It was twelve slim Bronx blocks from my duplex to the subway station. For the first six, the sidewalks were a shambles. They couldn’t really be described as walkways. The concrete slabs rarely met flush. Some had crumbled along their edges, leaving heel-sized gaps. Others twisted away from each other, twisting ankles in turn, while still more rose at sharp angles driven by the unruly roots of dying trees, making it necessary to high-step their borders. In winter, when the ground powdered over with white that obscured rather than softened the jaggedness, my walk to the subway became more of an adventure than I cared for. Locals trudged right down the middle of the road, between cars parked tightly on either side of the matchstick streets, stilling traffic. Black ice made the roads treacherous even when they were clear, so that cars often maintained a pace hardly greater than that of pedestrians.
Now, though, in mid-September, that liminal zone between seasons, there wasn’t a trace of snow to be found, even if one or two days recently had proved balefully cold. But the drivers had long ago lost their winter caution and whatever dribs of empathy came with it. They expected those of us on foot to keep to the disfigured sidewalks, and if they were no longer so dangerous as when they were laden with snow, you still had to be mindful of your footing in a way that made the walk seem far longer than it really was—particularly while carrying a portfolio full of drawings. To prevent my work from colliding with those gnarled slabs rising up like mountain ridges, from time to time I had to hold the oversize portfolio up in front of me by its handles, invariably attracting the attention of anyone nearby to something—art—that could only seem precious and out of keeping with the neighborhood. Loitering eyes at each intersection reinforced the oddness of my presence here, even those of people who recognized me well by now. It was as though, here, repetition lost its usual power to familiarize. Although they saw me week after week on these streets, sometimes even meeting my eyes, to judge by their visible surprise on seeing me the next time I must have appeared as strange and alien to them as on the day I’d moved in.
At least I could see there’d been an evolution in what followed this initial state of bewilderment. In my first few months here, their confused expressions would quickly betray a sort of curiosity that seemed to me fundamentally predatory. I’d seen it in my time on couches in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and Sunset Park, right after graduation, and again in the stint I’d more recently done in Bushwick. Before coming to the Bronx, I’d considered Midwood, a more tolerable part of Brooklyn, and not just because of Di Fara. In the end I opted for a change of borough, not only because of Midwood’s sizable distance from Manhattan, but because even the far parts of Brooklyn were within semiotic reach of its status as an artists’ haven. The place changed the way people looked at you. They were too ready to be observed—they understood their function for us—and you yourself, amidst that abundance of artists and writers, easily fell into familiar patterns not merely of doing but of seeing.
The Bronx had freed me from this constant presence of art, visible or not, which since my time at Cal Arts had struck me as anathema to real development. But here, too, there must have been something about my physical presence, perhaps the sense of preoccupation my features insisted on carrying even in repose (my self-portraits invariably confirmed as much, no matter the medium) which lent my face an intensity that suggested, I am told, that the very tenor of my mind must have been a bother to me. It was this that generally prevented my new neighbors’ curiosity from developing into anything sincerely malign. My unease, I mean, soothed them. Happiness, should I have possessed any, could only have been a provocation under the circumstances, in the conditions of casual abjection that reigned in most of the South Bronx. The important thing, for them, was that no-one like me who lived among them should feel at home, or settled, and apparently I didn’t look it. Nor did I need any goosing from them to maintain the feeling.
After a time, there may have also have been an element of respect for my living in a neighborhood that had proved, somewhat famously, and to the pride of locals, resistant to even modest gentrification. No juice bars, no sushi, no yoga, no pet salons. I was more or less alone here. Mott Haven was the northern limit of artistic interest in the Bronx, and even there it wasn’t especially strong. My cohort wouldn’t follow me in numbers to the blocks beyond it, and even less would they migrate to Soundview, or Castle Hill, or Edenwald. No-one was followed here. There was something positive in this for me: it meant I didn’t represent the looming threat of a more general encroachment. I could be appreciated as a curiosity, an accident, a puzzle.
That my forlornness placated them, that this would be the lasting condition of our relationship, didn’t trouble me much, nor did I attempt to alter it. Schadenfreude felt right, coming from them, since I did not, and simply could not, consider us as one. Nor could they. What they didn’t understand—and did I myself, when I’d first moved here?—was that for me the chief virtue of the place was this sense of not belonging, of non-community, which had begun to me to seem, paradoxically, more humanistic than banding together with others in common misunderstanding. I was here to establish a nourishing distance, where there would be less wasted breath, more oxygen in the blood. I was here also, of course, for space. My townhouse. Some days it felt as though my quest for space would lead me, after a series of intermediary moves, to some Kennedy-scale compound in East New York, which was technically Brooklyn, but utterly not Brooklyn. It was New York’s sixth borough, with a proprietary form of desolation no other could seriously rival.
I continued at some pace walking south. No, there could be no true harmony between me and my neighbors. Our fortunes, if they were bound, as the fortunes of those inhabiting the same lands must be, were not bound in the right way. My relative poverty had been arrived at by a series of decisions made under conditions, positively Habermasian, they could never have experienced. If I felt inclined, there was another series of decisions that could lead me back to a kind of economic security they could never achieve. As my fortunes went, theirs incontrovertibly did not. I don’t think this troubled them unduly. Their curiosity evolved, after only a few months, into casual dismissal, and more recently into something like amused derision. They perked up on seeing me; they enjoyed it. What did it matter if fellow feeling or kinship didn’t figure in their pleasure, as long as I was giving it to them?
At the corner ahead, pulling on a cigarette and looking lonely, nothing like the same person without his minions, was literally the only man, very young, possibly teenaged, even prepubescent—the only boy, then—who had actually allowed his dark interest in me to tip over into a genuine threat of violence. The stage for this encounter had been a twenty-four-hour bagel-shop-bodega just a few avenues down. This combination was slightly strange on its face, but these sorts of commercial juxtapositions, almost experiments, undertaken in the least self-conscious possible way, generated by customer desire, existed throughout the outer boroughs. I might have stopped in now at this place, I had a small pang for a butter and jelly, if I hadn’t told Whent I’d be over by noon.
My run-in with the boy had been at a very different time of day, in the hours just before dawn, when, in any part of the world, strictures of every kind loosened. I’d been reasonably stoned at the time, mostly on Claire’s sleepers, the ones that took the fear out of her face and that she would allow me to indulge in from time to time. Now they were the only pleasure she gave me, these forgotten prescription bottles. I’d blended my laboratorial haze with weed tucked into an artisanal chocolate bar, the sort of thing that still struck me as laughable, even if others had almost immediately adjusted to marijuana’s fall into complete mundanity. The boy came into the shop flicking a cigarette away and exhaling his last lungful of smoke directly in front of the counter. I was waiting on a jelly bagel, and all they’d had left at this hour was onion. I was undeterred by the combination; in my state of mind, it wasn’t going to matter.
But the boy didn’t know this. I’d first seen him through the window, ambling down the half-dozen steps to the door with a jitter in his gait that incarnated all the drinking he’d done that night. Three or four others were in tow, and I distinctly remember all this having a mildly sobering effect on me. Despite their natty athletic wear, I couldn’t shake the impression that they were, each of them, crudely formed. Though I was hardly someone impressed by omnivorous aestheticism, and though I kept myself from developing one of those tainted eyes that are constantly searching out “moments,” as this was precisely the problem with Brooklyn that I was escaping, I have to admit that the look of a thing, its particular manner of being available to the eyes, generally gave me pause. Certainly it detained me longer than it did those who knew not a thing about grades of horsehair and vine charcoal. But there was little of the dissection board in my gaze now. I had carefully re-trained myself, after art school, never to let my attention cleave away from the object seen, and to always ask why such a thing in the world should appear just that way. In this case, just that way meant just that crude. Anyone could have seen this, if they were genuinely open to their own experience, I thought, looking again at this boy from the bagel shop. He had yet to see me coming down the sidewalk, or anyway wanted to give me that impression. But I recognized his disfigurement immediately. His nose and mouth stretched across a skull that seemed to be wider than it was tall, like a football set on its side. The shape distorted his physiognomy, giving him the look of someone receding, even as I approached him on the corner. The skin itself, and this was true of several of the others from that night, refused all uniformity of shade or texture. Generally he appeared to suffer from some chronic dermal condition. They all did. Too much time outside in the acrid, exhaust-drenched air, burnished in summer by the sun? One good reason for staying in, I’d thought that night while studying the group.
