"The Golden Flea"

Michael Rips's short memoir is a long goodbye to the people and the objects found at the Chelsea Market, a very moving one:

• A frame or painting or antique table encountered anywhere else, a gallery, museum, or home, comes with an explanatory context: it may be near similar frames, paintings, and furniture with which it shares a style or provenance; it may be accompanied by a text; the owner may have a reputation for collecting things that are important or interesting or, at any rate, are not forgeries. <> But here the objects were naked, and effulgently so.
• At one time, over 90 percent of the clothing sold in America was manufactured in the Garment District. That had dropped to 3 percent.
• (Dan) Flavin designed works of art that incorporated electric lights. By the mid-1960s, his work contained no elements other than electric tubes.
• The rest of Levinas’s life was spent writing about the universal mystery that surrounds us and is most succinctly found in those with whom we are most intimate—parents and lovers—as “the face of the Other.” Neither our engagement nor our comprehension of the Other is ever complete—and this struggle, this unsatisfiable preoccupation, leads us to awe and piety. It also shaves away our narcissism as we are confronted by something that is prominently and immutably not us. We begin to see our victims, as if through a clearing mist, whether next to us in bed or on the other side of the world. For this we owe a debt to the unknown, and our new sight gives rise to a sense of reciprocal obligations, hence ethics.
• My wife and I were once in Damascus and asked an antiques dealer where he found the best rugs. His response: “The Chelsea flea market.” He explained that affluent Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would tour the Middle and Far East... The Syrian came to America four or five times a year just to buy at the flea.
• Unless the bookstore or video shop maintained a certain percentage of material that was not obscene, it would be closed by the police. In order to make certain it met that requirement, the owner of the store on the corner filled over half of his store with an inventory of used children’s books and movies.
• It was that way with everyone at the flea. Whatever they were during the week, there was a transfiguration when they entered the flea. They became, knowingly, willingly, devoutly, the people of the flea.
• “Lilly Pulitzer,” the man began, addressing neither me nor my daughter but the clothes on the rack where my daughter had been hiding, “got the name Lilly from her mother, who, as you may know, was an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune. She was at Chapin with Jackie
• “Arandú. The best shop in Buenos Aires. Near the Alvear Hotel. I assume you know the Alvear.”
• (Paul:) They go into my boxes and touch my clothes without ever considering whether it is appropriate to handle such a shirt or scarf, whether the shirt or scarf wants to be touched. That’s incredible.”
• Their expertise allowed them to recognize that, say, a single and not particularly attractive vase with an oriental scene and an “AR” on the bottom was, in fact, ordered by Augustus the Strong, king of Poland, for his Japanese Palace at Dresden, with the “AR” standing for Augustus Rex... One picker specialized in “trench art,” which is art made by those, such as soldiers, medics,..  Incised shell cases and jewelry made by convalescing soldiers, for example.
• What (Paul) wished for was to bring together, if only for an afternoon, all the men he had clothed, and together he and they would sit, share stories, and read poetry. It would be an “Assembly of Elegant Men,” he said.
• Paul, given his stories and his manner, was considered by some to be the most deceitful of all the vendors. But the day I met him, with my daughter in the Lillys and the sun sprinting through the flea to ignite the silver in Paul’s hair, joined by the amber light from the reflections of the belt buckles hanging from a rack of clothing, none of what was said about Paul mattered. Paul, saturated in colored light, was the central and numinous figure in a Byzantine mosaic.
• Frank would do so, but for those customers in the flea who regularly bought from him and for those he liked, Frank would indicate, in a set of gestures he brought with him from Italy, what he thought of the item. An index finger below his right eye meant that the object was probably not what the consignor claimed and that you should proceed carefully; the same index finger to the upper side of his head suggested that the item was probably genuine but that the price was crazily high; but if Frank brought a fist to his mouth, kissed it, and then opened it quickly, you knew that he thought the item was authentic and priced well below its worth.
• etchings by Piranesi with extensive foxing,
• But I discovered that her daughter had died. “My body is destroying me,” she had said to her mother. “I need to leave it.” I would have expected to find Sophia broken and charred, but she was not. She was solid, with a luminous brown patina.
