New York Necro # 2

There is an eerie scene near the end of the 1972 John Boorman movie Deliverance where the character played by Jon Voight peers through some weeds and witnesses a group of men exhuming coffins from a cemetery, soon to be deliberately flooded by the construction of a dam.
The fleeting vision disturbs on some inchoate and primal level. Perhaps because it is such a mock of the idea of sacrality. Perhaps because it shows that even the dead are not free from the dislocations of time.

Even as I could find no historical account of such a thing anywhere, sometime in the late 1890’s something akin to that strange scenario in Deliverance must have taken place at St Luke’s Place in the West Village. And it was precisely such a scene that allowed the metamorphosis of what was St John’s Cemetery, burial ground of Trinity Parish, into what is now James J. Walker Park. (The park is named after the notoriously corrupt if charming Jimmy Walker. Walker, a lawyer turned songwriter turned Tammany politician turned charming scoundrel, who was mayor of New York from 1925 till he was forced to resign in 1932. Walker’s family lived across the street at 6 St Luke’s Place. )

I have no idea how peopled the cemetery was – information is not easily come by and why would it be? — but I imagine there must have been quite a crowd as the land served Trinity Church from 1812 to 1895. It must have taken many men making a Herculean effort to dig them all up and move them from there to wherever it was they reburied them.
At any rate, there is but one extant memento to the park’s former existence as a graveyard: a nearly 200 year old marble sarcophagus containing the remains of two firemen who died in the line of duty in 1834, the year the monument was dedicated.

Appropriately, two small fire helmets sit atop what looks like a child’s coffin.

The monument was donated by the Eagle Fire Department, one of the several competing fire departments (a competition that provided the initial ladder for the rise of Boss Tweed) that served the city before the creation of FDNY.

One side of the marble is inscribed with these words:

HERE ARE INTERRED / THE BODIES OF / EUGENE UNDERHILL / AGED 20 YEARS 7 MONTHS AND 9 DAYS / AND FREDERICK A. WARD / AGED 22 YEARS 1 MONTH AND 16 DAYS / WHO LOST THEIR LIVES BY THE FALLING OF A BUILDING / WHILE ENGAGED / IN THE DISCHARGE OF THEIR DUTY AS / FIRE MEN / ON THE FIRST DAY OF DUTY / MDCCCXXXIV /

On another side is inscribed the following:

THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED / BY THE MEMBERS OF / EAGLE FIRE ENGINE COMPANY / NO. 13 / IN CONNECTION WITH THE FRIENDS OF THE / DECEASED / TO COMMEMORATE THE SAD EVENT / CONNECTED WITH THEIR DEATH / AND THE LOSS / WHICH THEY DEPLORE /

“And the loss which they deplore. ”

I do not think I have heard the word “deplore” used in that sense in all my life.

Necro New York

In the twelve or so years I’ve lived downtown I must have walked by the gated New York City Marble Cemetery, sandwiched unexpectedly on 2nd Street between First and Second Ave, more times than I can tell. I can tell the first time, however, as it was introduced to me by the woman who was to become my wife, who also pointed out that one of its celebrated dead had the unfortunate fate of receiving the name “Preserved Fish.”
Since that day, many is the time that in passing I would stop to take in the cemetery and maybe try to read the passages on one of the monuments closest to the street. The place never failed to move me in some small way, either as a kind of memento mori (“remember that you will die” ) or by its haunting Edgar Allen Poe-ish beauty, especially during a fall twilight or at dawn. But other than harboring the remains of Mr. Preserved Fish, I didn’t know the first thing about the place.

What I did know was that those who covet Manhattan real estate, possibly the most valuable on planet Earth, have time for neither tears nor the dead nor hallowed ground. To such folk there is but one thing on this earth that is sacred. This was made shockingly clear with the accidental discovery of what is now called the African Burial Ground during the construction of the Federal Building downtown in 1991 which led to the rediscovery ( begging the question of how such a place of such size and import can be forgotten in the first place) of what was the central cemetery for New York’s African Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries. The cemetery stretched from what is now Duane Street all the way to Worth Street, which is something to consider in terms of what you’re walking on the next time you are strolling through Foley Square. Also something to consider the next time you’re hanging in Washington Square Park which was once both a hanging ground and a Potter’s Field: a kind of one stop shopping for the criminal and the destitute.

None of the above was on my mind this morning when I went out for a stroll with my daughter and I was happily surprised (and surprised that it made me happy) not only to find the gates of The New York City Marble Cemetery wide open and non-mourning looking people ambling about but lawn chairs strewn hither and thither for those who wished to take a long look.

That was me. I took my time — the silence of the place invited me to – and read the names and dates of just about every monument I could. There are some interesting souls in there, among them John Lloyd Stephens, the “founder of Mayan archeology,” who published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and the Yucatan in 1849. What was left James Monroe was also in there for a time until the state of Virginia removed his remains and reburied them in Richmond, a job I am happy to have had nothing to do with.

