18 September '07 - waiting for the snow

Three days ago a cool breeze rolled in from the north. It displaced the sticky atmosphere―the incessant muggy haze that demanded cotton and punished polyester―for a portentous wind. Also three days ago a look of apprehension surfaced on the faces of my neighbours. The domino players outside my front door who laugh and argue all day and most of the night now argue less and there is resonance to their laughter has diminished as the echoes must now compete with the moving air. The street-sellers, whose wares once dominated the pavement and part of the road have drawn their racks and displays close to them. The homeless, especially, have an air of restlessness. Summer alleviated their condition. Now they, like everyone else, are waiting for the snow.

And like people who hear that war has been declared in a neighbouring country, the preparations must begin. But these people are used to war, for them it is routine. The shift in psyche was as swift and sharp as the shift in the weather itself. These are seasonal people. They have to be – the climate they inhabit is as regular in its movement, in its state of flux, as the city itself.

And so the second week of class ends. The comments in my last transmission, which alluded to Columbia rather disparagingly, have had the scaffolding surrounding them torn down. They have been revealed as a stinking and unclean mess. Two of my classes consist of discussion at a level I have not encountered at a university so far. I do my best to keep up, to unravel what they’re saying, but the experience is akin to trying to understand James Joyce’s novels or the cadence of Sylvester Stallone. It is humbling to not have anything to say, truly humbling. So often I speak just to bring controversy, to elicit an impassioned rant from a classmate so I can attack them at the legs. But in these classes at least, such callousness would be refracted with a glance and struck down without a whimper. And so I listen attentively and take notes and hope that soon I shall find a voice.

As part of my resolution to capitalise on the free entry to various cultural institutions my Columbia ID attracts, I went to the Museum of Modern Art. As it happened, I was nonplussed. So fat have I grown off cultural experiences, it seems that I am now indolent to the effort required to take it all in. I walked past Picasso and Rothko and Monet and Steichen with no more than a courteous nod. And then there were the fat, sluggish, creatures standing, leering, at poor old Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. Taking photos next to it, expelling foul breath on it, waving greasy fingers at it, they stood in crowds and wore baseball caps and shorts and sandals with socks.

I think perhaps my animosity came primarily because I was hungry. So often it happens that way―when the senses are heightened and each smell is distinguishable, when the guts contract, when you can taste the air―the world becomes a hunting-ground. A place of survival, of winner takes all. Man again becomes animal and other men become competitors. As the body pursues a meal, pretences at high culture and eloquence are dismissed and the right hemisphere is blanketed white like the eyes of a hunting shark.

Although New York is probably as far from hunting grounds as any place, instinct remains. Because the City’s inhabitants are so far removed, are so urbanised, perhaps, unlike other Americans, they cannot satisfy the craving for blood by revelling in the proximity of the wilderness. Perhaps that explains the incessant movement of the City, the regularity of flux. Or perhaps this is a poor hypothesis of a fool trying desperately to understand the madness of it all. The latter is most likely and in the meantime I shall go eat.