New York missive no 100 - an N train commute, Whitney Houston and Christopher Hitchens

C’s poem about Christopher Hitchens ends with the lines

The thing about death
is how efficiently
it silences.

Those lines sprung to mind again on my N-train subway commute the other morning. Two people along from me a woman was listening to Whitney Houston at full blast on her headphones. It was a couple of days after Houston had died, and there was her distinctive voice accompanying Queens-dwellers on their way into work: I Will Always Love You, I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me), Where Do Broken Hearts Go? The woman with the headphones wasn’t crying but was visibly upset as she listened. It annoyed me how little notice everyone took, or at least how consciously they seemed to be pretending they couldn’t hear.

On one hand it was a reminder that artists secure some kind of afterlife through their creations; they can be read, listened to, watched, after they have died. But that also makes death's silencing all the more dramatic. The carriage was full of an immensely powerful voice that would never sing again.

I then noticed that the woman sitting in between me and the Whitney Houston fan was reading Hitchen's autobiography Hitch 22, published soon before he died last year.

That’s two rather morbid posts in a row. I’m five months pregnant. I wonder if that has anything to do with it: amplified hormones and all that.

New York missive no 86 - NYC subway people who stay still

Most people in the New York City subway system are moving. Even when they’re standing on a platform waiting for a train they fidget, peering down the tracks as if to lure the train into the station. When it arrives, on they get and off they go to their next destination. But there are some people who do not move. You could call them fixtures.

On the NQR southbound track at 34th Street station there is the man who sits on a box at the bottom of a pillar and plays his accordion. I see him when I’m waiting for my train on the other side of the track. He plays classic melodies. La Vie en Rose, Lara's Theme. If you close your eyes you could be on the South Bank in Paris, just about.

On the NQR northbound track at 34th Street station there is the black guy with his possessions in plastic sacks piled high in a shopping trolley. He occupies the end seat on one of the wooden benches at the northern end of the platform.

Occupies, that is, until one day when I saw that a Navajo Indian had taken his spot. The new occupant had a sign, “Navajo Indian. Trying to get back to Arizona. Please help.” He was gazing into the distance and held out a little Dunkin’ Donuts plastic cup. The first day I saw him there I put a dollar in the cup. His eyes sparked up and he opened his gold-filling filled mouth to say “god bless you” before gazing back into space again. Who knows if he is really trying to get back to Arizona, but I felt motivated to give him the dollar.

The second day I saw him there, the black guy with the shopping trolley came down onto the platform. He looked distraught when he saw somebody else in his seat. He leaned against a nearby garbage bin, his trolley and bags gathered around him. And there he was, leaning against the garbage bin, when my train arrived, on I got and off I went.

New York missive no 78 - future environmentalism...and the NYC subway map

In his recent Open Democracy piece Confessions of a recovering environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth laments environmentalism’s shift away from an emotional connection with wild places that are unmarked by human influence, to a human-oriented science that lacks soul. Two traits, as he sees them, characterize the new environmentalism: an obsession with climate change (and resulting numbers-driven fixation on reducing emissions, even when this means colonizing wild places with turbines or solar panels), and the political mainstreaming of environmentalism by the left. They are important points, but as Kingsnorth himself acknowledges, he doesn’t come up with any answers about the way forward. He rightly criticizes the human-centric approach of the new environmentalism but takes it too far – saying that social and environmental justice are not connected (try telling that to someone whose land or livelihood has been destroyed by an oil spill, be it in Nigeria, Ecuador or the US Gulf), and almost, it seems, advocating for a world without people.

In a response, Andrew Dobson points out that the situation is not as dire as Kingsnorth implies. And, he says, you don’t have to go to untouched wildernesses to find a connection with nature. “Kingsnorth had his epiphany after boating up rivers in Borneo by moonlight - a ‘two-month immersion in something raw and unmediated’. If this is what has to happen for us to reconnect, then we surely are in deep trouble. Fortunately, it’s not like that. Most people have a much lower nature tolerance than Kingsnorth, so we need less exposure to nature to get the same hit as he does. This is good news: I can see something worth protecting just about everywhere, and not only where nature is at its wildest.”

Something worth protecting just about everywhere…that point is emphasized in a recent New York magazine article about how New York City has much higher biodiversity than many people imagine. In fact the diverse and dynamic characteristics of the environment here can encourage rare species to arrive and thrive - scientists are starting to see the city as "an ecological hotspot". People often ask me if I feel Astoria “lacks green spaces". You could easily say that - bricks and concrete definitely dominate. But I feel surrounded by precious pockets of green. The pear tree outside our living room window with its noisy colony of birds and squirrels, the herbs growing on our balcony, the tangled garden out the back of the house, Astoria Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, the two Coves Community Garden, the pigeons that poo over shiny cars parked beneath the El trains...(a welcome intervention as far as I'm concerned).

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One day soon after C and I had met we were traveling on the 7 train. I pointed out how the New York City subway map looks like a person on a life support machine. Manhattan is the person, with lifelines and wires connecting it to the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn that nourish it and keep it alive. C said he agreed but wished I hadn’t pointed it out because if we ever broke up, the subway map would always remind him of me and that conversation. Now each time I see the subway map I’m reminded of that conversation and the strength of our relationship.

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.