Semaphore: Codings

Among my old notebooks I find one labeled “CAPITAL—notebook #2.” It’s a notebook I kept during my first year in New York, which was most likely 1976, though I’ve lied about dates for so long in an effort to keep my age—or rather my “generational identity”—ambiguous; I don’t really remember. The poet Fanny Howe remarked that as she gets older, the illusion she’s happiest to shed is the importance of being accepted by members of her generation. Who, I asked Fanny, did she consider her generation? The poet John Wieners sprang to mind. In his magnificence, his dispossessed Boston Brahmin’s stately clairvoyance, I’ve always considered him to be her closest peer. “No,” Fanny said. He was several years older. And then she named several names, New York names, names of poets whose work seems to me of no more than contextual interest.

I was born in New York in the mid-1950s and have never once felt any affinity to what could be described as “my generation.” Too young to participate in the events of the 60s, too old to convincingly mimic the ontological amnesia of those growing up two decades later, those of us born in the US during those years have left no trace, as a group, on the culture.  

In 2008, Nikolas Gambaroff produced a series of paintings titled 8864 3362 2250 Z1 CDGRT, referencing Stanislaw Ulam’s innovative streamlining of statistical sampling techniques through the use of early electronic code that has come to be known as the Monte Carlo Method. Best known for his work on the hydrogen bomb, Ulam conceived these ideas in bed, playing Solitaire, during a lingering illness. It was 1946. Fast computers were already in use among scientists and military researchers and strategists. The method was further developed within the RAND Corporation, a technology and policy think tank formed in the late 1940s to provide research and analysis to the American military. The acronym stands for “R[esearch] AND D[evelopment].” RAND/random. Gambaroff’s paintings are rectangular blocks of color and pattern: webs, bars, the movement in paint in some of the frames obscured beneath washes of color. Black, azure, chloroform gray and sienna. I find them accomplished and visually pleasing. On the day of the opening, the paintings were taken down from the wall by the artist and his friend and collaborator Ei Arakawa and, reborn as integers or early internet message-blocks, physically moved around in the gallery. Photos were taken throughout this activity, and these would become part of the exhibition. In one of these photos, a man lies on the floor beneath seven large canvases, buried except for the soles of his shoes and lower pant legs. 

The notes in my Capital notebook came from a series of classes I took at the School for Marxist Education with its founder-director, Arthur Felderbaum. Newly arrived from New Zealand, where my parents had emigrated, I was a Marxist—i.e., I still saw the world in terms of causalities. Tuition was free, I wanted to meet other people, and everyone knows you’re not a real Marxist until you’ve read Capital. The School occupied several rooms on the third floor of a building in Sheridan Square in the West Village. Amiri Baraka, Franz Fanon and other political theorists taught workshops there, but the core of the curriculum was a close reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Patiently, night after night, Arthur explained the mechanics of dialectical materialism to a handful of people sitting on folding chairs in front of a chalkboard. A barrel-chested man in his 40s, Arthur taught Marx with fervor and discipline. Classes took place in the evenings, in deference to the School’s presumably working-class students, although only a few of our cohort held actual jobs. I sold counterfeit subway slugs in the park. Others were on unemployment, or collecting SSI disability benefits. 

Arthur despised capitalism with the most luminous, and at heart utterly reasonable, form of hatred. He was a born raconteur. Dressed like a math teacher in button-down shirts and plastic pocket protectors, he sometimes digressed from the complex equations of quantitative determination of relative value he wrote on the blackboard (“Isn’t this blindingly clear?”) to tell stories of real-life repression that were no more or less than the logical extension of laws set forth in Capital. He’d just come back from New Jersey, demonstrating against the arrest of Assata Shakur, a Black Panther educator being held without bail in the Clinton County Correctional Facility for Women for a murder she did not—could not have—committed. Assata, a frail woman in her mid-20s with a Hunter College BA, had, like Arthur himself, grown up in the Bronx, and he recounted the beatings inflicted on her while chained to a hospital bed as if they were family. “And all of this is taking place in broad daylight, in Clinton, a town which—you would not believe, is all roses and white picket fences—a scene straight out of Leave It to Beaver” (Years later, after Assata’s daring escape, I’d make a pilgrimage to Clinton, a place that had become more vivid to me than places I’d lived, thanks to Arthur’s description.)

Like all the most scorching hatreds, Arthur’s was driven by love. It was his belief that anyone has the capacity to understand and transform the world. All the keys to understanding society are held by its means of production, he argued nightly. Labor, i.e., time, once congealed in commodities, becomes abstracted through laws of exchange. “C+V+S = - C+V = S,” Arthur said, and I wrote. He never moved on from even the most difficult point until he was sure even the slowest among us had grasped it. He was a good man, a simple heart. As a young woman alone in the city, I was a palimpsest, a waiting receptacle for the ravings and diatribes of those I encountered. At that time the idea of goodness moved me to tears; I held it tight in my chest like the promise of some kind of salvation.

Arthur’s school attracted a disproportionate number of schizophrenics and perhaps this isn’t surprising, since schizophrenics are so intensely engaged with the intricate workings of systems.  

GOOD PUSSY YOUR MONEY

The American poet Hannah Weiner wrote in 1974 in her Clairvoyant Journal. She was living on Sullivan Street in New York City and seeing words on her forehead, in the air and on the foreheads of others. These were the words she wrote down and she welcomed them. “I’d much rather write what I see than what I think,” she remarked once.  

Go to country tomorrow.  If I stay home, will K call?  Bubble on

call.  Bubble on stay.  STAY HOME on gate.  See COUNTRY on

radiator.  (I see the words as I’ve written them in the 

notebook.)  See radiator on bed, phone on radiator handle,

handle on gate.  —Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journal

Patrick Durgin, Weiner’s foremost interpreter, has called her the inventor of “avant-garde journalism.”