Imperial Capital

Written in transit/so many places/last Sunday to this evening:

4 mins to train arrival, I skid 1 stop to Gallery Place/Chinatown, and I will for one thing kill time at the National Gallery of Art, fancy putting it that way, while parallel Smoot politicks somewhere within a radius of the station where I wait now for 3 mins more. What Is Metro Center? Suggestive for one thing, like Berlin's vanished Anhalter and Görlitzer Bahnhofs- their names remain stops on a U-bahn line. One stretch of Anhalter Bahnhof's wall still stands. In the vicinity are pieces of the Wall and the site of Gestapo headquarters. Metro Center is an illusion leaning on its name.

Across the aisle, -1 mins (I am on the train) a newspaper has a Popemobile burning beside St. Peter's colonnade. I jumped the wrong train. Reversing this, it was mechanically smooth from one portal to the other. JMW Turner at the Nat, pop, I skip, or my heart skipped, or at least I said I'll go there(!) when I discovered it last night. I must get off-

Now I learn I'll have to miss it. The cyclopean doors will open with a certain adverb, as long as it's pronounced it works, and cyclopes may enter at 11am. But that's when I have to meet Smoot again at Metro Center, which actually lies beneath this same city: cyclopes above and humans below. Getting here I crossed the grand boulevard of the imperial capital at Ninth Street, but otherwise the streets go unwalked, mostly. We have a few timorous fathers pointing out these intricate grandeurs with casual or unobtrusive gestures- submissive gestures, but it's unfair to presume. Presumably: this is how sons learn to feel safe among their fathers. The same passive cautions that keep walkers from promenading up and down these sidewalks may one day become manifest to these kids, all grown up, as they come to regret believing their fathers were heroes.

Again, it's rude to assume, but if I had to I'd say gryphons, eagles, cyclopes, torchbearers, Ladies Liberty and the rest of the company of heaven take Sundays at home, behind closed doors. Why? But they're not here. Maybe they mean to take that prescribed day of rest for health, or for giving praise where it's due. Also, it bears considering that for intensely ethical creatures such as these, being seen casually and continually, unnecessarily and without pause, is bad form.

A few delirious times in the past weeks I've gotten the impression I was witnessing America as such, unglazed. Walt Whitman's exuberant walker and watcher witnessed the same, among other things. He says the people want to keep him, but they must also forget him after he's demurred. Definition of passing into that state involves one's own severe dimunition until all one has left is the capability to notice and to strike out in instantaneous reaction. This reaction tastes acute and universal at the same time; surely it feels like a poet does before pen hits paper. This fortunate guy sees and is not seen. Actually, he or she may not cast a shadow- what's left of a body acts like a prism and may cast a light spot instead. Not mine, but I have no shadow- DC here, the sky's gray enough that shadows get lost, and riding through Green Springs on my bike- the last time this happened- I rode too fast for my shadow to catch me.

Permit me, glib reader, to interrupt this sensitive passage and mention that now I'm sitting on the shoulder of a side service traffic conduit in lesser hell, Tysons Corner or Reston or another, because the car's acting up. We fluttered to helplessness caught in a tollbooth and searching for coins to make the toll. It won't start, the obvious answer is out of gas, but it has a one-track mind. It flashes ENGINE messages at me- we're both panicking slightly, though I think I'm calmer than the car, and I suspect a deeper issue. Also this is fucking peachy, really- now is Sunday afternoon and I have to get back to Ch.ville this evening. I feel precise and immanent, but am exhausted and expect to crash soon- let's not say that in the car. Or (in the case of Opposite Day) maybe mentioning it will ward It off. NoVa threatens and people pass me drab, fast and systematic. I fear these people will not redeem or forgive. When we couldn't conjure up enough to make the toll, chump behind the window only lifted a finger to give us a pre-addressed envelope and direct us to drop a quarter in and send it to the Department of Transportation.

You notice they've taken to naming edifices and institutions after nobody at all. At first I presume it's so nobody takes offense: it's worth remembering, say those naming, that those worth remembering also did people wrong. In Winchester, our oldest public schools remembered Judge John Handley and Colonel James Wood. For Handley so loved this apple-pickin' town that he forked his riches over to the municipality- but he lived to his dying day in Scranton- to endow the library and high school. And paused here finally to dirtnap among the casks of other civic legends: C. Rouss who gave his name to Town Hall and the fire station on Boscawen Street, a mausoleum full of Robinsons, unknown Confederate soldiers, and a host of others congregate around the Judge, who sleeps under his own baldacchino. James Wood incorporated Winchester and named it himself after the ancient English capital that he left behind. They call their baseball and football teams the Colonels. Most likely and most often, those involved forget that there is allusive value to these names.

