I will be honest: I am more focused on the moment the cigarette stub is lowered down, its astringent aftermemory still lingering in the gums, because, as it happens, he has been caught living somewhere else. For the past five minutes, his mind has been honed on the auburn, embered end of his smoke, the same fire as his anthropological prehistory; it’s our interactions with fire that detail human development, after all, and the smoke from the cigarette spins away, dances its waltz in the air, swirling cyclones at the wave of a hand. It has not forgotten its own viscerality. But he stuffs the butt down some drainage ditch, in the ashtray on his porch or in his pocket. He steps away from the secluded corner or alleyway he found himself in, away from existing as those nooks existed, away from their stillness, and reenters the world again.
Inevitably, he slips back into the street he was walking, back into his enterprises: a resume to be updated, internships to be kneaded over. I’m reminded of an anecdote my architecture professor told me freshman year of a student in Paris, who, with that paragon of a city at their leisure, spent their time going only between their campus, the grocery store and their apartment. Trace the streets on the palm of their hand, draw the lines between those three points, and you’d find out what Paris was to that student: precisely a triangle — which is a geometrically strong shape; a table with three legs never wobbles. A triangle is structurally sound; we build the economy off triangles, whether imagined or apparent. It’s a rather virtuous abstraction of a city, which the smoke breaks ruin, each cigarette putting a dent in it. Introduce peregrine movements into vector analysis and the whole thing becomes crushed under the weight of its forces, the lines no longer perfect, the shape no longer rigid. It’s best not to wander too far.
This triangle is what Ann Arbor was advertised to me as. I’m conscious that I am here, in this city, for the sole purpose of getting a college degree, lured by the university’s promises. Ann Arbor exists in list form, as a set of disparate nodes: professors and their evaluations, buildings and their facilities, their resources, their amenities. Mean aggregate data — a class size, a ranking. More and more we break down a city into numbers; more and more they become easy to compute. What does the street exist as but the time it takes to cross? The route from my house to the campus — White Street that hits Arch Street, crossing through Packard Street onto Oakland Avenue to the Law Quadrangle — is nothing but 13 minutes, shining with the pure simplicity of Google Maps’ blue. Google Blue 800.
White Street to Arch Street. 13 minutes — rendered in binary: 00001101. One byte as the purest form of the city street. All the pavement, birds, shrubbery pressed down onto one end of a transistor. It was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the inventor of binary, who proclaimed that numbering system as the picture of creation: the zero as void, the one as god. Look at seven, the seventh day, in binary as 111: god, the son, the holy spirit. The trinity, the triangle. 111 — all there, all present.
But pedestrians aren’t angels, so the mottled grain of the sidewalk, the weeds poking through its cracks and the cicadas, in their Reichian music, breathing in their own pulses, all must lie in between that 0 and the 1. This is the price of the intercorporeal — embodied cognition, the chain restraining you to a body, experience as a landscape, a continuous textile over the discrete number. I suppose MATH 115 was good for something.
***
Enterprise hones our eyes on the city as the accumulation of capital, defined by economic development and property value. We gaze at the New York Cities, the Chicagos: the Vanderbilts, the Chryslers, the Willises, the Woolworths — the towers to topple Babel. We avert our eyes from the Detroits, from our prototypical shrinking cities, from losing: the losing of populations, of jobs, infrastructure, investment, funding, cultural institutions, retail. It’s narrative so anchored in the collective human consciousness that your eyes glaze before even the end of that list.
