Places
and a memoir
Today’s post includes four drawings of places, a series of drawings I’m phasing out or bringing to an end, at least temporarily, for many reasons, one being the large number of drawings I’ve churned out over the last six months or more. It’s been an intense drawing activity and I feel I need a break. I’m gathering all these drawings in the Art work section of the site with the title PLACES 2024-2025. However, if I were to exhibit the series in a physical space I would probably include some of the accompanying texts or articles I’ve posted along with the drawings for they are complementary to or interwoven with the artwork.
I’m also posting a piece about a book I’ve just finished by Lee Siegel.
PART A
“Eftychidou Street”[in Pagrati] by Chrysa Fanti
“As difficult as it is for you to grasp the signs of time on you, it is even more difficult to follow its traces backwards, and along with these traces of the people who lived in this neighborhood, to wander into familiar haunts, shops where you bought various things that you kept unused for years and others that, without a second thought, you threw away on the very same day; to list those that, from one day to the next, closed their stores without passing the baton to others, to bring them back to your memory, even though you do not know or cannot find the reason. […] Even if you are granted access, you are afraid that it will be almost impossible for you to restore the sense of routine and everyday life of its former residents, to recall the sound imprint of their speeches and quarrels that once reached your ears; their place will have been taken by rapid disintegration, the slow but sure decomposition of the concrete, the dull creaks of the cement, the half-rotten frames and the stained floors, signs of a neighborhood that in recent years has been in decline” (pages 375-376).
On historical preservation
In her 2017 article, La Salle University Threatens Germantown Landmarks, Arielle Harris writes: “Given La Salle’s demolition track record, what does survive on their campus from the late 19th century is all the more special. 2101 W. Clarkson Avenue [The Mary & Frances Wister Studio at 2101 W. Clarkson Avenue…. was unanimously approved by the Philadlephia Historical Commission for placement on the local register…….] and Little Wakefield have unique individual histories and contribute to a broader historical landscape established by prominent Quaker families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and thus are worthy of designation and protection from demolition.” You can read more at: https://hiddencityphila.org/2017/02/la-salle-threatens-germantown-landmarks/
PART B
Introduction
The Draw by Lee Siegel, a widely published critic on culture and politics, and the author of five previous books, is a memoir that covers the life of the author from childhood to around his mid-twenties. It’s a candid reflection on his life, and on class and how money or the lack of it can dismantle families and dreams. Siegel explores his New Jersey upbringing, unsparingly, baring his emotional scars and traumas. He painstakingly maps the familial legacies that shaped him with psychologically informed introspection and insight, shedding light both on the generational transmission of traumas, and the ravashes of lack of money or even worse poverty. It’s also a portrait of the writer on the make, a story of his struggle to.break through the barriers of family, class and money, in order to obtain the freedom to choose his own path in life.
It’s also refreshing that Siegel contextualizes his life story. He talks about Higher Education in America, class, money, poverty, authority and power: “I started to tremble. An encounter with power has an effect similar to a car accident. All at once, it wakes you up from the daily slumber of familiarity and routine, and it causes you to feel that you are inhabiting a dream.” He writes about a society, in which the lack of money and the struggle to obtain it can turn people’s innocent weakenesses into weapons of self-destruction. There are many threads running through this narrative, but class and money, often taboo topics, usually not centre stage in memoirs, are central here. Finally, Siegel’s memoir does not only contain a sociopolitical commentary, but also has psychological depth perhaps reflecting his own engagement with psychoanalysis / therapy, where he has explored his fear of ambition, the process of earning money, saving it and spending it wisely.
Origins
The book begins with the writer revealing his Russian Jewish origins, through his grandparents’stories. His maternal grandfather, Menka, an important figure in the writer’s life, with his younger siblings, had sailed to America, after the 1905 Odessa pogrom during which much of their family had been killed. Siegel writes about the stories he heard from his grandfather: “As he told the story of his escape into a new life, with its blatant omissions, exaggerations, and possibly wholesale fabrications, his face took on a glittering sardonic aspect, hard and grasping and touched with malice. You could not imagine that face wrinkling into tears unless you had worked out the equation between excessive feeling and paucity of empathy.” In America Menka worked at various jobs until he found a position as a bellboy at the President Hotel in Times Square, much beloved by Harlem’s artistic elite. Siegel describes how the fact that his grandfather worked, not for rich white people but for rich black people, made a lasting impression on him. His grandmother, Rose, Menka’s wife, was born in Minsk, and had emigrated to America with her parents in the 1920s. She had also lost her family. Her four older sisters with their husbands and children had remained in Minsk and had been shot in a mass grave by the SS after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
Family
Siegel believes that, above all, it was mutual vulnerability that drew his parents to each other, both reassured that the other was incapable of inflicting pain, and that he found himself between two parents with artistic talents and inspirations, an ineffectual father and a mother with violent outbursts and a rather histrionic personality.
