Blagovesta Momchedjikova
 

Screams and Bridges
 
 
 

BRIDGES AND SCREAMS   ***  Mr. Bomborowski was wearing his year-old shoes for the first time today. The color of deliciously fresh brownies, they made Mr. Bomborowski walk the streets of Lower Manhattan with a glow in his eyes, as if he was walking through a pastry shop. It was Mr. Bomborowski’s day-off.  Mr. Bomborowski was a small man. He didn't have much of a body or much of a face. But he had an avalanche of red hair which danced like a globe-lightning in the shy May sun, surprising people and cars.   Mr. Bomborowski tried to avoid a puddle but couldn’t quite make it and landed half-left shoe in muddy water. He smiled happily, with pride: the shoe didn’t leak. A few steps away, he stopped next to a fire hydrant, propped the dirty shoe on it, and pulled out a kleenex. Delicately, he cleaned the mud off his shoe.  On Delancey, Mr. Bomborowski bought himself an ice with coconut flavor. He drank it slowly, enjoying the ice cracking against his teeth and the coconut scratching his throat, warming it up. On his two brown buoys, his shoes, he sailed the streets towards the East River. The bridge loomed up before his eyes, like a huge gray scarecrow.  The Williamsburg Bridge was all that Mr. Bomborowski was dreaming of and planning about. It was the sole goal of his life. For this bridge he moved to the City a year ago; for this bridge he saved these shoes.   The Williamsburg Bridge was a regular bridge for regular people, just like Mr. Bomborowski himself. It was not handsome and neither was Mr. Bomborowski. It wasn’t loved and neither was Mr. Bomborowski. Yet it had character and so did Mr. Bomborowski. Mr. Bomborowski was a suicide case.  ***   ***  Screams are loud, inappropriate, neurotic. They are like dropping a piece of your underwear in the laundry room in front of your neighbor. They catch us by surprise. They make us wonder.   Screams ravish us. They lift us up and shake us empty. They rush down our bodies, setting fires. They scare us.   Screams come from somewhere else and never belong to anyone we know. They are always foreign. They know not who they are looking for, they carry messages with no addressees. They disturb us. We shake our heads, not recognizing them: that's not addressed to me, return to sender.   Screams are not welcome. They are like dirt under your nails at a fancy dinner party. They don’t fit. They indicate either bad manners or a tormented mind. They are our mentally challenged brother. We are ashamed of them.   Screams are independent. They explode out of the body and never come back. They leave on clouds, rivers, trains, airplanes. Yet we shudder with them long after they have left us.   Screams are liminal. They shout the desire to leave one space and enter another. They speak of a boundary just crossed or about to be crossed. They are departures which never arrive.  *** ***  Screams need liminal spaces. They need boundaries, borders, crossings. They need places between departures and arrivals; places that connect and disconnect at the same time. Screams need bridges.  ***  Bridges are brave. They are like a successful leap over a huge abyss. They connect what seems to be forever separate. They are precise. They are smart. They are winners. They fill us with pride.  Bridges are grandiose. They are like pictures enlarged to the maximum: they fill up our vision and spread out of it. They lift us up and hold us in the palms of their hands. We look in their eyes. They elevate us.   Bridges are gifts. They are much hoped for and dreamed of. They are treasured by all. We keep them on a special shelf. We dust them regularly. We show them to our guests, they can touch them, carefully.   Bridges are parades. We see them, from them, and ourselves on them. They are like getting married in a red dress. They teach us to be spectacles, views.   Bridges are foreigners. They belong here and there at the same time. They are prolonged departures and delayed arrivals. They are travelers having left one city and still haven’t reached the next one. They are forever extended boundaries. They are forever liminal.  Bridges are seductive. They tempt us with places that are constantly on the other side and constantly less known. They are a gambling game. They are the risk and the lure to take the risk, to cross them.  ***  The bridge accentuates the separate. The scream accentuates the separation.  ***     ***  Mr. Bomborowski longed to see death in the eye. To satisfy his utmost desire, in his thirty-five year long life, Mr. Bomborowski had jumped off trains, cliffs, parachutes, and roller-coasters. Yet to no avail. His last hope was the bridge.   The Williamsburg Bridge was perfect for that purpose. Although it had a walkway, few people ever crossed it; it had no patrols, no emergency phones, no benches, in short, any unwanted interference with his bridge-jumping would be unlikely.  