ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  C.) YOU LIVE ON Greenwich Lane with another typist (at another firm). Loves suffrage, hates temperance. Irish Catholic but an orphan too and so a sister nonetheless. Her father collapsed in the Park Avenue Tunnel, her mother to the Russian grippe. She’ll try to get you out dancing tonight, to celebrate her new schedule: from working six days per week, to working five. Still eight hours per day, now forty per week. Her Friday nights are now free. Saturdays too. You suspect this has to do with the unions, or socialists, or communists, the Jews. But you can’t go out dancing tonight, because you’re still working six days. You’re not disappointed however. You suspect that with her newly weekly bookkeeping sessions on Mondays, and her newly weekly training sessions on Wednesdays, designed to familiarize her with the new comptometer calculating machines under the tutelage of their new sales representative, your roommate’s total work time, despite the Saturday reprieves, will actually increase.

  “The weekend.” You go to work on Saturday just when your roommate’s coming back, babbling about the sales rep—“built like the Fuller Building”—who goes to a gymnasium where he walks on a rubber path that goes nowhere and bicycles in place. You take the subway, though as your office is on 46th Street you’re never sure which stop, 42nd or 50th. Your home stop is as far away as 14th Street, but you don’t mind the walk. Strange times when you can trust the Wright Brothers over a cruise on the General Slocum. You come back from work on Saturday and your roommate is gone, and you stay up waiting for her, reading the comptometer manual.

  D.) ON SUNDAY YOU shut all the doors and windows, from embarrassment. You go to your wardrobe, set aside the folded waists, reach below the automobile bonnet, but above the fleecy nullifiers. The typewriter you pinched and skimped for. A device of your own, to use at home, alone, this is what embarrasses you. As Sunday turns, you complete the reports, with stricter concentration than at the office. No ticktacky stock jottings. No bell-ringing cold candlesticks. But you’ve never worked this late before. You’ve never even stayed up this late before. Your roommate still hasn’t come back. You doubt that she’s at mass.

  You consider the conclusions: Female employment should be confined to the office; should be confined to the unmarried population only (“widows and spinsters included”). “A dainty danger.” “Spare perilous distraction.” “Manual labor dulls the feminine.” “Women make excellent typists, but the manual dexterity and concentrative capacities peculiar to the typewriter do not transfer to the production floor.” The manager who’d asked you out to Coney Island a season ago and is still waiting for an answer: “Women are naturally less productive than are men. Though it is our policy to pay weekly wages, if women are to be hired it is recommended to pay them instead on the basis of piecework. To pay them a wage equal to a man’s, for work in no way equal to a man’s, is unjust. To pay them per piece is to recognize women’s unique maladies, enabling them to moderate their health, and us to moderate our payroll. It might also serve to foster a sense of competition that would accrue to mutual benefit.” Two cents per page.

  CASE STUDY (CA. 1894)

  MIGRATION

  In 1849, in Königsberg, Hermann von Helmholtz calculated the speed of nerve conduction, or the rate at which an impulse travels along a nerve fiber. His tools were a galvanometer, a device named after Luigi Galvani, which measured electrical current, and Galvani’s preferred creature, a frog. By stimulating the sciatic nerve fiber at regular distance intervals from the frog’s gastrocnemius or calf muscle, von Helmholtz determined that the closer the stimulus, the faster the reaction. By subtracting the reaction times from one another, he determined that nerve impulses traveled surprisingly slowly—approx. 90 feet/27.4 meters per second; certainly slower than any electric or electromagnetic conductions; approx. twelve times slower than the speed of sound in air; approx. fifty-three times slower than the speed of sound in water; approx. twelve million times slower than the speed of light in a vacuum.

  A.) SENSATION IS NOT simultaneous with stimulant. Rather, it’s a matter of distance and duration, which are also the rudimentary quarantines of steerage. Yours was the Hamburg American Line, Hamburg–Southampton–New York, a deck below the waterline on the SS Germania, steaming. Germany is approx. six thousand kilometers, three thousand nautical miles, in the past, behind you.

