A moving subway is probably not a good place for attentive reading, especially when reading an essay like Rachel Cohen’s “Lost Cities.” The moment I began to read the essay, I was shuttling between west 4th and Roosevelt Ave., under the ground of this cosmopolis. I was considerably distracted by the trembling train and the moving passengers. I tried to focus, but the essay didn’t seem to be attracting until I reached the subtitle “cities.” “Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss” (Cohen 43). Ah, that’s it! That is the feeling that I always have but can never articulate. Satisfied, I raised my head. The train stopped at a station that I cannot recall. Strangers stood up, completed our only encounter in life, and moved out of the closing door.
Rachel Cohen must have been sensitive to all these fragments of life. In her essay, she develops a unique view on cities, and more importantly, lives in cities, based on these fragments and her readings on Fernando Pessoa and Constantine Cavafy.
Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet who claimed to live in two cities simultaneously, lived a life of an office clerk in Lisbon and at the same time explored his imaginary city through his “heteronyms,” or fictional characters who lived in Pessoa’s imagination (Cohen, 46). Constantine Cavafy, a Greek translator in Alexandria, was a poet with similar interests. He wrote about love, art, and history so intensely that he couldn’t differentiate the reality from his imagination (Cohen 39). Allowing his illusion to interrupt his office work, Cavafy traveled constantly between reality and his fantasy to seek moment of inspiration and freedom of writing.
Like poet-clerks Fernando Pessoa and Constantine Cavafy, “You, too, resist certain aspects of the city. You wonder if the city in which you live is not the right city for you. Some other city might be less oppressive, freer” (Cohen, 46). You attempt to escape the mundaneness but end up realizing that there is not a better place to go to, correct? If it is true, Cohen has some advice for you: life is meant to be mundane, so are cities. However, you can better them through imagination, perhaps the exaggeration of the positives and the neglect of the negatives. Once that is done, the life and the city become something of your own, something that others cannot share.
But how do we seek relief from the mundaneness of life in the cities?
“In the evening, he [Pessoa] walks the streets of Lisbon and returns home to write perfect crystalline meditations on depression, insomnia, nostalgia, memory, the city’s geography, anonymity, and mortality…In the evening, walking the streets of Alexandria or sitting at his desk working by lamplight, he [Cavafy] makes his escape into love, art, history, and memory” (Cohen, 39). Everybody has his or her own way of relaxing; it could be writing, it could be dreaming, it could be walking, or it could be a combination of all. How do you seek relief from the mundaneness?
I dream. In my dreams, I have lived in a small coastal town in Wales where the sea groans every night, visited the southern tip of Spain where the waters of Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea join to separate me from the continent of Africa. I have walked on the green of Ireland, ridden a horse on the Mongolian grassland, and sailed to an undiscovered Norwegian island. These imaginary experiences please me. Cohen is right; “dreams were richer if the fussy details of quotidian life were not intermingled” (40). Pessoa and Cavafy dreamed a lot, too. In their dreams, they were able to set aside their tedious clerical work and find delight in life. Perhaps they didn’t want to lose their thoughts; perhaps they claimed greater joy in their writing; perhaps they wanted to be memorialized; they put their wonderings into poems. Out of those writings, Rachel Cohen studied the ones on Lisbon and Alexandria carefully with the intent to support her own view of life in relation to cities.
Cities, as presented by Cohen, are personal and cannot be universally defined. Cohen states “You see everything with the same dreamy eyes,” including your city (45). However mundane your city is, you are always able to find joy in it with your “dreamy eyes.” Undoubtedly, Cohen has a pair of “dreamy eyes” that serves her well in a city so indifferent, in a life so mundane. She pays attention to trivialities, modifies them in her imagination, and makes them beautiful elements in city, in life. She explores the softer spaces in her city: “the parks at sunset, the river or the bay, a moment of sensuality, the vulnerability of certain passerby” (Cohen 44). Cohen believes that we should seek beauty and comfort actively, even if it means to daydream, to alter reality.
