A DAY IN THE HELLISH CITY

“This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.” --Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - I took an M3 bus south from Central Park East (Fifth Avenue) to the NYPL (the New York Public Library) at Fifth and 41st to read Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, looking especially for the justly-famous passages on music, expecting dark draughts of so-called ‘pessimism’ against the anterior sky of Some-thing Else. The call slip came back marked “Not on shelf” and I was relieved of the responsibility. I ambled over to the Internet stations below the plum-red skies of the palatial Rose Reading Room now ‘rationalized’ to keep tourists and ne’er-do-wells at bay (now requiring a library card and log-in) and spent some time wasting time.

I left walking east toward Tudor City and First Avenue dodging triple-wide strollers, tourists walking three or four abreast, past Grand Central, past rolling luggage, past workmen arc-welding air conditioners on the sidewalk, deliverymen wheeling carts of shrink-wrapped bottled water, mounds of decomposing garbage in superheated, super-sized black plastic bags, past ranges of newstands, trashcans and bystanders, crossing the taxi- and car-jammed intersections with and against the light, one eye open for delivery artists on bicycles riding against traffic. In time, I descended, eventually, a set of stairs to the chronically disabled and permanently under-construction UN enclave (sovereign outpost) at Turtle Bay, waiting then to board an M5 bus on First, all the while ignoring a man exposing himself to no one in particular from a window in an apartment high above the urban carnage. When the bus finally arrived, I found that I had $0.00 on my MetroCard.

Stepping off the bus, instead I walked through the destruction zones of the First Avenue traffic corridor, through over-, under-, and through-passages, eventually connecting up with the East River Park just north of the iconographically-grotesque One Sutton Place South and the high-flying Roosevelt Island Tram. Walking along the esplanade (which follows the dull, flat roar of the FDR), I observed relatively ‘ancient’, brownstone ashlar walls holding up the eastern-most portion of the Upper East Side against the cut of the expressway wondering what if anything at all was buried behind the ivy-clad, east-facing precipice punctuated by soot-glazed windows and rusted, sealed iron doors and grills.

Approaching 78th Street and the chlorinated John Jay Park, and gazing toward the brick colossi of Roosevelt Island (the towering apartment blocks), I noticed the waves of the East River rolling softly off the embankment, the inky brown-green waters roiled by a passing sailboat (motoring northwards) and a cruiser of the Circle Line plying southwards. The barely-audible surge of the River tugged and nodded in the 95-degree heat, a just-perceptible lullabye in late-afternoon, and I thought of Tagore staring into the waters of the Ganges, ‘adrift’, as it flowed through Benares; the poet transfixed by light-on-water, signal event of the Real, ‘the Given’. (It’s always still there; all of it.)

GK (DRAFT 8/03/05)