He’d looked compressed from top to bottom, too. Actually all but one of them had. They widened just below the neck—evidently broad shoulders weren’t always a virtue—and again below the hips, which gave them the squat profile of day laborers from a century ago, the kind who would have just spent twelve hours on the factory floor. Most of this was down to fate, a function of natural endowments and caustic environs. What they could control, by contrast, was really quite delicately done. The cologne of the lead boy, first of all, was soft cedar, free of the abrasiveness of most commercial scents. Then, too, the curves of his close-cropped hair, which was more sculpted than cut, given his hair type. I could also see, even under the dead blue lights of the shop, that the raw denim of his jeans would have been costly; it looked inkier than anything mass market, with more variation in tone. Even the cotton of his wife-beater looked unusually substantial and refined.
The rich wouldn’t be making haute-couture knockoffs of these garments, I thought, as they liked to do with so much style, because what these boys wore were already the low-market versions of those luxury proletarian imitations. Their tastes at this point were entirely mediated by the rich, by Fashion Week. It was really their fathers’ style, or even their grandfathers’, given their accelerated generational rate, that had been appropriated decades ago, so that the present version they wore was merely a corporate imitation of a boutique imitation of a long-dead street original.
The disjunctions continued, though in the other direction. The boy’s breath carried hops. As he approached the register, where I stood supervising the preparation of my bagel, I could see that his posture, though he must have been little more than fourteen or fifteen, had already turned vulgar, almost in anticipation of the troubles with women, with desire itself, that were certain to come. In the window behind him I could see his reflection. Stitched in black across the back of the loose gray shirt he wore over the beater, there was a very tall logotype, in a sans serif so distorted by condensation that I couldn’t recover the original typeface that had been raided—it became almost abstract in effect. More important, I couldn’t place the brand, as it was illegibly done in the same font near his front pocket. He was looking at me as if he recognized me, though I absolutely did not recognize him, not then. But, of course, it is the misfit who will be noticed and remembered, not one who bore so many of the signatures of the neighborhood, like this boy.
He hadn’t been the first of the group to speak. As I listened to the R&B escaping from the headphones clasped around his stubby neck, another of the boys, the second tallest, dressed mostly in Nets paraphernalia—again, of the luxury variety—appeared on the other side of me. I must have missed him passing silently behind me. He stared downward now and tapped the face of my watch, which hung down near my thigh. He knew this brand of watch, he said, and the crown was supposed to stick out further from the case, on the real ones. The boys all chortled. I raised my wrist and inspected the crown. The proportions seemed fine to me, my expression must have conveyed. The group turned more serious again, inflamed by my indifference, and when one of them actually began to order something to eat, I took it as the right moment to make for the door, even though this involved shouldering past the rest. I would have left then, it would have been wisest, but I was still quite set on the jelly onion bagel. The chocolate bar had done it. So, outside, I lit a cigarette. The months of solitude had driven me back to smoking. But before I could take a drag, four of them came out of the shop. The leader, again the youngest of the group, which made his status all the more strange, didn’t look directly at me. Instead, he sauntered up to me, just inches away—it would have been a frightening maneuver had he not been a child—and said only that he could really use a cigarette, mustering as much menace as a boy with such a tinny voice could. Then he looked at me, awaiting a response, while the other three were joined by the straggler who’d lingered to gather his food. As the young one stared at me through a trail of smoke that led back to my cigarette, the others began to make the indistinct noises of agitation that presage trouble. I still hadn’t taken that first pull, though, and I was desperate for it; so, even as the tumult grew louder and the curse words harsher, I felt myself blithely raising the cigarette to my lips. It was enough to make the boy regard me, though his eyes were empty of all import. He leaned in incomprehensibly close; I almost thought he might kiss me on the lips. In truth he was only setting his trap: if I exhaled without making special accommodations, I was going to do it right in his face. He wanted accommodations. The chorus of profanities rose to a wail as I held my breath for a beat and then two, just as a smile slowly corrupted my face. I could see he understood this smile wasn’t a move in our face-off, but something involuntary and probably unfathomable, even to me.
I am sure this made all the difference to what followed. I watched doubt fall over him, I noticed his posture relax, so that even though he was still technically in the aggressor’s position, brushing against my jaw, he appeared weak with second thoughts, wondering whether he was prepared to do what he would almost have to do as soon as I exhaled, with his friends’ clamor growing only stronger. I was not exactly a small man. Especially compared to him. For a moment I could see him only in a womanly light. I almost kissed him; my cruelty was in bloom. Finally, though, my smile receded, and without shifting in the slightest, I shot out the smoke scalding my lungs.
I could feel his relief, his gratitude almost, as the smoke harmlessly clouded between our chests. I’d rifled it downward through my nose, saving us both the trouble. The others began to jeer, but they were mocking him, not me, I realized. I reached for my pack and pulled out not one but four cigarettes, filled the laughing-stock’s hand with them. He was confused, I could see, but I had my reasons: I frequently gave away cigarettes simply to spare my health; the homeless outside my apartment and in the park had profited handsomely from this psychic tug of war. The boy must have been bewildered by my sudden capitulation, which occurred—and this is what would infuriate him later, when he’d made sense of events—without my losing any face at all: the very point of the exercise for him. It was he who ended up looking weak and indecisive. Indeed, he said nothing more as his friends grabbed the cigarettes from his open palm. Through the window of the shop, I saw my bagel sitting on the counter, jelly melting off the edges onto a Styrofoam plate. Yet it seemed apt, not for reasons of safety so much as of dramaturgy, that I walk away now, hungry as ever.
He looked different today as I passed him on my way to the subway. Or, rather, he looked at me differently. He was dressed more or less the same, though there was a fresh nerviness to his mien, which put his physical composure, his tamped-down form, in a new light. This was an alteration I didn’t have time to puzzle out, although I suppose if I felt inclined later in the day I could come back to this moment in my mind with a pencil in my hand. For all I knew his dealer or his buyer was running late today and there was nothing more to be made of it. He gave me only a passing look and the faintest of nods, the kind so subtle you would never have to own up to it later. He wanted to acknowledge me in some way, I felt, though his preoccupation failed to dissipate on my approach. A blankness remained in him, as if he wasn’t attending to what his eyes were providing him. Probably only snippets of experience, intermingled with the fragments of memory they trigger, come through to us at moments like these. And I knew which memory was surfacing in him then, just before he looked me over with the quickest of glances, head to toe: his own moment of misjudgment from that night, one that had come to nothing in the end.
For my part, I nodded deeply in his direction as I passed, pleased to observe in him a form of absorption that didn’t reek of the oblivious inwardness that troubled me in the artier sectors of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I’d noted this in his friends, too, and more generally in the social character of others in the neighborhood. They retained, under all conditions, a basic alertness to place, to bodies and not merely to the sensory forms that supervened on them; so that even when they were mulling other matters, as this boy quite clearly was, I wasn’t in the least lost on him. My person was precisely inscribed in his consciousness, so that he would have adjusted instantaneously to any sudden movement or change of course from me.
It’s not that I thought aesthetics per se were lost on anyone here, as opposed to Greenpoint or Ridgewood. It’s just that in most of the Bronx, people tended to observe design or form directly in things, rather than abstracting it away from its place in life. Which meant that vision—the faculty of beauty, if you wanted to summon the link to Hutcheson and the eighteenth century—never lost its worldly grounding. The people I knew, however, the artists of New York, often seemed slightly elsewhere as they moved about the city; or, to the extent that they were actually here, it was as if the place registered only as a kind of playground, a movie set, and each thing in it became a prop, a servant to some ideal or form that gratified this sense of taste. Matters of life and death, thriving and perishing—the grubby practical significance of everything that was—receded at the same time that arresting, even ingenious notions of the beautiful in our time, idealisms of so many shades, came to the fore. Beauty, whether as form, idea, or virtue itself, remained the master. This is why artists and “creatives” were wonderful marks for locals. They were perpetually in one kind of fantasy or another, while the man-boy I passed, who’d hardly looked at me, never let the world out of his grip.
