7 December '07

In a few days I will have been in New York for four months. This week I learnt that the weakest part of the human body is the neck. I have, for a reason I cannot quite isolate, a need to connect these two ineluctable facts. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the need arises from the kind of apocalyptic disposition this city elicits. The kind of disposition I tried to describe last week.

If I needed further proof that New York is a vision of the end of the world—I did not, by the way—it came a few days ago. On Sunday morning, when I woke, the only sound was the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.*That is, against the relief of the buildings outside my window were snowflakes. Hundreds and hundreds of snowflakes, landing on the sill, the cracks in the brick, on every edifice of the fences and paths below. Although the snow itself was a revelation (the first time ever, I would say, that I’ve been snowed on) its effects are what I will mention here.

As I waited underground for the subway later that day there seemed to be greater-than-usual preponderance of rats. Indeed, the tracks were throbbing with fat, spotty, callous rats. Rats that were all but impervious—they would pull up, hesitate, then continue—to missiles hurtled in their direction. Rats so sizeable and audacious —just one or two, basted over glowing embers, would make a good meal; they cared less about a stomping foot than they did aforementioned missiles—that the bubonic plague for an instant, did not seem so far away.

As I fixated on the rats, a busker on the platform opposite triggered his stereo, raised his violin to his neck, and after the introduction, began to play the theme from Phantom of the Opera. The background orchestra is terrifying enough by itself: dropping—no plummeting—through the octaves, then rising to new heights, all fronted by a scaling violin. Combined with the rats, the atmosphere was too perfect, too precisely apocalyptic. There was a second when the approaching train sounded like hoof beats.

There is a wonderful word in German—it escapes me now—which describes the phenomenon in which things are not nearly as bad as you thought, and you are disappointed. As the train arrived, and the rats scattered, and the violin was drowned in the screech of metal-on-metal, I experienced a similar feeling.

Back to the desire to reconcile the two facts, then. Although there is probably no link between the fallibility of the neck and fast-approaching four-month anniversary, in a world—yes, New York is a world—that has an air of immanent implosion, there is a need to connect seemingly incongruous facts. Whether it is to find order in chaos, or meaning in vacuity, I do not know. Indeed, it is likely that the need arises out of nothing more profound that a narcissistic desire to mark one’s life with transcendental experience, to rise above the mundane and heave a yard-stick into the great wheel the Fates control.

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Tomorrow I am to bus to Washington DC to attend the Australian Embassy’s Christmas party. It was not any antipodean connections that prompted the invitation, but rather a journalist friend from Kentucky. Thus, I really have no right to attend, but welcome the chance to escape the island, if only for a night. There is a reason most of the photos I have taken in this city are filled with sky.

There are a couple of photos at the following links, should you be interested. You do not need to be a member of Facebook to view them.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=59133&l=9aad8&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=73277&l=c7f45&id=585700346

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*This line is stolen, I do not wish to give it back.