For those who’ve never ridden the Manhattan Transit Authority’s subway, and for those who have, you don’t have to be either to understand when I say that my commute is a model of juxtaposition. Some days it becomes a discourse on sullen drudgery. It’s too early for most people. Their faces have either fallen down, chin resting on the lapel of their coats, sleeping, or they look vacantly past me so as not to make eye contact. Avoiding eye contact is a daily ocular dance. The commute is often a time when I feel the weariness of each person who hops on and off the car as if in some kind of post-apocalyptic somnambulism along the lines of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Or, I can see it as a Charlie Chaplin comedy, such as Modern Times.
If I can open my eyes, my mind, all my senses, and truly be in the moment of the now experience, I have the opportunity to take a glimpse at the beauty of what Buddhists call the samsara (the great revolving door between life and death and a reincarnated cycle of life – the game) or what I would call the inevitable dignity of living this crazy, mixed-up life of a New Yorker for which every one of us should receive an honorable mention in the race towards living (or dying, depending, again, on point of view). People in the suburbs don’t experience this kind of close-quartered stimulus en masse in their SUVs.
A Saturday: F. and I were on the 1 train going to the Met Opera. A rather rotund woman sat across from us, arms laden with shopping bags, skin on her face pushing out tightly from her skull. She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a plastic tray of six Ferrero Rocher chocolates – you know the ones: crunchy chocolate balls wrapped in gold foil. With a razor-sharp fingernail she sliced through the ribbon like a gleeful Edwina Scissorhands and opened up the ecstasy lay waiting inside.
She plucked a ripe one from the tray, unwrapped it (carefully crumpling and then discarding the foil into her purse), and took a bite. F. and I both watched. Her body jiggled with delight – truly. I’ve never seen someone enjoy chocolate more. Her mouth contorted in furtive licks and smacks of lips.
F. leaned over to me, “It’s almost pornographic.” He was right. I felt like I was watching something that should have been done in private quarters. It was like screening a porno film with one’s parents – something one simply would never do. Well, maybe you do, but I think I can speak for most by saying, “No way, José!”
She took another erotic bite. Her body seethed as the chocolate warmed every erogenous zone in her corpulent body. Disgust, awe, fear, delight, wonder. I felt it all. This woman was the epitome of the sublime moment on a subway. To top it all off, she continued with the carnage on the chocolate, devouring half of the booty before her jumping-off point at 86th Street. F. and I sighed with relief because neither of us was sure we could take much more. It was exhausting.
Sundays: My weekly respite from riding, unless I desperately want to see a movie or have tickets for a show. Otherwise, I’m embedded at home.
A Monday: I finished teaching, rode my bike from school to 14th Street and 7th Avenue and locked it on a bike rack, hightailed it down the stairs, danced with turnstile, and jumped down another set of stairs two at a time to happily find a 2 train diligently waiting for me. Without taking my backpack off I lunged through the open doors. Two people leapt in behind me as the ding-dong sound signaled the closing doors. “Please stand clear of the closing doors,” the soothing male voice exhaled. I was packed like a lemming in a shiny metal box (thank you Sting [If you know to what Police song I refer, I will send you a fruit basket.]), crammed, smashed, squashed by unknown bodies. I could smell the crisp, February air on their coats, which soon dissipated.
I usually try to take my backpack off before entering a train because it takes up enough space for one more body to fit in the car. If I were someone desperate to get on a train, I would appreciate this act of empathy. When I tried to get my backpack off, I hit the protruding belly of a red-haired, bespectacled man who regarded me squarely with disdain, even after I apologized. I stopped my fruitless attempts to free the backpack and simply left it on my back.
Peripheral vision can be a gift or curse. The man continued staring at me until he exited the car at 34th Street. I noticed that he gave me one last snarl before disappearing around a riveted green steel beam. A sublime moment. The absurdity of being pressed next to this unknown man, his reaction to me, and the beauty of his final glance could have been annoying. Perhaps a few years ago (or even the day before), I might have thought, Eat my shorts, Mr. Poopypants! Now that I’m back to writing more, I’m beginning once again, to practice looking at things in a different way.
I was reminded of a scene from Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. James believes a nasty rhino is out to get him, but when one of the bugs on the journey reminds him to look at it in a different way, he sees that it’s nothing more than a conflagration of bilious smoke and unnecessary noise.
A Tuesday: Coming home from work, a Sasquatchesque gent next to me exhaled languorously, sending a wafting smell of spearmint chewing gum with a hint of tobacco across my nose. Did I ask to smell his gum? Did I ask him to breathe heavily on my profiled face? No. I didn’t ask for any of this, but I got it. Was I mad or annoyed? At that point in the day, I only laughed inside myself. It was better than a bad case of halitosis. It was one of those awful, absurd moments that I would put under the sublime category.
