New York missive no 90 - Naming colours, and Astoria Park on a grey morning

One day I was getting on the downtown 1 train at 59th Street when a young Chinese girl asked if I could help her name a colour. She was clutching a large board. It had scraps of different coloured material and paper stuck onto it. Rather desperately, she said “excuse me, but what name do you give this colour?” I paused then offered “ivory".

“Good, ivory," she said, and wrote it on the board. We got on the train. She sat next to me, and for the next few stops we worked through the rest of her colours. Some were easier than others. There was “baby blue”, “mauve“ and "black”. We both got off at 28th Street: she was headed to the Fashion Institute of Technology where presumably her colour-naming would be put to the test.

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The day before JNH’s birthday I took him for an early morning stroll around Astoria Park (pre mum and baby music class). There was a slate sky and the East River was still. A black and white tugboat slid down it pulling a nondescript cargo. The arch of Hell Gate Bridge was reflected in the river to form an open mouth – leading to the winding throat of the Hudson if you were approaching (as I was) from the South, and to the clanging city and out to sea if you were approaching from the North.

It reminded me of a passage I’d just read in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The passage describes the city of “Despina," that can be reached by ship or by camel. When a camel driver approaches, he sees the shape of the city with its skyscrapers, radar antennae, wind-socks flapping and “chimneys belching smoke” as a ship. “…[H]e thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off…”

When the sailor approaches, he “knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea…”

The book pushes its idea a bit too far. It describes many, many incarnations of cities to drive home the point that cities have the same contents – it’s the angle they are viewed from that changes and changes them, like a kaleidoscope. But it has some gems, like this paragraph that I pounced on and tripled-lined in the margin. It captures what I’m trying to get at with my 30th Ave website:

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me’

Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.'"

New York missive no 41 - Mind, bodies & the city

Minds, bodies and the city.

Perhaps it’s stimulated by recession and recession-fears but it seems there’s more craziness in New York these days. So much so the boundaries between craziness and sanity are blurring. The man sitting next to me on the 1-train shouting, pointing, laughing at himself and the world and emitting fragments of phrases like “And wipe my boots," “Zimbabwe,” “You are him?” “Ha-ha!” may have as much sense and truth in him as I or our fellow passengers – who cast quick glances from time to time then buried themselves back in books and iPods. And the scene of a man in an electric wheelchair gliding slow and steady round the edge of a frozen lake in the quiet North West corner of Central Park with “Greensleeves” blaring from his transistor radio is as beautiful as it’s bizarre.

And then there’s the elderly man on the steps to the uptown platform at 14th Street station. He had a shopping trolley stuffed with paper Duane Reed bags, which in turn were stuffed with stuff. And he had more stuffed paper Duane Reed bags gathered around him. One of them tipped over. Its contents – bits of scrunched up paper, unidentifiable objects – tumbled down the steps. I went over to pick some of the stuff up. “Oh Nooooo!” he shouted, pointing an accusing arm at me, and everyone on the platform looked on. “No No! Don’t you help me. Don’t!” So I didn’t. Back on the platform someone said he too had tried to help and got the same reaction. It happened again. As steps-man bent down to pick up his things another of the bags tipped and more contents tumbled. Again, someone tried to help (yes whatever they say about this city people do look out for each other, after they’ve looked out for themselves). Again he shouted “No! No No!” Louder this time. And so it went on, more stuff tumbling, more offers to help, louder and louder rejections.

Is he a 21st century Bartleby? A couple of days previously I’d been at a New School class on literary New York (how very New York) where we’d been discussing Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. Bartleby turns up at the narrator’s law chambers one day and starts work as a scrivener, copying legal documents. He complies with the copying but whenever he’s asked to do anything else says, “I’d prefer not to.” Eventually he “prefers not to” do the copying as well, yet somehow the narrator’s unable to get him to leave, so moves himself instead. Bartleby’s preferring not to is many things. One is simple resistance. Unlike the narrator, the other scriveners and the teeming inhabitants beyond the boundaries of Melville's tale Bartleby refuses to let the city subsume him. Keeps his identity erosion-free. Steps-man is a resistor too. But I guess the question is, to be a resistor do you have to be a victim first?

Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” also came up in that class. Simmel writes about how minds respond to the city’s bombardment of fleeting external impressions. It made me think about how my kidneys are responding too. To explain…during the past few weeks something’s been up with them, which has led to a flurry of interaction with the US health system in search of a diagnosis (about which maybe more later). If I were to self-diagnose though, my grumbling kidneys might be symptoms of a saturated consciousness – all the more apt as kidneys receive and deal with stuff from outside. If that is one of the causes what’s the cure? One would be to block out external impressions, or at least receive them selectively. Taken to an extreme, the “prefer not to” option. But I’m not sure my nature would approve of that, no doubt provoking a different kind of rebellion. Another would be to expand. To somehow increase the space I have to contain them all. But that could be a futile and ultimately dangerous endeavour (I’d be like one of those endlessly inflatable empresses fed milk through a tube). Another would be to go sit on a beach for a bit and watch the sea (which appeals of course, and indeed can be done, but is more of a quick-fix bail-out than a sustainable solution). And another would be to process them. Accept them, play with them, filter them, blend them with a bit of imagination and then send them bouncing back out into the world, a little changed. That’s the cure I’ll experiment with.

That, and chancra piedra tea. When my back played up on a beach in Northern Peru a doctor came in from a nearby village, gave me a shot of morphine, told me it could be a kidney stone and that I should just consume water for a few days and get hold of some chancra piedra when I returned to Lima. So for a few weeks after that I was boiling up leaves bought for a few soles in little bags in a Lima market, straining them and drinking the brown tea. I felt better. Here in New York you can get it too, though for more than a few soles, in round tins not bags, from an online natural remedies store rather than a bustling market, and under the English and embellished name “Royal Break Stone Tea”. I've had a couple of cups so far.

Another way people react to the city is to create little islands. They can be made of anything. There are the polystyrene cups of coffee that people cling to on their way to work in the mornings as if to say “this is me, here I am still, look, I’m holding on tight.” There are relationships. For example S and A described the other day how they sometimes shut themselves off in a little world of their apartment and each other, away from everything else. He’s just lost his job of 13 years so might be finding himself in that little world too much. Oh yes and there are apartments themselves of course, but in that case someone else’s island is always better than yours. There are Sundays. And there are relationships on Sundays, captured stunningly by Tom Wolfe in “A Sunday Kind of Love” (in the way that so many New York writers capture things stunningly in their almost-unique ways; Updike, who died last week and about whom eulogies are bursting out of the pages of all New York papers and magazines, apparently thought New York would never let him be totally unique - too many distractions - hence didn't stay here long).

Wolfe starts by describing a young couple kissing on a Thursday morning in a subway station while crowds swarm by:

“All the faces come popping in clots out of the Seventh Avenue local, past the King Size Ice Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh, wool, felt, leather, rubber and streaming alumicron, with the blood squeezing through everybody’s old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin, backbreaking embraces.”

And then, “The vision of love at rush hour cannot strike anyone exactly as romance. It is a feat, like a fat man crossing the English Channel in a barrel. It is an earnest accomplishment against the tide…Which explains why the real thing in New York is, as it says in the song, a Sunday kind of love.”

He describes "George G" and "Anne A"’s Sunday kind of love. “George would be sitting at this rickety little table with an oil-cloth over it. How he goes on about it! The place was grimy. You couldn’t keep the soot out. The place was beautiful. Anne is at the stove making coffee. The smell of the coffee being made, just the smell…already he is turned on. She had on a great terrycloth bathrobe with a sash belt. The way she moved around inside the bathrobe with the sun shining in the window always got him. It was the atmosphere of the thing. There she was, moving around in that great fluffy bathrobe with the sun hitting her hair, and they had all the time in the world. There wasn’t even one flatulent truck horn out on Eighth Avenue. Nobody was clobbering their way down the stairs in high heels out in the hall at 10 minutes to 9.”

Oh wow. The fabulous rhythm of words.