Aby Warburg Recalls his College Days in Three Different Locations — Chris Eaton

…in Bonn, in Munich, in Strasbourg, on lampposts, on buildings, the chimneys, the plazas, oh redstart in the morning, early riser black taunting, oh robin shrill brazen, peak starling in the morning the trees, in the plazas parks the public gardens, the truth come plummet from the sky, come screeching from the sky, a richness of house martins, come glossy blue screeching, oh shrill shriek the bird, oh high-collared sparrows, like office workers to the screeching grind, like portraits in miniature of Louis XIII crowned by Victory furious in their magnificence, a hasty palette of thrush fleeing the cold of a Russian winter, a foreclosure of barn swallows on passage to the Saharan come punctuate the sky, the hawks, swept low the frosted lawns, the plazas, the cracked stone, the crimped necks of the mice left on the frosted steaming lawns, the green grasses, the mud, on the cracked stones of the plazas, beneath the statue of Goethe, facing south, of Beethoven, facing south, the mice facing south and twisted, in reverence, beneath bronze figures of Christ the gilded Christ, wrapped one around one around another like torpid lovers under a stained glass depiction of Christ, beneath bronze Beethoven, bronze Gutenberg, beneath various Bavarians, knights and electors, facing south, the dozing kills of the frosted hawk beneath the statue of bronze Beethoven bent bursting with those impossible multi-jointed fingers, like he’s playing one of those impossible chords of his, like he’s having a heart attack, impossibly, like he’s extinguishing a cigarette but spitefully, like his spirit once escaped this somber simpering city of his youth and now he is trapped here again, in this city of his ironhanded youth in this bronze statue in this graven moment in this hardened amber of history, the pigeons, the jays, against the cherry blossoms and the blossoms like the pink morning air against the sky, the jays flash brown the black, the jays the blue the black against the cherry blossoms, like the pink morning air against the sky, and against the white of the shops and the white of the apartments buildings and the pale white of the wealthy and the shopkeepers and their white white aprons and the brown black jays, against the branch the blossom fold, against the bird the branch, to feast upon the sleeping mice the blossoms berries feast the seeds the yawning trees and on the streams the rivers float the cormorants, the gush of cormorants the flood a yellow-throated cormorancy, surging through the green lime ribbons come to prey upon the prismatic slouching of trout and grayling, a mustering of storks, presenting arms, a kabuki of storks among the rough the stalk explosive willows, elegantly dressed, among upon the massive pollard willows, a pasty application of storks in their ferocious kumadori, black black eyes, eyes with serifs, like slapdash hederae, the storks, red red the beak, black black the tail, slaty grey, a hint of waxy green and blue the storks of mourning, strike their frozen mie among the willow and the moonlight storks the river, moon on the river, knock knock their beaks like Buddhist temple blocks, like a gathering of a thousand monks among the willow, drifting like steam among the pollard willow like balletic geisha in their susohiki emerging from the bath knock knock, every beat and knock knock like the city, if you listen, is entirely steam-powered, like an armada of congested steam shovels upend the earth just out of sight, just around the bend, just over the mountain, just pulling down trees, just tearing through the beet fields a thousand pliant steam shovels scallop the hills for new shorelines, for a non-existent sea, a filthy ocean of lack, filthy ocean of progress, dirty brown knock knock the storks like desperate trains in the distance, back from their knock knock African winter, like massive mantids come pray up through the willows and the moonlight and in the distance and on the chimneys and the crooks of the chimneys, the distant trains knock knock the storks and wedged like risening bread into the naves of the clock towers where the bells ring ring a marriage peal ring ring a funeral ring ring the hour, ring bells for the lovers, ring bells for the dead, bells for the punctual, bells to announce the trains the travellers, bells of shame, bells of God’s love, on the churches and on the government buildings where just after lunch the four stages of life parade past Death, where half past noon the Apostles strut in reds and blacks and greens and browns past the Saviour and, as with Peter, so the cock, crows, thrice, to track the days of the week, the stages of the moon, to track the planets, the twenty-eight year solar cycle, nineteen-year Metonic cycle, four-hundred-year Gregorian cycle, the bells and the drums and the storks knock knock and the sounds of the wind and the great clock that holds the universe, the swelling sound of the wind and the swelling of the universe, a miracle each and every bird, the emancipation of a moment in the form of every bird, even the dimmest dullest dunnest birds a miracle, the fieldfares, ugly cousin of the thrush family, always shrugging at the edge of the dancefloor, the sooty gulls the rock doves, in the streets, in the markets the plazas, by the statues of victory, of national pride, an embarrassment of birds who have all but forgotten how to fly, scavenging