isolation

I am sitting on the 4 heading down. At 59th, they really crowd in, humid from the rain. I look up to see who is with me.

There is a man standing over me, gripping the ceiling bar with both hands. He is in his twenties. His eyes are closed. He is wearing a beige sweater with one of those turtleneck collars that comes up around the neck and flares out at the top. Black rimmed glasses, thick eyebrows. I know, somehow, that he hates his reflection today, that he will not see a world that might see him.

He is making these deep rasping sounds, sniffling. At first I think he has a cold, and I wish he wasn’t standing directly over me. But as I study him, I see that his face is turned inward. He is crying—

crying in, toward himself, crying in the most lonely of ways, the way you cry when you are not letting your suffering flow: jerky, swallowed, grasped and withheld. Two thoughts run through my head: his father has died; a lover has rejected him.

He knows no one will see him. Certainly not the 30 something man next to him wearing that olive patchwork scarf, reading an old issue of The New Yorker. I thought maybe the girl next to me with the patched up soccer jersey might have noticed, but I couldn’t catch her eye.

There he is and here am I, staring. I want to reach out to him; I want to touch his hand. I want to give. Have you noticed that it is hard to witness someone's pain? I want to look away. Open your fucking eyes. Look at me. I see you. See me. We are suffering too. Please, I don’t want to sit here, watching your pain, alone. Be with me, for a moment. It doesn’t belong only to you!

5/30/07

When I came here to sit on the driftwood you sometimes find
bleached white by the madly shining sun,
the blown out afternoon was blinding to the mind
so the body listened to the music of the surf
and knew its hushed voice before memory--

It was then that I saw their silhouettes distant down the beach,
her nude form undulating on top like a playful seal,
and the mind struggled to be freed from the light
but the body knew what it saw and smiled--

and when she was done, she rose and dashed naked to the water
where her feet splayed, made tentative by the cold. She splashed
over her nakedness and squatted down to let the salty rush
clean her out, and turned to face him. He was still on his back

in the coarse sand. She must have been shivering, she was slender,
and I think she saw me then, way down the beach, watching her with my pen,
because she sank to her knees and maybe laughed, and then ran back
to the towel with the warm body waiting for her naked on the beach
and you could almost smell joy in the breeze

No surprise: shortly after these men arrived at the fence, their conversation turned philosophical.

This is one of the most poetic places in the city. When it is gusting, I like to lean over the fence. I find myself suddenly reconnected to space. Here, feeling flows through the body like wind. It is less contained—the recollection of an ancient memory, so intrinsic that it is effortlessly freed.

The buildings from this vantage take on a scenic majesty that often reminds me of looking at mountains. Always, I feel a surge of joy and relief followed by a sense of calm. Physical landscape and consciousness mirror each other. The visual perspective of this place provokes reflection, introspection, depth. On cool windy evenings when shadows are long and the light is deep, many people simply hug the fence and gaze out.

How is it that what we experience as isolation in crowds becomes attentive, expansive solitude in open space?

James posted an exquisite reply to the photo of the Couple in the 2nd avenue Diner. I think it needs to be linked to on the front page. Click Below:

I was sitting in a restaurant above a square in Reykyavík, thinking about the tasty Icelandic lamb I was about to order, when a beautiful blue-eyed woman and her companion walked in and sat directly in front of me. When sitting at my table I thought for a moment, "This chair, or this one?" And I finally decided to take the chair that faced the window. When they walked in they headed straight to that window. She sat down, then stood up, switched seats; he sat down, and then she stood up again, and switched to the seat on my left. I could see her better there. He turned to me and we smiled with that, "silly girl!" expression on our faces. We weren't thinking in the same language, but our eyes understood each other well enough. She, on the other hand, wouldn't look directly at me...

Together we made strangers of ourselves. We knew this and bore
it with dignity. Of the things we did not speak, the tacks
we made in mind and poise, the coolness with which we moved

in crowds, each of us encased as if by glass, none
would meet another gaze. It was this merit that afforded us containment.
It was this inwardness that held us out against annihilation.

We moved in multitudes, our erratic swarming
well channeled by the canyons of the country we inhabited—
the philosophical repose our buildings held, the cool formality of light

upon our towers. To each other, we were a restive scenery,
like the sidling forms of cats, the emergent patterns of the ants.
Upon us, an otherness crept. We moved privately

through the public spaces of our lives. We learned not to see
what we were, even when forced violently into intimate proximities,
even when we held each other to keep from falling.

We held our lives in thin separation above and below, left and right.
Years might have passed, we might have never learned who we were.
We made strangers of ourselves and to ourselves became strangers—
in our absence, we grew frozen and small.

Sometimes we were quiet, alone in the spaces we inhabited but did not share
We moved down the stone steps of our architecture, clutching
our briefcases, our jackets, our selves. Sometimes we waited,

our hearts silent in the greatness of the private country that we had built.
We looked out upon the longings of our consciousness.
We felt sadness in what had entered us. For the newness of our love unborn.