• “Dozens, maybe more. If your friend the editor is interested, she can have them all. One problem. Many are in foreign languages. Mainly Swedish, but some in Japanese and three in Romanian. The ones in Romanian are especially fine. If your friend doesn’t speak Romanian, I have dictionaries. You’re getting something very special, very intimate—the personal film collection of Al Goldstein—and if you get the films, the projector, and the dictionaries, I’ll give you a good price.”
• “The airplane had barely been invented,” Alan continued as I paged through the book, “when the Italian who wrote the book—his name was Douhet—predicted that one day planes would carry bombs and that the country with the most bombs and fastest planes would rule the world. All you had to do was drop them on civilians... But his writings got out to the Germans, who were smart enough to appreciate what he was saying, and next thing you know they’re bombing civilian populations in Guernica and then Warsaw, Paris, London. That book you’re holding was probably held by Goering, possibly even Hitler. Hitler loved the guy.”
  “The book is in English,” I pointed out.
  Alan did not hesitate.
  “Look, you’re a good customer.”
  So far I wasn’t even a customer.
• Alan was my expert—on Al Goldstein, military history, and typewriters—but more importantly on the current that ran between objects. And I knew from Alan that walking away with an eight-millimeter film, a rare book, or an Italian typewriter would not disrupt that current, for Alan quickly filled the empty spaces with other esoteric conductors, restoring the connection and electrifying those who came into contact with them.
• While Frank had revealed the transforming closeness a vendor might have to the objects on his table, Alan suggested this was part of a larger phenomenon: that objects, randomly assembled and of different kind, form an ecosystem of proximate items that define the objects in a way that is unique to that system and thereby remove them from the cage of their genus.
• The most striking color was the blue from the indigo plant, which I learned from Ibrahim had been applied to the cloth by women from the Mandinka tribe of Mali. They had been taught their skills by earlier generations of women. The designs and process of dying were also influenced by techniques brought to Africa from Japan.
• Traditional African works are often constructed of wood, raffia, shells, feathers, mud, and other fragile materials. Because of this, and because they are used in ceremonies or exhibited outside, few objects last decades or even years. An African sculpture that predates World War II is considered old.
• What he extracted that day was a chimera—a creature with the body and snout of a hippopotamus, the single hump of a camel, scattered feathers, and triangular legs—yet no eyes or ears, no tail or feet, and no mouth. It did, however, have two anuses. Its surface was a thick, grayish brown crust of finely macerated materials of unknown age. Large and small fissures crisscrossed its hide as if something were erupting from within. The creature was engrossing yet no more than two feet high and three feet long. It was like nothing I had ever encountered or imagined, and I was fascinated. <> Ibrahim told me that it came from Mali, and that it was an item of great ritual importance. He explained that animal bones and other objects are inserted into the figure’s anus.
• Boli are traditionally constructed from a variety of materials. Inside the boli is a skeleton of wood wrapped in cloth. Over that frame, depending on the boli, may be layered mud, feces, horns, shells, nails, feathers, twine, paint, raffia, fur, beads, or herbs. The outer surface of the boli is comprised of the dried fluids regularly poured over it to feed and placate the spirit; those fluids include menstruation, blood from sacrificed animals, saliva, chewed kola, honey, and urine, leaving striations across the sides of the fetish. The sacrifice of chickens and goats over the top of the boli causes feathers and hair to gather on the surface... Whatever its ritual or anthropological significance, the boli—bones encased in earth, washed in blood, and inflamed by the spirit of a god that resided within—was a stunning alloy of life and death.
• With that settled, there was still the question of where we would find a goat or chicken in the middle of the night.
  “What about someone in the hotel?” Ibrahim said.
  “There are rumors that a neighbor down the hall has a chicken, but he goes to bed early.”
• The man was from Krakow and his booth was devoted to homoerotic photographs from Communist Poland.