I’d like to think I was at least slightly less out of place over the next half-dozen blocks to the station. The sidewalk, for one, was quite suddenly sturdy and planar; my stride took a second or two to adjust to the lack of obstacles. Not only was it less worn, as the city council had just recently redone it, but somehow the concrete slabs seemed more precisely laid, as if getting the angles right had mattered more. I had overheard talk that this renovation would be extended to the prior six blocks and beyond, where things, and not just physical things, only further eroded—it wasn’t a direction I walked in much, for several reasons—but I got the feeling that no-one much believed this. There were sound economic reasons for keeping the sidewalks in order in this area: it was a commercial space, even if this was somewhat notional, as the businesses, the laundries and pharmacies, the liquor stores and delis, were all clinging to bare existence. But even clinging counted for something. In comparison, the residential area from where I’d come, and in which I lived, appeared to exist only in the afterlife, there being no plausible excuse to get it into better shape.
The great oddity of the area in this respect was the vast community center, which appeared on the block on the opposite side of the street to me and was fronted by an equally grand and well-manicured plaza. It was built in something vaguely resembling the late International style, a sleek gray slab of a building, though its underpinnings traced back to the City Beautiful, with its notions of civic centralization. In fact, I knew, the ancestry of this sort of urban-paradise building went much further back, far past the Garden City and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and even past More’s Utopia and the star-shaped planned town of Palmanova, established in 1593 in the spirit of that book, all the way to Pope Pius II, who had the city of Pienza constructed to his specifications in the mid-fifteenth century.
The community center and its plaza appeared almost totally contrary to the ramshackle neighborhood in which it stood, like a foreign idea that hadn’t taken, whatever the original redemptive meanings of these materials, this design. It seemed a part of some unrealized project, the rest of which had been either bulldozed or abandoned in the planning stages, perhaps when the city council’s composition had shifted enough to take away its funding, leaving the job to be finished, as always, by the invisible hand. Still, even if it looked nothing like its surroundings, the center, all concrete and steel and plexiglass, sat in a kind of unintended conceptual congruence with the condemned spirit of the place: indeed, the grim and grand precision of this prisonlike structure could amount to a more rational (and better funded) model for captivity than the neighborhood itself, which was merely haphazardly moribund. In such conditions, even one’s suffering became less predictable and hence more painful, like the punches you don’t see coming.
The center was one of the first things I drew once I’d moved in: at least ten sketches of it, from all angles, this building which unlike almost everything else here was effectively unmarked, as the lettering on the frieze, engraved directly into the concrete without any contrast, gray on gray, was too small to read from almost any distance. There was also—perhaps I shouldn’t say also, because it is what struck the eyes hardest—a precise rectangle of tightly clipped grass at the center of the plaza that was almost hallucinatory in its saturation. I don’t think I ever got the trauma of that green, in the midst of all that dull gray and yellow, quite right. It must have required zealous maintenance, like a golf course in Dubai, and it was the only living thing in the generally barren square.
I regarded the bow-shaped sculpture near the entrance as I passed and found it no more interesting than usual. Bronze and fuzzily modernist, it put me in mind of a giant Aboriginal boomerang. I hadn’t bothered to sketch this in anything more than a perfunctory way, as that is just how it seemed to have been fabricated, so my haste felt like an appropriate homage to it. Behind the sculpture ran two long glass displays built into the center’s façades, on either side of the entrance, with four tiers to each of them that all strangely remained empty. The cultural functions of the center were failing in plain sight. Often I would see employees—the slight formality of their clothes betrayed them instantly—passing briskly in and out through the automated doors that slid apart a tremendous distance, for what reason I don’t know. I’d never once seen a crowd here that wasn’t formed of employees. They may have been the only ones benefitting from the center; and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they resided elsewhere in the city. Though it was easy enough to see that I would find no community here, I had a harder time understanding why the locals shouldn’t either. But, from the effortlessly hostile way people navigated these streets, the sharpness in even their most pacific gazes, the gentle suspicion coloring them, which threw the preening and false bravado of others of them into relief, I had the feeling the social bonds they shared were no less tenuous than the ones linking them to me.
What bonds, though, did anyone have that were really any stronger? And I don’t mean just the easy targets: the bankers and lawyers, the Hollywood parasites, the ones who we could assume, with justice, operated in something of a vacuum vis-à-vis the welfare of the people they packed themselves together with in the metropolises of the world. I mean, no less than any of these, my own apparent cohort, artists and intellectuals, the sorts of people who would have built, or anyway designed, this community center and would have contributed to its theorizing. On the face of it, they championed the vitality of communal bonds; they were keen to uncover injustice and falsehood, the very things apparently separating us from one another. Yet, before all of this, one was perpetually reminded of the sanctity of their private, autonomous aims—this building serving as a neat emblem, good only for the creators and the employees and their vanities—and then, barely beneath it all, an atomistic pessimism of the gravest sort, unknown even to themselves, but there all the same, pulsating in the shadow of their good intentions.
It had to remain subterranean, of course. It violated their professed commitments. They seemed unwilling to tinker with those principles, even if only to bring them into line with their actual manner of living in the world. In a way, you couldn’t help but feel that the authentic and self-aware were those scorned men and women of commerce: the executives and stock-pickers, the salesmen and developers, and more generally those of the affluent professional classes, which included friends of mine like Immo, a pedigreed and promising physician. Mostly I mean the callow among them, who because of their youth still talked openly, without too much embarrassment, of their desirousness, their simple ardor; whereas the more mature ones, who had secured fine perches in society, learned to bury this honest crassness in humanitarianism, philanthropy, and art collections. These people might have been basically bad—they almost certainly were—but they were unsoiled by bad faith, which seemed in one vital respect to put them ahead of so many of those avowing a commitment to the life of the mind.
What sorts of things, I often wondered, actually went on in the community center? Was it making more headway than I thought in yoking together the peoples of this neighborhood? Or was its function at this point mostly symbolic, as if flesh and blood people were of only incidental importance next to the dream world the urban designers were ostensibly building? More and more, a contrary thought visited me: why exactly shouldn’t dreams have an independent claim on us, however at odds with reality they were? Why is it no-one could find their way to crediting that, at least sometimes, reality, first in the order of being, ran second to illusion in the order of value?
At what point would all these heirs to the Bauhaus finally stop pretending about the future, about where we were headed? Every decade or so, it seemed, some group resurrected a program—a project—of urban renewal, even if the members had to use a slightly knowing tone in discussing their efforts, which acknowledged the potentially indulgent, quixotic aspect, all the ignominious failures and the lessons of Jane Jacobs, to wit, that a city is not a work of art. What I wished, in certain moods, anyway, was that this tone wasn’t only knowing but positively unabashed: that hopes, even impossible, delusional ones, might be avowed as dearer to us, more complete, than any reality.
As far as community went, it seemed to me that the threadbare businesses I was now coming upon, as the social center and its radiant grass receded, were doing a better job of fostering actual ties, a sense of a common enterprise, than any of the utopian plans for renewal. This town square of sorts, centered on a series of massive billboards off to the left, hovering above the ubiquitous signage of the smaller shops—it was here, if anywhere, that one could begin to see the soul of the fellowship, the fount of its unity, where the personality of the whole, including its conflicts and incongruities, concentrated itself. Taking in all the hoardings and advertising, you felt as if you were staring it in the face. This was not an aspirational identity. No, it was a lived one, though one so many outside of this company seemed to be chagrined by.
I was always interested in the changing expressions of this face, in what new look it gave you as you passed. The larger signage altered every few weeks: fresh placards were posted in the bus shelters and abandoned telephone booths. But those two giant billboards might as well have been eyes, and when they shifted, the particular expression of this face would set the governing tone of the streets. It appeared that a new vision had emerged since last I’d walked this way. Was it two days in my apartment that I’d spent, not venturing beyond the pair of bodegas on my street? A monumental advertisement had gone up on the side of the ten-story apartment building just beyond the subway station, past the intersection. This façade wasn’t blind: people lived and worked in these windows, theoretically at least, so there were holes cut out of the image to accommodate them—the windows, if not the people.
