Nelophone's blog

This morning, at precisely 6:44 am, I was sitting at my computer. The trees in Central Park seem to have fully bloomed, and they are a delicious light green color. My windows face east, and this morning, as the sun rose, its light filtered through the leaves of a large London Plane tree about a block to the northeast, casting undulating shadows, almost like shadows of smoke, on the wall behind my computer. For the few minutes it lasted, it reminded me of a tiny version of the northern lights, even if they were transplanted thousands of miles south and deprived of their color.

The principal lesson that I’ve taken from A Sense of Place is one that I’ve been trying to learn for a long time. It can be summed up in two words: PAY ATTENTION. The books that I have most enjoyed this semester, those of Tuan, Frazier, and Whitehead, are testaments to the rather remarkable things that can happen when you simply heighten your awareness of your surroundings. Had I not read Frazier’s essay “Cops,” about a fugitive chase that literally walks in on Frazier as he is sitting admiring the light on his bedroom wall, it’s questionable whether I would have thought anything of the light on my own wall this morning. Yet what Frazier does with that light–using it as a launching pad to reflect on what people around the country are doing as he is lying on his bed–is emblematic of the role of good writing in general: to make the mundane interesting, and to make the personal universal.

Stare long enough at something, or look at something in a new light, and some previously obscure significance may begin to emerge. Frazier sees police officers climbing around on a billboard on a nearby roof, and writes, “I had looked at that billboard many times, but I had never realized before that you could climb on it, or how hard it is to see a person when he climbs on it (14).

The idea that we ought to pay attention is, of course, nothing new. It is as old as we are. There is a passage from the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese text though to have originated around 600 B.C., that I think Frazier, Tuan, and Whitehead would enjoy:

Taste the tasteless

Magnify the small

Increase the few

Reward bitterness with care

See simplicity in the complicated

Achieve greatness in little things (65)

This passage, it seems to me, is about the challenge of heightening our perception, and the significance that lies dormant in mundane things, waiting to be perceived. As Jacob Needleman writes in the commentary to the edition of the Tao Te Ching that I have, “We are being told…that our lives are a reflection of the quality of our attention” (101). In a very real sense, our attention is all we’ve got. Depending on its quality, the world is rich or drab, significant or meaningless, interesting or boring. It’s going by fast–we may as well try to take it in.

Why did you choose the act of dusting as the subject of your essay?

When I woke up on a recent morning with a hangover, I was genuinely surprised by the intensity of my urge to clean, to order my life and impose control in some way. This, to me, was representative of the larger instinct to make a place, and to maintain and protect it against the inevitable entropy that dissolves everything eventually. I think the amount of time we spend merely maintaining our lives–rebuilding the sand castle, essentially–is pretty remarkable, as is the automatic, almost robotic quality of this maintenance. There is a lot of life being lived as we brush our teeth, wash the dishes, or dust the shelves, but we rarely see anything special in these tasks.

I chose dusting in particular because I couldn’t think of any task that was more mundane. It’s something we do as quickly as we can, with our minds occupied by other things, so we’re unlikely to absorb much of the experience. And yet when I dusted the shelf where I keep all my random odds and ends, it forced me to interact with aspects of my life that I had long neglected, to bring awareness to these things and begin to contemplate connections between them. The act of dusting served the same purpose, for me, that Tuan attributes to good literature, which “…draws attention to aspects of experience that we may otherwise fail to notice” (162).

This morning I woke up with a hangover, and I knew I had to clean. It is an urge that visits me with a particular urgency after a night of drinking. Having relinquished some control the night before, I feel an almost religious compulsion to recapture it, to grab the reins and prove that my life is on a stable path. It helps, too, that my hangovers usually fall on weekends, when my apartment is in a state of mild squalor after a week of neglect. So it was this morning; the stress hormones surged through my veins, and I was out of bed to take stock of the task at hand.