His mother had been an aspiring actress, who after declaring to his grandfather that she wanted to be an actress and a singer received a slap and a short speech about all actresses being whores, thwarting her ambition in one instant. Siegel writes: “Menka could turn his mother from a wife and mother into a little girl. She would freeze and start to stammer.” His mother unable to reflect on her traumas passed on trauma and the ways of her ancestors.
His father, a jazz pianist and an amateur painter, gave up his career to get a job as a realtor to pay the bills. He was was a kind, decent man, who amassed a crushing debt to the real estate firm he worked for, which had been paying him an advance against future commissions. When the recession hit in the mid 70s he ran out of commissions and was unable to pay back the firm.This lead to being fired, to unemployment, problems with the law, a divorce and bankruptcy while Siegel was in college. He eventually ended up giving piano lessons and living in poverty.
About his father Siegel notes, “He possessed another superlative quality, too. He was kind. Other men, the men he had worked with in real estate, got rewarded for their coldheartedness, and often for their dishonesty, while he, Monroe Siegel, who had never hurt and would never hurt anyone, had to groan and stumble through life simply because he could not operate at a similar distance from his feelings. Did not kindness deserve an income?” Actually, the theme of kindness, appears in various parts of the book.
“Kindness,” he writes, “theoretically speaking, begets kindness. The next time you are standing behind your overloaded cart on line at the supermarket, invite the quiet, thoughtful young man waiting behind you with a bottle of Coke and a Snickers bar in his hands to go ahead of you. When he bursts into the movie theater where you are sitting with your wife and children, shooting people in their seats with a semiautomatic rifle and seven handguns, he might recognize you and allow you and your family to live. People often remember the nice things that you do. Alas, cruelty responding to cruelty is more of a certainty than the reciprocity of kindness. The push on the playground or in the bar provokes a counterpush….A slight, once embedded in someone’s mind, metastasizes into rage.”
Elsewhere, he refers to a very wealthy and very cultivated writer friend of his, who once described someone as being “almost pathologically kindhearted,” which has agitated and perplexed him. He asks us: “If a person’s kindness causes his destruction, then wouldn’t the pathology be on the other side?”
About his younger brother, Siegel tells us that they were not able to form a strong bond and console each other. His moither was responsible for this impasse because as an only child she could not conceive of sharing their love.and felt threatened by the possibility of an alliance between the siblings and at times viewed her eldest child as an adversary. He writes: “She sought our complete estrangement from each other….. He grew closer to her but at the same time managed to keep his distance. I moved in the opposite direction. For all my resentment of her, I could not bear to hear my mother suffer.”
Siegel himself was an asthmatic child, who at the age of eleven caught pneumonia. Laid up in bed for weeks or months at a time he watched television and read the armloads of books that his mother brought from the library. He found solace, joy and power, in books and intellectual reverie, his comic streak and capacity to make people laugh, and an inner voice that he invented, which would comment on painful events with detachment. Among the books that he read the long spells he spent in bed were countless books about the Holocaust. Siegel refers to this as an involuntary passion. He refers to a passage in one of the books that buried itself in his imagination, in which an SS officer distractedly mutters to a Jew he finds annoying, Why don’t you just kill yourself? The inmate shrugs his shoulders, and then hangs himself.
His attempt to escape home and pursue his inclination to write propelled him to college, Norway, and finally to Columbia University. Through a series of menial jobs and department stores, where he found work, he dreams of the sanctuary of a good university. In order to do this he takes out loans, which he cannot realistically earn enough money to repay, in some sense, unwittingly repeating his father’s trajectory. He brilliantly situates this trajectory within the socio- economic context. As he notes Charles Manson was serving time in prison, Vietnam was seared by napalm, the genocidal Khmer Rouge was coming into power, Nixon’s henchmen had broken into the Watergate Hotel, and his father was alone in a rented room…. Meanwhile, he conceived of events “as being isolated from each other by inevitable ruptures,” unable to grasp the importance of cause and effect in life, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He writes: “That was the nature of reality. All of a sudden, where you thought you had a modest stepping-stone into the future you wanted for yourself, you found yourself falling through a trapdoor.”
