Galleries and whatnot

The galleries we went to today were beautiful. By far, the most incredible, for me at least, was the first we attended for the artist Anthony Goicolea, called Pathetic Fallacy. Pathetic fallacy, we discovered, is the act of treating inanimate objects as if they had human feelings. Or, I suppose, simple anthropomorphism. Goicolea—an extraordinarily talented Cuban-American artist who graduated from the University of Georgia—however deconstructs and representatives this topic beautiful. There was one image that was particularly arresting. Unlike the others, which were all generally wall-bound, this one was lying in a case. It was a beautiful sketch of a tree that partially opened to reveal a spine, and it was simply breathtaking. Goicolea doesn’t use color often (he relies mostly on a black and white, sometimes red—which produces a startling effect—or dull blue, green, and golds), but despite this—that is to say, despite the obviously non-realistic interpretation of his subject—there is something startling life-like about it. Not human, not even with the spine. Simply something alive. A good reminder of the life around you.


There was another gallery—this one I sadly can’t remember the name of—and, though I think Anthony loved the bottom floor more than I loved anything we saw, the top floor was, like Goicolea’s work, arresting. Hidden behind slanted walls, there was a small room. On one wall there was horrible kitschy wallpaper, and on the other there was a large black box that in bold questioned You don’t see it, do you? I stared at it for a very long time. There were no colors, only black and white, and the words, which were in a bold white and very even and proud, were oddly challenging. I don’t think I saw it.

***

So I don’t know if this is relevant, but I’ve been working on a paper (fictionalized, or really semi-fictionalized) for another class in the style of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. As the entire idea is to talk around your city and write your thoughts I thought I would share it:



This is not my city. I must be like Baudelaire, dragging myself along streets that are no longer mine. Today, and only for a few hours, I went into my office to read, and pass the time by not reading and talking to friends. By the time I left the scaffolding that had been there for months previously—perhaps even years—had been taken down completely. I could see the blue sky. It had been raining earlier that day, a sort of torrential disaster that you feel even in windowless lower-levels. After which, the blue sky seemed absurd.


Paris changes but nothing in my sadness has moved! In the streets the rainwater had already begun to evaporate and my grief felt precise, but rather stagnant.


Right before six my co-workers and I stand below the boarding dock and smoke. We are just below Canal Street, on a corner where you can see the Hudson, and the wind, even on otherwise still days, rustles the trash on the sidewalk and our hair. At certain moments, when the sun is at its apex or just beginning to set, there are two buildings across the water that become literally gold, that shudder faintly against the skyline. The river does the same, if one gets close enough. The water—at moments, gold, at others, iridescent, like oil—can make me homesick. Or rather, it can make me feel far away from home.


My grandfather had a boat and when I was a kid he would take my cousins and I fishing. He could spend hours this way; we could not. We would get loud and fight; we would cry. My grandfather was, for no better words, at peace on the water. Until one day when, after securing and closing the boat, we continued to fish on the dock. At which point my grandfather, partially blind from cataracts that surgery could not reverse, slipped off the dock into the water, where all our fishing lines were tangled.


I was convinced at that age—five, perhaps six—that the world, right then, had fallen off its axis. It was like seeing a giant stumble. I was scared that he would get punctured by a hook; I screamed. His hair was silver then, though it is white now. It looked like a fish’s scales, and when it hit that water, and when he came up for breath and met the sun, it appeared dully metallic. I leaned against the dock, and reached, still crying. He had overcome his panic and was moving toward the ladder. My hand caught on the barnacles on the side; his did as well. There was blood on both our hands.


The moment before he fell, in which I saw the reality of his fall without comprehending it, he was encased by the late afternoon light and looked like one of the saints whose icons are hung upon his walls.


Above Canal, going east on Spring, the Hudson becomes a memory. For awhile the sidewalks are empty and, if you stay on Spring, you see very little of interest—office buildings, apartments, a restaurant here, or a café. To the west, there is a bar that I have gone to once, though the memory feels, somehow, typological and infinite. I remember saying nothing at first then everything at once and letting everyone order for me, and pay. It was hot for June. We were close enough to smell the Hudson.


Approaching Houston, on the west side, it is hard to pass fewer than two subway stops. I never see anyone exiting or entering, except, sometimes if I happen to pass the ACE on West 4th. Though even then, it must be a certain hour and I must remember to have my head pointed somewhere other than the ground.


G­– kissed me on the A going to Brooklyn and before that as we were waiting on the platform in West 4th (and, of course, before that as well, a handful of times I care not to enumerate). G­– kissed me and we said nothing and we were, perhaps, better for it. I felt, in some sad, ego-fueled way, that we were the epicenter of the train’s collective stares and spent the entirety of the trip wanting to leave.


There was a summer when I wanted everyone to look at me no matter where I went. I was haunted by the feeling that I wasn’t real, or that I didn’t exist. I felt like Kierkegaard’s Johannes, holding onto me must have been like embracing a cloud.


G­– clung to me as though as he didn’t see me as an actual body or, perhaps more precisely, as though he didn’t regard any individual body part to amount to anything of value. On the A he fit his fingers very closely against my spine. I hung onto him as I might a pole. And he kissed me, as I have said, mostly to fill the silent. The subway was consumed by a weary weekend silence that makes everything feel deadened and inert, the air even feels lifeless, and people appear, in some ineffable way, subhuman until they depart. And we kissed.


We were not beautiful.


It is not simply that the city comes to life in certain areas; it explodes. And it not only sheer numbers, but the feeling of exuberance and life, which moves like electricity in these populated areas. I see this walking down Houston, and up towards the Lower East Side. I see this in Soho, and Noho, and the West Village as well. All of these hubs of activities, and energy, a strong, consistent current that seems to penetrate the sidewalk and the air. During the day people walk, crowd the sidewalk—I do not know where they go—and at night, they are loud masses in black, huddled in front of restaurants and bars.


Dusk, though, can become quiet for a small amount of time, and sometimes I think it is the only time of day when I am happy here, when the city is something truly recognizable.

The Lower East Side, for no discernable reason, always reminds me of greater poets and so, when at dusk I wander through quieter streets, their words beat through me as though it were my pulse. I think of O’Hara sometimes. R­­– told me once that O’Hara had a way of invading your sleep. I mostly think of Ginsberg.


Strange now not to think about him, and almost impossible, for I’m under the impression that every street that I walk down, he must have walked down once, and loved. Much in the same way I am convinced that he read—as I read now—Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and was convinced that the beauty of every metropolis was indebted to that man.


For every street—from crowded Houston, to filthy Broadway, and vibrant Bleecker—reminds me of a poem, or a song. They are constantly the words of others. The absences and ecstasies of the city are not mine, perhaps will never be mine, perhaps can never be. They belong to greater men, though their verses are within me.


Ginsberg speaks of his greater loves of the Lower East Side. He speaks of his greater loves of Lower East Side and often, when I am walking home from work, or during class, or in the middle of a kiss, I feel those words rise up. His greater loves—


I have never been in love, not in any way that has mattered. I often wonder about the men Ginsberg had loved (an innumerable list, perhaps, as O’Hara would say) and I think that I too would love them.


Though, perhaps, this signifies nothing.


My room isn’t near the water. At night, when I go out to walk or smoke, I loop around a few blocks that don’t take me anywhere and I wish I were somewhere other than this. I feel ghostly, often, and non-existent. Like a foreigner, I feel that I’m speaking in a strange tongue.