It is as though you are made of sponge, and each of these people in your midst is also sponge, and each of these sponges is soaked to saturation with story, energy, inner chatter, so that the liquid of each personhood seeps through and over the threshold of its cratered, rectangular mass, passing seamlessly across your own threshold, plunging deep into your fibers. For this hour, while you yourself are immobilized, you become part of a massive, mobile Venn-diagram-chain of stories and inner lives, surging through the city’s veins like blood. You arrive to work two trains, two boroughs, and a six-city-blocks’-walk later sopping with impressions, every once-vacant pore besotted by intimations of other fears, other desires, other lives, other frequencies than those you alone contained when you stepped out the door of a yellowing one-room apartment on Greenpoint Avenue this morning. Yet your day’s work has just begun: wring it out and start again.
It is late January 1996. Manhattan; rush hour. A sour, metallic damp-cold permeates everything – the morning air, your muscles and bones, your black pleather boots and the toes within them. Within a larger vessel of concrete, steel and sky, you are surrounded by humans. Only fist-sized pockets of air and space separate you from the nearest bodies in an endless sea of bodies, most of which have hoisted game-faces like sails into the cutthroat daily gauntlet of packing one’s person into overcrowded subway cars and jockeying for just enough space to feel discrete, unpenetrated, unthreatened (though ever-wary…). And even as you strain the awkward reaches of your periphery toward whatever might be nudging with increasing insistence into your right buttock (a sensation that summons both your drowsy inner prude and latent Rottweiler), a subtler, more interior dimension of you is being alchemized, like it or not, by the psychic clouds emanating from the bodies that flank you on all sides. You are enveloped, helpless, like a sand grain sandwiched between sand grains caught in the cyclone of a wave.
It is as though you are made of sponge, and each of these people in your midst is also sponge, and each of these sponges is soaked to saturation with story, energy, inner chatter, so that the liquid of each personhood seeps through and over the threshold of its cratered, rectangular mass, passing seamlessly across your own threshold, plunging deep into your fibers. For this hour, while you yourself are immobilized, you become part of a massive, mobile Venn-diagram-chain of stories and inner lives, surging through the city’s veins like blood. You arrive to work two trains, two boroughs, and a six-city-blocks’-walk later sopping with impressions, every once-vacant pore besotted by intimations of other fears, other desires, other lives, other frequencies than those you alone contained when you stepped out the door of a yellowing one-room apartment on Greenpoint Avenue this morning. Yet your day’s work has just begun: wring it out and start again.
2 Comments
Mom
10/8/2014 11:23:34 pm
You're back!!!!! I've missed you so!!!! Your writing paints such an alive and electric picture!!!!!!
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Cara
10/10/2014 03:00:31 am
Wow! Gorgeous. The art and your writing and you!
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Adrienne LynchIn the spirit of Rilke: living the questions. Archives
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