What went up around here really did matter, in a palpable, pre-theoretical sort of way; the wrong images could scramble the space, making it incoherent or worse. A few months earlier, I’d seen an especially ill-conceived advertisement plastered on this façade, for a televised psychological thriller in eight parts. People wanted their shows in parts now, segmented, and indefinitely extended: the idea of an ending, a finale, had taken on a newly tragic dimension. This show, Connivance, would go on to dominate the summer, for Netflix or HBO. But the central characters, pictured off to the lower left here, had been rendered indecipherable by the holes punched in the boarding. Worse, the blown-up face of the ostensible star, the man who was expected to get and keep people watching but who I only vaguely recognized, had not been placed along the edge, where there was more room to accommodate an image before all those windows began to break things up. Instead, his visage cut through at least three columns of apartments, such that even if you managed to recognize him from what remained, you certainly couldn’t interpret his expression as he gazed across the frame at an encroaching conflagration. To know a face without also perceiving its expression is discomfiting in the extreme. It’s like an outside without an inside, a window onto nothing. In this case, not only did one not know, immediately, for whom this television series was a vehicle—someone in a passing car would surely miss it—but, even more fundamentally, one also couldn’t say what attitude he took toward the flames. It appeared he was smiling, but what sort of smile was it? Beatific? Contemptuous? Maniacal? Which one would have depended on precisely the information the windows redacted.
For precisely this reason, I assume, it was redone after only a few days. But the new image had no protagonist at all—or, if there was one, it must have been the holocaust itself, which cut more deeply into the foreground. The star’s curious name, Merc Erringer, came just below it, in a poorly proportioned serif, almost as if it were naming the flames rather than a missing actor. I waited for this advertisement, even more jumbled than the original, to be taken down, but the costs must have been too great. It survived the month.
Today, as I stopped at the top of the steps leading down to the trains, this same façade was covered in thick red stripes slashing diagonally across a bright white support, with the Marlboro logotype along the bottom, in quite small lettering, so the colors themselves served as a metonym for the company. Nearer the intersection, there were the two billboards straddling the street and carrying, as they frequently did, a single ad between them. On the first, the larger one to my left, a blue can floated in white space while tipping right, with a plastic lid and an aluminum pull-tab flying above it, both halfway out of frame. A flurry of peanuts sprayed out toward the right edge of the billboard. Closer to the ground, on the shorter board on the opposite side of the road, there were more nuts, those that had completed the leap between the panels, cascading down into that same infinite white space:
The nuts with POP
This was the tagline, along the bottom, upon which the nuts fell. What I mean is that these were diegetic letters: the nuts were ricocheting off the letterforms themselves. At first, I assumed pop simply stood for especially good flavor. But looking more closely at the copy printed on the giant Planters can, and at the nuts themselves, more the size of basketballs and tinged a similar orange, I could see that these were spiced peanuts.
The fringe of the sign had already succumbed to graffiti; locals had added various taglines of their own, all of them endearingly obscene, laced with epithets and slurs and sexual references to nuts of all kinds. Theirs was no sterile rejection of the sign, the détournement of champagne socialists, but a genuine collaboration between the very people likely to consume this product. They weren’t interfering with the marketer’s message; instead, the graffiti resembled the commentary one found appended to online stories and Twitter posts, and, just as there, it only drew more attention to the sign, exerted a kind of communal possession over it, even in its soft contempt, which was, remember, the general tone of the entire neighborhood. Was there any other attitude that could have been more apt?
Marlboro and Planters, cigarettes and peanuts. Neighborhood staples. Taken together with a few other giant ads clustered on intersecting streets; the ads blanketing bus shelters and flying by on taxis; and the smaller shop signage, which itself seemed to be reconfigured by the point-of-sales ads in the windows just below—you could say these comprised a kind of stage-set, but not one the actors recognized as such. It was simply their ecological niche.
The products and their distinctive designs and trademarks, the symbolic valences—the “personalities”—of the various brands to which they belonged, the latest line extensions of one company set against the classic reissues of another, jointly adumbrating the movement of history: all of this was luminously conjoined by nothing more than the physical constraints of that public space. It lent structure to buyers’ lives, as market squares always have in every part of the world. It may not have been realized in quite the way one would have hoped, but it couldn’t be said that genuinely public meanings weren’t circulating here, that a common visual language didn’t exist, nor that this language was any less binding than Christianity’s iconography woven through the plazas and pews of days past. The parallels weren’t merely visual. The adman’s redemptive exhortations to consume, harnessed by turns of phrase meant to ring eternally in the ears and move men, in spirit and body, were simply an outgrowth of the minister’s righteous entreaties. It could hardly be doubted that the representational powers of commerce were any less flexible, complex, or generous than any religious order’s.
I trotted down the narrow, corrugated steps of the station. The entryway was especially deep; you descended three long flights of stairs, turning against one wall and stepping down sideways to make room for traffic in the other direction. Daylight gave way to greenish tones as blue electric light struck an aqua mosaic running down the inner wall and bleeding its colors onto the floor as well. Here was a queue of human figures, rendered at scale, extending at least thirty or forty yards, right up to the turnstiles—as if people were desperate to get on these trains, away from the borough above. But the bodies’ forms were curious, indeed near-hieroglyphic, given not just their flatness but the discontinuous spatial relations linking one to another. That is to say, these bodies, recreated in miniature tiles of differing flesh tones, were next to one another without at all being together.
I didn’t linger long over the mosaic, though, and the others passing didn’t seem to see it at all. Underground, what really attracted their eyes, and mine, was the great variety of posters riddling the space. These bills were slapped across every surface that would bear one, whether the paid advertising spots in each station sold by the MTA or just any bare bit of wall, even sometimes a garbage bin or an elevator, where riders posted smaller notices for more local matters—performances, apartment rentals, protests—that, however regularly they were taken down by officials, never seemed to stay down for long. As I slung my portfolio over the turnstile and swiped my way through, I could see them all together there, at various distances and in every size. Among the most polished were the large placards for bombastic silver-screen blockbusters, which were in truth almost indistinguishable in style and finish from the ads pitching the better television shows, of which a fair few were interleaved among all else here underground. In both cases—and curiously, just like the mosaic—they tended to flatten perspective and collage their elements in symbolic relations, however confusedly.
The ads for clothing, mostly mid-tier fashion brands employing mass-label designers, were cleverly calibrated to the traffic at this particular station, which was less generically laden with images than you might assume. Now that even the advertisements of public space could be almost as precision-guided as Facebook’s and Google’s online, these fashion appeals were pitched to locals as accessibly aspirational, not absurd or even mocking, as they would have been if the brands had been truly luxurious: Lobb or Creed, say, which you might well find closer to Fifth Avenue. As always, there was also a smattering of ads for abstract services like insurance or the issuing of credit, where the imagery had no clear significance at all: sometimes just a busy intersection or a large congregation, for instance, like the one in front of me presently streaming toward the platform, I suppose simply to signal a general sense of frenetic interaction, where Mastercard or Prudential could help in unspecified ways.
Typographically, the design consisted in a lot of knee-jerk, left-justified, lower-case sans serif: a careless, watered down version of the already dulled Swiss style, which would have been too complex or jarring in its original asymmetric arrangements for today’s consumers, who, experience proved, would settle for rather little, if any, art in their products, so long as they continued to confer the right sort of social stature upon their owners.
What I found genuinely appealing, though, was the continuity the posters and placards maintained with the world above: that overground space of bills. Not unlike the community center, the city-commissioned stairwell mosaic seemed distinctly misjudged, evincing a blindness to the real workings of the community by trying to provide what was already provided for. It was almost violent, the way public art here intruded into an ecology that had, without anyone’s help, managed to generate its own order, however brash and abject you might find it.
Eventually I reached the platform of the five train. The summer was only just over and the station still held heat; within moments of entering I’d felt my shirt wilt against my body. On the streets above, the heavy air lent the refuse lying around a violent stench, far more commanding than the eyesore created by all those plastic bags. Down below, something similar went on, the heat amplifying the pungency of beggars, like the one in army fatigues procumbent beside me. I toed the yellow safety line, inches away from the depths of the tracks and the little furry missiles, the truest natives, the rats, who probably felt the beggars to be squatters.
