Cold, gloomy day.
Stuffy, overheated apartment.
Looking at maps and trying to comprehend the enormity of this earth as it aligns with the tinyness of individual lives.
I was at the East River last week, hunting down what was left of a burned out payphone I spotted 11 years ago. A part of that old payphone still exists but most of it either rotted into dirt or became invisibly submerged in seaweed.
I have never been much for nature, with the exception of water. I cannot stand being in the rain, but I love to hear it pour from inside a building or even just under a roof. In Laos I remember standing under a metal roof supported by several metal sticks. Rain came roaring down on the roof, making an incredible racket of smiles, anger, and applause all at once.
The East River river has become a destination for me for some peculiar reasons, but to simply watch water flow by seems not so strange. It connects me to the earth, making me feel privy to its heavings and inhalations. It is orderly by appearance but chaotic in substance, like the earth itself, where everything is random.
When I feel especially depressed I look to the water. I see and feel some of myself in it, as if I, too, could rise and fall from one extreme to the next with no explanation. Patterns emerge at the river, of course, but what landlubber New Yorker knows of the tides? I don’t want to go to the river knowing when tides are high and the water impenetrably dark. Nor do I want to have a schedule of low tides, when shopping carts, metal railings, payphones, and other objects of discarded urban vomit appear for all to see, as if rising up when in fact they might only have barely moved since the last time they were visible.
I think of these objects as garbage, but a studiously artistic form of trash that sings with the water of the East River as it takes them into its mouth, never swallowing them.