Money and class
Money, as I mentioned above, is a thread that runs through the whole story from the opening description of the full moon shining like an “incandescent coin” to the subsequent events and the significant role that money played in the falling apart of his family. At one point he writes: “In my horrified eyes, material worry reduced them to scrimmaging chunks of matter themselves; to things….” Concerning his grandparent’s financial status he writes: “They [his grandparents] stayed afloat because their rent was protected by the city, and by means of Menka’s modest savings,” and on Menka’s view of money: “The other side of Menka’s idea of money as something like snow, there for the taking, was his fear that once he possessed it, the money would vanish.” Later he mentions, “Like the smell from a gas leak, money began to seep its way into every aspect of their relationship.” If my mother wanted money to buy something, Menka said NO.
Siegel wonders whether money is a natural feature of human existence. and if there would be the equivalent of money in any world, in any universe, the way there must be the equivalent of oxygen anywhere there is human life or if money as the abstract of everything, is something artificial that human beings must contend with, “weary generation after weary, beleaguered, exasperated, fed-up……” He refers to the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, who wrote that “money has presented us with an abstract of everything.” He ponders on how money is the medium for the human desire to possess: territory, objects, even other human beings, and how it puts everything within reach, but also on the problem of acquiring money. As a result, he comments, “every exertion, or enervation, of intellect, will, and emotion eventually becomes an economic event.”
He consders whether his father’s self doubt and lack of confidence would have had a different outcome if money had not been the means by which they produced their effect. His father was an innocent, and he had strayed from the realm of music, where he had received and offered pleasure, and which was the world he felt comfortable in, and had found himself in a world of calculating hardness, business. He writes: “But whatever forces of character and circumstance determined my father’s relationship to money, money was the decisive factor in everything that came to pass. In a universe or a society, where money was not so gravely consequential, would his personality have destroyed his life?”
Siegel defines poverty as a type of terror, a disease that enters your metabolism and a circumstance that consumes your insides, and as one adpts to poverty, even as they are struggling to escape it, one strengthens the forces that keep one there. He poses the question: why personal qualities like wit, kindness, and intelligence that society claims to value, society has no interest in sustaining if those qualities are all a person had to offer.Siegel also discerns between lack of money, poverty and abject poverty.
I’ve provided two relevant extracts below that create clear visual images of what worrying for money or even worse, having no money looks and feels like…..
“A famous magazine cover portrays the average New Yorker’s mental map of the world as consisting of a vast foreground that is Manhattan, after which appears a small rectangle representing the country beyond, followed by the barely visible rest of the world. If you had excavated the minds of my parents and my friends’ parents, you would have found a map of the world in the form of a giant kitchen table. In the middle of its Formica surface sat an enormous pile of bills and small savings-account books with vinyl covers. The pile represented their lives in northern New Jersey. Pushed to the edge of the table, the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder stood for the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. Budgetary conclaves around the kitchen table were weekly, sometimes nightly rituals for our parents.”
“These people, sitting or lying on the sidewalk, pressed against the side of a building, also found refuge in the newspapers. They covered themselves with pages of The New York Times or the Daily News or the Post as they slept. I found it cruelly ironic that people so hurt by the cold, hard facts of life could seek protection underneath them. Perhaps they felt reduced to a cold, hard fact themselves. Or they instinctively felt that the newspaper’s rational organization of the facts would shelter them. The homeless and their rituals disturbed me.”
Finally, he addresses the issue of meritocracy and the reality of American higher education. Concerning the latter one cannot help to wonder why the richest country in the world has not been able to provide free higher education [many smaller and poorer countries have, to some extent at least, succeded in doing so]. One cannot also wonder about the high tuition fees and the prevelant reality of student loans and debt. Siegel writes that the idea of a society based on merit is inspiring, but beyond this, there is the way things actually work. He refers to community colleges for the poor, and the state schools, where the children of the middle class can also earn a college degree, but “after graduating use up the youngest, most vital part of their lives as slaves to the debt they piled onto themselves in order to go to college, unable to buy a house, start a family, or follow their talents and inclinations.They are unable, that is to say, to lay the groundwork for their own children to shift around the ladders of inherited luck that make up the beautiful idea of American meritocracy and to rise up in society themselves…….”
“By making Alexandria rather than himself the subject of the poetry, Cavafy explored the inescapable relationship of Alexandrians to their home, best summarised when he acknowledges that ‘The city will follow you’. Cavafy reminds us that comprehending a place so infused with history and myth is not a matter of either perception or conception – it is both. To Cavafy, past and present Alexandria are strikingly similar. He imagines the city through the eyes of Greek Byzantines who’ve migrated from Constantinople, halfway in time between Alexandria’s founding and his own life: ‘Always, Alexandria remains herself’, he wrote, ‘For all the harm it’s suffered in its wars, / for all that it’s diminished, still a marvelous place’. The act of imagining Alexandria’s past inspired Cavafy to understand its present.”