I’d seen this woman many times before. She was both emaciated (her arms and legs) and bloated (her face and neck). And she was always right here, on the Manhattan-bound platform of the five. We were almost intimates. Finding her brought me a sense of comfort, like seeing the mailman delivering letters, or watching the pigeons strut around Times Square. I believe her name was Helena, though it is possible, on the few occasions she used the word, that she’d actually been asking for Helena, or else simply declaring, through the slur of drunkenness, hell-on-earth, which would have made enough sense. We’d not really exchanged words, though we had both spoken or mumbled or muttered to ourselves within earshot of one another when there was no-one else around. I considered her a confidante of sorts. Today she was rolled over on her belly, her marbled green-and-black trousers stained around the backs of the thighs—I could only imagine with what. Apparently she was trying to sleep on a bench that was itself specially commissioned, like the mosaic, but with less benevolent purposes in mind. It had been broken up with narrow, unusable armrests to make passing out on the bench unpleasant in the extreme, in the same way rows of gentle spikes—nothing that would create a liability, of course—were strategically placed in the plazas of grand corporate offices to discourage sitting or even leaning.
I regarded her warmly, without any of the pity of those who would take her fate in their hands and try to improve her life, say, with a five-dollar bill or half a Reuben sandwich, or even by sponsoring job training programs or drug rehab centers, as if they full well knew what a good life was and were going to help Helena achieve it. I admired her as she was, for the ancient archetype she instanced—the indigent nomad, carrying her sacred burden—and even more for her ingenuity in conquering the benches of the city planners, who were locked in an arms race with the homeless, perpetually extruding them from public space. Helena effected a number of contortions with her spine—her body undulated right along with the armrests—to turn this bench into a bed, as if it were no ordinary backbone she possessed but a jointed one, and multiply so at that, five joints to match the five rests, like some adaptation her line had evolved over the years to keep up with the treacheries of her steaming, sulfurous environs. In this regard she was no different than a bacterium clinging to life in one of those toxic Yellowstone springs.
Presumably Helena was sleeping off another hangover, which would spare her some of the pain induced by her tortuous posture, however well adapted she may have been. Alcohol was a second adaptation, or more likely the very first. I myself knew, through dealing with Claire’s departure, what alcohol could help reconcile you to. Whatever else you could say about it, it had magic in it.
The fermentation of beverages was the clearest component of the woman’s odor—gin and beer were pronounced notes, and probably I would have detected other things had my nose been better, or had I been willing to risk getting any closer—along with what must have been weeks of perspiration that had worked itself into sloughing skin. The sweat had congealed into a crumbly tan paste around her neck. On days when she was down to a tank-top, the same substance enrobed her armpits; I couldn’t imagine how the situation could be any better around her crotch. Her aroma commanded my attention, and that of several other would-be strap-hangers nearby: her own private atmosphere, a vile miasma, endowed Helena with her last bit of authority in the human race. How many times had I seen people sit, had I myself sat, shoulder-to-shoulder with tramps on the train while carrying on conversations with friends or even strangers that were of middling interest at best, yet whose continuity was entirely unthreatened by the plain sight of the beggars’ stupefied heads lolling as the train rattled along. You could see, if you bothered to, that this stupor derived from drugs only in an ancillary sense. Mostly it traced to the sheer accumulation of desperation, which cleaved to them like sweat, this desolation induced simply by the relentlessness of living, the endless onrush that they, for whatever reasons, and these reasons were far more diverse than we typically acknowledged, couldn’t stay out of the way of—or just ahead of—like the rest of us. It left leaves and debris stuck in their hair, and crusting fluids staining their lips and shirts and trousers. And what exactly was it, anyway, this yellowish stuff, to be distributed so uniformly around their bodies?
Compare this invisibility to the way a vagrant, even one of the less tormented ones, if she’d not had access to a shelter’s facilities recently, or want of them, could clear out half a compartment and still leave the other half dazed, staring at nothing, choking for air. The force of the odor was undiminished through familiarity. That you’d smelled fetid skin a hundred times before did nothing to assuage the pain you suffered the next time. Granted, the type of attention held this way usually was laced with contempt, exasperation, or irritation at the least. Stink was strictly a power to repel, not attract. Yet this was still power, the last bit these creatures possessed in the social world. Given how disoriented and diminished they seemed, it struck me as offering a kind of natural protection, as plants are protected by tannins, millipedes by quinine. Nature was clever about such things. And the power really wasn’t all negative. What I’d noticed, and I was noticing it again as I waited for the five train, was that the fragrance didn’t just draw my attention: it captured it, refused to release it, so that there was nothing left to do but engage its source. This is why the homeless were often taunted and occasionally beaten, even killed. More typically, matters unfolded like this: while my first feelings may have been, yes, exasperation and disgust, after thirty or forty or however many seconds, my mood would invariably soften as I began with my eyes to return the creature, till then hardly less alien to me or anyone else onboard than the rodents on the tracks, to a shared realm of humanity.
That didn’t mean I took any action. Nor did it mean anyone else on the train did. But to see a creature as human is not to see her as a friend as such or, more fundamentally, to think you had an invitation to change the course of her life, as if something licensed you to select experiences for this person, decide which ones were worth having and which ones should go. Would I grant anyone a similar power over the course of my own life? Did I even grant it to myself? Did we really live only for pleasure and the cessation of pain? Maybe the rats did, but not us. It could be impossible to say what was best for any one of us, I thought. I couldn’t even say with unassailable authority what ought to come to me. How many times had I not gotten what I wanted, what I needed even, and found that life had turned out larger for it? For all I knew, this is what the loss of Claire would amount to, though I hardly felt that in my bones, not yet. So what of Helena’s pain and dereliction? Could it end up being the very deepest part of her life, even if it was also the darkest? I couldn’t be responsible for taking that from her.
What I can say is that my regard, in those moments, could actually enchant its objects; it was as if someone were born before my eyes. If this capacity of mine had no material effects, well, I didn’t think it needed to—though often enough I would later sketch whatever it was that had convinced my gaze of its higher possibilities.
Helena was sitting up now. My feet were starting to ache, the train was so late. I sat down in the last “seat” on the bench as she transferred herself to the ground, not far from me. My head filled with further ideas about what this odor was that had my being in its grip: rotting apricots came to mind, nauseatingly sweet, I don’t know why. I almost wished I had my sketchbook with me; I sometimes felt able, like a synesthete, to render one sense into another. This lady crawling on all fours, I realized with some joy, was now more of an olfactory phenomenon than a proper object of sight. With the right instruments I could render the transposition, molding her visible form to match her defining scent. She stretched out and placed her head near my legs. For a moment I thought she might actually bite my feet. But she set her head down softly, put her face right on the concrete, satisfied that my loafer was neither a threat nor a source of nourishment.
A gentle breeze tickled my cheek, and soon after the train streamed into the station, carriage by carriage. I rose above Helena and lingered over her form for a moment as the doors opened. No-one got off, though the carriage was quite full; people must have still been going to work around this time, and my neighborhood was not much as a place of work. From one car down a pair of young black buskers did get off, rather noisily, but they boarded again through the far doors of the car I’d be riding in. One of them carried a portable stereo, a device more or less obsolete aboveground but put to good use here. I stepped over dear Helena’s head and onto the train, my heel might have even brushed her hair, and slid the portfolio like a blade between several passengers, resigned to the musical performance to come. But as the train gathered speed, the stereo remained mute. The buskers simply stared through the windows into the black tunnel where nothing could be seen. They must have been off duty, which was just as well, for once again, as I stood with my portfolio balanced against my legs, my head tilted back to avoid incidental eye contact, I found myself face-to-face with the car cards, in this case a single advertisement running the full length of the carriage, like a multi-panel painting. They snaked their way down the far side and collectively addressed a rather heterodox theme: food delivery. In a skinny white lower-case typeface, set against pink and green pastel panels, and with no food or anything else actually depicted—this was the most interesting choice—these panels held forth on the virtues of the home-cooked meal, even when the home in question was one you would never visit. What mattered, rather, was that this home, its kitchen in particular, did in fact exist, and that a go-between did, too.
