Of the man of his time, the man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.

This
representative man has failed to live, in living a life of inner anguish: it wouldnt have been
failure to be bankrupt, dishonored, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. In
mourning he discovers why the seeming inner drama of his life has been no life at all. In the
cemetery where he makes regular visits to Miss Bartrams grave, he one day notices a man
wrecked with grief over another womans tomb. At first he is puzzled, and then horror-stuck.
In observating, this Woebegone man, Marcher realizes he sad seen outside of his life, not
learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself. He
had failed to love Miss Bartram apart from her connection to his secret and now in the
graveyard the beast has sprung. There was a terrible shallowness in his obsession with his
inner demons, the beast has bitten his consciousness, his knowledge that he can never regain
time delayed. The beast was Marchers waiting to live.
In one way, this is a parable simply of a modern fear. One has to wait so long to be in a
position to be ready, to know what one is doing to be strong enough to really live. But
James parable even more suggests something about the consequences of gaining control
through acting neutrally.
When no information is conveyed from the neutral exterior of difference, the eye looking
inward sees not a corresponding emptiness but rather confronts a secret. It is a secret of
time that no clock can tell, the secret of what one will become. In the neutral space of the
grid, differences are classifications and names that are static in meaning. The interior, by
contrast, is the time of process as value. Marchers entire life was such a process he treasured,
this secret he carried within that could not been seen, classified, let alone verified. In the
world of grid differences, when feelings, desires, or beliefs are stated outside, they become
subject to the threat of neutralization. The best defense against the things that one cares about
being treated neutrally is never to be too emphatic about them, too exposed.

The self thus remains in process, a process ever stranger to its own needs. The process of
intimating, reflecting, hoping and feeling becomes the search for a catharsis that never comes,
and endlessly delayed gratification. All his life Marcher kept faith with his beast, until too
much denial turned on him. And at the end, he had become a vacuous man.
In his American travel notes, Tocqueville records how much one place looked like another,
how little variation the local economy, climate and even topography seemed to matter in
constructing a town. This homogeneity in building a city Tocqueville had at first explained as
the result of unbridled commercial exploitation. In his later years he added a further
explanation, resonating to James story. The famous American individual, rather than being
an adventurer, is in reality most often a man or woman whose circle of reality is drawn no
larger than family and friends. The individual has little interest, indeed little energy, outside
that circle. The American individual is a passive person, and monotonous space is what a
society of passive individuals builds for itself. A bland environment assures people that
nothing disturbing or demanding is happening out there. You build neutrally in order to
legitimate withdrawal:
The reproach I address to the principle of equality is not that it leads men away in the persuit
of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbls them wholly in quest of those which are
allowed. By these means a kind of virtous materialism may ultimately be established in the
world, which would corrupt, but enervate, the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of
action.
And then the beast springs in emptiness things come apart.
Taking Contro as we know it in this modern form is thus really about losing contrl. The
duality is evident to the eye now in the bars of New York. There are bars eveywhere in the
city, bars devoted to heavy drinking and bars that are a mere afterthough, like the bar in the

Museum of Modern Art; there are bars in discos, bank buildings, brothels, as well as
improvised in housing projects. Spiritual struggle in its form as Protestant ethic denies the
outside a reality in itself; denies the value of being present in the world. It is therefore
disconcerting to hear presence asserted in the bars on the edge of a Harlem Project like the
one along upper Park Avenue. (There are no places to drink in public within the forest of
towers itself). It is strange because the language of sociability its so broken into fragments. I
used to think it was because i was there, but in these Park Avenue bars after a while people
forget about a stray, balding, familiar white. These are family bars, cleaning women and
janitors drinking beer; more lively places nearby are for people living on the shadows of the
underworld. The family bars next to this project seldom have an actual bar; they are just
rooms where someone has put bottles on a table. Here it is as though time has stopped; the
day hangs in dust roused by the commuter trains shuttling in and out of a tunnel next to the
buildings. The bar at night has a television turn on without sound; there is the ebb and flow of
police sirens, a fan in summer. This is the space that talk filled, but i came to understand it
was enough. The drops of sound made for a consciousness of presence, of living if barely
audible here.
By contrast a resolutely neutral bar of absence can be found in places of power for instance,
in the bar of the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue just where Central Park begins. The physical
contrast between this bar and the room up in Harlem with a table crowded with bottles is so
extreme as to be meaningless. The pierre bar with its ample tables, flowers and subdued
lights, has always conveyed a perculiar disrection people come here who need to do business
without being seen to be doing it. This is evident in little details; when people recognize
others here, they seldom table hop; at most there are brief nods of recognition. The drinks at
the Pierre are mostly for show. Two men will sit for an hour nursing the glasses in front of
them; the waiters are trained not to hover.