Mr. Bomborowski joyfully climbed up the golden stairs, a public installation art project, to the Manhattan entrance of the bridge. He imagined golden dust sticking to his shoes, like glaze. Mr. Bomborowski had dreamed of this bridge in so many different places and in so many different ways. Mr. Bomborowski heard the thud of his heart in his ears.  The wooden walkway was unstable. It was screeching under Mr. Bomborowski’s brave steps. Through the crevices, he saw the cars parked in the streets down below, like kid’s toys, a planet away. It was scary and Mr. Bomborowski loved it. His white shirt was glued to his back.   He walked towards the edge and looked down at the traffic below. Someone screamed: “Don’t jump!” Mr. Bomborowski’s facial muscles stretched in an intense expression.   On the walkway, Mr. Bomborowski quickly approached the web of cables constructing what looked like a huge steel obelisk, the first bridge tower. He walked under it, sensing the clumsy yet friendly hug of the cables. He traced the labyrinth of stairs leading high up to the other foundation of the tower, the sky. Mr. Bomborowski stopped there.  ***   ***  The foreigner is not from here. He comes from there and holds on to that spiritual connection while here. Thus, the foreigner hasn’t fully left there and, because of this, hasn’t fully arrived here.  Having departed, having left there, the foreigner still exercises his responsibilities for there, not for here. He doesn’t owe to the here: it can’t boast a childhood house, memories, or family; it is not populated with the what constitutes the foreigner as such. The foreigner can leave the here at anytime and forever. However, he can never leave the here unmarked by it.  The foreigner best represents the modern condition of living “in-between” cities, countries, cultures. Living “in-between” here and there, the foreigner is vulnerable, he questions both here and there, and frequently feels belonging nowhere, neither here nor there. Stretched between two places that have to connect in him, the foreigner is like the bridge: always belonging half-way to the parts it connects and thus, profoundly disconnected. He has always already departed and always already not arrived. It is no surprise then for the foreigner to seek the company of something that is similar to him, the bridge. On the bridge, the foreigner voices the pressure of his disconnectedness through that which too has, though violently, departed a there -- the scream. The scream, of course, doesn’t have a destination, the bridge has a destination it will never reach and the foreigner is in a destination that is not fully his.  ***  The foreigner “condition,” that of being “in-between” cultures, appears with Modernity, when major writers, painters, musicians live and work outside of their native countries (Munch and Camus, for the purpose of this essay), and flourishes in Postmodernity, where “home” is displaced and is everywhere (seen in film characters such as Paul from Last Tango in Paris and Sally from Cabaret).   I want to draw a distinction between the scream of the modern foreigner, the modern scream, which happens on the bridge and the scream of the postmodern foreigner, the postmodern scream, which happens under the bridge, beneath passing trains. In between the modern and the postmodern screams, marking the transition from one to the other and at the same time the separation between the two, is the suicidal scream. It marks the abrupt, violent, and final crossing of the border, that between life and death.  ***  A train passed by on the right side of the pathway and the conductor waved at Mr. Bomborowski, smiling.   Mr. Bomborowski scrutinized the body of the tower. It would take him exactly 3 minutes and 43 seconds to climb the tower and jump. His calculations had always been precise.   Mr. Bomborowski bent down to untie his shoes. The shoe-laces caressed his fingers, unweaving themselves in his hands. Mr. Bomborowski’s slowly slipped out of his shoes, first the right one, then the left. Through the crevices of the walkway, the speed of cars, boats, and water rushed in Mr. Bomborowski’s body.   A bicycle swished by. In that sound, Mr. Bomborowski heard his jumping scream: a hollow moan, a powerful gush of air, slashing its path out of him. How well he knew this scream and its extended invitation. How much he longed for it.   