Walking in Tongues

It was a huge, glorious realization, some 15 years ago, when I realized that I had nothing to lose by shamelessly revealing my weaknesses. Anything but. In fact, hiding, and hiding shame, makes one weak. But to the point: I have an incredible spatial disorientation when it comes to, well, to everything. It’s three-dimensional — not only on the x-y axis, like walking on a map, but also up and down and inside and out. I discovered this to my horror when measuring and cutting sheetrock for the ceiling of 519 East 11th Street, the building-love of my life, which I rehabbed along with other young people in the 1970s in New York (sweat equity, another story). If you don’t know, sheetrock has a good side and a bad side. I had to draw out the irregular polygons of sheetrock with paper and pencil upside down, looking at the ceiling, and then when I brought the drawing, and my head, down to start cutting I was immediately lost. Up, and it all made sense again. Down, I couldn’t make anything of it. In order to cut the sheetrock correctly I had to indicate the good face of the sheetrock on the drawing or I would cut it upside down, or inside out, or something. Then, when cutting, I had to simply trust the drawing and trust that, when I lifted the sheetrock toward the ceiling, along with my eyes, I would understand how to position it. The logic of it disappeared when I couldn’t see it. …

(This was one of the reasons I thought secretly I couldn’t be an architect. Plus Ben Nicholson told Vera and me, in the beginning of our first year at  Cooper Union, that if we had one very un-functional eye, which we both did, then we didn’t have proper depth perception and were fundamentally unfit for architecture. It tormented me for years.)

All this has to do with endlessly attempting to and endlessly failing to map out a path, in writing, in traveling, in daily and existential life, that is, all this has to do with a fundamental condition of wandering.

Lauren Elkin’s recent beautiful book, “Flâneuse,” celebrates the female flâneur. Vive, evviva, hurray, it’s about time. I have a new word too: parleuse. She talks like the flâneuse walks (and she walks too). The unpredictable, spontaneous ecstasy that is speaking in tongues? I get it. I think I do something like it on the street, in my own city and in cities where I am a stranger  —straniera, foreigner, in Italian. The unknown person and the foreign person are elided.

I call it walking in tongues.