Haunt the Streets & Redeem the City
Summer Chronicle #3*
By Jim Miller
Walking saved me during the pandemic. If I had not had my two feet to take me away from screens and out of my work-infected house onto the streets, I surely would have gone mad.
Some have argued that working from home is liberating, but I see the erasure of the space between the workplace and the domestic abode as a menacing erosion of the distinction between laboring and living, a kind of soft totalitarianism that seeks to engulf the whole of one’s being into the logic of capital.
When there is no “outside” of work, it never ends, and your utterly colonized consciousness suffers in a million ways. Your work dreams you and you stop dreaming.
You can see this happening even with people who have escaped the house but have brought their workplace and/or the marketplace with them on their cellphones. They speak oppressively loudly about the brain-numbingly banal details of whatever it is they do for the boss. Or, if they are the boss, they dictate things to people in a variety of abrasively robotic tones. Either that or they are slouching zombies recklessly zig zagging down the sidewalk or walking into traffic. It’s enough to make one want to jump in front of a bus to make it stop.
As Matthew Beaumont puts it in his elegant tome, The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, the “spectacular virtual space of the smartphone screen, whether it functions as the domain of work or leisure, of production or consumption” is “structured by the profit motive.” Thus the “distracted walker” glued to her/his device is “a smartphone endowed with a consciousness.”
Of course, this is only the latest installment of an old story. As Beaumont observes, “In the nineteenth century, as industrial capitalism increasingly remoulded people’s everyday experiences and perceptions, the apparently natural, spontaneous action of walking came to seem more and more culturally determined, more and more alienated.” Beaumont reminds us that the father of the scientific management of the workplace, F. W. Taylor embraced the slogan “down with dawdling!” in factory spaces, and unproductive sauntering and/or lounging came to be seen as a “flamboyant rebuke to the principle of productivity.”
Good workers, on the other hand, engaged in “hurried or brisk walking” that “marked one’s subordination to the industrial system.” So, whether it’s the brisk, efficient worker walk of the industrial age or the distracted walk of the worker whose consciousness has been colonized by market forces in the postmodern era, the way we move our bodies in the city reflects the social, economic, and political hegemony of capitalism.
Beaumont, whose book traces the subject of walking through centuries of literature, suggests an alternative form of undistracted walking that “carves creative, subversive spaces” on the map of the city and “haunts” them in a way that doesn’t serve the interests of our faceless masters. By doing so, he argues, we can take back what we have lost as our cities and our consciousnesses have been made less hospitable for us:
In the fight for the city’s future, we need to function like ghosts. In this way, through undistracted walking, we might be able to redeem all those lost steps we currently trace through the city while reasserting the value of those unlost steps that the modernists of the street promoted. Let’s haunt the streets . . .
Time to put away the smartphone, get lost, and find yourself again in some haunted space of your own creation.
Summer Chronicle #3*
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.
Lead image by Jorge Barahona via Pixabay