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Of Poor B. B.

I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother carried me into the cities while I lay
Inside her body. And the chill of the forests
Will remain inside me until my dying day.

In the asphalt city I’m at home. From the beginning
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
To the end distrustful, lazy, and content.

I am friendly to people. I put on
A stiff hat according to their custom.
I say: They’re animals with quite a peculiar smell.
And I say: What does it matter, I am too.

Occasionally in the morning I sit
A woman or two on my empty rocking chairs
And gaze at them thoughtlessly and say:
In me you have someone who can’t be trusted.

Toward evening, I gather men around me,
We address one another as “gentlemen.”
They rest their feet on my tabletops
And say: Things will get better for us, and I don’t ask when.

Toward morning in the grey light the fir trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, begin to chirp.
At that hour I drain my glass in town and chuck
The cigar butt and worriedly fall asleep.

We have sat, an easy generation,
In houses thought to be indestructible
(So we have built those tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And those thin antennae that amuse the Atlantic swell).

Of these cities all that will remain is what passed through them, the wind!
The house makes the consumer happy: he empties it out.
We know that we are only tenants, provisional ones,
And after us there’ll be nothing much worth talking about.

In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I don’t let my cigar go out, embittered or not,
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried into the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.

--

This poem may get posted twice, as I seek to overcome my rusty Serendip skills. But I wanted to share it--partly because it's another exploration of urban play, but partly because it creates an opening to think through how we come to city-play. I'll leave it to Anne, if she chooses, to inscibe her own tale, but here is mine. In it is the origin of my interest in the "topic," and also the roots of my biases.

I didn't grow up in the city. Rather I grew up in the suburbs. Actually, until I was two and a half, we lived in an apartment in an18th century house, which my parents decorated with cheap antiques. Someplace I have a photo of this aprtment, and it really looks like I must have been a civil war baby. But I wasn't. And we had a car and a TV a big white metal box, with gold painted trim. And every day, my father would go to the city to work. And the city was not spoken of.

When we moved into a tract home in a suburb with Good Schools, it became clear to me that everyone's fathers went to work in the city. Some in white shirts and ties in their cars and others in checkered shirts without ties on the trolley (this was how we understood diversity where I grew up). And it wasn't until I became interested in baseball, at 6 or so, that the city began to be a site of meaning. Philadelphia, it turned out, was where Our Team played. And since Our Team, played there, we *were* Philadelphia. So those of us who played little-kid ball in Springfield had blue hats with an "S" on them to wear to our games on Saturdays *and* we had red hats with a "P" to wear on our annual excursion into the unspoken of city. And to wear in our backyard games, where we pretended to be our heroes, imagining ourselves to possess the prowess of "real" baseball players. In our run-the-bases and stickball adventures, we fancied ourselves to be a part of the city, to be playing beneath its bright lights, in its integrated stadium, our majesty broadcast throughout the region, onto the black and white TVs that everyone's families (presumably) owned, throughout the region that was (to a six-year old boy) inited in its baseball fantasies.

It wasn't until I was a teenager, fully appalled by suburban tract house living, bored by my town, embarrassed by its conservativeness, and frustrated by there being Nothing To Do, that I began to really feel the city as, again, a site of potential meaning. It was the primary terrain against which my adolescent explorations of self were played out. From walking to the trolley tracks, to taking the trolley to the El and the El to center city, to exploring the axes of its primary grid (north and South of city hall on Broad Street, East and West on Market), I discovered that ther was art in the city, that there was Very Serious Politics in the city, that there was commerce in the city and that there was sex in the city. I saw Penn and Teller busking in the street (as The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society). I heard Ramona Africa cursing out the city, dreadlocks and f-bombs flying around her bull-horned tirades. I visited the voodoo supply store. And I discovered a community that was beginning to come together around The Rocky Horror picture show. Later I joined with freakers from all over and around the city, rebels without causes who stalked up and down South Street, trying to invent the strategies of haberdashery that would become punk fashion. 

Somewhere along the line, I discovered that if you cut class and went to the art museum, you would never get caught. And that you could buy a used book cheap, and read it until the changing-daily double feature of Real Films was going to start. And that all kinds of music drifted out of the bars and churches there. And that there were people living in the thousands of rowhouses. People whose backgrounds and outlooks were mostly different than the one I had grown up with.

The City to me was a kind of salvation. There were other things that I encountered, theater-making, libraries, other suburban discontents. But I experienced Philadelphia in my youth in ways that seem analagous to the ways my own kids experience the internet. You could find EVERYTHING there. You didn't search for one specific thing, because you didn't know just what you were looking for. But there was possibility in every new block, potential in every storefront, there was unpacked significance in every alleyway.

To be continued...

So. The reason for telling this story is that I feel as if it's important to state that I feel extrinsic to the city--that is to say that, like Brecht, I came to the city from not so far away, but from a very different landscape. Although I have, at various times and in various ways, found myself "at home" in the city, I experience it differently, I think, than I would if I had been born into one of its neighborhoods. Although, the residents of the neighborhoods often feel a sense of apartness from "downtown;" I had someone tell me that they were escorting an elementary school field trip from South Philadelphia to the Franklin Institute, which was about a mile's ride on the schoolbus. The kids were astonished to drive around city hall because, they were amazed to report, it was "just like at the beginning of Action News."

Maybe it feels to all of us as if we are set down somewhere on the grid and have to make our own rules. Heidegger, I recall, writes of "dasein" as having been "thrown into the world." And maybe my story is just my version of an existential event.