• But something happened that no one, especially Morris, foresaw: the more time Morris spent with the objects the vendors had abandoned in the warehouse, the more interested, even enchanted, Morris became. He started to invite people who entered the warehouse to a viewing of what he’d assembled in the basement.
• William Zorach, for example, was a pioneering and celebrated sculptor who brought cubism and other modernist styles to America in and around World War I. He died in 1966, yet his figural sculptures appeared in the flea for the price of a nice floor lamp.
• He would also fix in his mind the thousands of marks, monograms, symbols, and blind stamps artists used instead of signatures (James McNeill Whistler’s mark was a butterfly; Carlo Crivelli’s was cucumbers; Gauguin signed his works “P. Go.”;
• “Bourdaloues?” “Named after a priest who gave long sermons. Women would come to the sermon with ceramic pots. When they had to piss, they’d slip the pot into their panties.
• The attraction of the surrealists to the flea markets was understandable: conventional assumptions splinter under the weight of the randomness and inadvertence of the flea market, and in this way the flea was a dreamscape to these artists, writers, and musicians, one that evoked the danger and beauty of the unknown. With its deracinated objects and their unexpected juxtapositions, the flea awakened the mind to new impressions of the world.
• “When the Dane is worried about something, he plays with his pencils. As soon as I sat down, he began rolling one in his fingers. At a certain point, he snapped the eraser off the top. The eraser is a symbol of death, and the death of an eraser even more so. Tell him not to worry about me killing myself. I am, after all, ‘the Prophet,’ and I don’t see it.”
• The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard described collecting as rooted in an attempt to evade mortality, closely related to the fear of castration. It is not by chance, Baudrillard observed, that collecting is chiefly the habit of men just prior to puberty and men, again, as they become middle-aged. He also stated that collectors were people who felt alienated from society.
• (Collecting vs. hoarding:) The function of the two terms, it appeared to me, was not descriptive but social; that is, to warn those in society against straying too far into the ambiguity of objects and the relationships they were capable of establishing with humans. The message was that if you are not in control of objects, categorizing them according to a strict logic of society’s making, setting them up in cases and constantly monitoring their status (that is, if you stray from your job as warden over these prisoners), then you are a hoarder and the very objects you invite into your home will destroy you.
• There were any number of people who, addicted to the flea, had spent most of their money there and ended up working in nearby restaurants, salons, and shops.
• That smudge told Harold that this was not a reproduction, but something else. A drawing. The artist’s hand or sleeve had passed over the work, causing the imperfection.
• (The Cowboy:) “Instead of going to the bodega, she bought a gun, and with the gun, she shot Warhol. The next thing I know, the newspapers are calling and asking me to explain what happened, and I said that the shooting made a lot of sense to me.
• This would explain the manner in which the Russian inspected paintings. Paintings disintegrate in specific ways—paints fade; varnishes change color; bubbles may form if an artist is impatient and does not wait long enough for a painting to dry before applying a new layer, and sections of the surface thereby become unstable. <> There is also “craquelure.” Paints and the materials added to paints (such as solvents, which are used to thin paint) evaporate, and this causes the surface of a painting to shrink and crack.
• For years, I thought about why he wanted that exact book. Then one day, after a lover of mine died, I knew the answer: there is a point in chess, the zugzwang, when you have to move but any move you make will bring you closer to defeat. With his wife gone, he felt that way. Then one morning he sees a light from a book, and he knows his way around defeat. Suddenly he feels happy again.”
  I appreciated what the Dane was up to: he understood my obsession with collecting and the problems such an obsession inflicts. But he also understood that there was something in the flea other than objects and collecting—a salvation harbored in the chaos.
• He did not deserve to touch this object. Good or bad, it had mattered to a succession of people—the sitter, the artist, the doctor, Morris, and myself—and each had found something of value in that object. Around the painting, his delicate hands were enormous and grotesque.
• “Hoarder!” <> As I was recovering from this, my wife pulled up to in­form me that the president of the country of Georgia had just arrived in our living room.
