The Show

I have redirected my dreams of New York City into so many different people, things, and places that when I took my first trip there a few weeks ago it was almost impossible to believe I was actually there.

Most of those dreams grew out of art and legend, often intermingled … the stories of J.D. Salinger and the memoirs of Mary Cantwell, the jazz masterpieces on my stereo and the jazz myths of O’Hara and Kerouac, the colossus of Kane and the buzz of a thousand wild news presses running at all hours, decade after decade. And all of that merely in our century … not to mention the great coups that the city has hosted, the violent exchanges of culture and power, the fortunes that rush through its veins, the persistent crush of myriad hopes and failures.

Back home I couldn’t touch anything real about those dreams, couldn’t stalk the same streets that many of my heroes had or touch the same buildings. So I found substitutes. English teachers for the wry icons of The New Yorker, the great avenues of Chicago for those of Manhattan. I grew to love those people and places for themselves, but I recognize the impetus that pushed me to them, and now beyond them, past all those things I cherish about home. I recognize why they weren’t enough.

Joan Didion articulates what it is like for an outsider to encounter New York:

To those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (‘Money,’ and ‘High Fashion,’ and ‘The Hucksters’), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.

The city was and is a singular place. Cantwell called it “the hive.” It may not be a permanent destination, but it is an unavoidable portal of American desire and ambition, a passage one must experience at some point in one’s life.

My trip there, with a couple of friends, only lasted for a weekend, not nearly enough time to process all of this. I spent much of my time memorizing subway routes and street maps and it is only now that I’m making sense of my brief experience.

I had decided before I left that it would be better to focus on a single thing, so as not to be overwhelmed. Take E.B. White, bombarded by the marvelous volume of fact and fantasy contained by that place:

I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher’s office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Will Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White … and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.

I had one plan: to walk the great span, The Brooklyn Bridge, and perhaps mumble a few lines of Hart Crane along the way. I was lucky to be traveling with other English students, and we were able to share in the pilgrimage to and through Crane’s modern shrine:

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry, –

The Bridge was a good place to begin because I had only been dreaming about it for a few months. It was easier to believe than Central Park or the Algonquin Hotel. It also took a while to walk, which allowed for the rare act of thinking about what we were doing.

It still stands. That’s about all I could muster. Hope of American Reconstruction and packhorse for more than a century to the bustlingest city in the world.

The rest of the trip was a blur. Dozens of famous paintings and streets, pizza here, beer there, and nothing much left at the end of the day but aching feet and a handful of crumpled museum floor plans.

I have only one other complete and meaningful memory: After almost ten years, I finally read a New York edition of the Times.

Before leaving on Sunday I saw Columbus Circle, Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the Public Library all in the span of a few hours. Kerouac’s holy scroll, on display at the last place, was just an afterthought, a parting kiss from the great metropolis as we shuffled off to the Metro and down to Chinatown, where we gobbled up lunch and, panting, caught a bouncing bus back home.

There is still that shadow, as T.S. Eliot called it, between the vision and the reality. I do not know when I will make it back to New York for a fuller inspection. I’m just happy to know it exists, to have touched it. And I am also happy to know that that touch didn’t cancel the wanting and the dreaming. To quote White again, the city is “the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”

3/15/08
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This is one in a series of posts (listed below) that seem to be feeding into the same idea and may become part of a larger personal essay.

Notes on the Ineffable 1: New York
Notes on the Ineffable 2a: In the Air
Notes on the Ineffable 2b: Chicago
Notes on the Ineffable 3: Literature