I fell to studying it, as I frequently did the city’s vast and often incongruous signage; but it wasn’t long before I turned to scan the cards on the facing side, as if I’d heard a voice over my shoulder, beckoning me. Here was a parallel set of ads from a different company, once again running from end to end: this was now the popular if expensive format. Once again they consisted solely of text, in all white, but the background tones were stark: black and gray with swatches of neon blue set vertically in stripes along the borders of each panel. Standing where I was, I could take in both sets of cards simultaneously, right above all the faces of the people I was avoiding. From this position it seemed as if the two advertisements were carrying on a dialogue, each panel speaking to the one directly across from it. But the darker panels spoke not at all about meals, home-cooked or otherwise, even if they were still enthusiastic about movement, transport, automobiles. Rather they spoke only of personal, not food, transport—car ride services and surge rates, to be exact—and this time they dared to speak comparatively, if not belligerently, naming the names of their chief rivals (there being but three players in this industry) yet maligning them only subtly, with a tonal simper.
The food delivery advertisementss simpered, too, actually. Although they spoke past each other substantively, in language I cannot now recall and don’t believe the marketers had any interest nor expectation in my retaining, there was a deeper kind of conversation going on here: not a discussion of food and rides and food rides so much as a lesson in the best ways of speaking, and hence of thinking, about these things—to wit, hedged with parentheticals, laughing all the way. And it was diction, subtextual without being unconscious, that did the psychic work. Doubtless the marketers planned on making this message, rather than the language itself, unmistakable and eternal.
At this level, each ad said something parenthetical (the after-subtextual thought), although what was said under the breath, as it were, in each case differed greatly. The one touting the beauty of traditional home-cooked meals used invisible brackets to address the reader’s misgivings: What’s past doesn’t have to be past, you know. (Though let’s not get carried away, it can’t exactly be present either.) The other series, however, framed the pitch itself as the after-thought, reserving the primary (invisible) copy for the ostensible virtues of the competition. It seemed to have no interest in lifestyle advocacy or nostalgia, playing instead to simple efficiency and the obviousness of its superiority: You’re getting one of those? Nice. (Seen this one?)
The two voices rang out clearly in the subway, though both were defined by their keenness not to be seen as keen. The lower-case voice had been echoing, I knew through Karen’s tutelage in the history of advertising, at least since the days of Bill Bernbach and those VW ads from the 1960s that people still couldn’t stop trotting out as unsurpassed paragons: the ones where the clipped copy, the only ballast in a sea of white space, somehow turned the Bug’s slightness, the fact that you could miss it altogether if you weren’t paying attention, into its strength. This voice, which you couldn’t escape no matter where you turned now—the Millennial and Gen Z versions were so many variations on a theme—had resignation as its eternal bass note, even when it was trilling with mirth. It spoke with a wry melancholy of and for a world buried in goods and services, in which the most one could do—or, rather, would do—given how little out of one’s way, against the currents of ease, one was truly willing to go, even in the name of things one knew to be right, or anyway certainly not as wrong as this—the most one would do was make the best of things, which meant consuming with a touch of knowing regret.
More than one generation had tried to shake off this apparently terminal state of acquiescence, which advertising only reflected back to us. There’d been a flare of real indignation at the beginning, in the sixties, and here and there since then: the Frankfurt School art of the eighties and nineties—Cranbook art, we sometimes called it—and the waves of protest, like the anti-WTO demonstrations at the turn of the century; Zuccotti Park a decade later; and the more recent hashtag umbrage of Black Lives Matter and Me Too. But the emotional costs of fury, coupled with the unavoidable retrospective acknowledgement, in each case, that it had all been a retrenchment since then, meant it petered out in one or another kind of moral fatigue—which of course led right back to resignation and gentle regret. In other people, the same emotional toll, and the same unyielding commercial realities, had led to the deliberate sucking of thumbs, a self-infantilization that spawned a childlike wonder at the starkness of twenty-first century man’s predicament; but this was really just a subspecies of surrender, defensively spiritualized through the assumption of the fetal position.
It seemed to me, as I rode the train with the buskers, that none of the voices clanging around us, whether of art or what passed for public philosophy, or even those of the admen on the billboards, had yet found a way through to a genuine rapprochement with the world as it was. A secular theodicy is what I’m talking about, more or less, or at least its possibility. I’d raised this notion I don’t know how many times with Karen and John and Rick. They always got a certain look in their eyes when I did; an aloofness would overcome them. They were never going to help me explore this properly, as they were convinced that everything had to change, that this, the world that was ours, that was us, just couldn’t be right. How much time had they actually spent trying to get a hold of what was, though, rather than trying from the start to refashion it into something they thought had to be superior? Did they even understand that something, either? They thought they did, of course—but did they?
The two buskers, black men dressed in homage to the 1980s, with satin jackets and tight black jeans, remained docile, biding their time as the train slowed at the next station without actually stopping. My gaze eventually landed on the people seated on the cool lavender benches, the ones addressed by the ads on the opposite side. Since I was standing at one end of the car, facing toward the rear, I had a vantage on nearly all the passengers, right along with the entire ecology of ads here that the MTA swapped out week to week—not just the cards above, but the posters near the doors and just over the seats. Half the people in the car must have had alternative forms of transport impressed upon them; the other half couldn’t help but think about what lunch or dinner might look like, whether and from where it ought to be delivered. I myself was in some way considering both matters when, after a slowing of the train that wasn’t a feint, we rolled to a stop at the next station. But before the doors could close again and we could restart our journey, ‘Beat It’ exploded from the boombox.
As passengers squeezed past the buskers onto the train, the one with Wayfarers clapped his slender ashy hands and swung his head low and wide, from side to side, in a way that suggested he was blind—which is to say full of life but utterly without vision. His timekeeping was abysmal: his claps went in and out of sync with the music and his swinging head did no better hewing to the beat. Everything about him was wobbly, even his grunts and come ons and oh yeahs and feel me nows. So the hypeman’s young partner, the dancer, had little choice but to carry the load. The boy was small yet his jeans were smaller, and evidently this wasn’t an aesthetic decision but a matter of economics. The pants were meant for a child—probably the one he once was, who he was now compelled by circumstance to continue to dress as. I marveled at the degree of constriction the jeans enforced, the way they lent a geometric precision to the swings he took around the pole and the running wall jumps—the doors served for walls, he had such confidence in the train’s integrity—that made him flare his legs in a manner somehow both mechanical and animal.
As Jackson’s staccato vocals gave way to Van Halen’s warbly solo, I let myself imagine the boys were brothers, or better, the subway children of Helena, making the daily rounds and collecting money to support her. They must have delayed their routine initially, I thought, in the hopes that by 125th Street there might be enough Harlem gentrifiers onboard from whom to scare up some pity and cash, the one leading to the other. This car’s composition, though, had changed little from the time they’d gotten on; the crowd might well have suffered from greater material lack than the performers, who at least seemed unburdened by children and, who knows, might well be living on and off with relatives other than Helena. They had style to them, nothing mystical or in-dwelling, but also nothing that could be freely acquired. It was the kind one picked up only through just the right degree of exposure to hazard. It made certain others of us envious, the ones whose lives were simply too insulated from danger to furnish it. Most of the riders coming from the Bronx occupied that same reality, and so were probably no less formed by distress; but the weight of accumulated obligations, or just the recession of magical thinking that comes with age, had cost them their daring.
They seemed barely to register the performers right in front of them, and were in a state only removed by degrees from that of the homeless, who’d for their part been rendered almost catatonic by city life. Yet Jackson’s song couldn’t be so easily fended off. It must have led them back to memories from a time before their burdens had overwhelmed them so totally. At least two riders were openly mouthing the words, words I couldn’t recall until I saw them on their lips; several others, almost despite themselves, could be seen quietly nodding along, as if they were resisting the impulse but failing to suppress it. I myself was accosted by shards of imagery from the classic music video: a corkscrew of glistening black hair down the forehead, virgin white suitings, eyes that seemed not to have aged with the rest of him. It had made Michael seem old when he was young and, later, young when he was old.