• But in time it occurred to him that whenever he had his records up on the wall, his business would increase. From then on, he never put his records on the wall. He understood where money led and saw, from his folding chair, those who were already lost to it, those who, upon noticing the lavender in a Sammy Turner cover, failed to recall a fresco which they had studied in college or the scent of someone whom they had once loved.
• I agreed, knowing that one day the Prophet—standing ­in the middle of the flea, incanting prices from auctions, his arms stabbing the air—would come upon the sequence of numbers and gestures that would cause Sophia’s child to be brought back to life, Jokkho’s eye to grow back, the Dane’s dissertation to be finished, and the flea to be saved. The latter would be the most difficult: in my two decades in the flea, the number of vendors had dropped from twelve hundred to fifty.
• Those who remained, along with Paul, Morris, Sophia, and the others, were capable of intricate connections to the most maligned objects, including themselves. From this arose a rare light and sympathy that made me feel there was nothing lowly in the world.
• “Within a couple minutes I’m back at my seat in the lecture hall, filling in the dots on the answer sheet, confident that the afternoon part of the exam is going to be as easy as the morning, when I hear a voice. David, the voice whispers, so as not to disturb the others, you can finish the exam and become a lawyer, get that job at a big law firm, and buy a beautiful old house (just like the ones you used to visit in St. Louis), or you can get up, go back upstairs, pull out the rug, and drag it to your car.” <> David paused, reflecting on the serendipity of coming across a rug from Tabriz in a UCLA classroom on his way to a bathroom in the middle of the law school admission exam.
• it was the event itself as orchestrated by David that kept me there. It was, in David’s own description, “improvisational theater,” the “Wild West of auctions,” with David as ironic circus host.
• “If I know what the piece is, I lose interest,” he told me. “The only things I hang in my home are things I can’t figure out.”
• would dismiss (the Prophet) as odd and insignificant, with his paintings he buys for $70 and sells for not much more, his shopping cart of auction records, and his shaking and sniffing. None of them would understand that this person existed only because of the flea. He was its magus—the interpreter of its signs and the forecaster of its future.
• Paintings have a life: they crack, fade, shrink, yellow, and bubble. They also breathe fatty acids. Which means that if a painting is sealed behind glass for a sufficient length of time, the acids, evaporating from the painting, will be deposited on the inside of the glass, causing the formation of a whitish film. This is known as blooming or blanching. It is also known as a “ghost image” because the film will sometimes take on the outline of what was in the painting—people, buildings, trees. David knew that I had been collecting glass sheets, preferably in frames, that contained ghosts.
• And when I finished and the three plates were in large shards, I stomped on them again. But the images did not disappear, for they had reconstituted themselves in a crystal powder that was the amorphous shape of my boot.
• At this point all the men at the funeral service were staring at other men at the funeral service; none were paying any attention to the Eddie story and all were agitated and hostile... During cocktail and dinner parties in Greenwich, Paul might have gone through his friends’ closets, removed items that no longer fit them or they weren’t wearing or he felt they shouldn’t be wearing, and secretly taken the clothes back to his house and given them to other friends who fit into the clothes, would wear them, and should be wearing them. What was left over, he brought to the flea... Paul—knowing that at his funeral we would each be wearing something we had purchased from him or that had been given to us by him as a gift, and that we would then all catch on to what he had been doing—had created a giant distraction, a comical confusion, at his own funeral, thus turning what otherwise would be a large and unhappy affair into a large and mirthful affair.
• The destruction of the garage was an expression of our failure to protect and nurture uncertainty, the mutating salvation which resides within and about us. Whether uncertainty has an existence outside our thoughts or is a category of consciousness, it is fixed to our being, and as such, it responds to, reacts against, historical forces. Giulio Douhet, the Italian whose manuscript I had purchased at the flea, knew this and knew that we could be manipulated by infecting our intimate sense of uncertainty with the threat of immediate and mass annihilation. Consequently, uncertainty became so feared that our instinct is now to turn against it, attack it, and in doing so our thinking stagnates. We lose the ability to adapt, to move forward—to retain the chaos in ourselves that gives birth, in Nietzsche’s phrase, to a “dancing star.”