Habitus

by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10

In February, the city is filthy with almost-black snow. It drifts from the streets and overwhelms the sidewalks. Drainpipes pour water on the pavement that instantly turns to ice. No one lays down salt. In a few days, a half-dozen guys with shovels will show up, scraping away for hours without making any real progress. The passersby each have to find their own elusive footing; they try to keep themselves upright without making direct contact with the concrete. From the flat roofs, other men with shovels send the excess snow and ice hurtling downward without warning. The traffic moves incautiously through the intersections, spinning off more filth. Cars race forward, just to idle again in mid-block traffic.

But then, a black—always black—sedan or jeep will ride through, gleaming. There isn’t a speck of dirt or soot; even the tires are clean. This seems impossible when you look at the sputtering, gray Russian cars, or even the plentiful German and Japanese imports, none of which could make it a few feet without succumbing to grime. Somehow, though, these cars manage to stay pristine, unspoiled, unimpeded. They travel along their own privileged plane: above the pollution, the crowds, even the weather. Moscow is a place that won’t surrender or accommodate easily to fate, history, or nature. With a little luck and the right connections, anything can be made or unmade.

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by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09

New Orleans is a floating city. There isn’t much earth beneath the street before you reach water. Suspended in its basin, between the crooked embrace of the river and Lake Pontchartrain, leading out to the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is always moving and adjusting, sinking and shifting. The sidewalks and streets have been stretched mercilessly; they tilt and crack and bulge from all the changes underneath.

So many different people have laid hands on this place—empires, immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. Their imprints are still everywhere, on an unforgiving terrain that pushes back against human intervention. It’s impossible to even know what direction the city is moving in, when you try to account for all the complicated equations of past and future, culture and environment.

When Umberto Eco visited New Orleans, he saw “one of the few places that American civilization had not remade, flattened, replaced.” Where most cities are functional and orderly, New Orleans is lyrical. Just read the street signs: there’s the counterflow of Piety and Desire, parallel streets in opposite directions. Humanity intersects with both Arts and Music. Race meets Religious not far from the river. It’s a place where the imagination can float, too.

Making sense of New Orleans is a constant negotiation between time and space, expansion and limitation. History moves in its ways, the landscape shifts too, and New Orleans is their fluid sum.

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by Joshua Ellison · 02/05/08

It’s winter in Buenos Aires, one of the coldest ever. This is a port city in the southern hemisphere—low and humid—and the winds here have a raw, sudden sting. People look restless. If they are outdoors, their heads are down. Most activity has been driven inside. All the life that usually takes place on the street has been corralled into narrow spaces. Noise floods out through the openings in every border or barrier.

The city is always moving, almost compulsively, but it’s also breathlessly studying its own reflection, taking its own pulse. The very existence of the city seems to depend on the psychic exertion—urgent, anxious, and loving—of the people who live here. As if the whole metropolis might vanish if their attention flagged, even briefly. The city has to be conjured anew every day through sheer resolve.

Trying to understand Buenos Aires feels like trying to master the human heart. This is not a place that can be learned in the usual ways: it’s too fragile, too volatile, cobbled together from too many unlike parts. The journalist Jacobo Timerman writes, “Argentina…does not yet exist. It must be created.” Over the generations, Argentines have shaped the city out of desire and discomfort, and these heavy emotions seem as real as all the towers and avenues and parks.

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by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/07

In just a few hours, I had traveled the distance between Sarajevo—Europe’s Jerusalem, as it’s been called since Sephardic Jews first settled there after their expulsion from Spain—and its namesake in the heart of the Middle East.

I walked both cities’ streets in the same day—the two cities I know on the planet where churches, mosques, and synagogues seem equally at home; where almost every turn points you towards another history, another ethos, another dream. These are places where multiplicity and division seem to taunt each other, where purity and synthesis make opposing claims on the cities’ authentic nature.

The displaced Spaniards who made their home in Sarajevo saw reflections of the Jerusalem they knew only in their minds’ eye. Somehow the analogy stuck. It’s become a central part of the story that Sarajevans tell about themselves and their city. In my time there, I heard it repeated by Jews and Muslims and Christians, by both locals and foreigners.

It’s the kind of comparison I would normally resist: there should always be room in the world for a Jerusalem, but how many can we take? Still, as much as both cities have changed over the generations, you can see the commonalities. In fact, the congruence has probably only deepened over time, and in ways that no one ever expected or intended. As I spent time in Sarajevo, I found myself thinking more and more about Jerusalem.

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