Jackson’s words and odd ejaculations mingled with the ones from the ads, introducing another layer of text into the atmosphere as we descended further down the island to a place where the young men’s routine, nearly over, might still succeed. As the song entered its final bars, the dancer helicoptered dangerously close to riders’ heads, but none of this could convince passengers to pay him any mind or protect themselves—which, I suppose, meant they believed in his skill. Or else they were genuinely oblivious to him, and not merely simulating preoccupation or lethargy, as was common in more prosperous neighborhoods, as a stratagem against verbal or physical assault.
As the subway car emerged from the constriction of the tunnel, its volume seemed to expand many times over, precisely in proportion to the growth of our collective field of vision, which encompassed a good part of the overbright station. When the brakes clunked on to slow the train, the dancer, panting heavily, and the hypeman, putting the boombox back on his shoulder, held out their mesh baseball caps perfunctorily, guessing that from these uninterested riders no coins or bills were forthcoming. They brushed past me, with patchy moustaches and open mouths full of crooked brown teeth, at such a speed that even if I had wanted to drop a few coins in their hats—and had I been given slightly longer to consider it, I might have—there was no real chance.
This time they didn’t even bother to hop out first and come around to the next compartment; they went straight through the interior doors linking cars, which from the start would have given them away to the next car as hustlers, rather than offering even the pretense of being ordinary passengers, perhaps inspired (it was absurd, but still) spontaneously to dance. I moved toward the windows of the doors they’d just passed through. I let go of the rails and leaned against the window, with the portfolio flat against the door, to get the best possible view of them, and indeed of the new adscape in which they’d be performing. I must have made a strange impression from the other side, clinging to the window like this, with my face pressed against it as if I were intoxicated. The older of the two buskers looked back and smiled, though I couldn’t be sure he was looking at me exactly because of the sunglasses.
I could hear nothing from the car after the train began to roar and squeal through the tunnels: each section of track throughout the city seemed to make singular ululations, I wasn’t sure why. I was curious to see how the buskers’ performance played when framed through two windows and without the aid of iconic pop. My only indication that the music had begun was the swinging of the hypeman’s head, which again made me think he could see nothing at all, and further that he couldn’t have smiled at me just seconds before, only at the place from which he’d made his escape.
Observing his asynchronous sway repeated with such precision—perhaps he had more talent than I thought, though he was certainly deploying it oddly—as well as the boy beside him taking his first tentative steps with the same sense of experimentality, it was clear that their performance was more carefully choreographed than I’d thought. The program was quite strong: balanced, pregnantly paced, in a word, shapely. And it closed fantastically, once again with those legs twirling above the young man’s head as if he might just take flight, and the delicious hint of a disastrous collision with the face of an elderly white woman who looked as if life had brought her enough trouble already.
Yet the dancer was not yet a beautiful mover. The choreography outclassed him. Who’d come up with it? Perhaps the blind hypeman, in the days when he’d danced, which he might have outgrown not because of the onset of blindness, but for a reason similar to boys who quit singing soprano when their voices break and they’re forced to move on to lower registers if they are to persist at all. I imagined that there were enough subway cars in the five boroughs, that someday this same boy would be something quite sublime—before he too grew too old for the part and turned into a sideman—supposing his station never changed and the underground remained his home.
His problem, once he got going, wasn’t any kind of tentativeness, as one might have expected given the demands of this style of train dancing, and his youth as well. In fact, he was too brave, hurtling himself into positions he couldn’t yet control. The blind man’s claps seemed only to goad him to venture further beyond his skills. His ambition, though it was his primary charm, and I was delighted to witness it as I pressed against the glass, compromised his performance. I don’t know that it would have been more satisfying, all told, if he’d respected his limits. It would just have been a performance with different merits. In any case, I doubted that the rawness of his maneuvers had much to do with why the riders remained indifferent, as they were for his latest performance, too. It was as if, side by side, two distinct modes of being prevailed, with no bridge between them. This was, to a lesser extent, the very condition of life in the city, a kind of open-air fragmentation of psychic space, a perpetual, and probably adaptive, blindness to what was right next to you.
The train stopped sharply and I nearly fell backward before catching the pole. The buskers got off this time without even going through the pantomime of seeking donations. They pushed their way out of the car with their hats back on their heads and disappeared into the station. Or they tried to. Through the car’s windows I could see they were trailing an energy undimmed by their failure to transubstantiate it into cash, and this energy, demarcated by the emptiness of their wakes, the wide berth they were given underground, seemed to pulsate against the backdrop of all those anonymous passengers crisscrossing the station at what seemed like half-speed. I followed the boys quite a distance with my gaze, much further than ought to be possible if they were really no different from anyone else. I fancied their chances.
I took a newly vacated spot on the bench between two others who made no effort to make room; my portfolio crashed into their legs and I made no apologies. I got off at the next stop, at a station I could only remember as the one to get off at for the Met. My last time at the museum would have been almost six months ago. Since then, I’d developed a startling and visceral aversion to such spaces, for whatever it was they did to my sight when I crossed their thresholds, ambling from room to room, with ceilings too high to concentrate the mind, passing from the listless supervision of one set of guards to the next, gazing alongside dozens, sometimes hundreds of others fanning themselves with the cleverly designed programs for the latest exhibitions or else trying to occupy understandably weary children with the programs’ hot colors, and finally peering into the pristine glass houses of European paintings and sculptures. There was also the pivoting one did in the centers of rooms where recent work had been arrayed on all sides, intentionally haphazard, and throughout, the consultation of those blocks of texts stationed on the walls, in a self-serious humanistic font that needed kerning, though somehow this was missed in spectating like this, in an induced state of hushed, reflective repose, scanning a hundred cultures in a day: Etruscan pottery, the festive and cultic masks from Indonesia and Aboriginal Australia, not to mention Venice, alongside Mayan shields and stone tablets, inscribed with something like an alien calligraphy, and even a cracked spear from the Andamans, which I understood couldn’t be reached, the islands, that is, but apparently not so, one could at least pluck the spear they hurled at invaders and tuck it away in a New York museum. Looking around in these ways, exercising my faculty of taste almost indiscriminately on all these uprooted artifacts presented as self-standing totems, representing only themselves, their looks: well, this is precisely how I had gone blind to it all.
Not to the displayed forms, of course. That’s exactly what remained of them: shape, color, line, extension. But blind to whatever it was that might have made them, pre-reflectively, count for something; what might bond them, that is, to the world of their creation, to their original users, not merely their latter-day appreciators. Such an understanding was probably the historical reason they’d been gathered here at all, at least for the pre-modern work. The wall text was meant to situate me, but really it only redoubled the dissection-board-and-formaldehyde reek pervading the space. Modern museums invariably led one down the aestheticist path. No wonder people had been complaining about them for so many years.
Long before I’d developed this sickness, I’d studied museums quite carefully. Every artist did, of course, at some point, under the heading of institutional critique. So many of us had our intellectual doubts about the place, but that didn’t seem to spill over into experience, the fundamental testing ground. Even for me, it hadn’t happened until recently, and that only because, perhaps, the sheer length of time I’d been considering all this, long before most, long before I’d ever arrived at college or even junior high. I was engaged with museums, and going to every last one of them, from my earliest days: all because of my mother. And I’d been thinking about them ever since. In what I learned of her self-exile from that industry were born, perhaps, some of my first doubts about its value, hearing her expound on how programming was created, and the sorts of people that went into this line of work, the particularities of their attitudes and educations. It was only a matter of time before my heart caught up with my mind.
What was the root of it? It started from all the history my mother had insisted I know, the books she wanted me to read, which she would even read to me before I ever became serious about making things to go in those spaces. Half of this stuff my brother and sister could tell you, too, though now they had no practical use for this knowledge. I knew very well, and for the longest time, that the modern Western museum’s handling of objects traced most directly to the sixteenth century Kunstkammer and the gentleman of taste to whom it belonged. It amounted to a sort of proto-museum, this cabinet of curiosities, though it was private and permanently accessible only to its owner, being housed in his home, where he might experience it over long stretches, weeks, months, years, in solitude. It altered the equation, allowing for a sort of slow drift toward and through the objects so held that public museum-viewing simply precluded. It was here that the dispassionate manner of considering art began to take hold, where artifacts, frequently from far-flung parts of the earth, might be registered in the first instance not as objects of use, spiritual or otherwise, but as curiosities speaking to the diversity of mankind’s endeavors, which was the first decisive step, really, toward formalism. It also had the hint of carnival, and novelty for its own sake, too: a tiger’s paw, a Komodo skin, the tusk of some dinosaur, a medieval painting, an ancient bust, all crammed together. Of course, the remediating factor of the Kunstkammer, one which the museum didn’t share, was that since the collection was private, it made it possible, should the nobleman spend enough time among his holdings, for his relation-ship to go far beyond mere curiosity and embrace more intimate functions.