A Wednesday: A voice at the end of the car heralded, “DVDs! Movies! Five dolluhs! Two for ten! Four for twenty!” I blinked, processed it, cocked my head, then thought, Five for one, four for twenty. Two times five is ten. Five times four is twenty. What kind of deal is that? I turned and looked up at the tall man next to me. What, was this Yeti week on the subway? I only needed Big Foot and an alien to show up to make my week would be complete. The guy’s head hit the ceiling with each bump of the ride. He raised a questioning brow and smiled. I laughed and shrugged.
“I got movies,” the voice sang. “I got Fool’s Gold! I got Step Up 2! I got porn!” That last one got a communal laugh from the car full of straphangers. I didn’t even know there was a Step Up 1. Perhaps society would be blessed soon with a Step Up 3. I thought that this series might be the millennial version of the Electric Boogaloo series – hooray! And porn? What kind of porn did he have?!
“Fool’s Gold, Step Up 2 and porn, get ‘em while they’re hot.”
The train rattled uptown. People’s heads bobbled back and forth. An old lady, for whom no one given up a seat, clung to a pole with both hands. Her body jiggled with each jerk of the subway car.
“I got porn!”
It wasn’t like he had other recent, insipid movies like Mad Money or How She Move. No, he had sinful celluloid pleasures on DVD – he had PORN – and people’s interests were piqued.
I looked around. The subway’s runner-up for Yeti commuter looked at me and laughed. What kind of porn guy was he? Hmm. Probably a bondage and biting fetishist. The old lady clinging to the pole? Definitely into S&M. The couple sharing the New York Times? Leather. And the gent with the ponytail? I can’t say in decent conversation.
At 96th Street, along with me, the DVD-selling muse hopped ship and peddled his wares down the platform while I hurriedly pushed my way through the masses and jumped on the waiting 1 local train to the Bronx on the opposite track.
Sublimity.
A Thursday:
A gent on the 3 train today, tan floppy hat pulled down over his eyes – the kind one might wear fishing – sat quietly, head down, as if dozing. A raising of the head, hat pushed back, eyes still closed, an impromptu flutter of lips proceeded by: “My sister, 28 years old, fainted in the street and shriveled up.” Mumblings and more indistinguishable mumblings and then: “She laid down and got bigger and bigger and blew up, blood all over the bed.”
It’s not often that one gets to simply stare, drink in, observe a person on the subway. Most riders acquire the averting eyes skill – the one in which one’s eyes first see a pock mark, the lines around the mouth, the wrinkles from a lifelong furrowed brow, the plucked eyebrows, the drooping ear lobes from laboriously dangling earrings, hatch lines on cheeks that have puckered up from one too many cigarettes, a mole, a wart, a broken nose, a cleft lip: all these a skilled subway rider can observe in two seconds before the observed eye’s find the source of the gaze.
Seeing this man’s countenance expressed sadness, loss: the heavy head, the slumping shoulders, the kneading of hands as if he was trying to wring something out from his body, something that had collected there in his digits. What was sitting there in his hands? What was giving him the waking nightmare of loss? Did he have a sister who both shriveled up and exploded? Something happened to him. Or some things. And there are probably many more things that he happened to.
A Friday: It was a long week at school. I simply wanted to sit down, read my book, get home, cook dinner, maybe watch a movie, do a little writing, and then fall unconscious into a peaceful slumber.
I’ve begun reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. There’s a lot to meditate on with what he’s saying. He writes of the ego being the thoughts and emotions that are not our true selves – our selves that are connected to our source of Being: God. The ego is the collective dysfunction of a society run amuck with setting up the binary opposition of us vs. them, me vs. you, or as Roald Dahl so eloquently states in Matilda: “I’m smart, you’re dumb, I’m big, you’re little, I’m right, you’re wrong.” Tolle writes that religion is one of the institutions in our world that has set itself up as the authority on Truth, when in fact this truth is based on the ego, and that the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, et. al, have been manipulated and misconstrued through the millennia to service the ego.
I suddenly experienced this first hand with the appearance of a pontificating evangelical Christian at 125th Street who decided to break into a apocalyptic sermon on the God, Jesus, heaven, hell, and the zillion years in the afterlife that were just the beginning of eternity.
“This might be your last trip on the subway. What if you died when you stepped out of this car? A million years is nothing. A billion. A zillion. A hundred thousand zillions and that’s not even the beginning! When you step out of this car, you might step into eternity!”