low the fruit wagons pulled by the dogs, the milk trucks behind the mules, beneath the hard women under the burdensome yokes of society and carrots and cabbage and potatoes, the dull birds in the plazas beneath the palsied hands of big bronze beauty Beethoven, dull birds lodged in the brief forest of the B’s bronze boots and the boots of the clergy, dodging the boots of the boys of the Corps, beneath the fishmonger, the seafood, the mussels, the escargot soup, the botulism, beneath the boots of the butchers, outside the bakeries, the cafés, the sausages, hung meats in the windows, long and short bread piled in the windows, the eggs and the pastries, cream puffs in rows in the windows, the foie gras, cold ham and herring, the thin beef water, reindeer boiled down in paste, partridge floating hard in grease, mutton slunk low to the eyes in peculiar sauces, the dim grey wren on the powdery edge of the garden planter, on her hawthorn pulpit, sermonizing to the wind on winding, the air on airing, dullest of all the birds the wren, never invited to the parties, plain as pot of boiled water, plain as a winter breeze, as a pallid librarian, and even then and still a miracle, the homely fieldfare, bridesmaid to the thrush, stuffing its fat face at the edge of the dancefloor and in the park with the pale green caterpillars come fall from the trees, come cast off the trees and even then and still a miracle, the stony brute the rock dove, with its neanderthal brow rammed, its massive frontal skull run through the void of some pretzel spit cake bundt and even then hunted by all its brothers and sisters like a walking blood pastry, like it’s a gushing wound in the fabric of existence, like a rift in reality, to see a bird come startled come screeching from the brush, the air, come whistle by your head be soothed, come likewise come be lifted, the woodcocks cry a nasal peent and break the brush and strangle in the horsehair nets the mesh the woods of Middle Germany, come slaughtered come the nasal woodcock come the branches and the fruit, of the juniper bushes, a thousand and a thousand more come starve in the neglected and forgotten snares of past seasons, a thousand and a dozen to beat their tiny heads against the apathetic lighthouses of the coast, lazy killers of the beaches, the woodcocks stumpy fat and listing, a thousand and a one, from the fast fading forests of Norway, emaciated rye fields of Sweden, fat from northern berries and wet shoots of the larch to rest—they think—the beaches of Heligoland, to pant to gasp to douse the fires in their tiny lungs, their weary wings, to be greeted by the entire village by gleeful shouts of The woodcocks! The woodcocks! The woodcocks are coming, on a Sunday, and the entire congregation rush out the church, the entire population of the God-fearing bight, the Lutherans and the Catholics, come rush out the churches and clutching to their Bibles, their own boots, anything of substance heavy rods and lengths of pipe stacked for that purpose in the narthex, the communion flagon, the most substantial crucifixes, the hardened loaves, some old bog sculptures, the men and women and their fat children rush out into the sun and shade their eyes with their Bibles and look up into the sky and see the long wavy black line of the woodcock, the black cloud of woodcock, like a swarm of enormous flies, like spilled ink across the sky descending, the worshippers laughing and singing and doing their stretches, then club the entire fall of them to death, too fat and tired to move another inch, the dim patient woodcocks, to become paté and hats, both renowned across the country, the destruction of the woodcock for their drag and liver is a great and never-failing industry, the fact that any survive to Bonn, to Munich, to Strasbourg, is a miracle, anything that survives, a miracle, so many birds, so many names, there are perhaps even more names for birds than there are even birds, regional names, private names, no matter how forgettable they may seem, so many names for the dull affronting thrush as well as the colourful, the woodcock also known as the bog snipe, also known as the brush snipe, the Labrador twister, the night partridge, also known as the bog sucker, the big-eye, the timberdoodle, each person each region can have their own names and perhaps even that is a miracle, like the rest of the world blurs around them, these birds, like the reality of them is so strong it sucks the reality from everything else, pales the everything else, like the everything else around them is just grey, blurred, because you are drawn to the miracle, your attention is pulled to the miracle, like everything else is just the picture frame and there you have the stork and the ambient throats of the cormorants, the prettier thrushes and the dull ones, like the rest of the world is this poorly made frame and yet, it is the frame and not the framed that is in motion, blurred, while the miracle remains motionless fixed neverending, like the rest of existence spirals off around it, like the thing you are looking at is all but impossible but then again what is a miracle but that what you can’t believe, what is a miracle but fixed and eternal, I do not here refer to those other types of miracles, those events scorned by the clergy, those women called to strike the rock and the water to gush forth and cure the blind man of his cataract, the old woman’s ague, the cat’s glaucoma, the stigmatics of