different ideas of what can be a friend, who is part of this ever expanding community.
At EarthChurch, the Church of Stopping, a satirical preacher and choir riff on this idea every Sunday at the corner of Ave C and 3nd in the lobby of an old Chase Bank lobby. This is their Community Gathering, a mock ironic church service, performance and sing along.
“Be friends with the animals,” sing the choir as I walk in.
“I like your suit,” I say to Bill Talen, the Elvis Impersonator, come performance/priest, at the center of it all.
“Fossil fuels,” he says, holding his pink tux jacket.
My friend Sarah greets me, telling me she is being kicked out of her apartment.
“The music helps me hold on,” she says. Sara is one of the organizers in the campaign to save East River Park.
On the way to the service, I passed Children’s Magical Garden, a garden we worked to save, thinking of all the art and bike gangs I have been a part of, the ACT UP affinity groups, and Lower East Side Collective, and its ever morphing offspring, Reclaim the Streets, and Times Up, and then Voice of the Gowanus, the wins and losses, so many of them. Have we done enough? No one is sure.
“Extinction is here,” sings the choir.
I think of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who said “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” We act; we live and build community. “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
Sitting listening to the choir, I jot down notes about the heroes and friends in this room, Dana Beal, the Yippie, Eileen Myles, the poet, Sarah, the organizer, Tim, a saint with the choir, now in parts unknown. Each of them love public space.
I think about my friends at the beach the day prior, Walt and the Cold Civil War, hoping it doesn’t heat up as it did in Walt’s day.
“Death makes the sun rise,” sings the choir. “Do something to remember. Say I love you before we disappear.”
The teenager says it all sounds a bit culty.
Maybe so.
Everyone is standing, clapping hands, like at a Gospel Service.
“Stop, stop shopping.”
“Data vs Dada!”
“Data vs Dada!” the drummer leads us in a chant.
“In preacher bootcamp, they tell you to tell them you are going to tell them a story, tell them a story, and then tell them you told them a story.”
Billy follows with a story about growing up in Green Bay, Wisconsin and hearing a sermon that stuck with him his entire life. “‘Just below the surface is hellfire,’ the preacher told everyone. “‘It's no ordinary fire. Its eternal fire. This fire will sweep into a new eternal hellfire. You will burn and burn and burn. It never ends. You are sinners. God is punishing you. Burn, Burn, Burn!’ he screamed, said Billy, his voice escalating. “That hellfire is how many of us live. They run their lives with this fear of a vindictive, all knowing, militaristic god that will burst into your life. This Calvinistic fear was purposely surreal. It extends from Michigan to Wisconsin and parts unknown. The fear is at the point of your imagination, at the point of your individuation. That's when it starts.” It discourages independent thinking, says Billy. “Most of us have graduated from this exclusive, militaristic god. This fear is the predecessor of shopping for comforts into a sort of socialized Zombiism. Even New Yorkers are consumed in this,” says Billy turning his attention to the destruction of East River Park, a 20 acre stretch of public space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Poet Eileen Myles puts the destruction of the park into context:
Each yeas, NYC participatory budgeters and urban planners call for more trees to be planted to save the city and the world. Still the city cuts them down to save us from climate change. “As a part of a flood mitigation plan the City of New York will level the park and build a concrete flood wall, killing more than 1000 mature trees in the process. The green space here is being taken away and we don’t know why,” laments Billy, wondering if we’ve been entertaining ourselves to death, instead of doing enough to save the trees. Central Park, even Union Square has a conservancy, with backers such as Michael Bloomberg. No such conservancy is available for East River Park, just a low income constituency. I fear luxury towers will be going us there next. We were caught shopping.”
Changing tone, the fake preacher acknowledges there is another storyline here, that the trees are still feeling, still connecting at their roots, in our hearts, as a part of a city of friends. “That story is more powerful,” he says. “That's more deeply in us. The earth story is more forceful now, at a time of a sixth extinction. The earth has no answer but lots of questions, lots and lots. The stuff of dreams, without answers. Its unexplained. It doesn’t pretend to have answers; instead it invites more questions.” It seems as though Talen is conjuring a sort of unknowable, unconscious idea, not unlike Paul Tillick’s concept of an “unknown god,” as something beyond our comprehension, something unknowable, a sort of Neitzchian abyss. “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
In this way, belief takes shape as a sort of “yearning.”