I had to dust. There were several clues: The sun streaming in the window illuminated the dust particles wheeling through the air. Was it true, as I had heard, that they were simply dead skin cells? As I breathed, I was sure, I was sucking them in, canceling the lung benefits of whatever exercise I had recently done. My apartment has cheap hardwood floors, and dust accumulates at an alarming speed. It had gathered in small dunes behind cabinets, and in thin films atop books, speakers, and the cowbell that has sat at the head of my bed since I moved in two years ago. It had accumulated in clumps among the tangle of extension cords beside my desk, a bizarre matrix of dog hair (a roommate keeps an irate Chihuahua) and what appeared to be lint. In homes with carpeting, it must somehow be absorbed, but in my own it had once again piled up for all to see.

I have been to Coney Island and ridden the Cyclone, but it did not occur to me that the dips and yaws of the coaster might represent an epic battle between city and sea over me and my fellow riders. I have taken a commuter train from Grand Central at rush hour, but it did not strike me that the announcer’s voice over the loudspeaker behaved as a cue stick might, knocking trains into berths like pool balls in side pockets. I have seen well dressed businessmen on the subway, but I did not think of their finery as the plumes of a peacock, a front carefully calculated to impress. I have navigated a traffic jam in Times Square, but I did not feel, as I picked my way through the maw, that the place represented the summation of all the wrong turns of civilization. I have gazed, from many vantage points, upon the Manhattan skyline, but never once did I see it as a bar graph charting the hubris of generations.

Such is the beauty of Colson Whitehead’s New York: it is a city of metaphor, a place where nearly everything is a symbol for something else, and where inanimate objects come alive. Yet Whitehead takes pains to point out that the city he portrays is his and his alone: each of us has our own personal skyline (6) constructed out of the places we have slept, worked, walked, and played. Along with that skyline comes the potential to conjure our own city of metaphors. A simple example illustrates the point: If I extend the sphere of domesticity from my apartment onto the city at large, and think of the metropolis as a single home, metaphors come easily. Central and Hudson River Parks are my chimneys and ventilation systems, the places where I go to blow off steam. Too often, the Turkish deli across the street from my apartment is my kitchen, often a source of more nutrients than the kitchen in my apartment itself. And of course Greenwich Village is my study, a space for work and contemplation.

As I read The Colossus of New York, I found myself chuckling aloud in recognition every few pages. What makes the work so effective, I think, is that it puts metaphor to work on multiple levels. We recognize ourselves in Whitehead’s prose: when he describes the morning commute, the city in the rain, or a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, it is as though he were describing our own lives. In a sense, he is, since the themes he addresses­­-from drudgery and social alienation to sunburn-are practically universal. What’s more, the city he takes as his subject is itself a metaphor for something larger. “Talking about New York,” he writes, “is a way of talking about the world” (158).

When I ask people living in New York whether they ever plan to leave the city, the response is often the same. “Where else would I go?” they ask. “Where do you go after New York?” That the city is an exciting place hardly needs to be said, and Ian Frazier captures some of that excitement in his book Gone to New York. New York is a place of Romanian landlords named Gary who sell vintage hand grenades, of black school children who talk about shooting and stabbing on the subway as white women sit reading nearby, and of elderly men hoarding the largest collection of typewriter keys in the world. Yet the allure of the city goes deeper than entertainment value or novelty, and Frazier alludes to this when he says, “Like many Americans, I fear living in a nowhere, in a place that is no-place; in Brooklyn, that doesn’t trouble me at all. Everybody, it seems, is here” (94). New York, in short, is where the action is, and when you get here you can put down your bags and say, in capital letters, I HAVE ARRIVED.

And that feels good. At least, it did for me, after so many years of nursing a pervasive itch to be elsewhere. Some years ago, when I was living in Washington D.C. and working as an intern for a liberal political magazine, I would occasionally take the Chinatown bus to New York on the weekends. D.C. was the first big city I had really lived in, but when I returned from New York on Sunday evenings, I was always struck by how tame and pedestrian Washington seemed by comparison. Of course, I had friends in New York, and I had yet to make friends in D.C., which only added to the mythical aura that the city assumed in my mind. As Yi-Fu Tuan points out, “Myths flourish in the absence of precise knowledge” (85), and my knowledge of New York was far from precise.