varying intensities, with anywhere between one and five of the slick and sacred wounds, the corpses that do not rot, the stolen wafers of the Eucharist that bleed, that out the thief or bless him, the thief, the body of Christ, immovable and emitting a bright and furious light, of Christ buried in what garden and on what spot a tree what grows, and from what tree—when toppled chopped for dry what fire—would come a perfect form a crucifix and when it is, levered against the forehead of the witch, when it is, thrust to be gone gone gone be gone, a woman can now lead a normal life, now, the holiest of host, left in a cupboard for five years and open the door and there’s the Baby Jesus, nor do I refer even to the Marian miracles, those countless visions of the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, the greatest injustice to the clergy, that the Mother of Jesus, who should only appear to people like them, the devout, the Chosen, considering she is the holiest of the saints and perhaps more due to them, more covenanted, something more private to them, a reward, say, for their unwavering devotion, should like the stars—Star of the Sea—appear sudden to everyone and everywhere without Vatican approval, in home shrines and grottoes long dotting the roadside, as some stranger to children in caves, to peasant children, mostly, children of humility, children of shepherds, of cowherds, children who are deaf, the dumb ones, the children with chronic pain, children of old women who lost their true children, old women who can no longer bear children of their own, in a barely-town like Knock, in County Mayo, in Ireland, reciting the Rosary in the pouring rain, staring open-mouthed at water stains on the cement beneath the gable wall in the shapes of Mary, Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, a lamb, a cross, so many things, Our Lady of the Lake in the bark of the maple tree, the folds of a cape, the haunch of a horse, in a custard, on a toastie, in expressions of Polish nationalism, to random children with no liturgical or sacramental education whatsoever, like some grand reset, a recalibration, a reconnection between the essence of the everything and the everything else, what with promises of comfort, what with healing and assurances of victory over the Prussians or the Protestant Swedes and warnings for the future, with requests: the swift erection, for example, of some new church or chapel, to indicate some future saint, a bird doesn’t appear like some sad sack same shell woman, does not appear to everyone at once but to eachone with their own personal vision, even beyond the birds, of a perpendicular blade of grass, of the sunlight break the glass, the miracle of the kingfisher, the golden bee-eater, like a painting by Franz Marc that winters in tropical Africa, the miracle of the Mandarin duck, so many miracles that this is in itself a miracle, the miracle of the two trees one taller than the other, miracle of the four trees of equal height and evenly spaced, miracle of the trees knocked over by the storm, the trees resilient in congregation in slow dance in flagrante, with the birds the squirrels the butterflies bees beetles moths and wasps, the trees dead and about to be and being, blossom and seed, trees besides the cherry, the willow: the hazel, beech, the sycamore, the oak and hawthorn, mountain ash, the silver birch, the maple, apple, Rose of Sharon, in the parks of Bonn of Munich Strasbourg, the ancient oaks the lime the beech the dormant plane, in the parks the skeletal sleep of the freshest buds, the fallen leaves as large as dinner plates and trampled beneath the boots of the boys of the Corps, this is what I mean when I talk about miracles, these supreme moments of disbelief, that need no God or cause but that they recur, that they are unique and recur you can’t draw up with your eyes and pass over, that make you question reality, where words what fail you, is it possible—one must ask—to be impossible, is that a thing, it feels commonsense that every word or thing should have its opposite and that these words or things, in being, in opposition, should almost bring into being the existence of the other, but, that it be possible that something be impossible, can it ever be both, if it’s possible for something to be impossible, does that make the impossible possible, it also seems impossible for the possible to be impossible, it's like a grandfather paradox, these physical disruptions of reality that don’t quite make sense, that don’t belong, they negate each other, in the park the boys the Corps and their swords and their great demonstrations of tolerance, their red and blue, their black and white, in sash and cap and padded leather girdles, armbands, in protective goggles, in the park a boy with a watch, in the park a flute, in the park a boy with a dented bugle tapping its conical bore against his leg his toe the ancient oak, in the park a boy takes a single step from the shade of the leaves of the ancient oak and a dozen cigarettes flare at once and the leaves trampled and spotted with the blood of the boys let—and left—upon the autumn leaves, the earth opens up, swallows the boys, would it be any more surprising, more of a miracle, the earth opens up and erupts with birds, miracles are the acknowledgment of the world that the world makes no sense, or at least insinuates it and in so doing makes the feelings you have feel more permissible, a miracle is what