It is a strange but not unpleasant sensation to walk among the silent dead in the middle of such a crazed city and it certainly helps put things in perspective.

New York Sublime

St John the Divine Cathedral above the maple trees and ball field of Morningside Park in Harlem.

Ginsberg’s Spirit Alive and Well in Tompkins Square

Allen Ginsberg

The indomitable spirit of Allen Ginsberg was felt this evening in Tompkins Square where a host of poets took turns reading lines from Ginsberg’s transcendent Howl to kick off the first day of the three day Howl Festival. The reading of Howl was preceded by readings of original poems by many of the same poets, including Eliot Katz.

Reading Howl

It felt good to hear poetry sung out in the park with abandon. It felt very good to once again take in a bit of the the brilliant defiance and imagination of Allen Ginsberg.

Information on the festival can be found at http://www.howlfestival.com/

Visiting Dorothy

Visiting Dorothy

And so on Memorial Day Weekend I went to visit my Ma and together with my wife and child went to visit the grave of Dorothy Day, the astoundingly bold and beautiful co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. My mother, a devout Catholic who raised and fed eleven children largely on her own after my father’s untimely death at age 52, has a soft spot for Day as well as a similar sensibility.
Dorothy Day raised one child but fed untold thousands of men and women whom she perceived as nothing less than children of God, but not before she spent years as a hard drinking journalist of a decidedly anarchistic bent. Day was the acting editor of The Masses when it was shut down by the U. S. government and she was arrested for picketing Woodrow Wilson’s White House for women’s suffrage. Day was also known for hanging out with the likes of Eugene O’ Neill and Kenneth Burke, both of whom it is said, she could drink under the table.

Quite a feat, given the thirsts of such crazed Irishmen. But that was nothing to what she would do in years to come.

While she was still young, Dorothy underwent a crisis of meaning, brought forth, in part, by her experience of having an abortion. This crisis resulted in her conversion to the Catholic Church, hands down the most historically repressive of all Christian denominations and at the same time the church with the richest intellectual and cultural legacy. In short, a complicated institution to say the least. Some of Dorothy’s friends were lopsided with shock at her conversion, some considering her mad.

Mad she was and mad she remains in the context of the culture of what William Blake called “Selfhood” in which she was raised and which rages on in ever greater ferocity and diabolical intensity in our own time, when in 1932 she met the enigmatic Peter Maurin. Together they embarked on a project based on the Sermon on the Mount which was both very simple and very radical: to build a “ society in which it will be easier to be good.” Five months later, at a May Day rally in Union Square, the first Catholic Worker newspaper was sold. The price of the paper in May of 1932 was one penny. Catholic Workers were selling copies of the paper this May Day in Union Square. The price of the paper in May of 2013 remains one penny.

You figure it out.

Around the same time Dorothy opened the first Catholic Worker hospitality house in which anyone who showed up was fed, no questions asked. There are now over one hundred spread out in cites all over America. God only knows how many thousands and thousands of despised and desperate souls were fed by Dorothy and those who came after her.

Moreover, there is but one rule: To proselytize was and remains forbidden.

This work of the Catholic Workers is strangely taxing. The people who come to eat are sometimes crazed and often filthy. They are the Unwanted. The Weak. The Failed. They embody the most damning of all American insults: they are the Losers. Their mere presence calls all kinds of metaphysical and theological questions into mind. One must have iron faith. One must have limitless compassion. One must make your breathing and believing one or you may well run out the door in horror.

Dorothy did this work for almost 50 years, on top of her non-stop political activism, until her death in 1980. Her work continues all over America, all over the America demented by greed and the need for power over others, debased by degenerate forms of religion preying on the weak and keeping them so, degraded by a culture where “all that is sacred has become profane. ”
Almost.

Some time ago I was speaking with the writer Jim Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable and The Non-Violent Cross, who runs a Catholic Worker hospitably house with his wife Shelly in Birmingham, Alabama, when he said something about Day that startled me. I did not know that Jim had actually known Dorothy and when I realized he did I asked him what she was like. Jim paused for what felt like a long time and at last he said simply, “ Dorothy was a lover.”
I was shocked and asked him what on earth he meant by that. Jim went on to say that when you are in love with someone, you see only the good in that person, only the potential in that person. That, said Jim Douglass, was how Dorothy Day saw the world.
I think of those words from time to time or rather they swim into my consciousness to haunt or invite or inspire depending on my mood and my strength at the time of their always unexpected arrival. They bespeak of a spiritual state I can only call sublime. They describe a spiritual power of which I am in awe.

Dorothy Day was a Catholic anarchist. Such a thing is an absurdity, something that should not logically exist. But then so is the sun. And so is the soil. And so a song. And so a frog. And so you. And so I. And so all.

But here we are.