But allow yourself to read it and draw your attention to the things hidden from its view. As Andrew Herscher argues in “The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit,” “what if one sort of property value has decreased in Detroit — the exchange value brokered by the failing market economy — but other sorts of values have reciprocally increased, use values that lack salience or even existence in that economy?” He focuses on urban unvalue, a supplement to real estate with its own forms and possibilities, and Detroit not as failing but, “failing better — more equitably, justly, and beautifully.” This is unreal estate, property that has been excluded from the market economy, property at a parallax position to assess value, property where the city has been reimagined and reconfigured. Grace Lee Boggs, in “The Next American Revolution,” writes:
“Precisely because physical devastation on such a huge scale boggles the mind, it also frees the imagination … to perceive reality anew; to see vacant lots not as eyesores but as empty spaces inviting the viewer to fill them in with other forms, other structures that presage a new kind of city which will embody and nurture new life-affirming values in sharp contrast to the values of materialism, individualism and competition that have brought us to this denouement.”
This is the Navin Fields Ground Crew, who’ve illegally maintained Tiger Stadium’s infield — Detroit’s original ballpark later replaced by a shiny new stadium — battling the city, hoping to redevelop the field in the process. This is the Brightmoor farmway, a path going through urban farms, wildflower gardens and community parks organized on vacant lots. This is the Michigan Theatre parking garage, a car lot built out of a gutted Renaissance Revival era building, the old facades never bothered to be torn down. This is block parties, main streets made into protest parade lines, the ivy alleyway between an office and an apartment that marks its exit from market reality with cigarette butts strewn upon the ground, akin to a smoker’s geocache, breathing its memory from everyone else that have leaned against its brick wall, watching the beetles scale the vines. The way the streetlights shine off the metal signs at night, each its own miniature Aurora Borealis.
It’s here that I ought to break from the narrative and note that smoking is, in fact, bad for you. Each cigarette, despite the industry’s best efforts, delivers about 10 milligrams of tar into your lungs, sticking to your epithelial cells, blocking the alveoli. The common prudence largely rings true: lung cancer. COPD. Reduced bone marrow. Blood coagulation. Grow those black roses in your body and have yourself a viking’s funeral, complete with fire. At least I’ll remember what it’s like to die — nicotine decreases the prevalence of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, after all.
There is a public shame that comes with the cigarette. You feel the eyes on your back, the need to slithe into those nooks in the first place, because in the same way we view architecture, we view humans. If you believe architecture to be a marketized good, then you are too. Smoking has been public health’s golden thorn since the Surgeon General’s first report on it 60 years ago; no matter what epidemiology says about its many vices, it stubbornly sticks around precisely because of its ferality. Burn a dent in yourself: become invisible to the ecosystem of corporations, just for a moment, and maybe you won’t be completely eaten alive. And so it was only through the embodiment of this public failure that I could properly see the city for what it is again: refusing to be contained, with wildness poking through its many cracks. With failing, but failing beautifully.
I’ll admit I earlier lied to you: I’ve never made a resume, because I’ve always been too scared, because sometimes during the last years, five minutes — a smoke break — was all I could afford away from the labor of being an economically productive American. Slip into the skin of a smoker, and for a moment alternative meanings can shine. In the dark, shadows dancing against the fire, you can be something else; even human.
It’s late July and summer’s jejune imagination has stretched itself thin. I am on my porch, trying to catch the waves of a fading sun, and, of course, a cigarette stub is making its way into the ashtray; I’ve picked up a smoking habit, unfortunately, and to my surprise, the bush in my front yard — the one I’ve passed countless times through the school year on my way home — has sprouted flowers. First, just one, poking through the fence, then each all at once. It’s a hibiscus plant — a Crimson-eyed rosemallow. Poetically, it’s the flower that blooms only for a single day. In reality, it is several. Still, as Amanda Fortini wrote for the T Magazine, the flower’s “grandiose blossoms are as dazzling as they are ephemeral,” a Victorian symbol for delicate beauty. Without realizing it, I’d begun to track the movement of time with that flowering bush, watching as each bud blooms, watching as each flower falls, watching as new sprouts take their place. Watching as it pokes through the gaps in my white fence. A perfect watching — me, the cigarette, the flower, a holy trinity — before, inevitably, I have to press resume; back to the computer, the book. Back to life. Blink, and you’ll miss it.
Statement Contributor Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu
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