makes life bearable, for a miracle allows, a miracle captivates you so wholly because it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit in, a miracle makes life more bearable, beautiful or dull, because neither do you, a miracle is the reminder that that you also make no sense, a miracle is a concurrent forgiveness and a celebration for being, in the parks the bathers the lovers, in the parks the hewn grass, the rock the stone the pebble snowflake desire paths and every rupture in the earth from which the insects pour, the miracle of the sunlight on the fallen fruit the rotting meat, the miracle of the cherries on the road and the skins of the cherries crushed beneath the heels of the wife of the baker or the provost, a crown of dead grass, even in the inert, the inorganic, the miracle of the Romanesque, the German Rococo, which was not the same as the French Rococo but unique entirely to Germany, more ornate, asymmetrical, gaudier, the Beaux-Arts rooms of brutal blue and pink, the Baroque, Baroque Revival, the Gothic, the Carolingian, the Wilhelminian, the imitation Classical, imitation Italian, imitation Florentine, the exceedingly and unnecessarily Byzantine, the nostalgic and flat, to more closely to resemble ancient ruins, the aesthetics one forces into the world, the conceptual miracles, the false stucco and marble and meandering Greek key, the old Doric colonnades, the random unity of brick on the escarpment of the frauenkirche, the city gate, the loams that trench the city… codified, reconstituted and reorganized into miracles, people like to think of a city as geographic, fixed in place, in geography, in geometry, but a city is not the insides of a border, all the possible things located within a legal geographic boundary, a building, a building, a person, some streets, a city is not a legal entity, not a corporation, not the points on either end of a straight line, a city is a bag of things that aren’t, a city is not even a noun, a city is an adjective, sometimes a city is a verb but rarely, and only a passive one, a city doesn’t do, a city is not a place where things happen, how is a city, how does it, a city is a place with its own gravity, that draws you to the same places, over and over, there is only one city, a city is a bag filled with all of your shit, your own emotional baggage that you carry around with you and occasionally take out the parts that you like and ignore the rest, the city has many parts you have never seen, but that is not the city, the city is only what you have seen, what you know, a city is a bag of only the parts of the city you are drawn to, a city is the city but is also your city which is completely different but the same, a city is that what you remember, or is it the reverse, a city is all the things not seen, all the things not heard, not moving, all the things not remembered, a city is a miracle, a city is an angel, like one of Giotto’s angels in Padua come to visit Joachim in a dream, a city is half smoke and the other half dream, yet more real than Joachim, a city is an angel that appears solid and real but is really just smoke and dream, if a city were a character in a book, say, if an entire city had characteristics and personality traits, in Bonn: the smallest, conceited resentful introvert, where the students all came from the wealthier families, the larger centres, private-er tutors, in Strasbourg: the bordertown, abused, insecure, in Munich: Bohemian, opinionated, embarrassing, like the bitter uncle at the family dinner who quotes at you from the Preussische Jahrbücher about the proposed tax reforms, a replacement for the previous grist and slaughter levy in which citizens had been divided into several dozen classes, each with a simple fixed amount, depending on your class, simple, ranging from thirty thalers to a maximum of just over seven thousand, depending on your class, they’re going to replace this, he says, this simple system that has worked for generations, works for your father, worked for my father, your grandfather, his father, this system, it made this nation what it is today, this nation we used to be proud of, they’re going to replace it with a tax not even based on presumable income but on actual declarations, on polite requests for documentation, on trust, not just on salaries either, not just on wages, on pensions, on annuities, but also income from invested capital, you follow, from real estate, from ownership in industries and mines, things we already own, for God’s sake, it’s bound for disaster, the uncle says, not only because of our febrile and ineffectual county boards of assessment but because human nature is what it is, like a river flowing downhill, all of it eventually collects in one pot, he says, raising taxes on the upper class is only going to make them move their business elsewhere, or they’ll just pass the cost on to the rest of us, it’s the thing that all university towns have in common, is resentment, is quietly standing to the side and whispering, complaining about the ones from away, where are you from, who’s your father, they all hate the same, university towns, Hamburg is no different, if a city were the hero, were to be presented with conflict and be forced to resolve it, what else would Hamburg be but the bitter old woman who holds up the fence, visibly decomposing, holds everyone up with her gossip, holds everyone but herself responsible for the nation’s lack of progress, the value