Pessoa and Cavafy were daydreamers. They dreamed of glory and immortality of their works, and then they came back to reality to write about their dreams. “They were their own clerks, taking down the words of their inspired dreams, living a memorial to themselves” (Cohen 43). They translated, too, possibly to immerse themselves in a sub-reality where a different language was spoken. Translation enabled them to expand their own language “under the influence of another’s language” and to be “carried away by two languages together” (Cohen 42). The two languages, resembling reality and fantasy, served as a medium of imagination for Cavafy and Pessoa. While translating one language into another, they completed a round-way trip from reality to fantasy. They weren’t totally free, though; just as their translation was bounded by the original, their imagination was restrained by the physical reality. They always had to return to their work, to their office, to their city.
This duality in the poets’ life must have inspired Cohen. She divides her essay into two sections, “Clerks” and “Cities”. While “Clerks” brings the readers into the world of Pessoa and Cavafy by introducing them and their imaginary world, “Cities” pulls the readers back to the reality by describing her own encounters in the city and how they remind her of Cavafy and Pessoa.
More than often, Cavafy and Pessoa wrote about cities, the cities that they lived in as well as the cities that they dreamed of. At some point, they intermingled, reality and fantasy. In their writings are imageries of the cities enhanced by their imagination. As a result, we, as readers, are often drawn into the beauty that the writers depicted. However, when we do visit, we get disappointed. The places we have read or heard about simply do not exist; they are the products of their poets’ combining of reality and imagination. Or perhaps they do exist, in a contemporary and mundane way that is seen in every other city. So we return to our own cities, cities we resist but accommodate with, and we are comforted (Cohen, 47). We are comforted by, paradoxically, our familiarity with the city, our daily routine, and our weary but reassuring work.
We, like the poets, share our emotions and personalities with our city, a city possibly visited, or lived, but never discovered by others. We personalize the city with our sentiments and memories and decorate it with unrealistic romanticism that cannot be felt by others. By doing so, we release ourselves from the mundaneness of life, temporarily.
Permanent escape from reality is simply not possible. As portrayed by Cohen, we live in a circle of “acceptance and resistance” (47). We come to a city, resist it, attempt to escape it, leave it, and then return to it. The reality is, no matter where we are, our life is always accompanied by mundaneness and stress. The only relief seems to be the moment of fantasy, the moment that we immerse ourselves in the world of imagination, of perfection. Although the idea is somehow wistful, it helps us to better adopt ourselves to reality. After all, we cannot function without resting ourselves, mentally.
Cohen seems to master the art of daydreaming. She has an in-depth understanding of the nature of daydreaming and she analyzes the mindset of the daydreamers so well that I can’t help but to suspect that Cohen daydreams herself. It is very possible that she has lived the lives of Pessoa and Cavafy as well as those of their readers’ in her imagination and is inspired by these experiences.
Like Pessoa and Cavafy, Cohen writes to record her thoughts as well as those fragments of her life in the city. During the process of writing, she looses her imagination and alters her memory a little bit just to please herself. After years, who will remember the true details?
I fabricate my own memory, too. According to Cohen, memory is made up of “small fragments of loss.” And it is the “small fragments of loss” that enables my imagination to fill in the blank. As a result, I prefer words over pictures. Pictures are, to me, too real; they provide no space for imagination.
You and I and Pessoa and Cavafy and Cohen, we all fear, or feared the monotony of life in city. It is the observation of pleasant glimpses alone with imaginations that free us from the moment of the day. Gradually, our artificially enhanced cities become something private, something that others cannot share.
At some point in history, the poets died, alone with the city that they had personalized. And not a single pair of “dreamy eyes” has been able to see the same city ever since. “The city of the poet lies buried beneath its stones or is hidden behind its walls” (Cohen, 47). We, too, will one day be gone, and our cities will become what the essay is all about – “lost cities”…
Trembling back to the reality, my train stopped at Roosevelt Avenue. I stood up, moved out of the door, and watched as the train disappeared in the dark. I saw it, the track of mundaneness and the train of imagination, each resisting but depending on one another. We get on the train of imagination hoping to escape the mundaneness of life. But without a track, is the train still a train?
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