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 Olga Zondberg · 01/21/10

[This is the shortest day of the year in our neck of the woods.]

The divergence of animals, said Khlebnikov
is the result of their ability
to see God in many different ways.

If the Universe, said Hawking
was different, we still
would not notice.

From Chanel to Escape (remembered
one pretty fashion magazine)
in every year death has a different scent.

There are these people, writers
who have everything written down
the tics and the tacs
in place of numerical facsimiles

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by Yuri Slezkine · 01/21/10

I became Soviet in 1963 when the USSR beat Czechoslovakia in the World Hockey Championship on an empty-net goal by Leonid Volkov. I became Russian around the same time and for the same reason. I became exuberantly Soviet in 1964 when I joined the Octobrist (Lenin’s Grandchildren’s) League, and then again briefly in 1966 when I was admitted to the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”

I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.

I was officially classified as Russian in 1972 when I received my internal passport (on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday). I was temporarily reclassified as Soviet in 1978 when I received my external passport (on the day I was hired by the Ministry of the Merchant Marine).

I became Swedish for a day and a half in 1978 when I borrowed the identification papers of one Gunnar Gunnarsson (place of birth Göteborg, permanent residence Boda) for the purpose of surviving a visit to the rebel-held part of Sofala Province in the People’s Republic of Mozambique.

I became a published author in 1981 when Progress Publishers printed my Portuguese translation of L.M. Maksudov’s Ideological Struggle at the Present Stage. My attempt to translate a manual on mechanical engineering for Peace Publishers was aborted due to my unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I became Iouri Slezkine in 1981 when the Department of Visas and Permission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR received special permission to transliterate my name into French. I was dismissed from the All-Union Union of Communist-Leninist Youth and from the Soviet Army reserve.

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by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08

From the roof that I had before Katrina, I have only one slate left.

It’s a jagged grey oblong, about the size of my head, thin and sharp at the edges. It flakes easily; after a hundred years, this old slate has lost most of its integrity. It’s a slate that’s been written upon: a history of wind and sun and rain. It protected me and my family, and the families before us who lived here. It was a roof over our heads.

There was a time when I had piles and piles of these slates. I was a mad collector in the months after Katrina and stacked them around my porch and in the crawlspace underneath my house. Every time I heard the shovels scraping a roof in the neighborhood, I ran over to see if I could get the Mexican guys to save some slates for me. It was always Mexican guys working on roofs in New Orleans after Katrina, which is a sad fact that people make into politics: the old Creole craftsmen who built this city by hand and pride hardly exist any more, the men who passed on specific knowledge of the wood and stone and plaster. The Mexicans came in to do the roofs, and they worked quickly and just slid the slates off the roof with shovels. As the slates cascaded to the dumpster below in a cloud of gray dust and fracture, you could feel your heart breaking with it, and the sound when they hit was like disaster all over again. But when I explained I would pay fifty cents a slate, and once they got the idea from my rusty Spanish, they seemed to like it a lot. In Mexico people understand materials and recycling and the old ways.

I became a militant slate preservationist. I didn’t really understand why, since our obsessions only look like obsessions in retrospect. It just seemed like the only thing to do. We hadn’t had much water damage at my house, but the wind had torn through the neighborhood pretty badly—130 miles an hour, some said. An amputated branch of the sycamore in front of the house shot over the driveway like a white rocket and somehow landed high up in the ginger fronds. And the wind ripped off a bunch of the hundred-year-old slates on my roof, leaving the attic exposed to wind, rain, and ferocious winged termites. I lost a lot of sleep over those slates—for me there was something fundamentally wrong about a house with an open roof. Every minute that went by, I felt more damaged.

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by Habitus · 02/14/08

This interview—which has never appeared before in English—was conducted in 1984 by Professor of Philosophy Tomás Abraham, associate professors Alejandro Rússovich and Enrique Marí, and their students in the Psychology Department of the University of Buenos Aires.

RÚSSOVICH: We begin. What can we say about…?

BORGES: In the beginning, b’reshit bara elohim, no?

RÚSSOVICH: B’reshit bara elohim et hashamayin ve et ha’aretz, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

No, the Gods created.

