Prepositions, before and after

I’ve been thinking about prepositions. You know, those little words that shouldn’t terminate sentences but do. They come in pairs—in/out, above/below, on/under, before/after—and they seem fond of clarity. You’re either with us or against us. There was before and now there’s after; there’s nothing in between. 

Stay in. Don’t go out. Work on the computer. These little words tell us so much about ourselves and where we are, physically and metaphorically. It’s in their very name—to pre-position, to place before. Prepositions fix our place in time and space, and therefore our relations to others. For such small words, and ones we use so reflexively, they carry a heavy burden of conveying conditions of belonging or alienation, otherness or inclusion, at-homeness or displacement.

I live in the city. I work in a different city, but whether I am at home or at work, I am in the city. To move from one city to the other, I would go out, into the public realm of sidewalks and transit. That was before. Now, like everyone, I’m inside, #staying at home, in this city. I have never felt more aware of in. I am in my home, but at work, online. On line. On-line. Online. In the New Jersey vernacular of my youth, “on line” meant the condition of waiting in a linear arrangement with other people, a condition others might call being in line, or in a queue. Now it means something else, with no connection anymore to being somewhere, on a line connecting two points. Now we are networked. You can be on a line, but you are in a network.

Quality of life in the city, which is dense by definition, depends on clear thresholds between the pockets of public and private places that define urbanity. They are so clear they have names: gate, stoop, porch, vestibule, lobby, bay window…But that suite of relationships collapses online. The thresholds have vanished. We sit in our private spaces, looking through a glowing rectangle at the private spaces of others, at rooms we would never be invited into, hearing sounds from off-stage—barking dogs, clanking dishes—we shouldn’t hear. Private and public spaces—our private and public selves—are inside out while still inside, like a Klein bottle. 

I shouldn’t be in my students’ rooms and they shouldn’t be in mine. That’s why we have schools, libraries, museums, cafes, theaters, clubs, markets, plazas, playing fields, street corners: so I can meet you in a place that belongs to neither of us; so we can make room for strangers; so we can meet in a place big enough to hold a lot of us; so we can determine

what comes in and what stays out. The magic of the city is its capacity to offer all those places, and everything in between. Lewis Mumford described the city as both a magnet and a container: it attracts us with promises, so many promises, and then holds us--because it just keeps promising and we can’t quit it.

One of my thesis students said yesterday that this virus is the “enemy of urban design.” She wants to design a community place, for the human network, one like Italo Calvino’s city of Ersilia, entangled in strings of different colors to signify “a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency.” Calvino says that these strings represent the “relationships that sustain the city’s life,” and the citizens of Ersilia are constantly abandoning and rebuilding them. One of the intriguing aspects of this strange new world is that we are finding new ways to connect those strings, because we deeply need them. So when it’s time to leave the in, and venture out into the city again, we can put those strings back in place, more substantial and with better knots.

Don't it always seem to go...?

Don't it always seem to go that we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone. Right as usual, Joni. The "it" that's gone in this case is the public realm, with the public in it. A paradise in its own way, even if it is in fact often paved. Love of cities in the time of Covid-19 is problematic. It even feels inappropriate (self-serving, off-key, tone deaf...insert your own adjective) to ruminate on civic health as distinct from public health.

Before--yes, we can now speak of a before and an after--I had a little notebook filled with half-baked ideas for blog posts. They were stranded in the notebook, half-baked, because I had failed to maintain the dam that held back just enough of my administrative tasks to keep my productive writing wetlands from being drowned. Failure to maintain may be a theme here. One post, on what the rules of improv have to do with good urban space, is a bit more than half-baked; it's actually browning nicely, if still soft in the middle. Yet it seems too chipper and shallow to post right now.

What is it that's gone that we didn't know we got 'til now? Sharing the spectacle of sport. Gathering to protest an injustice. Marching. Occupying. Assembling to redress a grievance. Worshiping someone or something. Live music--playing it and listening. Seeing coffee shop regulars, and the other familiar strangers who speckle our lived space. Being alone in a crowd. Watching people. Eavesdropping. The world of together, of transit, of third places, and parks, of plazas and piazzas. We're missing the city floor.

Residential buildings in US cities often don’t have the fringe of balconies that characterize housing in Italy or Spain, and we tend to draw a sharper line between public and private. We have seen the isolated in those countries engage with one another in applause and song, several floors above the street, but still in the manner of the street. It's as if the social space of the piazza, flat as a sheet of paper, crinkled up until it invaded the previously private air between homes. In dense cities people have to practice the fine art of a disattenuation, which is being in a position to see what someone is doing nearby but pretending, politely, not to--think of elevator cab or subway platform behavior. But now, with the possibility to assemble, to be part of a civic body, denied at ground level, the desire has no where to go but up. In time, that air will float slowly back to the ground, as one by one we congeal back into a public. Will we remember what we got when it was gone?