for regyt

[kitchen_kink]

I've never quite understood New York. I like it well enough, but ultimately I find it too big, too ungainly and overwhelming, and after a few days there I'm usually happy to leave and get back to my funky suburb of my manageable little city.

But I appreciate people with a fierce love for a place like that; I think it says something brave and sharp and indomitable about them. People who love New York seem to me to be harder than most folks, but purer, too, more fully themselves. People who love New York have to protect their own personalities, not to get trampled or stripped by that impossible, merciless confusion. It crushes people under its teeming pressure until the ones who survive it are diamonds. dr_memory is another such sort. But when I read this passage in Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries (incidentally, a book that's great in parts, but overall disappointing for those who love Winterson generally), I thought of regyt.

[After the first time she sleeps with her married lover, the main character Alice takes a midnight walk from Central Park to the Battery to think.]

I ignored the Stop-Go of the endless intersection traffic lights and took my chance across the quieted roads. Not night, not day, the city was suspended, its cries and shouts fainter now, its roar a rumble, like something far off. In the centre of it I felt like a creature on the edge. This is a city of edges, grand sharp, precipitous, unsafe. It is a city of corners not curves. Always a choice has to be made; which way now? A city of questions, mouthy and insolent, a built Sphinx to riddle at the old world.

I learned to feel comfortable in New York the way a fakir learns to feel comfortable on a bed of nails; enjoy it. Beauty and pain are not separate. That is so clear here. It is a crucible city, an alchemical vessel where dirt and glory do effect transformation. No one who succumbs to this city remains as they were. Its indifference is its possibility. Here you can be anything.

If you can. I was quite aware that much of what gets thrown into an alchemical jar is destroyed. Self-destroyed. The alchemical process breaks down substances according to their own laws. If there is anything vital, it will be distilled. If not...

Undecieve yourself Alice, a great part of you is trash.

True, but my hope lies in the rest.

Comments

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

i've never understood how people can not understand New York. i understand not being able to take it for too long, but i don't understand not understanding it.

as to the passage, my only response is yes (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nex0s/444532.html).

n.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Perhaps what I mean is that I don't quite grok it. Your passage about the pulse and the sparkle is quite amazing, by the way, and I do get that feeling. But I don't feel at home there. I don't feel welcomed. I love it in many ways, but it doesn't love me back, if you follow. There are places that open their tiny molecular arms and draw me into their fabric, places where I stand on the street or the land and feel the land pulling back at me lightly, asking me to stay. In New York my overwhelming feeling is that the city is a thing unto itself, a giant crashing symphony, as you say, and whether my instrument can be heard in its careful cacophony is not important to it at all.

I imagine that those who grow up there are in some sense blessed with a feeling of belonging and a place in the orchestra.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

It is a thing unto itself, yes - and it spoils you if you love it too much, I think. Because people start to feel too small to love truly. (As I said in my last paragraph of this post, I tend to feel closer to cities than to people.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Like nex0s, I don't think I've ever really understood not understanding New York. There's a part of me still that believes that if you don't understand New York, it just means that you haven't seen it the way I see it, and if I just show you the right places, the right times, the right chance meetings and moments, you'll get it, because it's too big and too beautiful not to get. For any value of 'you'. But this is probably wrong.

I like the quote. Thank you for it. It sort of makes me think of the way I appreciate movies and books - if it has good characters, or a good moment, or good imagery, or just one truly gorgeous line, I can usually forgive and ignore the rest. And it makes me wonder what the author would think of those of us who were born here - we remain as we are, no?

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Again, I'd love for you to show me sometime. When it's warmer, when I'm visiting, it'd be a joy to have you walk me around to your places. I promise to wear comfortable shoes.

For comments on my "not understanding" New York, see my comment to nex0s.

Yeah, this book kept pushing me and pulling me. Now and then an old image of hers would reappear (specifically, a castle where ceilings are worshipped and floors are absent, and a table and chairs hang from the ceiling, which the diners reach by means of tightropes), and I would think, Lazy! And there are so many sentences and passages that seem like drafts: they're the germs (interesting enough to see, I suppose) of the fantastic images and thoughts that Winterson is capable of, but it's as if the manuscript was due and she didn't have time enough to revise.

There are two characters in the novel that were born in New York. The character Alice is the usual Winterson analog (British, wry, love-obsessed); the couple with whom she falls in love are both native New Yorkers, one a first-gen Italian, the other half-Jewish with a mystical Kabbalah-obsessed father. Both of those characters are sharp and hard-cut like diamonds, distilled, shining, quick-tempered and quick-tongued. I think she tries to examine the very question you pose, and I think her answer is that one just turns out crystallized like that, certain and alchemized and strong.

I almost want to reread it immediately. Maybe I will; it only took me a few days.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Again, I'd love for you to show me sometime. When it's warmer, when I'm visiting, it'd be a joy to have you walk me around to your places. I promise to wear comfortable shoes.

Definitely.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting that quote. I never lived in New York -- I always found it scary, in some way I couldn't ever quite push into my conscious mind, and now I think I understand why.

[cycon.livejournal.com]

I've never been comfortable with New York. It intimidates me. Too big, too dangerous, too many people forced into too small a space. I can enjoy a day or two there, and there's stuff I love going to, but I could never live in or around the city. I just don't trust it.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I grew up in NYC and I love it. I sometimes ponder moving back, though I don't know if I will. Anyway, you may be interested in a sort of urban fantasy novel called Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. The images of New York are just lovely. It's an amazing book.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

"A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise."

[mangosteen]

I went to college in NYC, and lived on my own there for a while afterwards. NYC is home. It feels like home, it smells like home, and when I arrive, I arrive home.

Yet, I look at everyone who lives there, and no matter how happy, healthy, well-adjusted, well-off, or otherwise whole they may be, they all look a little bit beat down. Strung out. Awake for a bit too long. Weary.

If you have the time, energy, and money, NYC is like nowhere else. Otherwise, it's just dirty, noisy and expensive, so why bother? I look back on my decision to leave NYC, and I still wonder if I would have stayed if I didn't work a job that didn't pay enough, where I was on-call 24x7 with no backup. I'll never know.

I can't say I'm too sad about the outcome, though.