RÚSSOVICH: Ah, “Gods”; elohim is plural. Borges knows more. [laughter]

ABRAHAM: Today, philosophy invites poetry to a discussion. We have a poet…

Supposedly.

ABRAHAM: A supposed poet, then, of whom we can ask what relationships exist between philosophy and poetry.

Sometime ago I said that philosophy is a fantastic branch of study. But I didn’t mean anything against philosophy, on the contrary; it could be said, for example, that it was exactly the same [as poetry] maintaining that the syntax is from two distinct places, [and] that philosophy deserves a place in the order of aesthetics. If you look at theology or philosophy as fantastic literature, you’ll see that they are much more ambitious than the poets. For example, what works of poetry are comparable with something as astonishing as Spinoza’s god: an infinite substance endowed with infinite attributes?

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by Habitus · 02/05/08

Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentine Jew with a global imagination, is one of the most celebrated composers in the world today. The New York Times suggests that Golijov is “profoundly shifting the geography of the classical music world, dumping the old Eurocentric map.” He has crafted his own vernacular from his experiences in Argentina, Israel, and the United States—along with his learned grasp of the Western tradition and an expansive ear for pop and folk sounds from around the world.

In 2000, he was commissioned to create a Latin American interpretation of the Passion of Jesus Christ. Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos, based on the Gospel of Mark, boldly recasts the story of Christ’s death with Cuban drums, flamenco guitars, Brazilian dance and percussion, cantorial melodies, a choir and soloists singing Spanish and Aramaic texts. The piece ends with a melancholy setting of the Kaddish. It’s both an inward turn and an empathetic leap from a composer who has taken what he calls a “step towards the Other.”

You said in an interview once that you saw music as a way to “map the human soul in sound.” Is Argentina at the center of your personal map?

Argentina is pretty much at the center, but I don’t know if it’s the center-center. [laughter] It’s interesting, because I don’t know if the map even has a center or not.

That’s true. It might not.

For every artist there is a center, which is childhood. And Argentina was my childhood. But it’s not necessarily the Argentina of a Christian kid, who is part of the majority there. My Argentina also has the memory of my great-grandfather, who dressed as if he had never left Romania. A lot of my experiences were specific to the Jewish immigrant community. It might be the Argentina of Borges, but it’s not necessarily the Argentina of the majority.

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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 Habitus · 03/22/07

The photographer Simon Norfolk finds moments of beauty and wonder in the world’s most forlorn landscapes. From Afghanistan to Auschwitz, Norfolk documents the imprints of war—sometimes physical, sometimes physic—on its surroundings. His book Bosnia: Bleed is an impressionistic testimony to the mass slaughter that accompanied the war in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, he focuses on the sites of “secondary mass graves,” where the perpetrators tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. He writes, “They thought that, by intimidation and subterfuge, their dirty secrets could be preserved, held, trapped. Frozen.”

Norfolk spoke to Habitus from his home in Brighton, England.

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by Aleksander Hemon · 03/21/07

The taxi driver who drove me from the airport and, when I observed that the leaves were already beginning to fall, replied: “Why, yes, first watermelons, then lessons,” which, on close analysis, I understood as representing a magic formula to describe the gradual approach of autumn.

The moment when, from Jekovac, after the Ramazan cannon fires to indicate sunset, you see the lights on all the minarets of Sarajevo simultaneously ignite.

The clatter of the first morning tram, echoing through the empty streets of the city.

The coldness of the buildings from the Austro-Hungarian era and the staircases inside them, with their treads worn by the soles that have climbed them for more than a century.

Somun—soft, white bread—(scattered with seeds) from the baker’s in Kovači.

Children’s balls, rolling in the shallow eddies of the Miljacka river.

The beauty of Sarajevo women, who always bear in them the imprint of their own past and their own future; the history of past and future changes: their faces reveal both skinny little girls and mature women, both minxes and careworn matrons.

The sfumato of a cold Sarajevo morning, before the sun steals up behind the mountains, and mist drifts up the slopes.

Škembići—tripe—at Hadžibajrić’s.

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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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