#24: "The City" & Me
Another personal retrospective.
I.
Driving in the suburbs is different than driving in the city.
To drive in the suburbs is to relax oneself into an effortless state, to keep space between yourself and others, to know the roads like the back of your hand. Peak suburban driving maintains a sense of grace, where one simply arrives at one’s destination without so much as noticing the journey. The driver extends into the car which extends into the roadway as a single spatiotemporal entity, and you arrive at your destination.
The suburban driver must relearn how to drive in the city. How to deal with the constant stimuli: pedestrians, potholes, signals, and most of all, other cars. It requires a contraction of space, an inward withdrawal. To ask for more than a foot of clearance is to render much of the city inaccessible. Parking would be impossible. The urban driver’s perception of self and car as a unit ends precisely at the paint.
II.
Yesterday I read about Thomas Cole, one of the founders of the Hudson River School, in the local newspaper. This school of painting
[refers] to the artists, poets and writers who “forged a self-consciously ‘American’ landscape vision and literary voice” that fostered a sense of the landscape “as a resource for spiritual renewal and as an expression of cultural and national identity.”
In particular, the school of painting drew from Transcendentalism in foregrounding the “transcendent goodness of the country’s still-wild natural beauty and the unity of the human spirit”, with particular emphasis on the “wild and untouched scenery”.
I found myself drawn to this description, as it seemed to highlight a particular fact about my upbringing and values which I had trouble putting to words, beyond the too general term “Romanticism”. I grew up in a suburban town just beyond the Hudson river, not too far from Cole’s original subject matter of Catskill, NY. I took it for granted that we would hike in the rolling Catskills and stark Berkshires, and camp in the grand Adirondacks every summer. I took it for granted that the woods was always nearby, whether behind my childhood schools or along the abandoned railroad trail behind the plaza. And I could easily drive out to more remote landscapes, farms and trails, if I so desired.
I went to college in a small city in a different part of the country. Even there, my school abutted a massive park within a ravine. The city itself was overbuilt for its current population, so I felt in the wilderness even while walking up the hill, beyond the overgrown factory, toward the quirky neighborhood with its single cafe and record store. Beyond a certain point, I would be the only one on the road.
I would spend a lot of time walking, reflecting, appreciating a ray of sunlight through the trees. The most important factor was the absence of the other. In these spaces, I was alone. By “alone” I don’t only mean that there were no others around, but that even human intention failed to touch these spaces — I was alone not just now but across time. Of course a park has boundaries and trails, but what happens within the park seems to preclude intervention and intent — at least enough for me to sustain my imagination. The overgrowth along the abandoned sections of the city represented a reclaiming, an abandonment of aim, which felt similar to the park, and perhaps even more stimulating, as one can witness the process of decay, how wildness comes to overtake even our deepest foundations.
Within these places, I was alone, and thus I was nobody. But insofar as I was nobody, I felt immersed, the boundary between myself and the rest of things finally able to collapse. It was an immense relief to return to that pure state, being in the world and leaving my self behind. Music and poetry would spontaneously emerge from me, and I would take it down in my little notebooks. These wild, natural places came to feel more like home than my house or apartment.
And then I moved to New York City.
III.
In 2015, with my college diploma and job offer in hand, I moved into my first apartment in the big city (well, second — I’d done a summer internship in 2013 — but it was my first lease, and the beginning of my life in the city). It felt like a moment of destiny for me: my parents, my extended family, our family friends — they all had lived in the city, back in the 1980s or earlier. And now, in the mid-2010s, it was my turn.
My apartment was on the 6th floor right by 117th and Lexington in a neighborhood called East Harlem, aka Spanish Harlem, formerly Italian Harlem. I was sandwiched between housing projects to the south and drugged-out homeless by the Metro North, on a block with some of the best Mexican food in Manhattan. I was also “right by” Central Park, the northeast tip of the park being at 110th St and 5th Ave, no more than a ten minute walk away.
Almost immediately, I hated it. The noise, the anonymity, the repetition. There was no escape from the touch of Man: the buildings, the roadways, even the trees were Planned. Central Park is a great place to be with friends, but I found it an awful place to be alone. People are always there, sitting on benches, roaming around, jogging, even in the middle of the night. The traffic and sirens penetrate the naturalistic setting, itself an invention of Frederick Law Olmsted, who set out to reproduce through careful landscaping the experience of romantic nature (NB: the best spots to take selfies were already decided 150 years ago). The environment lacked that essential unity that which allowed me to lose myself in it. Instead I found myself forced back into myself, suffering from isolation, seeking an escape from it all, an escape from captivity.
IV.