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  —

  B.) YOU WORK IN a factory in Manhattan. You work on the line. You have, had, an accident. Everything you know you know from memory. Not from your own. From others’. Your memory is a broken line. You see, saw, the sparks before you hear, heard, the bang. You are aware of that now. You were aware of that then. You smelled and tasted the smoke of the mitrailleuse before you felt the burn or else you’re dead—elementary stuff to a veteran of Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour, the Franco-Prussian War (a conflict sparked by telegram).

  A gasket is among the most material and so most fatal armaments of class warfare (especially given lack of safety protocols in the workplace). Steam, coefficient with the scalding pressure that powered your ship, builds up in another type of engine—the boiler. The boiler’s gasket is weak and blows. The gasket hits you in the back. You fall forward, over the line, are pulled forward, by the belt, are pulled backward by your co-workers by your belt, but your belt breaks, the belt lurches, you fall, your feet get tangled in the ropes, are mangled by the pulleys, as the line slows from lack of steam, grinds the toes, itself, to a halt. Prussian honor is not at stake. You cry, pass out. The conveyance of your consciousness. Stops.

  C.) YOU’RE RETURNED TO your senses, your tenement. Metzmann at one arm, a newly arrived Berliner at the other. Even the Berliner knows not to call a doctor. “Metsman” knows a nurse. She comes, cleans and dresses your back and feet, and presses both her palms to your fever. A pill, you don’t recall, a tincture, extra charge. The day foreman comes by, gives you two shifts off. The night foreman comes by, gives you one shift. Or the same foreman. Says different things. You’ve been working double. Light and sound pass through the air, through bodies that change their course, and you think that the same might obtain for you, when you attempt to project your thoughts deep into the future, or deep into the past—that they might lose their potency or become scrambled by materials unknown to you. You’ve been worked double. You can’t feel your feet. Your legs to the knees. Your shoes by the bed. In tatters.

  * * *

  —

  D.) NO UNION EQUALS no sick pay, no insurance. Yes union equals maybe sick pay, maybe insurance, if you can afford the premiums, separate from the dues. $5/$6/week, $18/$20/month. Houston Street to work takes twelve minutes on the streetcar, work to Houston, twelve minutes too. The track arrives at its destination, perpetually, regardless of the cars. The Elevated, the gutter. The Landsmannschaft should offer union insurance, the party should offer Landsmannschaft insurance. For when you can’t afford the plans or if your benefits are cut. The nurse comes again, extra charge. A different nurse, you don’t recall. Too much muscle traffic. Too much elbow in the needle. Try to borrow, get lent at interest, die on credit, get buried in debt. It’s not just the Italians and Spanish who gamble. Though it’s pleasant to tour the reservoir they’re draining for the library (both before and after shifts), unless you forget to avert your face as you pass the man amputated of legs but rubbing at the air they occupied—his sign, propped against his wheelchair: ANTIETAM.

  E.) THE LINE AT work had once been lines. Each worker his own factory, with a table to himself, assembling his parts into a completed product. But then the manager decided it would be better to arrange the tables into a single line and have each worker contribute their special completory part to the product in its turn, a dedicated packer, a dedicated shipping supervisor in brakeman’s overalls over sailor’s stripes. Once each worker had been a generalist, capable and employable widely. But then the specialties narrowed. None were also friends. You’d been up for swing-shift foreman until the other foremen blocke
d you—cut your line—by arguing how liked you were, how kindly. How much you’re liked, how kindly, can be assessed by how many visitors you’ve had in convalescence. Szentman. Erbnil. Die Bildung ist für die enorme Mehrzahl die Heranbildung zur Maschine, Die Bildung ist die Heranbildung, Bildung Heranbildung, Bildungheranbildung. “Repetition is, for the enormous majority, an anesthetic that pays a wage.” (Hallucinating.)