What strikes me now, looking back on my first year or so of living in New York, is the way that its mythical status persisted long after I had moved there, providing a sort of psychological bridge for me as I began adjusting to the unglamorous reality of the place. As the radiator in my room exploded and began hissing steam, as the squealing of revelers in from New Jersey kept me awake late into the night, as I returned home after hot days bone tired and covered in grime, as my bicycle was stolen by some thug who I later saw riding it in the park and chased after in sandals; as I WOKE THE HELL UP from my New York fantasy, it persisted just long enough to keep me living here. It was my romantic vision of the place that drove me to invent questionable justifications for my staying, as Frazier does in his book when he says, of living in Brooklyn, “I think of all the rural places, the pine-timbered canyons and within-commuting distance farmland, that we are preserving by not living there” (93).

Whether such justifications make sense is not important: it matters only that they keep you in New York long enough to slowly begin falling in love with it, the way you do with a co-worker who doesn’t look like much at first, but over weeks in the office begins to bewitch you with strange little gestures, like the way she twirls her pen. The light on red brick in the fall, the smell of cigarette smoke outside the library (I am not a smoker), the pleasure of taking a cup of shitty coffee and just walking around; These things would not have shown themselves had I not stuck it out, had I decided at the first taste of misfortune that it was time to pack up again and move on, had I not continued to believe that I really had arrived.

One of the major themes in Auster’s City of Glass is the imperfection of language, and the idea that words have ceased to adequately describe the things they represent and have come to represent each other instead. The principal objective of Peter Stillman, the crazed professor who Quinn has been hired to follow, is to invent a new language whose words perfectly describe the things to which they refer. He works in New York in particular because, as he puts it, the city “is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal (122). Which made me wonder: If we lived in a New York City where every word was understood to have just one meaning, and to describe exactly the thing it represented, what would the city be like?

In the historical book that he wrote before being locked up for abusing his son, Stillman claims that before humankind’s fall from grace, “A thing and its name were interchangeable. After the fall, this was no longer true. Names became detached from things; words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; language had been severed from God. The story of the Garden, therefore, records not only the fall of man, but the fall of language (70). In short, all words used after the Fall are used with an awareness of evil.

This introduces the first reality of my imagined, pre-lapsarian New York: the recent financial crisis might never have happened. One of the things that kept irresponsible mortgage lending going for so long was the packaging and sale of bad mortgages, in the form of things like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Entire markets sprung up around the sale of such instruments, or around bets on whether mortgages would fail. Key in this arrangement was the idea that many investors never had a clear idea of the risks of what they were buying, and could thus be deceived into thinking that their investments were safe. If the words “credit default swap” had accurately described the financial product that lay behind them, that financial product would have been much less attractive.

On the downside, a New York where every word had a single meaning would also mean the collapse of irony, and thus the demise of much art. One of the central functions of art is the appropriation of well-known cultural symbols and concepts for an alternate purpose, or the recasting of such symbols in an alternate light, allowing viewers to see them from a new perspective. This practice depends upon the fact that words have multiple meanings. If that were untrue, New York’s art world would be devastated. The galleries of Chelsea would close in droves, and much of Williamsburg would revert to the Jewish and Latino communities who dominated before the artists arrived.

As if the collapse of art weren’t bad enough, a pre-lapsarian New York would probably mean the collapse of the very industry that gave rise to the production of this blog post: academia. Historical research would die down, since the content of artifacts like ancient texts would no longer be open to multiple interpretations. Theory and criticism of all types would vanish since their reason for existence–differing views–would also be gone. In a town where city, state and private educational institutions make up a substantial chunk of the economy, the undoing of the fall from grace would be very bad for business. If academia did survive, it would do so only in a vastly diminished form. When every word only has one meaning, after all, there is much less to teach, and much less to talk about.

I have always hated small talk. As a socially awkward teenager, I loathed it so much that I began assuming false personas at parties, just to make the conversation interesting. Rather than being myself, I would be Scott the violinist, or Robbie the short story writer from Georgia. Cynically, I would regale those who I spoke to with details from my fake lives. That I was able to get away with these impersonations when talking to people only confirmed my suspicions about small talk: it was superficial, practically meaningless, and the person I was speaking with seemed indifferent to what was coming out of my mouth.

