Witness
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Revision. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
For some time I’ve watched a row of buildings visible from the back of my apartment first burn spectacularly (in a five-alarm fire, with more than 200 first responders on the scene, all of the tenants escaping), then sit derelict for months, then get demolished, then be rebuilt without apparent deviation from the originals. Last week, construction workers came to dismantle a portion of the weirdest one, which had already been rebuilt once, and now they’re rebuilding it again. Somewhere in the middle of all this, another house two doors down from the four that were already destroyed also caught fire (in a cautionary tale about plugging your air-conditioner into an extension cord) and was rendered, along with its neighbor, uninhabitable: cumulatively, a 100 percent hit rate on that side of Montrose Avenue. (Only in studying up for this post did I read that a 99-year-old woman was rescued from the second fire by her grandson, who didn’t live there but just happened to be across the street in the bodega.) This instance of witnessing is multisensory: The smell of burning has wisped through the neighborhood air, on and off, for two years.
Sometimes neighborly witnessing is unintentional. The construction workers on all those fire-scarred houses have had at best an oblique and distant view into my kitchen, but just out from my bedroom is a rooftop equipped with what looks like the installation that a government in a ‘90s thriller would set up to study a UFO crash. (It’s actually cellphone towers.) You never know when someone will be out there, doing maintenance or monitoring alien vital signs; and as soon as it seems like no one ever goes up there anymore, they do. Being that sometimes in my bedroom I am not fully clothed, the whole situation is a case study in performative ignoring. One day, I looked out the window to see if anything was going on over there and noticed that the shorter building next to it just … didn’t have a roof anymore. You could see right into the empty third-floor apartment. I guess they were engaged in the favored local pastime of rebuilding, because a day or two later the roof was back.
But the richest source of data about what’s going on around here is sound: the sound of the subway announcements filtering up through the sidewalk grates (which you hear only very rarely unless there’s a blizzard or an early pandemic); the sound of the cement trucks rumbling away from the cement factory at 5 a.m.; the sound of people on the street threatening each other with dishonorable deaths. For many years most of the windows in my apartment didn’t close properly, and the soundtrack back then was louder and more intrusive. But even with all the panes sealed up and the frames clicked into place, you can see whole epics playing out in the twitching of the ears of my cats, who—having been outside only on the way to or from the vet—have no context for the rumbles and thuds. They’re haunted by occupants of a realm they can hear and feel, literally in its vibrations, but never see or touch.
The cats come into a more immediate and exquisite act of witnessing when the pigeons rest on the fire escape, two panes of glass past claw range. Pigeons see everything. This helps make them the opposite of cats: They appreciate, courtesy of a view in through every kitchen window and not just out through a single one, that they are not the center of the universe. And yet even in the seat of their solipsistic illusion the cats try desperately to connect. They would prefer that this take the form of murder, but sometimes they’ll warble in pigeonlike tones, pleading to know what they’d see if they too could fly. The pigeons shuffle nervously and stare through their soulless beads and offer nothing, because relating to the enemy requires imagination, and their all-encompassing gaze has left no room for that.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.