Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember how for quite a while whenever I walked around New York I looked at buildings as potentially climbable. I would think about whether I could get up to the second story, where the climbing was easier because of the regularity of the alternating granite blocks. The first story was always the hardest to climb, but sometimes you could use the bars on the windows to boost yourself up. I remember a Batman comic where the thief used his cape (I think he was disguised as Batman) to pull down the ladder from the second-floor fire escape, so that he could then climb it into the upper stories. The clue was some chipped paint on the ground, I think. It seems to me you saw Batman as a thief in the teaser, but it would have been the thief in disguise. But the idea of climbing buildings, and seeing all walls and all ornament as an incitement to climb, was pretty longstanding. I think it dated to our clambering and climbing up the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on 89th Street. You could make it up to the eagle that looked South, and just hang out there. If you fell you probably wouldn't die, though the climbing was hard. Then there was another bit up past the base of this monument that looks I guess like a gigantic column (framed in a basket of smaller columns), though I wouldn't have thought so at the time. Inside was a very high wall of stacked and alternating blocks, that went up about ten stories to the capital. There was graffiti there, half-way up, but no one I knew ever climbed that high, not even Hugh Cramer. (If you click on the link above you'll see the eagle over the entrance, in which it turned out sweeping machinery was kept, and to the right, the farthermost mansion from the perspective up Riverside, what is now -- or was when I was climbing the monument at any rate -- the Yeshiva Torah Va'adoth, the last mansion on Riverside Drive).

posted by william 11:44 AM
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