  F.) HUMANITY EMIGRATES, LABOR immigrates. A part becomes a product sometime, someplace, between being modified by another part and completion. A German becomes an American after approx. a year in New York. Approx. another year and you’re a German American. A lineworker is promoted to foreman within four years or remains a lineworker. A foreman is promoted to manager within six years or remains a foreman. A manager marries the owner’s daughter within a decade or never owns a factory. Whether you’ve emigrated or immigrated depends on where and when life’s best. Prussia, Alsace-Lorraine, the Ostbahn line to Russia: Berlin, Cüstrin, Landsberg, Kreuz, Bromberg, Dirschau, Elbing, Königsberg, Insterburg, Eydtkuhnen—the only things farther were Moscow and St. Petersburg, horse bone and disembodied cuirass. (Delirious.)

  G.) TELEGRAPHY (ELECTRICITY THROUGH a field) moves faster than ordnance (mass across a spattered field), which itself moves faster than sensation. Distance is duration, between stimulation and a twitch, between an agony’s signal and its acute cerebration. Manhattan’s nerve grid is so long and wide, America hasn’t felt its wound yet. But it will—sooner if it’s warmer, later if it’s colder.

  Amid the span of Second Avenue, a billboard: VITAL RESTORATIVE, $2, INTENDED TO RECOVER—the rest obscured by streetcar. The snuff and rush of gas. Stomach rumbles, clangs. But nothing can ever be recovered, no one is restored. The Landsmannschaft gives Bibles. The party pays a visit with stub cigars and schnapps.

  H.) A FLY DIGS in at shoulder. Just atop your old bullet scar, the chassepot lead that’s skipped around under your skin like a toad, ever since the siege of Metz. A slight twinge, turns into a scathing tickle. You’re an American German, not a machine. The morphine wearing off. Your stomach sweats. The fibers of your back bandage sweating loose. Your insulation. Your cladding. A seal. A gasket. Blow.

  CASE STUDY (CA. 1884)

  RACISM

  In 1860, in Leipzig, Gustav Fechner proposed to measure the intensity of sensation, not objectively for all people, but rather—as everyone has different thresholds—subjectively, for the self, whose feelings can bear no relation or comparison to anyone’s. Fechner’s Law, expressed in words, states: “In order that the intensity of a sensation may increase in arithmetical progression, the stimulus must increase in geometrical progression.” Its expression as an equation is S = K log (I), where S is sensation, I the intensity (numerically estimated), and K the result of Ernst Weber’s Fraction of 1846, which standardized units of intensity by defining the smallest detectable difference between a primary and secondary intensity of stimulus. Weber’s Fraction was ∆I / I = K, where I is the primary intensity, ∆I the increase/decrease required for a difference to be perceived, rendering K the increment itself, signifying that the proportion of intensity gain/loss remains constant with each and every variance of intensity.

  * * *

  —

  YOU SHOULD BE DISMANTLING that Liberty monument they’re putting up. That statue. That’s all you’ll ever need. They’re putting in so many telephones and so much electric and all that sister’s just wire. Should just try and get a lock off her. They’re all getting rid of gas, but where all that gas goes you’re not clear. Hissing up into the air like spirits. Or collected for her torch to keep the dump lit.

  You go out to the dump and then around the tinkeries and smithies that make the pots and pans and scrounge. The Pole trades money for what you haul, melts it down and puts around it better clothes than you have, and it’s wire. Copper. Mine the bags.

  You strip what you can. You lift something enough you get to feel the certain weight. The more you lift the same something it feels lighter and only more weight feels the same. Your hands and arms get used to it. Like men. The more rods, the less they hurt. The more the whip, the pain lessens. You brought a kettle and got a certain amount but then you bring the same model kettle and get less because the Pole says now they’re putting in it less copper than before.

  You’re not saying you can’t tell the difference between then and now. You’re saying that slavery is not being allowed to tell the difference. You’re sure it’s either crazier now than ever before or that every generation increases its limit as the crazy increases so the level is always maintained. You miss the old tools and if you find them you keep them because the old tools aren’t made of copper. Adze, scythe, sickle. Your husband used them but you never did. You tell everyone at the roominghouse your husband’s a prospector, a Creole lumberjack, Canadian. Staked out west to claim his acres. Anything but lynched. He would’ve voted Blaine. A Democrat in the house will send you back to chains. New Jersey’s wrapped in the scraps of chains, mostly rusted, mostly useless. You notice things if you can.