of the mark, who keeps tabs on everyone else, peering over her fence, sees her neighbour out and follows him just to make sure he’s up to no good, a city is a cliché, is one too many cigarettes, a meal at the wrong hour, a city is two boys in the plaza bursting into song and marching down the Ludwigstrasse, collars up in the alleys, collars up in the parks, the police stations, the depositions, the miracle of the Golden Star Hotel, the Grand Hotel Bellevue, the Hotel Royal with its gardens not quite straight run down the river, the trains arrive and the people slither stammer tumble to the platform, to the hotels, the trains arrive and the people head to the shops under the covered walks, shops in the fine squares, shops in the alleys and the shops with windows of exquisitely cut glass, shops with murals depicting historical battles, recalling important incidents, they spend their days at the galleries, the kunsthalle, the museum of decorative arts, museum of this, museum of that, to the cinema picketed by Catholics, by the Conservatives, museum of depravity, to the opera house, trains arrive and the food vendors, the barbers, the shoeshines the newsstand, the papers on benches, in the trash receptacles in clenched fists the pamphlets, the mildly off-colour cartoons, the tasteful nudes, the schmutz and the schundliteratur, the romances the adventures the colonial stories the cowboys the indians, the popular literature, the pickpockets, the porters who are all on break, the coffee, the cake, the bells strike four and the articles of travel, neglected by the porters, are left in piles on the platform, left the hat boxes, the carpet bags, left the great coats and railway wrappers, the debris of yesterday’s lofty plans, like the ruins of ancient Italy and Greece, to be combed through with brushes and sieves, what do they mean, what can they say to us, these piles of anxieties, piles of vacation high to heaven, a city is for things that have already happened, a city is always in the past, but the miracle is always right in front of you, a miracle in the past is no longer a miracle, a miracle in the past is a memory, the city, when someone else says the word city they are talking about something that doesn’t exist, you hear the word city and you imagine it, what they’re saying, but this thing doesn’t exist, it is not the same city as your city, made up of all the parts of your cities, but another thing entirely, made up of many of the same parts but also many different parts, a city is only the things that you see, or only the things you don’t, a city is also never a day city, a day city is a masquerade, a façade, a city is the side you show to others, the city is at night and is the true city, a city is at night you are at night and there are people you can barely see and that you fall in love with and that you never see again, a city is a thing that you barely see at night and the next day you’re stuck with it but still it fades and the next day, a city is the next day, always rushing to get somewhere, perhaps sometimes a city is a doing verb, a city strains against its constraints, boys in the plaza, the britzka, wheel axles screaming with the weight, hired with a weekly allowance, the boys in foaming packs and playing at imagined men, boys you cross the street to avoid, young brash boys calling out what’s different, shouting down women, children, smaller boys, young boys emboldened, crying out over the unjust finity of rights, why are rights finite, they complain, while obligations feel limitless, young thugs showering their opinions on the streets, the plazas, the parks, shrieking about injustice, about the plight of Bismarck though without mentioning his name which had been banned by the university in order to foment peace, the boys with the scars heaving like bulls in the pen, pawing at the ground the bulls, to be released into a world that hates them, hates their majesty, the bulls, released from the schools upon the poverty, upon the ethnicity, upon the Poles and Lithuanians, a city is the laughing of immigrants, the untidy, the lazy, rising income, rising literacy, a city is where once were tolerance, a city is where once were trees were steam-powered storks, a city is a bird and a tree and a violent and desperate adolescence, a city is a clam bucket of shrill screams, a city is a basket of aesthetic mycelium, a city is a frayed creel of gasping buildings, a city is a slow erosion, is everything you know and/or believe ground to dust, a city is the miracle of the Hotel Stern with its performative balconies overlooking the marketplace and the young boys around some stiff stone obelisk bawling out every patriotic song at once, every patriotic song they know, various choruses from different songs without any concept of harmony, balance, unity, until someone leans over the balcony with a request, at last: a single key, perhaps, just one, pick one, doesn’t matter which, I’m not picky, pause, pause, and perhaps something in unison, something less difficult, something that can truly showcase your varied talents, your skill level, pause, just settling down for the night, you see, pause, there go the boys, the boys are off, like the chain of anchor just dropped, like startled antelope, they’re off like wolves through the front doors, the foyer, up the stairs and down the hall to rush to pound the door, giggling, jostling for position, rushing to proffer cards, to be the first to slide