Ode to Manhattan
The city is so big, so magnificent, so diverse that there are a myriad of cities within it. There is a cumulative energy that permeates the environment. It is a raw and indelicate energy that dominates the atmosphere; that perplexes and mystifies visitors; that torments even the most thick-skinned of New Yorkers. The city is a grand and voluptuous mistress well-versed in the art of seduction, yet she is dangerous for there is something ominous in her grandiose presence.
I grew up in the Bronx, but Manhattan was like a luminous and alluring siren calling to me to come and be captivated by its majesty and magnificent energy. It was only as a young man that I finally lived with her, and felt her passion, her exuberance, her ferocity and her grace.
Within the many awakenings of my chaotic young life, I began to pilot my way through the tumultuous aspects of humanity. My own upbringing in a working class neighborhood helped prepare me for the wild-eyed life of the city. The tenement I grew up in represented a microcosm of a world community. The tenants came from many parts of the beleaguered post-war planet. Many struggled with the English language. Diversity was a simple fact of living. The tenement was like a meandering ship navigating through a storm-tossed world. Many of this ship’s passengers were in hot pursuit of the American Dream with varied success, and experienced many mishaps along the way that they were mostly unprepared for. Some were self-proclaimed pariahs wanting to be left alone. Some were new immigrants trying to grasp all the nuances and subtleties of an entirely new life, culture and language. Considering all the varied cultural inclinations and differing world views that co-existed in such a confined space, it was quite amazing that we lived together as peacefully and as well as we did.
It was a densely populated neighborhood where privacy was a luxury none of us could afford. My bed was a convertible sofa that dominated the living room. Everyone in that building shared a singular telephone in the lobby. My family did not own a car; the automobile represented a level of affluence that was well beyond our reach. We did not miss what we did not have, and for that reason we were no lesser for it.
When I was a young boy, technological advances were just beginning to invade our lives. The portable transistor radio was born and the television had recently become affordable. These were profoundly life-changing events, for they expanded the boundaries of our existence, and, ultimately, our view of the world we lived in. These were not so subtle indications that the world was rapidly changing. It made the young restless and the adults nervous. Where the young could see an array of possibilities and new frontiers to explore, the older generation looked upon the adaptation that necessarily comes with change as a labor they would prefer not to undertake. Some were so alienated by these changes that they preferred to be left behind.
When I had become a young man, I felt that I was ready to direct my own course through it all, and eventually made the plunge into the heart of the city to be embroiled in its relentless motion and impaled on its bedrock of desire.
I was always enamored of the subways, of the rhythm of steel grinding against steel, of the scream of tormented metal as its reverberations echoed off the damp inner walls of the tunnels. The clamoring, clanking subway roaring through the long slender tubes beneath the city produced howling sounds of such intensity that it was reminiscent of boyhood dreams of hell. The comings and goings of humanity in and out of those subway cars, the apparently inexhaustible chain of individuals representing almost every sovereignty on the planet, every conceivable lifestyle, every age, every persuasion was itself a kind of initiation into the most wondrous and preposterous city on earth. I would often ride astride the space between adjoining cars of a subway train with one leg on each side bathing in the muted light of the fluorescent lamps as the train sped into the darkness.
I had a special fondness for the "D" train as it made its express run from Columbus Circle to Harlem. The white ceramic-tiled stations appeared only briefly as the train sped by them, as if they were stills in a movie. The hollowed out earth that was the home of the subway knew neither sunshine nor greenery.
Passengers became like the living dead moving methodically on their journey through the underworld. I often stood looking out the front window of the very first car in the train peering into the very heart of darkness as I was encapsulated in a long metallic worm threading its way through the city. It was a kind of barely contained madness. In the subway, we were all subservient to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the underground.
Subway platforms were forums for the impromptu and irrepressible convening of humanity. At the West 4th Street station, the gateway to Greenwich Village, a remarkable potpourri of types promenaded on their way to the streets above. There were gloriously dressed transvestites with every particle of clothing meticulously in place, black-jacketed studs with big buckles and Garrison belts, picking their teeth with cobras and post-pubescent girls with precocious bosoms. There were heavy-hearted winos leaning desperately for support against the station pillars, young adolescents terrorizing defunct vending machines and everywhere the couples hopelessly and deliciously lost in the throes of their own private erotic journey. All this transpiring simultaneously, choreographed by the interplay of time and humanity. All of this periodically interrupted by the clamoring trains.
Manhattan is a fever of contradictions. In the pulsing stream ride the many nations and its many peoples - Italian-Irish-Haitian-Jew-Arab-Black-Chinese-Hindustani-Swedish-French-Hispanic-German-Greek-Jamaican-Peruvian-Russian-Ukranian and many other representatives of nations from around the world. From the mixing of these many cultures, there does indeed come violence but also compassion, shadow but also light, pain but also joy. There is death but also birth. There is hunger but also vitality. There is desperation but also hope. Humanity is the heart of New York; it is the collective heartbeat of all these exotic souls that is the very rhythm of the city. It is ever present - on street corners, on the rooftops, in the underground. The power of life is through its expression and it is through this energy that the city lives.