It is a nervous bar, with so many people paying careful attention to one another. The pierre
bar is neutral in the way a chessboard is. And yet in this power center, among these men in
their quiet, expensive clothes, sunk deep into their leather chairs, the atmosphere seems more
charged by fear than entrepreneurial zeal. The men are afraid of giving away too much.
Control is a meaningless word uptown; here it is a synoym for anxiety. If you dont pay
careful attention, things will come apart.
The visitor intent upon seeing men like Marcher in the modern city might do well, though to
avoid either extreme, the bars either of the Harlem housing project or the Pierre Hotel. The
signs of his spiritual quest are most likely to be found in certain bars in the afternoon, like the
Lions Head in Greenwich village, or the little bars at the front of French restaurants in the
1950s, after people have finished lunch. These comprise a scene of truants a scene of men
who should be back at the office but are having a drink instead, not necessarily alcoholic,
merely delaying, and of men and now also of women, who have nowhere particular to go in
the afternoon, perhaps unemployed, or engaged in the myriad of jobs in New York agenting,
publicity, graphic design that do not require the full time attention of those who arent at the
top.
The bars in which people pass their afternoon in New York are unlike Parisian Cafes, the
cafes des amis. The bartenders dont want these customers; the bowls heaped with salty, thirst
inducing nuts placed on the counters before lunch are withdrawn after it, the bartenders
themselves are less responsive to requests for drinks, even though they have more time; some
of the truants do drink untill they drop but others are more likely to want to talk and they
expect the men behind the bar, like a captive audience, to listen. In the old working class bars,
Irish in Hells Kitchen, polish on the Lower East Side, the windows blacked out and a radio
and television blaring at the same time from different stations, afternoon pass in this
desultory way, plumbers and carpenters dropping in for a shot and gossip between jobs; on

the front stools of the French restaurants, those a leisure are not at rest, their talk is tinged
with an undertow of urgency, which is perhaps why the bartenders are uncomfortable having
them there, even though people are well, often very carefully, dressed, as if this indeed were
the afternoons appointment.
The urgencies are about something important that is about to happen, a deal shaping up or a
love affair, deals that turn out to be a chance remark dropped by a prominent, distant
acquaintance and affairs that begin mentally after the first date. Or there are stories about
where people grew up, stories that come easily to the speakers because they have been
polished through use, one man occasionally interjecting a comment or exclamation to show
another he is listening, before he takes up a later point his own tale. The most curious thing
about the stories is how the tellers sit as they talk, usually directly facing the counter in front
of them, on which they lean their elbows and behind which the barman bends over his sink
polishing a glass, men talking to one another by looking at their reflections in the mirror
behind the bar.
Here was material, i first through when i entered this sea. And then, after a few years, it
was clear there was no writers material here, for these stories seldom made sense.
Something was always left out in the account of the important deal that would explain why it
might work or a womans problems would be alluded to heavily but without specifics, as a
man explained why he was alone most nights. The men in the bars lacked craft. And if
indeterminate and illogical, these stories were also curiously neutral, the speaker seldom
moved by his tale, at least audibly, the voices recounting problems with women or big deals
equably, perhaps with the poise that polished repetition does give and also perhaps, like
Marcher driven by the compulsion to tell it once more in order that, by chance the telling
might suddenly reveal the hidden meaning of the tale. In the bars there is a place and a time
for each man to recount his fragments as though they are just about to become wholes.

After listening to these year after year, however i have begun to realize that here, in the
stream of bland voices and unfocused words, as the light fades outside the front windows, we
are truly within the citys grid. These are emblematic New Yorkers, men and women whose
lives are endlessly pregnant with meaning and yet to whom, like Marcher, nothing ever
happens. Their lives are afflicted with that perculiar lack of concretness, that endless
becoming which marks the space of the city.
The cross within the circle is a perculiarly modern as well as ancient Egyptian sign. It
represents two ways in which the human subject lives walled in from the world. The circle
confines his or her experience of compassion and mutual regard within the walls authority;
the grid is a geometry of power on which inner life remains shapeless.