  Some are good for the field; some are good for the house. Saturday the white folks clean; Sunday the white folks throw out.

  The elders told of the elderland where when you died you could come back again as a child. Some of the elders said this was good and some of the elders said this was bad, because you could come back only by taking over the body of a child and getting rid of its soul and the soul would just wander around. (Vodou.)

  In the elderland if you craved another person’s husband, or luck, or fortune, or power, you’d just put the powder around them or sprinkle them with drops and everything was yours for the taking and they’d become just a body—a body lost its soul.

  The elders said the lost souls were trapped in bottles or jars, rendering the bodies too as empty vessels. A body whose soul had been trapped just lay around like a moldy sack. The body would just sit propped against a gate not moving or talking or anything until the man who had her soul would tell the body how to do and then she’d do it. Fetch and thatch, mend and tend, do how Polish tells you.

  Some of the elders said that was bad but others said it was bad only if the spell wasn’t wanted. You yourself have known folks to just give their souls away. Have known folks who just wanted to be bodies. They signed their X, forever. But you yourself don’t believe in any of the spells or drops or powders. You believe in dumps, fair skies, life after Newark. Copper. You would not be like Liberty and let others into your head. Not for nothing. But not for everything neither.

  12. CASE STUDIES B

  CASE STUDY (FREUD)

  VIENNA, BERGGAßE—WHAT ARE YOUR ASSOCIATIONS? and why? His office ceiling is unpeeling and white—which is nice, as it’s basically the only thing that you, the patient, the analysand, have on which to focus. White like that can’t help but hypnotize. You can’t decide whether a fan would help the effect or hinder. Freud gestures you toward the settee, whose angle supports you not quite sitting, but not quite lying either. You wonder why Freud insists on this settee and why he sits behind you, definitively sits, in a chair. His inaccessibility is both because he’s uncomfortable listening while you speak, and because you’re uncomfortable speaking while he listens, eye contact. While the angle of your recline can be explained as mediating between a sleep or dream state, and waking attentivity. Also it will be believed: R-handed people use more of their L brain when standing—the position most requiring logical thought—and more of their R brain when sitting and lying, positions most associated with…associative thought.

  You inspect the office and muse to yourself that the decoration of an analyst’s office tells you everything you need to know about the analyst, or perhaps it tells you nothing you need to know because the analyst too must know this and must decorate accordingly, which, if that’s the case, tells you everything.

  You are a train (Freud tells you). Proceed “me
taphorically,” a transitory word. Metaphora, in Latin and Greek, “to bear,” “to bring,” “to carry over.” “Your mind is like or as a train,” a simile—similis, “similar,” simila, “to sift grain” (for similarity)—stimulus “to resemble.” “Train!” the imperative metonymy.

  You are to do just this: Recline at the window of your train and think, or remark, on whatever passes by. “Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a train car and describing to someone inside the car the changing views you see outside,” Freud, On Beginning the Treatment.

  This double transference—from the sensorimotor to the conceptual, from the conceptual to the verbal—comprises your train of thought, which does translate to German.

  Even if Freud is not your analyst, he will try to ride along. It might be that his whole method can be explained entirely by his relief that this journey is just a function of language.

  Freud was afraid of trains; scared of the challenges they presented, of the challenges his conception of them represented, rendering his use of train metonymy to explain his science an act of either neutralization or confrontation. The phallic symbol stops at the vaginal station, everyone gets off. Freud was a lineman, a switchman, of words; associating Bahnhof, “station,” with Friedhof, “cemetery,” letting him off at Vorhof, a “lobby” or “forecourt,” but an anatomical term too, for the vulva’s hole. From when he was a child leaving Moravia for Leipzig he recalled the station’s gas lamps, “souls torched in hell”; later, on a journey from Leipzig to Vienna, he shared a compartment with his mother, who undressed in front of him—hairy. When new tracks were built from Vienna, just before Freud’s birth, they bypassed his birthplace, Freiberg in Mähren, essentially bankrupting its burghers, among them his father—trains ruined fathers too.