2 November '07

This week I left the Island—Manhattan, that is—for the first time. I crossed the border of New York and New Jersey via a tunnel struck deep beneath the Hudson River. It was almost a relief to be on the mainland. The Island, like the city itself, lacks permanence. When the polar icecaps melt, it will be among the first tracts of land that is reclaimed by the ocean. And even before then, I would not be surprised if the earth gives way to the immense weight of steel, concrete, brick, stone, blood, tissue and bone that sits atop the Island and envelops it all in some cavernous rent.

In any case, along with thirty-odd other students I boarded a bus en route to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Traveling above ground was, in itself, a revelation. The subway system is by far the most economical and efficient means to travel the city. Thus, all my crisscrossing of the Island has been subterranean. And being subterranean there is very little to look at. It is considered rude, I gather, to meet anyone’s eye. Consequently one must either glaze-over on some indeterminate vision or flit one’s eyes from one strategically-placed advertisement to the next. Further, because the whole experience occurs in artificial light and without significant markers, it is difficult to conjure any sense of spatiality. The distance between origin and destination is only as real as the ten-inches that separate the two on the subway map. The only marker of distance when underground is the ‘dud dud, dud dud, dud dud’ of the tracks, which after a while become meaningless. As such, the only possible measure of a journey is temporal: the time it takes the rider to arrive at their destination. On the bus this all changed. Focus shifted outwards to the passing cars, the passing people, the mile after mile of factories, bulk retailers, used-car yards, and anomalies like the Jam Shop, the viability of which must surely be precarious at best.

Soon into the journey the buildings next to the interstate were replaced with trees. And not just isolated, ordered plantations but real, wild forests. The Island has trees, sure. Central Park is a sprawling, swaying mass of them. But even in Central Park there is the knowledge that if you walk too far in any direction you will, within a few minutes, find your feet on concrete, then tar seal, then carpet. For this reason the experience is little more satisfying than the illusion created by romantic comedies. A forest in a city is as mythical as a chance encounter with a long-lost lover in some forgotten corner of the earth. But Mountain Lakes has real forests. Forests with beavers, deer. Forests without hobos piles of cigarette butts. And Mountain Lakes has lakes (granted, these lakes are the work of a reckless developer who dammed rivers, which then swamped pristine wildlife). Mountain Lakes doesn’t, for the record, have mountains (but then Manhattan is, I assume, no longer a good place to collect bow-wood, as the Native Americans originally named it).

Mountain Lakes also has a warm and generous family who housed me for the night, fed me, and wisely kept me away from the weekend’s formalities (which were, by all accounts, rather dull). We picked pumpkins, then carved them. We make pumpkin pie, then ate it. We dressed up and went to a Halloween party at a mansion, its owners so inebriated with the holiday spirit that the decorations extended from the scale cemetery in front yard to the jack-o-lantern toilet paper in the bathroom. We walked down to the lake and kayaked. We drove to the forest and walked. It was, in short, a rejuvenating experience. The American host family was extremely generous and welcoming. There was no hint of arrogance or self-importance, traits that in my part of the world at least, are characteristics of the American stereotype. Traits that have proved themselves to be fallacies considering the Americans I have met so far. Indeed, the host family—like many other people on this continent—are constantly try and atone for whatever imagined or real faults they see in their country, most often in its foreign policy. So prolific are the apologies that I often find myself defending the place: ‘It’s not that bad’, ‘all countries have violent histories’, et cetera. Somewhat of a role-reversal, the tourist as the patriot.

In some of my earlier transmissions I talked at length of the uncanny experience of having the surreal rendered real. That is, I talked of the many experiences in New York that are familiar to me, despite never being here before, the many symbols that I have previously encountered that appear as strangely familiar apparitions. The Mountain Lakes weekend was very similar. I cannot understand whether Americans parody themselves, or whether the parody comes as a result of action. The latter is most likely but I continue to think that the parody is a key driving force in the continuation of tradition. Let me explain: there is something absurd, almost ludicrous in the fact that Americans actually do, for example, pick pumpkins, carve them, and convert them into pumpkin pie. Something reeking of hilarity in that Americans, and many others in the world, dress themselves, dress their children, dress their houses in garish plastic costumes and prance around the streets. Simply, Hollywood parodies the United States. Then the United States assumes the parody. Witness New York on Halloween day. With some friends I dressed and traveled underground to the Lower East Side. Emerging from the subway station was like emerging into a Christian nightmare. Pagan costumes and pageantry abound. Three miles taken up with dancing, shuffling, rolling people and floats. If you are suitably attired you can join the parade. This we did and witnessed the spectacle from the inside, as it were. Thousands of people, mostly sober, dancing and singing in costume.

A friend and I were once talking about the compulsion we both felt when, for example, walking over a bridge suspended hundreds-of-metres above the sea, to jump. Not that we were suicidal, but there seemed, to us anyway, to be a human compulsion to at least flirt with the idea of death. My friend then told me a story—the details of which are now long-lost so I shall falsify—in which during World War II, say, a Greek island was invaded by Turkey. On this Greek island was a village situated on the edge of a cliff, a cliff that plummeted to black-rocks and waves below. When the Turkish soldiers approached, rather than surrendering, the inhabitants of the village—men, women, children, all—jumped from the cliff, to their death. Some who have speculated about the motivation for the villages to jump have argued that, like the pedestrian on the bridge, they had always flirted with the idea of jumping. Living so close to death, it was never far from their minds. The compulsion to act was only suppressed by reason. The invasion of the Turkish soldiers, then, was merely an excuse, a justification for action.

Returning to the Halloween parade, a similar speculation can be leveled. That so many New Yorkers were so quick to abandon their suits, their stockings, their glasses and don the clown suits, the bras, the bizarre and whacky outfits is testament, I think, to how thinly sanity and convention are in control of this city. So quickly and so blithely did so many people march, dance and sing in the parade that ‘holiday spirit’ or some such platitude just cannot explain it. The Halloween parade was a release, a vent for otherwise un-channeled animalism. The phenomenon is similar to that of night clubs, rock-concerts, riots, but none of those events are on this scale. This was a whole city, or at least half a city, gone mad.