As declared in the quotidian, we hereby renounce the use of the pronoun I & the verb to be. We have already written as such in the book West of Kingdom Come, but herein we follow the same laws to keep us thinking in such a voice.

This morning we mailed dozens of packages & when we got to the last one, the postal agent, only noticing then, informed us we could not use our Rome address as the return address. And here we did this all along, including our last trip here in March, wherein we figured we discovered a loophole whereby you could send packages international for cheap by sending to a bogus address with a, say, Italian return address. But this morning she caught us & made us put stickers over the return address & put the address of the hotel where we stay for now, On the Avenue.

So if you receive a copy of the book & wonder what up with that, this explains. Strange becomes the idea of a return address, especially when in limbo as we roll.

And what a mind-blowing surprise worthy of every cent! How did we make it through life this long not reading this book? Mostly recollected vignettes comprise the book, of Schulz's childhood living above his father's dry-goods shop in Drogobych, Poland (now Ukraine)—a far cry from NYC (where we write from) or Rome (where we live). But the geographical space Schulz creates (both the cityscapes & indoor spaces) become mythical & warped, to bend into your mind as if little plastic word explosives become embedded, to blast mining tunnels deep into recesses previous unknown.

Schulz's in-depth understanding of the natural laws (both in physics & biology) enables him to distort them at will to fit his mythology (& retain believability). Laws of time & space become rules made to be broken. In the the Treatise on Tailor's Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis he writes: «The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it.» Mostly such philosophizing comes passed down through his father, who teaches him that: «There is no dead matter. Lifelessness is only a facade concealing forms of life unknown to us.»

His father who collected birds up in his attic space, obsessed to the point where he himself becomes a bird (and later his obsessive hatred of cockroaches turns him into a cockroach (at least in young Bruno's eyes)).

Schulz sees through to details we cannot see, even in familiar every day things. Again, channeling his father:

«How much ancient suffering is there in the varnished grain, in the veins & knots of our old familiar wardrobes? Who would recognize in them the old features, smiles, and glances, almost planed and polished out of all recognition?»

Schulz remains always ever inspired, ever lucid, insatiable, ever curious, ever infused with child-like wonder, through his words, like a kid in a candy shop.

«It was overwhelmingly interesting to have as one's own that scrap of life, that particle of the eternal mystery in a new and amusing shape, which by its very strangeness, by the unexpected transpositions of the spark of life, present in us human beings, into a different animal form, awoke in me an infinite curiosity. Animals! The object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying the richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.»

One wonders if Schulz wrote the way he did because he wrote in the shadows of persecution, ever living life in imminent danger. Don't we all to some extent? Schulz senses this & embraces it, rather than fears it. You sense this urgency in his writing (not that he politicizes or tries to make any statements), but his writing becomes confession, things he needs to get off his chest, the words packed in his DNA, a DNA accumulated from all animal forms before him, unraveled into myths that now—as a fatherless hermit, inevitably killed by nazis—remain embedded only in his books. It seems he knew this all along & accepted this fate with almost euphoric elation to rival Nietzsche (spliced with some Kafka for good measure):

«Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interest of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism.»

Writers like this don't come along very often, especially in this day & age. In the last post we talked about Super Sad True Love Story. That strikes us as a disposable book (we tried to give it away, but no one, not even the NY Tyrant, will take it), unnecessary in the scheme of things. The Street of Crocodiles seems a book to preserve at all costs, to remain ever in print. A keeper, in one's library.

In another recent post, we gave a number of reasons why to quit twitter, but one thing we neglected to mention (that we still don't know if we can articulate) has something to do with the perils of existing wrapped in the present—of thinking the present so significant, when in time you'll come to realize how petty & trivial it all becomes. It takes time for a book, for true literature, to come to fruition, to become accepted as such. 99.99% of what we write in the present, including this, doesn't mean shit in the long run. The only thing this means becomes to point you to something that does mean something, that must be read, in our opinion.

The Procession by Bruno Schulz (he was also a visual artist)

We read The Street of Crocodiles mostly while pedaling on a stationary bike (our hotel has a gym—something we don't have access to in Rome). In between reading it, we flâneured around NYC (though we have not a single photograph to show for it) or hung out with the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum.

The city where The Street of Crocodiles takes place, Drogobych, seems more like a wanna-be city. A drab town living in the shadows of the great metropolises emerging at the time (between the world wars). Drogobych becomes something else entirely though, when filtered through the writing of Schulz:

«Only a few people noticed the peculiar characteristics of that district: the fatal lack of color, as if that shoddy, quickly-growing area could not afford the luxury of it. Everything was gray there, as in black-and-white photographs or in cheap illustrated catalogues. This similarity was real rather than metaphorical because at times, when wandering in those parts, one in fact gained the impression that one was turning the pages of a prospectus, looking at columns of boring commercial advertisements, amongst which suspect announcements nestled like parasites, together with dubious notices and illustrations with a double meaning.»

We don't know why his writing struck us so, but that becomes why—what we cannot put into words as he does. Almost as if Schulz sees into the past & into the future, whilst living in the present, all at once, and for our sakes. A visionary in the true meaning of the word, a seer. And he sees beyond just the surface into the inner-workings.

«Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. At times one has the impression that it is only the small section immediately before us that falls into the expected pointillistic picture of a city thoroughfare, while on either side, the improvised masquerade is already disintegrating and, unable to endure, crumbles behind us into plaster and sawdust, into the storeroom of an enormous empty theatre. The tenseness of an artificial nose, the assumed earnestness of a mask, an ironical pathos tremble on this façade.»

We recently read another book with a similar shtick (mapping eastern european urban landscapes into psychological headspaces), The System of Vienna by Gert Jonke, though we can't say we liked this book nearly as much. Or even Invisible Cities pales in comparison (though it has been a while since we read it).

This sense of psychogeographical mapping goes beyond just the streets into dwellings, into mind-bending structures that rival the houses created by Blake Butler. And this ever-present skeptical sense of it all becoming a farce, of it all crumbling beneath your fingertips at any moment, pervades through it all, down to the denizens & their actions.

«But when, talking all the time, he unrolled an enormous piece of cloth, fitting, folding, and draping the stream of material, forming it into imaginary jackets and trousers, that whole manipulation seemed suddenly unreal, a sham comedy, a screen ironically placed to hide the true meaning of things.»

He is ever cognizant that everything we create, these cities, are mere manifestations of our collective psyches. And in the end, all that remains become words.

«Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year, that large crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams, which multiply in it. Ah, when writing down these tales, revising the stories about my father on the used margins of its text, don't I, too, surrender to the secret hope that they will merge imperceptibly with the yellowing pages of that most splendid, moldering book, that they will sink into the gentle rustle of its pages and become absorbed there?»

Suffice to say, we liked this book enough that we put it into our deck of 52 to have on a desert island.