Judging from his commentary in Space and Place, Tuan would seem to share some of my misgivings about small talk. His central problem with it seems to be that it cheapens and oversimplifies complex and nuanced human experience. He writes, “At a party someone asks, ‘How do you like Minneapolis?’ The typical response is, ‘It’s a good city, a good place to live in, except perhaps for the winter, which seems to last forever. Thus with tired phrases our personal and subtle experiences are misrepresented time and again” (201).

My hatred of small talk growing up was matched by an equally intense enjoyment of good writing, but not until reading Tuan’s chapter Intimate Experiences of Place did I make a connection between these two seemingly unrelated inclinations. As Tuan helped me realize, though, good writers provide the polar opposite of small talk. Rather than repeating the clichés and tired turns of phrase that comprise most conversation, they relate the experiences that are hardest for us to grasp and describe. As Tuan puts it, “Feelings and intimate experiences are inchoate and unmanageable to most people, but writers and artists have found ways of giving them form” (202).

To this point, I’ve given small talk short shrift by ignoring one of its central characteristics: what matters, in small talk, is less the actual topic of conversation than the bridges and connections that the conversation will build. Small talkers, it turns out, almost always have an ulterior motive. In a 2004 articlein the Washington Post, social reporter Roxanne Roberts notes that small talk has become so important to social interactions that, “The ability connect in short, casual conversations can make or break careers, friendships and romances…”

Roberts quotes David Weinberger, described in the article as a “former philosophy professor and dot-com entrepreneur,” who argues that as people make small talk, they are subconsciously evaluating each other’s behavior in a myriad of subtle ways. "In small talk, we express ourselves in the details of what we talk about, the words we use, the ones we don't, how far we lean forward, how tentatively or aggressively we probe for shared ground…” says Weinberger. "Because all of this is implicitly presented, it tends to give a more accurate picture of who we are and what we care about than big, explicit conversations."

If Weinberger is to be believed, then it is during small talk that we first discover some of the most subtle and elusive quirks of our future friends, colleagues and spouses. Such observations could easily constitute what Tuan calls “the fleeting intimacies of direct experience (146),” and viewed in this light, they might convince Tuan and myself to give small talk a second look.

The folk singer John Darnielle once said that for some people, feelings of loneliness have nothing to do with whether or not there are people around. I think the same statement applies to loneliness and place; in my experience loneliness often has little to do with where you are. I have felt lonely in the wilderness, in a Wal-Mart parking lot in a small western town, and on the subway in New York City. Yet just because it is possible to feel lonely in all of these places, this does not mean that these places inspire loneliness equally. So what is the relationship between loneliness and place?

New York is often thought of as an alienating and lonely place, and at first blush, the data would seem to bear this out. More people live alone in New York than anywhere else in the country: in Manhattan it’s 50.6 percent of households, while in all 5 boroughs combined the number is about one third. Yet in a recent feature article in New York Magazine, Jennifer Senior examines a growing body of social science research that suggests that the stereotype of New York as a lonely place may be flat out false. “In study after study, urban dwellers have a more substantial social network,” she writes. Even if they’re not married, they often have a large circle of friends or strong ties to work or other organizations. And when they are lonely, it often has less to do with the place they live than with a sense that they are “asynchronous with their cohort,” or somehow out of step with their peers.

Tuan, in Space and Place, describes another silver lining to city life, which at times can seem cramped and unpleasant. He speaks of an, “…indiscriminate, gregarious human warmth” that can be derived from residential crowding under some conditions (64), and although he is talking about families living together, it reminds me of the cameraderie that surfaces occasionally among New Yorkers on a snowy street or in a crowded train. However casual this interaction is, it can be a powerful tonic for an otherwise lonely person.

There is, of course, a dark side to cities. With space and privacy in such short supply, they can easily inspire a sense of constriction and enclosure: the antithesis of freedom. As Huan writes, “Freedom implies space... Fundamental is the ability to transcend the present condition, and this transcendence is most simply manifest as the elementary power to move (52). This is what the frontier can offer, what the American West, with its seemingly endless vistas and empty spaces, serves up in abundance. Solitude and purity are words often pleasantly associated with rural life, but in the rural too, there is risk.