I imagined myself tripping and making a face-plant into a Calvin Klein Eternity cologne ad.
He stood right in front of me. It wasn’t as if he was simply talking to everyone on the subway at an appropriate volume. He was shouting so loudly I felt the tips of my nose and ears vibrating.
He talked about standing naked before God when you die, Jesus saying that you did a good job or that he never knew you. There was much on burning in hell. He was actually pretty adept and affective at building his manic case against sin and the devil that dwelled in all of us. I did my best to ignore him, but it was impossible, like trying to read Proust in the front row at an Iron Maiden concert.
“GOD IS A GOD OF LOVE! JESUS LOVES YOU!”
That was it. This was no curate’s egg – there was not a bit of merit in anything he said. I knew that I’d probably be tilting at windmills, but I had to say something.
“God is a god of love?” I interrupted.
The man was taken aback. I don’t think he was expecting to be engaged, or maybe he was. Most people probably didn’t want to bother to speak to him, but I’d had enough.
“Uh, yes.”
“And Jesus was the epitome of unconditional love, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why would either of them create a hell and make people burn for eternity?!”
He didn’t know what to say. I’d broken his rhythm, his cadence, and there was no going back.
My stop was quickly approaching. I had timed this right. I really didn’t want to get into a theological repartee with the guy. I just wanted to stop him for a few minutes. I wasn’t judging him. He had the right to say what he wanted to say, as did I.
Another guy next to me said, “Why don’t you leave him alone? He can say what he wants.”
“And so can I.”
“Yeah, but you’re making him look like an idiot.”
I shrugged. The doors opened. “I think he’s doing a good enough job of that without my help.” I turned to the preacher, patted him on the shoulder and said, “No hard feelings.”
“God bless you, brother,” he said.
Afterwards, I realized that perhaps my own ego of wanting to be right, to debunk this guy, was feeding into his own, and the reaction that he wanted to get from someone to satisfy his own ego had been evinced by me. On the other hand, part of me was really just trying to get the guy to quiet down so I could read!
The synchronicity of reading the passage on religion and the ego and the appearance of this man was another instance of the sublime, a moment in time that was there to offer me a chance to be present, to be aware of myself, my thoughts, my emotions, me ego.
*****
If I always saw things in a rosy-colored pyrex measuring cup, then life wouldn’t be as rich as it is. The good with the bad, the joyful with the sad, the tireless with the exhausted. It is what it is and I just have to let it be.
I’m not perfect. I have my bad days when all of the above would have been a minor or major annoyance. But I find that the more I practice the little moments of living in the now, the less I’m apt to be that disgruntled straphanger. Instead of looking in disdain at the person who just shoved me into a little grandma, I’ll try to look at the grandma and laugh and move on towards my final destination.
My daily commute is coming to an end. I finish teaching on June 10th. Will I miss the ride? It’s a fair question, but I can’t answer that right now. Actually I can: I won’t miss it because I’ll still have the occasional ride downtown; I just won’t have it every day, which is okay by me.
This past year, commuting from West 225th has been a study, a reflection on humanity. Like I wrote previously, I’ve ridden the subway more in the past year than I have in my entire life. One day it’s a hardship for me, the next it’s as easy as swimming with the current of a river. I have a choice of how to experience my life. The more I practice living in the present moment and experiencing it is for what it is, the more I’m fascinated. I need to retain that fascination, the wonder, the awe of it all.
1 comments:
I have been commuting with my nine year old (a former student of Tim's) on the subway every day this year, and it is indeed a wonder. I often think about all he is taking in, and what impact it will have on what will become his worldview. Yesterday, side by side on a bench awaiting the downtown 2 train at 96th Street, was a man in a maroon Buddhist robe, a woman wearing a huge balloon hat and what appeared to be a costume of the "Strawberry Shortcake" character, and a very corporate looking gentleman reading the Wall Street Journal. Nobody paid any attention to anyone else, which was, to me, the beauty of the scene and what is astonishing about New York City.
Below is a quote about NYC which I have on the wall of my kitchen. It was written by Spaulding Gray just after 9/11:
For 34 years I lived with you and came to love you. I came to you because I loved theatre and found theatre everywhere I looked. I fled New England and came to Manhattan, that island off the coast of America, where human nature was king and everyone exuded character and had big attitude. You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd.
When we were kids, my mom hung a poster over our bed. It had a picture of a bumblebee, and under the picture the caption read:
"According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly because its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wingspan. But ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway."
That is still New York City to me.
Lisa D.
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