A green graffiti face from the cables winked at Mr. Bomborowski. ***     ***  The modern scream, that of Munch's homunculus, happens on a bridge. It is, as Munch refers to it himself, a scream of nature. The sky and water whirls carry that scream. It imposes itself on the body from outside and disfigures it: the body of the homunculus is twisted in pain, his mouth mimics the horrifying invasion. The body screams under the scream of nature: shutting his ears off, the homunculus doesn’t want to hear the scream coming at him, stamped on him, and mimicked by him. ***  The refusal to hear the scream, this time coming from inside, from a human being is what Camus’ character, Jean Baptiste Clemence from The Fall lives with. The scream comes from a woman who commits suicide from a bridge on the Seine. It is the scream of someone physically crossing the border between life and death, the suicidal scream. The suicidal scream doesn’t happen on the bridge, it happens away from the bridge: the woman is leaving the bridge and this world for another. The scream signifies a violent crossing, a crossing that knows no coming back. Yet Jean Baptiste Clemence refuses to acknowledge this scream, to give it a name and a face, thus rendering the scream and the crossing forgettable. He fails as a witness to that scream and the scream returns to torture him. It returns to him as laughter, a snicker. Laughter attacks Jean Baptiste whenever he crosses a bridge they way scream attacks Munch’s homunculus.  ***  But the scream shouldn’t come back. It is not supposed to be like a bridge, both departing and arriving. A scream has only to leave, to depart. That is why the postmodern individual comes up with a device against the return of the scream, the train. In contrast to the modern and suicidal screams, the postmodern scream has moved under the bridge, below the train tracks on bridges. There, the scream becomes ritualized. It reoccurs, it follows the schedule of the train. Paul and Sally want to scream under passing trains: they go to particular spots, wait for the trains to pass by, scream, and then leave. Only to come back another time. No longer is the scream a one-time event, like the modern or the suicidal screams. The postmodern scream is a scream that can be repeated, recalled, rehearsed, retold. Sally longs to share her scream with a friend, she introduces him to her ritual. Screaming becomes accessible, amusing. Underneath the passing trains, the screamers rehearse, mimic crossing of borders. They prepare themselves and exercise vocally for the final crossing, death. Yet they also reenact their burdensome foreigner “experience”: they are on a train that doesn’t stop at train stations.  The reason why the postmodern scream is ritualized and popularized to a certain extent is because the screamer found a way to do away with the return of the scream, with the echo of one’s own scream. The postmodern scream, being also an individual scream, though in accordance with train schedules, is shocking. It is from inside yet no one recognizes it, least of all the screamer. That is why the screamer seeks the train, the plane, the waterfall, to board his scream on it and never hear it again. Paul not only screams under the passing train but also, just like Munch’s homunculus, shuts off his ears. He doesn’t want to hear his own scream and shudders from it. He doesn’t want to meet his unknown self. In contrast to bats who use screams to locate themselves is space and locate their prey, the postmodern individual wants to dislocate himself from the scream. Echolocation is transformed into echodislocation. ***  Our screams sound unlike us. Or maybe we sound unlike our screams?  ***     ***  I went to scream under the Williamsburg Bridge with a friend. It was a weird snowy day, late March.  There is a spot on the Williamsburg Bridge walkway, close to the Brooklyn side, where the train tracks run right above people’s head, just before the train tracks hit the walkway. It is a small place but enough for a scream to occur. Surrounded by protective nets, it looks both like a nest and a prison.  My friend and I, we screamed under the passing train on that winter day.  After the scream, he remembered the sore muscles of his stomach and I, my sore throat: our bodies guarded our screams and guarded them well.  To this day, we don’t remember our own screams. Each one remembers the scream of the other.  *** Do screams have names? Do they have our names? ***   *** When do we scream other people’s names? When do we scream our names?  ***   *** Do our screams ever scream out our names? *** *** What is the color of my scream? Orange? Red? Black? ***     *** on the williamsburg bridge our feet bathing in snow waiting the train tracks above throbbing a crack the train bullets the sky sprawled underneath we grin with delight our game about to begin a dark red flood of air from the center of him bursts out trashing the snow scorching my skin racing away with the train i gape mute after the scream stained with track dirt his face an unknown mouth my eyes buried in it *** ***  On that sunny May morning, a Hassidic family strolling on the Williamsburg Bridge as well, saw a pair of brown shoes staring at them like two blind eyes.  A red-headed guy was walking away from them. Every now and then he would turn back in the direction of the shoes and give out a slight chuckle:  he enjoyed imagining his suicide more so than committing it.  ***

  (c)Blagovesta Momchedjikova 2002