“How do we live in New York?” wonders Talen, seeming to reflect on a city of friends Whitman imagined. This is a place where we have a spatial relationship with noise and forces beneath the pavement. “Yet, we are made of the earth. We walk into each other. We are in a hurry. We fall in love. We curse. We smash into each other. It was a good we think,” says Talen, reflecting on the here and now. “We started this Earth Church as a performative gesture. Hopefully, its clear we are fucking with the church. I am stuck in this Saturday night live character. I can’t get out of it,” he confesses. Others have made the same point. Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, another saint in the church of stopping, wonders if Talen is lost within the Rev Billy alter ego. The character seems to have taken over. Still Talen preaches with more and more of an authentic, even sincere point of view, walking the tightrope between earnestness and irony that New Yorkers thrive on.
“I sense there is a change going on,” says Talen. “We are sensing the earth in each other. Seeing the birds around us. Maybe intimacy is changing. Being an earth lover takes practice. I walk to the park every day, just to get into green space.”
“500 trees were cut, but 500 are still standing, half one story, half another story. We have to adapt. Love has to be active,” he explains, again referring to the city of friends. “In New York when someone is depressed, we take them to dinner or we go to the trees. Whats local is global. Whats global is local.”
Talen pulls out a letter he wrote to Savitri, his partner, reading it:
Dear Savitri - That grove of trees between the 6th street walking bridge and the river that should be our stage. It’s at the edge of the city’s clearcut. The 700 tree-stumps to the south, the devastation, and then to the north the 500 still-standing trees, moving around in the river wind.
At that edge - let’s take an oath that we believe in the hidden life of trees. Their roots are full of language, their branches sending out perfumes that make signals to the life that flies through. Let’s just talk to them and listen and then whatever comes into our minds turn and face the music, the bulldozers and the cops with their guns.
Because what are these trees witness to? …the months-long slaughter. We feel their confidence, terror, maturity, loneliness. It’s flooding out of the bark. We will be powerful with the city if we let the trees be powerful with us. Let them design our performances of stillness, recitations of Silent Spring, chaotic flailings, a day of screams.
Each time we go out we need to be a self-contained drama, with costumes, a mood, an impossible but worthwhile goal. Just keep doing it again and again. And when finally they move toward us with guns and chainsaws, we will have built a history of weeks of expressing the electric field of trees, and they will be pushing at a dream.
I’m thinking Gezi Park in Istanbul. People will join us.
Earthalujah!
Billy”
After a few more songs and thanks, the service ends.
I think about the East River and the friends we encounter, the giving trees, those we meet, the trees that provide shade, that we lean upon, as part of our city of friends..
“I don’t know when I first went down there,” wrote Eileen Myles, referring to the park. I moved to the East Village in 1977. People say you’ve seen it all. Well, sometimes. We would walk our Millers down to the park and run around the track and then head back to the neighborhood and the night would begin. Drinking stopped and the running continued. When alcoholism goes into a dormant state (hopefully for the rest of your life), you actually begin to get space. You require it. You look up and go, Wow, look at the buildings. I discovered the park majorly then, when I was too poor to join a gym. There’s a tree I’ve been putting my leg up on for at least 40 years—perhaps it is an elder—and I give it a stretch. I was never a long-distance runner, but East River Park was how I began understanding the tree-like experience of being human. We’re in this together. Though they are apparently ‘still,’ we share a long narrative with them. You begin to move, the body feels heavy while running, the feet pound sadly, and your mind is full of syrupy anxiety and despair. And then it begins to lift. It’s like sap. Air began flooding through the thing of me. It was easier and easier to run, and at about two miles I was virtually being carried. Running on the track or, later, along the esplanade, which over the years would open and close, gave me the island feel. I began to understand New York not just as us, and what we wanted, but as land. And land made my sanity great. When Robert Moses built it in 1939, East River Park was the way he made his plan to build the FDR highway more juicy. This park is for the working people, he claimed, this park is for everybody.”
Others wanted a higher sea wall, one that protected the freeway, the cascade of cars.
