30 November '07

In usual circumstances I would be loath to issue forth a photo of a sunset. But this photo—by no means a special by itself—illustrates a feature of this city that has been getting to me like an itch.

A couple of nights ago, as I was waiting for a friend on a busy street, an old man stood up from a huddle of blankets and bags under a makeshift shelter, walked to the corner, and began screaming. Held aloft in his right hand was a bible, held below in his left was a handful of proselytising pamphlets. The man, turning to face whoever approached, bellowed crude theology in a thick accent. “Jesus, Jesus, Jeeeeeesus”, “Lord God, Lord God, Looooord Gaaawd”, on and on and on, over and over again, until the words began running into each other and all that emanated was guttural noise. He stood screaming, a rock in a river, as the lights changed and a crowd streamed past him. When there were no pedestrians, he stood screaming at cars and trucks, even as their engines flattened his voice and rendered him a comic, dancing, mime.

In one part of the world the man would be locked up, in another he would be canonised and made to perform the unction. In this city he was left to babble, so that his voice became as regular as the braking of traffic and his body as common as a shop’s façade. That the man was fanatical is of no great interest (there is, after all, little difference between the rabid fervour of religious extremists and that of environmentalists, for example. And both are plentiful). Rather, it was the atmosphere that the man helped create.

And here we return to the photo. If there is anything redeeming about the photo, it is that it hints at hyper-modernity, a kind of futuristic dystopia, a future akin to that depicted in myriad science-fiction movies and novels, movies and novels that trade in the currency of a dirty, stolid, seething brave new world where nature is replaced by culture and then culture is usurped by sentient machines, where the skies are lit up red by nuclear fumes, where there is either permanent, blistering sun, endless twilight, or stygian darkness, where the only music that suits is that of a thundering male vocalist, the only art that which is minimalist, barren, epic.

This sort of post-apocalyptic vision is what is conjured by the screaming man and the red sky. And it is this vision that is strengthened by the canyon streets, the decrepitude of the alleys, the great City that at every vantage point sweeps from horizon to horizon.

This kind of thinking is not new. Many writers and artists have venerated the City through their craft. Gotham City, for example, was described by the writer of Batman as ‘Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November’. But this is precisely what has been irking me. New York City, as with the rest of the United States, has spawned innumerable parodies, distortions, and caricatures, most of these in the dark and gritty vein described above. So prolific and effective are these parodies, however, that they end up replacing the actual city. Thus, perhaps the man screaming on the corner was only there because every vision of a post-apocalyptic city requires that a man be screaming on the corner. Perhaps the sky was only red because skies tainted by pollution and full of acid-rain must be red.

***

In other news, the mercury hit minus-five a couple of nights ago, or so they say. Gloves and scarves are now left home at your peril. Hands and neck I have mastered, but I have yet to figure out how to protect the face (there is, you see, the rather troubling bind of having a hypochondriac’s sensitivity to frostbite and a not-yet-local resident’s sensitivity to wearing a balaclava in my ‘hood). In combination with the tropical heating of most buildings and my bedroom, the cold weather demands an oft-daily ritual of dressing and undressing, donning and discarding layers. I don’t mind though, I like rituals. They force you to slow down, to stop and think. There has not yet been any significant snow, though stories of flurries on the outskirts of the city come through like war correspondence. There are fronts approaching and all we can do is wrap up and head for the shelter.