his card beneath the door, one by one, like antelope, and you’ll meet us tomorrow they pound, giggling, tomorrow in the park or else pound pound, we know where to find you after all pound pound the boys, a city is row upon row of houses little red and quaintly resting, with their wee weedy windowboxes and precarious dormers, neglected grape trellis-es-es, half-timbered the tenements with their obscene ratio of sublets to renters, lodgers to owners, to rooms, to beds, to cooking utensils, to darned socks, a machinist of long standing and his sickly wife in a single room and an alcove with three more beds for the sonorous horse-car driver, the pair of newlyweds without even a kettle, and the last for the two masons freshly arrived to share and looking for work and still able to laugh at it all, a closet (a luxury!) with three children curled for warmth and pinching twisting whispering love to one another and harsh cruelties, the third child is not even theirs but was left behind by a cousin one evening who appears at the door and she’ll be right back she says I just need to leave her with you for a second, a moment, someone owes me money, you see, though she never comes back so now they have three, that’s just the way it is, three children who recoil as soon as dinner is ready and the table boarders arrive breathless from the factory, the workers, who smell like rust and inhale harshly around their bits of bread stew before it can cool then without a word push themselves back from the table and disappear back into the night like smoke and the children swear when they’re alone again in the closet that they would know them if they passed them on the street because of that unique odor, unlike the room boarders they can hear fumbling beneath the sheets in the darkness like smoke, the clergy, the theological students, in their simple robes and Hessian boots, the Army of God, out for a brisk stroll, to do some shopping, some errands, to fetch the ingredients for the night’s dinner, fetch cleaning supplies for the narthex, to secure more votive candles for the side altars, the altar rails, general Army of God things, the boys coming home from their tolerances luck onto them, theology students in full vestments, make to jostle one like it’s an accident, to immediately present one’s card and when the Catholics won’t fight, make no move to reply with cards of their own, the Corps members apologize, it’s just been a misunderstanding is all, just thought they were someone else, then follow them home, break in while they are sleeping, and pummel them in their beds, a city is sometimes being beaten up in your bed while you sleep, a city is for wondering why no one is sleeping, a city is the bruised colour of the air before a rain, days cold and imminent, days humid and hot like being packed with wet mud, like the world itself is painted on the sheer film of a bubble of soap and you’d walked right into it, into the world, and it’s pressed against you now so you can’t breathe, can’t even think to breathe, at times like these I take it back, a city is a verb but a passive one, the immovable object against the immovable object, the homeless beggars piled in the gutters, the ditches, the sewers, the faceless beggars with their faceless arms comforting one another in the faceless black, the faceless gods of the sewers, deities of the ditches, warning one another against the light, you see, we left that world behind, they say, we once lived the light but we were too fearsome, too strongsome, made the ones afraid, you see, they choose not to think about us, it’s easier for those without troubles, they say, not to think, lecturing the shadows about the light, we should destroy this fresh scrape of the sky, this hateful sun, these harsh bulbs along the strassen, along the ramparts, there’s light everywhere but never where you need it, the discarded homeless outcasts migrant workers, the migrant orphans, the pickpockets and blind beggars, crippled beggars, the beggars with addictions and with hair lips, with questionable burns, and coating long the hidden stairwells, like day-old porridge, down the beaten alleys like strips of flesh from the ceiling of the smokehouse, slathered in the darkened true and vicious corners, in their temporal and eternal ruin, each with an upward glance like a throttled dog beat about the ears, like two swimmers on the bank on a winter morning, the hand the cup extended not in hope or even false hope but habit, the eyes that creep the true and vicious corners of repetition and their necks a guilty hinge that, never fully open, let spill their dignity their fear, spill from about their faces at your feet the homeless beggar, stepped over, every homeless beggar you do not look at, every one you make to try to gain the attention they already have, is this the last dignity, is this the robbing of someone of even more dignity, there they are and you notice them and still they must work for you to acknowledge that you notice them, the homeless beggar to whom you softly whisper sorry not even loud enough for them to hear and just step over, they are just for you those words, you are sorry but for whom, step over and ignore every homeless beggar, this is my home, my country, and here we homeless beggar are expected to feel this brief guilt homeless beggar and move homeless beggar on, the city is a foul contract to step over homeless beggar, a city is failure to take notice, a city is failure