This gentleman’s most distinguished early theorist, my mother had first shown me, I believe as early as the seventh grade, which is extraordinary, was the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. It makes sense, I suppose, that it should have been an earl to have hit upon this, this somewhat remote and tranquil form of appreciation (does the word not already suggest a distance, something somehow extra?) long before Kant did. But it was a view I hadn’t found agreeable for some time, if, in truth, I ever had. After all, hadn’t I always preferred viewing prints of great and frequently esoteric works directly in my home, or else in an anonymous private carrel of a library after getting the archivist to find them, rather than the original work in a public museum, which so many times I’d declined to view, or took only the most cursory peek at—say, Velázquez in the Prado? I could get far closer to a knock-off viewed in solitude than I could to original works of art in a museum, which managed to degrade and distance the signal, surely greater than my prints, of the originals they housed.
Saul Steinberg, the unplaceable metaphysician of the line, a line that ran straight through so many mundane venues, none more so than the pages of the New Yorker, had said he disliked museums precisely for removing art from the flow of life. I’m not sure I cared about dislocation as such, if it didn’t have the effect of removing the art from art, too—though perhaps he would not have cared either, unabashed elitist that he was. What I did know was that it was no longer my goal to be in the permanent collections of New York’s great museums, to be displayed in just the fashion that left me so cold. (This would have secretly thrilled my mother, given her own disappointments in the art world, though she would never tell me to throw away my career.) Crucially, that doesn’t mean I was looking to create ephemeral art, or that I had gone in for participatory practices, relational aesthetics and the like, which had led to hardly anything of real import, once the novelty wore off. I was still keen on making things, concrete physical objects, not merely events or experiences. But it seemed to me far preferable that these things stay in private hands, and out of these glorified Kunstkammers. For was it not obvious that an artwork, any artwork, today was nothing more than a curiosity?
Of course, adequate prints of everything certainly didn’t exist, so it remained the case that plenty of work could be seen nowhere else but in a museum. That was the state of the world; these endowed institutions had managed to stockpile great numbers of objects, as all those grand cabinets were donated by gentlemen of taste upon their death, for the sake of posthumous prestige, to the museums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When these artifacts existed in the hands of a private collector, though, they would have often carried real vigor in them: they would have made worlds present to their owners. Perhaps some of those collected items retained interest even after the relocation to the museum halls, just as one can occasionally find a happy bird or lizard in a zoo. Indeed, many of these objects, created in the centuries since Shaftesbury, were really bred in and for captivity, ideally for universities and museums to curate; they bore that lifelessness within them, in their origins. But the ones that had come from the age before the museum had seemed to me to have died behind bars, thought that didn’t mean you couldn’t still see some glint in their fossilized remains.
When I’d come to the Met last, there’d been an exhibition of manuscripts dating to the early Middle Ages, a period bound on one side by Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and on the other by the rise of Charlemagne, the first great post-Roman European ruler. I had gone there, and indeed, climbed up these same station stairs, not with a portfolio but with a sketchpad. I’d come quite early in the morning, earlier than it was now, so that the Met would be as unpeopled as possible. The relevant exhibition was gloriously empty, as I’d hoped. I began to copy the specimen I’d come looking for, an illuminated manuscript of Lucian’s A True Story. The original work dated to around 400 AD, and was full of alien life-forms; quite possibly it was the first science fiction text and therefore eminently suited to illustration. There was also a copy of The Golden Ass, which I was left somewhat unimpressed by, and then several of the five canonical ancient Greek novels, all written in the period of the Roman Empire. Perhaps because of the glass, I began my copying without much enthusiasm. But this couldn’t be pinned on the museum’s airlessness. I simply didn’t know what I was seeing yet, the ancient delicacy that still clung to these artifacts expelled from the classical world. I could only see a nascent, underdeveloped form in them, something essentially transitional: the uncertainty of design, both of the images themselves and of their integration into the text, as well as the quality of the handwriting, which carried its own crudity, as I saw it, something that was only to be ironed out in the High Middle Ages.
I did know enough, from other cases involving other periods of art, to suspect that I might be, even must be, missing something, and that my view of things was likely embedding anachronisms. Only raw, extended exposure could loosen this view of things, the kind of exposure a Kunstkammer, or in my case, those books of prints I adored, could aid in. I was happy enough, then, simply to take things in at the Met, for future parsing, almost as if I were creating my own curiosities, through copying, that I might house in my apartment to simulate the effects of the cabinet, so that at some moment, I hoped, after sufficient steeping, I would begin to see them for what they were.
I sketched with great care, taking pains in penning the Latin to capture the evolution of the lower-case letterforms, alien to Roman antiquity, and the precise script in which these letters were rendered, their heavy angular strokes whose descendants would come to be known as blackletter, a calligraphic script developed by priests for the speedier copying of manuscripts. The slightest shifts of weight, I discovered, could mar the effect. The purpose of copying was twofold for me, though. I was also always curious to see what effects copying would have on my original work, pushing my sensibility, which originated in my hand, up against the world, and seeing what came of it, irrespective of what I thought might happen, or of what I could understand of it at the time, or even, indeed, in the future. There was a kind of blindness here that I actively sought. Today, though, with my portfolio in hand, I was headed east, away from the museum, and I was gripped, always as if for the first time, by the characteristic hush of the East Side. This and the intricate stone façades all around, clearly done at significant expense, and, just like my work in the museum, involving extensive copying of a sort, both of ancient and European specimens. Unfortunately, these weren’t merely studies but finished products, which meant there was a dutiful, slavish quality to them. As I continued eastward across the pristine walkways and massively proportioned blocks, so unlike the spatial relations of the Bronx, what stood out was the hesitancy afflicting such pure copies, the lack of the wildness of creation.
All the same, there was no question, as I looked up at them now, that the architectural sophistication of the buildings was far ahead of my neighborhood, with the possible exception of my own aberrant home. Yet the primary point of difference was this: there were only buildings around here on most of the streets, and little public imagery—which is to say, the sparseness of advertisements, or more neutrally, in the language preferred by advertisers, of communications. What ads there were had been mounted low to the ground or done in muted styles, as if whispering. This lack, this silence, or at least this quiet (shouting in public around here was not so much the norm as where I lived) was understood implicitly by all as a prime index of affluence. Still, as I listened to distant sirens and watched the city buses roar by, I could never really forget I was in the muck and mire of a metropolis. The lack of signage hadn’t somehow managed to transform the area into the Cotswolds, despite its residents’ attempts to cultivate such delusions. Neighboring Central Park, too, I thought, ultimately only reminded you of how grubby life was in the city, even elite life. There was nothing pastoral about it. It was grand as far as city parks go, if sheer size could make things grand—but compared with unbridled nature herself, which it couldn’t help summoning by comparison, it was nothing, embarrassingly tiny, a curio next to the sublime, in short, a bad joke—but, perhaps, still a loving evocation of the fantasies of the bourgeoisie. I didn’t know.
The lack of imagery among these giant façades, too tall, in my mind, to ring with real majesty, succeeded in marking a further absence of humanity, of man’s activity, rendering it, if anything, less humane than my own neighborhood. Perhaps, though, it suited the kind of people who lived here, the bankers and old commercial families who had never actually understood, even many generations back, anything of the true grace of nobility, but were instead the products of modernity’s rising urban classes, who had managed, through sheer industry, to put gentlemen of taste into a permanent state of retrenchment. These massive stone structures, right up against the rot of Spanish Harlem, must have been a decent summation of their impoverished ideas of privilege.