Eileen Myles had another idea:
“all we really need is a two foot wall to manage the very minimal amount of flooding that had actually occurred. The original version of ESCR left the park intact. That berm eventually became a negative focus for the city, because you would be building it on top of Con Ed wires and a lane of FDR would have to be closed for five years, and so on. The plan generally bugged the city because they said it was too much work. But just hold that thought for one second against the reality of human values, the effects of trees on people, animals, water, and fish. The park was opened to the public more than 80 years ago, and earlier it was the Lenape people’s, so it’s naïve of me to think of it as “ours.” But to ignore the effect of something as massive as fifty acres of green space on the lives, mentality, and overall groundedness of the people who live in a place makes me wonder, widely, what a city is. Because what is a person? What is a tree? Is that not part of the calculation? If not, then where are we? That’s my only question in this history.The shape of the original resiliency plan got hashed out in textbook fashion of how city planning works today. The community was involved. They were asked what they wanted. People said they wanted the park to remain, they wanted to see the water, they wanted flood protection. Designers and architects were also involved in these conversations, politicians were included. You can find details and even the heartbreaking transcript of all this earnestness on the internet. But why this process is typical of city planning today is that a simulacra of democracy (not a park) is what’s being constructed for the people, while the actual plan got cooked up behind the scenes. And, you know, we still don’t know what the actual new ESCR plan is.”
A couple of days later, Talen and I meet up to continue the conversation.
“Friendships in New York have a practical aspect,” says Talen. “Different from California friends or my Burning Man friends. City Light is a little different kind of a story, as it traces a line from San Francisco to New York (to Paris). If I’m in California places and spaces, Haight Ashburry to Zanadu to Half Moon Bay to San Luis Obisbo, these are friendships that have in them the assumption that you live in an environment that will buoy you up. But that may be changing. California is changing. Friendship is changing. In New York, we say how are you? There is a practical assumption of dearth, an efficiency of action. I’m going down from Washington Heights to Tribeca to Brooklyn. I’m going to take the D train. There is an absolutely revealed mutual aid. If someone is not in a good mood, you go to a gallery with them, you go to the park together or not. You don’t let them isolate unless they need that. I’'ll meet you at Grand Army Plaza. You have to be focused and aware of the challenge of the environment. It's different than City Lights, which is a sort of Weimar oasis, of orgies in the afternoon.
All afternoon we talk about the lessons of growing up, the lessons of a city of friends.
I learned ‘be nice to people’ from tripping on MDMA. That was the only real insight from the drug culture. But its still something, be nice.
“As I get older, be nice becomes more important,” says Talen as our conversation turns to inevitable dialectical turn of every friendship. “I’d like to know what happened. And grow from that interaction. Gratitude and forgiveness become more important. I’m grateful to this to spend more time with it, right there together. Forgiveness without gratitude is hard.
“I don’t forgive Jamie Diamond,” says Talen. “I don’t forgive him. My enmity is intact. I have people i know inside the system i talk to, bank tellers, etc. He knew what he was doing. I saw one of the members of the Squad interviewing him about greenhouse gas producing products that were being supported by Chase. Before the inc was dry on the Paris Climate accord, he was investing in products that would sink the thing. His was a signal. She asked him about this. And he sidestepped her question, talking about a sustainable building. He was gaslighting her.
Conflict is a different dynamic. “Make a distinction between being around someone and being unable and how you spent your time. My precious time says Bob Dylan. Thats something altogether. How you spend your precious time, thats a choice. Among the virtue signaling, canceling crowd, we always risk pulling the trigger on someone too quickly. What happens if you pull the trigger too soon? You lose your nuance. There’s way too much virtue signaling,” that leaves us separate Talen concludes. “Hopefully our church has a non didactic ambient sound. And thats coming from someone who likes to talk.” Sometimes it's better to sing along instead of preach, dialogue instead of monologue. Voices of the many, the chorus which opens, it offers a glimpse of something, even that simulacrum of democracy Eileen Myles images, that bother Walt prophesied, that Billy and the choir sing about, and my friends show me when they bring poems over, that Jack writes about, imagining hiking with Gary, sharing stories all week long, here in Brooklyn. Its hard to know what to do in this city of friends or if it even exists. Still I believe in it. Its something we make together, each day.
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