I already wrote about captivity once on here, almost two years ago. Here’s what I said:
Captivity is an absence of an other, where the actions of your superior are managed by impersonal systems, creating an impersonal sort of guy. In captivity, there is no “other”, all that remains is this empty “I”, who wants, but only for “freedom”, itself a negative movement against captivity. It is the negative of the negative, “I wish I were freed so I could [live happily every after].”
But does the captive really want to “live happily ever after”? Freedom from captivity would mean losing the dream, the deeply invested fantasy of being freed.
This is an abstract piece of writing, but it speaks emotionally to the other side of the feeling I had moving to New York. The other pole across from aloneness, where one’s identity can melt away into the world, is togetherness, where one encounters the other and the two together become something more than one and the other. I may have had nowhere to be alone, but I also had nobody to be together with.
I had friends, of course. But if you know the topography of NYC, then you’ll know that East Harlem is a long trip from Brooklyn. I would go out to dance parties until 4 AM, and back then there were no train timers and no wifi in the subway, so I would wait a true eternity for the L train and then another for the 6 back home. Suffice to say, I didn’t see my friends often, and we weren’t that close. I had a few casual internet friends too, but we didn’t vibe well — their main topic of conversation was passing judgment on each other and on aesthetic things I had no opinions about, so I found myself at a loss to participate. Even after I moved to Brooklyn at the end of my lease, the situation remained roughly the same.
So I felt crushed between the two poles: I couldn’t escape myself, because I couldn’t enjoy being alone and because I couldn’t enjoy being with others. I ended up coping by going online, pursing the intellectual avenues I described in my last post. But something had to change, and it had to be inside myself, because I’m not nearly rich enough to change the city around me.
I went through a period of deep loneliness and extremely onlineness. I felt fragmented, like I didn’t know who I was — was I the employee, the New Yorker, the friend, the son, the student, the internet troll, something else? Ultimately there was a question of identity which I had punted on for my life up until that point, and which I struggled to solve, because any identity I landed on always seemed insufficient, unable to capture the surplus, the part of me beyond the label or definition. I didn’t understand how other people were able to pull off this feat of self-definition which seemed like a self-compression, like cutting off one’s limbs to better show the face. And I definitely didn’t understand how to write a Tinder profile. I guess it was an existential crisis.
It took a few years and a feeling of certain death for me to figure out that I was doing it wrong.
V.
As The Last Psychiatrist likes to say, you are what you do. Apparently he stole that quote from Carl Jung, and he omitted the second half: “You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.” This second half modifies the quote, because it invokes speech, the action of saying you’ll do something, which implies a listener, someone who hears you say it. The fact of a listener introduces an inevitable social component: you are what you do involving others. I can walk alone in the woods all I like, but I “am not” until I engage with and affect others (note that this reading is implicit in TLP, because he’s speaking about narcissists who demand social validation for their self-ideas, but not inherent in the quote itself).
How was I doing it wrong? I was trying to “define myself” in a vacuum. It’s a lot easier to simply spend time with others and see what emerges as a result. So I made a choice to move in near some of my old friends who’d recently moved to the city. I was also entering a niche online community where I did vibe with other people and could start making real friends off the internet. This niche took off during the pandemic, and “TPOT” as an irl community was ready to hit the ground running once NYC reopened.
What I did during this period could be described as “re-socializing”. Like re-learning how to drive when moving from the suburbs, I needed to come to terms with the boundaries of who I was in relation to all the other people, rather than allowing myself to become an imaginary expansion into the environment. The latter mode is possible if you’re squarely rooted in a place — then you can be “that guy” who owns the store on the corner for decades — but for young mobile New Yorkers this is a difficult position to hold. Perhaps the difficulty of becoming “that guy” stems from the social problem of “atomization”, but it’s more tractable for me to learn how to exert precise control over my car than to solve all traffic.
It felt like a massive relief to have an actual social life rather than occasionally meeting up with a friend. Like you no longer need to bear the burden of life on your own, you can share it with others. It does introduce an element of precarity, as you allow yourself to depend on others, but it also introduces the possibility of love, in the general sense of giving to the other simply because it is the right thing to do (i.e. you have the possibility of morality — this is why you’re not supposed to learn Kabbalah until age 40).
My ennui as reflected in the poem above was really a sense of grief at losing my immediate, almost womb-like connection to the physical environment, but the fundamental task of becoming “an adult” seems to be the embedding of the self into something broader, where you can touch and be touched, rather than simply slipping away. Besides, I can recapture the feeling on occasion in a voluntary rather than necessary way, which eliminates the immense suffering I felt when I couldn’t access it at all.
Although the re-learning period is difficult, it’s freeing to be able to drive in the city (I got a car in 2020; I park it at a garage in Brooklyn). Maybe I can even take a trip to the countryside.
Didn't Luria die at 37? When did the 'Kabbalah at 40' rule come into effect?