to pay attention, a city is failure with walls, homeless beggar, the trains arrive and the travellers rush past the homeless beggars to the Roman antiquities, to climb the twenty-eight holy steps that Jesus climbed before he was sentenced by Pontius Pilate, not the same steps exactly but the same number, past the old Roman towers, squared towers, rounded towers, dome-capped, towers three hundred and sixty-feet tall to Heaven, to God, the miracle of a cathedral, the brick, the stone, the rounded arches, pointed arches, the barrel vaults and buttresses, decorative arcading, the curves and anti-curves, the undulations, the light, breaking on the morning, breaking through the stained glass, the light of the invading sun, the light of renewal, palaces of light, of stolen art, of antique mosaic pavements and arabesque frescoes, of gold and variegated marble, floors of polished wood like black ice, floors of jasper, floors of porphyry, floors of amethyst, floors to be avoided, floors to be walked on but only gingerly, other objects that don’t properly serve their purpose, palaces of God, the tallest, the oldest, the most indulgent churches by the river, churches in the suburbs, churches in the country, the new synagogue, cathedrals surrounded by great green lawns and poverty, windows too small while above the ceilings drip with stucco, ceilings painted blue with gold stars, ceilings with scenes of the Last Judgement, saints and martyrs, greater and lesser, scenes of the lives of great painters, on the walls, recessed into alcoves, crusaders, Luther, Melanchthon, Luther turning back the witches, Luther and a great goose, another crucified Christ or three, seventy-two columns of Tyrolean marble, more frescoes, a city is one cathedral and another and another, a city is an open airy nave beneath which lie the tombs to mad kings, tombs to military leaders, tombs to Bavarian dynasties, tombs to the vanity of Pigale, tomb to the twenty-six Servants of God, in the cellar of the church they built, in 1627, in rows upon the ground, in boxes, in coffins, intelligent, and tastefully dressed, the brickwork sewers concrete sewers, the pipes, shaped like an egg, like the face of a Byzantine Jesus, through the small iron pipes below the water line and into the river, though in Dresden-Alstadt there are fifteen days when the water is too low and so the pipe is closed, in Krefeld sixteen, in Cologne the proposed number is twenty, in Hamburg every day at flood tide when things cannot so easily be hidden, into the river and the yellow-throated cormorancy, the straps of green and lime, come beneath the streets, come through the sand and kitchen drainings, cooking oils, the fats and scraps, the sewer gasses like a wistless wraith in the path of the glowing cormorancy, the miracle of the clouds and of the reticent mountains, distant, past the handsome yet venerable bridges and flowing out the gates the Roman towers, following the (theoretical) path of the cannons, the ramparts, fortifications stood to withstand the Merovingians, hold back the Alemanni, the Huns, the Franks, to repel the Swabians, the Dutch, the Austrians, Protestant Swedes, the French, the Germans, the French, the plague, its own disenfranchised citizenry, to hold back the dreamers, to hold back temptation, past the ramparts the mountains, past the ramparts the snowy peaks, past the ramparts a reluctant half-assed autumn, a second summer, an unusual lateness of spring, a glorious burst of green leaves in the near or distant wood or so the autumn fall the mountains, arrogant, rusted against the purpled sunrise, oxidizing against the abandoned beer cellars frosted in lilacs, from the ramparts the hard-tilled fields the plough and vineyards steeps and shores and all along the jeering rocks and banks and grass and trees like humourless monks in worship, like storks, the fields like quilts by aging omas, stitch the orange peel, the nine patch, threading the ruined castles approachable only by donkey, encroaching on the private villas styled as palaces in the mountains, built by barons and brokers and never lived in with rooms of pristine French oval dining tables, rooms of blocky oaken armoires, Medieval Dutch benches, rooms of Baroque marriage chests and secretary desks, of Bavarian breakfronts, hunt cabinets, displaying the emptiness of the past, rooms of carved wooden chairs like spindles, colonial teak and mahogany, Indonesian flower patterns, carved Black Forest armchairs vanities tables, carved to look like animals stags lions, like a wolf with a jacket and a food platter and tobacco jars carved like noblemen like gnomes, like a bear with a walking stick and brandy snifter, rooms of asymmetrical coffered ceilings and Biedermeier sofas and rooms of dusty Flemish tapestries depicting the crowning of an ancient warrior, a golden statue, two priests standing on a staircase, flirting, a dog ignoring rabbits for love, a baby counting objects in a basket, a cross-eyed man at the window, vertically narrow aristocracy, Roman soldiers in various expressions of dropsy, unicorns and lions at picnic, rooms of blue and pink and nothing but cabinets, trespassing near the private villas and castles on peaks whereby a dragon was slain—by Siegfried literally then Byron’s metaphor, the miracle metaphor—the ruinous miracle of some neglected and forgotten monastery, an inn, a temple, a sunken church where, if one presses one’s ear to the ground at the appropriate