Why does nothing remember Admiral Byrd or Patsy Cline, though they grew up among us and went on to the South Pole or the charts? Having nurtured heroes and talents among ourselves, are we now ashamed of them? Are their accomplishments too precise?

I guess Admiral Byrd smells a little like colonialism, or of privilege- he has senators for brothers and uncles, and Confederate officers for cousins. We do have an unfortunate and relatively new bronze welcoming you to the city and county headquarters. The Admiral shores up his position; his interaction with the wolfling at his side proves him a friend to animals, in addition to an intrepid explorer. Patsy? She lives on the radio.

New high schools get names like, I don't know, Mountain Brook, Spring Valley, Forest View. In NoVa whole towns are named by picturesque lottery. NoVa will catch Winchester soon by a limb, too. Impugn these names for their generic quality. We do have valleys and seasons, something like mountains, we can see, our forests bristle with youngish trees, but these names do refer in vaguest terms to landscapes that can be constructed- though if you do imagine a mountain brook, it probably carves its way through a landscape devoid of persons. Suggested is prehistory and, in a way, a time more legendary than the year James Wood planted his flag and zoned Frederick Towne. Possibilities proliferate and are available to anyone who speaks English, though they ignore the traditions of the interval and its arthritic bluebloods- but new Americans, or even new-to-the-area folks know nothing of veterans' heroes and may prefer, frankly, to look forward. Those who toss out names may be lazy, or they may choose to suggest subtly and still give everyone the chance to imagine history into these places. One could argue it's a shallow history-

The District of Columbia, the imperial capital, was built on a swamp- also shallow footing. Grander among its edifices are elaborated to a T, and allusions of form urge you assume a wisdom accompanies them. The disappeared architects, desaparecidos, left their stones incised with a litany of messages in Roman majuscules: the most communicative of architectural details, or the most structural among axioms? Universally it's suggested you bend your human gaze upward and smile, because a great metaphysics is at work and the District is proof. Columns pose in military file, and their retinue of details all recall Rome, if not Greece- acanthus fronds swallow their capitals, each column has a pedestal to keep it out of the dust, and they opt for opulence- they couldn't leave well enough alone- and stud their surfaces with roundels. You are meant to recall that the Romans, riding the Greeks' coattails, also harnessed a metaphysics into the service of unparallelled empire.

Formal allusions to the architecture of a dead empire aren't meant to suggest age- nothing in the District rusts, all is maintained. The federal capital exudes a paradoxical air of vitality and restraint, of gravitas, and the trust that comes with it. I had no choice but to imagine, standing on Pennsylvania Avenue and seeing it all surreally new, that humans had no hand in building it. The federal city insists that you will know it as an eventuality and a necessity. It asserts that given all possible chances and sources, the city could exist no other way, just as it asserts that America itself was inevitable. In this light, we humans are fortunate to participate.

When I read Whitman and he can't even begin to stop praising what goes on here, I think a hundred and fifty years on, these hymns grow tired. It's more interesting to ignore Washington's boasts that it could never be, act or seem otherwise. Wander walker so untouched by preconception you lose your English, you might think- crossing a boulevard with no persons and many cars, and what we know is the National Archives squatting on the other side with too many uncertainties shooting around its attic- I want before anything else to imagine them alive- so you pass through their respiratory arches, they rest gingerly on the ground. At the other extreme I wonder how this city would feel destroyed- proven entirely wrong if, to prevail in its righteousness, it must persist forever.

DC, destroyed: I'll imagine it on a dim November afternoon; of course the streets still go unwalked and motionless, except for the wind carrying paper to the Capitol. The wind will run down the flanks of these buildings and make each sing a tone, according to a circumspect planner's dream. It's never the same for the number of players and each has its scale: the Washington Monument keeps the time like a metronome. Below it the Reflecting Pool amplifies the Lincoln Memorial's fluted middling, and wind around the Capitol's tholos builds into a baseline that pervades the earth for miles, and other pursuits must be rendered secondary. Blair House synthesizes a high, fast treble; the tympanum of the Jefferson Memorial oscillates wildly, and the sun striking the statue draws out the piercing song of the sunlight. The multitude of pieces, and the complexity of parts in each, ensures a different song every moment. There may be discord. As the buildings lose stones and the city becomes more and more a ruin, it's big enough, it's hard enough and tough enough, it won't stop whistling for a while now