Me Three

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Pond Scum: A Tale of Three Cities

By Steve Finbow

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It is observable that those who own dogs do so in order to shout at them. Walking across the park each morning, on my way to Soho, dodging the joggers (British joggers are unhealthy, unfashionable, and uncoordinated, whereas American joggers are fit, trig, and tuned), I hear the stentorian commands of masters and mistresses, berating, browbeating, and doggone plain hounding their pooches. "Sit!" "Stay!" "Fetch!" "Leave!" All the commands appended to ridiculous names.

Art by Nicholas Allanach

I live in Primrose Hill, and the names are of the Nigel, Ralph (pronounced Raif), Kevin (an Irish Setter, poor love), Isabel, Eileen (I kid you not), and Zanzibar kind, rather than Spot, Rover, Rex, Fido, or Patch. The dogs sniff, piss, shit, and chase squirrels, and their owners shout at them to cease and return in order to chide the dog for something that, to the dog, is merely an appetence.

You think I'm going to argue that Paul Auster's Timbuktu, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated are inferior to John Berger's King: A Street Story and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Well, you’re wrong. But I am going to argue that people own dogs for the same reason they go on holiday – to feel powerful, to feel superior, to feel in control. Who are the worst offenders? Why, fellow travellers, it’s the British and Americans, of course.

Well, that’s how I planned to start my column. One problem: I've been in Berlin on holiday for the last week. While there, I didn’t encounter a single American. I thought I’d got lucky at breakfast on my last morning. Wafting over the salami, blood sausage, cheese, and coffee came an unmistakable transatlantic accent. I listened. Canadian. Where were you all? Then again, there were hardly any British tourists, hardly any French, or Spanish. The majority of tourists in Berlin were German. And I was constantly mistaken for a German; I was asked directions, assumed into conversations. I "did" German (I can’t say "studied") for three years at school, and specialized in Anglo-Saxon at university, so, language-wise, I got by – surprisingly.

The clouds were the colour of old computers, and as the plane came out of them, the Earth appeared camouflaged as if expecting attack.

I spent one day walking around Berlin with a bag containing the head of Friedrich Nietzsche. Not his actual head, silly, but a bust I’d picked up in a small antique shop in Charlottenburg. After six hours of walking, the going was getting as heavy as the Third Essay of The Genealogy of Morals. I planned to visit art galleries – I’m a big fan of Richter, Kiefer, Beuys, and Grosz. So, off I went to the Martin-Gropius-Bau. It housed a retrospective of Sophie Calle. She has worked with Paul Auster – she’s a sort of anal-retentive Tracy Emin. Then to the Nationalgalerie to see the Caspar David Friedrichs – the gallery floor was closed. Then to the Neue Nationalgalerie and I found a travelling MoMA exhibition – yeah, yeah, American cultural hegemony, blah-blah. I bought a ticket anyway. Then I saw the sign – a seven-hour wait. Then I saw the queue. It reminded me of a Ronald Sukenick story Who Are These People? in which a guy queues to get into the Uffizi, and the queue is so long that people join it when they get on the plane at San Diego. I decided to come back the next day. I got there at 7:00 a.m.– the waiting time had increased to 11 hours. I was flying back in 24. I could have flown to New York, visited MoMA, and flown back in the time it would have taken me to stand in line.

I watch the city thrum and buzz, it guides me along, and other tourists come and go – touch, flirt, and separate. I had known cities like this all my life, cities that were familiar in unknown ways.

The districts of Berlin spread out like little chaps and double crosses around the jigsaw crossbar that is Mitte. There’s not much left of the wall – a long stretch along the Spree and a fragment near Potsdamer Platz. It occurred to me how much Berlin has covered its tracks. It conceals its recent history whilst glorifying its past. It is a palimpsest – it is history written over; it has eradicated any vestige of the 20th century whilst preserving 19th century buildings and constructing a new 21st century city.

London, by comparison, is a dusty, calf-bound tome you’d find in an antiquarian bookshop; the cover damp to the touch, and as you open it, amidst a small blitz of dust, you find pressed leaves, old bus tickets, insect husks, paper angels.
I lived in New York in the late 80s and early 90s; it was like living inside a graphic novel. But what is New York like after 9/11? Will New York become like Berlin? Will it erase its recent history? Become new? Remake itself? Or will it become a museum of trauma? Just off Potsdamer Platz is the only evident sign of Nazi horror – the Topography of Terror. Will the new memorial – Reflecting Absence – actually reflect on absence? Or will it reflect an absence. Will it mirror that loss by constantly recreating and rewriting memory and history?

Let’s go back to Nietzsche – whose bust now squats frowning in my living room. If London, Berlin, and New York can be seen as antiquarian, as a palimpsest, and as a graphic novel ,respectively, the three cities can also be seen as embodiments of Nietzsche’s theory of the three uses of history – antiquarian, monumental, and critical – or the historical, suprahistorical, and unhistorical. While antiquarian London aims to preserve the past, and monumental Berlin wishes to learn from or emulate the past – the preserved buildings are pre-Nazi, pre-Cold War, Classical, and the new buildings are monumental, they are colossal – critical New York strives to forget the past, to live in the present, free of the claims of memory. Or does it? Is New York, and therefore America, becoming overly concerned with history? Do you ache to be antiquarian? Do you yearn for the monumental? Is America acting out, in a short period, its own genealogy of memory?

What is history? It’s a dog with fleas. A dog no longer free to sniff, to piss, to shit, and to chase squirrels. A dog constantly beckoned by its masters – war, politics, and power. “For the man says, ‘I remember,’ and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever” (Nietzsche).

Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.

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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.