I walked the streets of the city like a traveler from the distant stars noting every nuance of the humans' thirst for survival, for pleasure, for reverence, for glory and for meaning. Humans seem to be beleaguered by the complexity of their inner life, the images of self and others and the summation of the infinitely diverse interpretations of the singular events and circumstances of a lifetime.
There are many nomads in the city, many homeless, many hanging precariously to life. There are many young vital males with nothing to do but endure the relentless passing of time. While the vitality roars in their bodies, these men decay from within from the ravages of the restless engine of inertia. The parks, the Christian missions and ultimately the prisons await them.
There are many who walk the city inescapably mad tormented by the fire burning constantly in their brains. There are many who walk the streets with a running dialogue being carried on by the myriad personalities trapped within a singular consciousness. These individuals are particularly prone to perilous ends, for they are completely devoid of even the barest remnants of survival programming, so engrossed are they with their own divinations.
Uptown women, at the very pinnacle of fashion, hailing cabs in a driving rain. Junkies nodding out over a cup of coffee at Bickford's. Employees on lunch break causing thousands of hot dogs to disappear from a Nedick's restaurant in less than an hour. A drunk pissing on a statue opposite Macy's. Five young black boys with nothing but a rope at their disposal demolishing what was left of a burnt out tenement with consummate speed and skill. Young gay men cruising with an almost mocking grace on a hot summer afternoon in Central Park. A family speaking French on a bus nearing Lincoln Center. Old Italian men in white suits playing bocce. A gaggle of old and widowed Jewish women lined up on a park bench, like chickens roosting on a fallen log, exchanging stories regarding their dead husbands, or inconsiderate children or comparing the severity of their operations. Queues of young professionals outside the Broadway theaters on a Saturday night. The neon half-light of Times Square with the atmosphere of frenzied commerce permeating the very concrete. Yellow cabs maneuvering like crazed hornets along Sixth Avenue picking up harried professionals on their way to their appointments.
Pedestrians move in great hordes through the narrow valleys of steel and glass. They meander through traffic as if they are fording a treacherous river. New Yorkers are walkers; walking is an essential part of survival in the city. At the end of the working day, thousands upon thousands of employees empty out of their cubicles onto Fifth Avenue. They move about collectively like an indefatigable army of bugler ants. The rhythm of human endeavor is relentless in the city that never sleeps. Every hour of the day or night, there is a parade of humanity that endures all manner of weather and calamity whether natural or otherwise. In contrast to all this chaotic movement, Wall Street on a Sunday afternoon projects a ghost-like quality with the wind blowing the refuge through silent and deserted thoroughfares.
Even though nature has been severely circumscribed, it still manages to assert its presence. The sharply delineated gray of winter with low and voluminous clouds enshroud the great skyscrapers and suggest a world beyond the lure of commercial appetite. Savage winter storms evoke a respect for the natural world in spite of all the worldly distractions.
These are some of the images that enveloped my senses and catapulted me into a dream-like state bound up in an ever-changing fabric of the human kind infinitely diverse yet somehow monolithic, ever moving yet changeless, an immense population of individuals that share a commonalty of their genes, the architecture of their brains and the form of their bodies. Humans are the chimera of a protracted past, an instantaneous present and an uncertain future. The city stands as a crystalline mirror to that humanity revealing all its convoluted facets, its monumental incoherence and shimmering vitality.
I imagine that every attentive moment produces ripples and eddies in the vast microcosm of the inner brain and that these disturbances are both fluid and fixed and over many years imprint a kind of map which establishes the network of my conclusions. I imagine each person's map to be uniquely different i.e. that from identical circumstances two minds produce different imprints. The self-awareness of these characteristic imprints provides an emotional dimension to what is seen as personal experience.
The city was the harbinger of all things to my expectant senses, and I feasted on them. Although I have left the past, I secretly built upon its ruins my own temple. The old neighborhood I left behind is now physically beyond recognition. Pop's Italian grocery store became a pile of fallen bricks and mortar indelicately surrounded by a chain link fence. The Third Avenue El was dismantled years ago. My five story tenement was consumed by fire; only its burnt-out outer shell remained as a reminder of its previous vitality. These remnants of an earlier time were ultimately swept away to be replaced by housing developments profoundly subdued and more reminiscent of a suburban community than a city neighborhood. The street which encompassed my young life is now strangely quiescent. All the physical evidence of my growing up has been discarded and displaced. This makes me feel strangely uneasy. Yet what truth there is remains intact and I its feeble caretaker.
My own growing up with all its particular circumstances is but an indelicate mirror of the state and situation of humanity. I am, in fact, a living time machine carrying with me, through the fourth dimension, the history, inclinations, failings and possibilities of the race.
The End