time one can hear the bells from beneath the ground or somewhere else, from some direction that no longer exists, from the ramparts the river lurches, shifts and ever so slightly claims another inch of the bank, the water that sends up the sky and only some comes back and lowers, the river, flat, doesn’t come back and flows downhill past the hard fields flat and dull as a Dutch landscape, past the light and whimpering amphitheatre, the modest bathhouse cracked and dry, the timid mausoleum, the crumbling cistern of an overgrown mineral spring, of an ancient military garrison, the memory of some old fort, damaged with deliberateness and by erosion, by Protestant Swedes, the ruins of quaintly grimacing villages and Roman aspirations, of European pedigree, of the once were important, past the farmer’s drozy cattle driver burden, crossing the higher pasture and past the child of the shepherd, the swineherd, past the pristine English tourists with their sketchbooks full of hayfields and notebooks dripping with poems about the Rhine, the Isar, sterile wounds about love, free verse pastorals about the sound in the distance the knocking storks, a city is a memory, a city is sounds in the distance, a city is the early stage of a cough, a city is a persistent scratching just out of sight, a city is hobbled, a city is a lamed horse unaware of the glue of posterity, a city is the memory of a someone else’s hopes and dreams, a city is a library of the past, a city is a burying of hopes and dreams, a city is a child who has just been slapped, a city doesn’t know why, a city waits, a city aspires, a city is an anger on a low boil, the boys like black and white Sámi, like overly ornate harlequins, like inkblots against the over-worked canvas of the city, the boys, return laughing to their Corpshaus and later mount an attack on the opera house, dressed as a well-polished swineherd and his wife and a squealing wake of half-naked pledges and past the confused and underpaid ushers to the private box owned by someone’s father and calling to mind, naturally, any number of paintings by any number of people, The Swineherd by George Morland, by William Ewart Lockhart, by Allart van Everdingen, The Swineherd by David Teniers the Younger, The Swineherd by Charles Émile Jacque, The Swineherd by James Ward, its yoke like a sun-bleached pelvis, Swineherd Conversing with Another Man by Paulus Potter, The Prodigal Son by Moreau, with its pigs like seeps of oil, by Rubens, The Prodigal Son as Swineherd by Bloemart, by Matham, by Justus Sadeler, how many ideas are there in the world and is that really the point, really, is it the number of ideas or the number of ways that we look at them, The Swineherd by Alexandre Decamps, seen only from the back, The Swineherd by Paul Gauguin from 1889, previously in 1888, again in 1888, and the doors to the box throw open and the only thing you can picture is Briton Rivière and the insanity of his Miracle of the Gaderene with his sick of coarse black pigs massing over the brisk of the abyss, Rivière’s focus is less on the swineherd than on the pigs, he is obsessed with the boy’s tunic, the dog, Riviére is in love with animals, in love with the way the boy’s tunic bunches, the boy who might even be Jesus, and the expression of the dog that seems to float several millimetres off the painting’s surface like it’s been caught eating the roast and the dog that seems to be saying with that expression: are we doing this, both excited and confused: are we really doing this, right now, this is simultaneously the expression on the face of every boy who has just now for the first time been introduced to the specter of true regret, just as they burst through the doors, each face a new contortion, a drove of deathblack pigs against the latent bruise of the sky and against the cinder toffee cliffs and the fantastic bodice and bustles or silk and velvet Bavarian dirndls and the fans of chalk feathers of the stern women in the neighbouring loge and trampling the swineherd and Jesus—is it Jesus?—and screaming like men straight down and down, pressed against the sweat of the rail and spilling down and down you see, a city is what you make of it, a city is a point of view, a city is a technique, a city is like a country is like a painting is like a book, there are no borders except the ones we imagine, the ones we erect ourselves, there is always more just beyond the bend outside the frame on the next shelf and what if we could pry the frame from off your painting peer beneath it, what if we could address the wall beyond, could dig our nails beneath the gilt and oh, peer beneath it, would we find that it also just keeps on going, there are no cities just your city, they exist all in the same destroyed place, you carry them with you, like an idea, a city is an idea, like burrs from the wild, like sticky willies when you re-emerge from the dense forests of thought and in your hair and in the cuffs of your trousers, like traditions, like prejudice, a memory is an apocalypse and you carry it with you…

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Chris Eaton writes in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has published four novels, a collection of short fiction, and has released multiple recordings under the name Rock Plaza Central. He is currently working on a larger fiction in interconnected pieces that work like paintings, of which this is one painting. @rockplazacentral.bsky.social