Too much mental and physical space can inspire profound loneliness, a sense of rootlessness, purposelessness and obscurity. As Senior points out in her New York article, in the U.S., “states with the highest suicide rates are the least dense.” This correlation does not imply causation, of course: the statistic could simply reflect a rural aversion to seeking help for mental problems, borne out of a strong sense of individualism, toughness and independence. Even so, these values are ultimately rooted in the environment: they grew up in the tough soil of the frontier.

Tom Mylan hurries about his shop, chopping, weighing and wrapping while calling out instructions to his employees. One moment, he’s dressing up a roast beef for a waiting customer, and the next he’s bisecting a chicken with one of the 12 knives that he carries in a large silver scabbard on his belt. Mylan, a man whose beefy build portrays his profession, wears a green baseball cap, and has blue eyes that peer out from behind his black, thick-rimmed glasses. His white chef’s jacket is covered in blood.

Mylan is a butcher at Marlow and Daughters, a Williamsburg meat house that opened in December of 2008 and carries an array of pasture-raised meats from regional farms. In many ways, the shop bears a closer resemblance to a mid-19th century butcher shop than it does to most shops in business today. While most U.S. butchers get their meat from a few large packers, partially cut and packed in cardboard, Mylan and his staff source whole animals and do most of the butchering themselves, making a range of products from the lesser known animal parts. And like the butcher shops of old, Marlow is more than a meat supplier: it connects customers to their place by supplying and explaining local product, it provides a venue for social interaction, and it gives customers a sense of agency over their own diets.

In thinking about Jackson’s essay “Jefferson, Thoreau, and After,” it didn’t take long for me to arrive at the conclusion that neither Jefferson nor Thoreau offers a vision of the landscape that provides everything I would hope to derive from it. Like Jefferson, I want a public life, one engaged with my neighbors and the body politic, but like Thoreau, I also want some measure of privacy, regular access to green space, and the ability to occasionally escape to an entirely different context. Further complicating the picture is the fact that I live in a city, the environment that both Jefferson and Thoreau loved to hate. Yet I think there may be something that would prompt Thoreau and Jefferson alike to take a second look at cities, and that might begin to make our cities into places where both agrarian and romantic needs are met: urban agriculture.

The idea of growing our food in the city deals most obviously with Jefferson’s critique of urban settings: that they are places of “useless luxury and corrupt wealth” (175) where no one has access to the land. As Jackson describes it, Jefferson believed that “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of god,” and he worked to create a republic where  “a few as possible shall be without a small portion of land.” (175) There are many urban farms in existence in the united states today that give city dwellers a sense of what it means to work the land, while also serving to reinvigorate a depressed urban area. For instance, the farm Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin employs local people at a complex that includes six greenhouses, two fish runs, outdoor pens for livestock, and 5 beehives. Farmers teach local people how to grow their own food, while producing food to sell at local markets. (Click here for a nice Youtube Video).

A similar project exists within New York City, in the form of Red Hook Community Farm, run by the organization Added Value. The farm employs local schoolchildren, and its produce meets a critical need in a community where there are few supermarkets.  Finally, for anyone who does not believe that food could be grown in a place like Manhattan, there is the vertical farm concept, which would convert skyscrapers in major cities into food producing machines.

I don’t for a minute believe that any of these initiatives would convince Thoreau to leave Conchord, Mass and move to the city. I do, however, think that Jackson presents an overly harsh portait of Thoreau’s feelings about agriculture. Thoreau may not have loved all farmers, but he grew beans of his own when he lived alone at Walden Pond, and in Walden he describes how trying to maximize the health of his crop gave him a heightened sense of his surroundings. I suspect that Thoreau would at least appreciate the way that urban farms can heighten people’s understanding of natural processes.

Urban agriculture cannot make us good citizens, as Jefferson wanted. Nor can it give us the unspoiled nature that Thoreau idealized. But it can bring us closer to both our neighbors and natural systems, and it does something even more important by diffusing the tendency to believe that our utopia lies elsewhere. The environmental historian William Cronon wrote the following words as an argument against romanticizing wilderness, but they can be interpreted as a general caution against looking too far afield for solutions to the problems of our landscape. “By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness,” he wrote, “we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.” (11) What’s nice about urban agriculture is that it offers city dwellers both community and nature, without requiring them to leave the places where they live.