Escaping Artist

Adam Gopnik says:

In New York, the space between what you want and what you’ve got creates a civic itchiness: I don’t know a content New Yorker.

Moving is difficult. It’s not so much the physical act of lugging your things from one place to another, albeit an exhausting experience beginning with packing the first box to unpacking the last, but the psychological aspect of being in transition that makes it so traumatizing. All semblance of a routine full of familiarity and comfort disappears as objects are moved, and rather than facing the fear we might feel at not knowing if a new home will become a home, even though they always do, it’s easier to cling to our belongings. I watched my Grandpa horde objects throughout my lifetime, loving his clutter so much that I associated his belongings with his person, and moving his furniture felt just like moving the displaced man himself. While watching his things disappear from a house I loved was like witnessing a small kind of death, seeing familiar, though just as displaced trinkets in my parents various apartments over the years act as a reassurance that they are still themselves. I think about the infamous wagon-wheel-coffee-table scene from When Harry Met Sally when I trash objects I myself fought so hard to keep in my possession. The things that surround us have a meaning we don’t really intend for them to have, and seem to be the most convenient tokens of displaced emotions. Moving this past weekend I realized, only when I was returning the van and all was safely moved, including my most precious yowling Boo, that everything was alright. It’s seeing our lives packed and placed in a homeless state that is so unsettling.

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The first week in nyc has been a strange one, a cross between grueling packing and unpacking, shifting and rearranging. The apartment has changed numerous times as I argued with D over where furniture should go, and what looked best where. It is odd how the same objects look and behave differently in a different sized/shaped place, objects that were deemed practical in Richmond have lost their purpose here. The # 4J made moving in a real pleasure—at least more of a task than that of moving out—even more enjoyable than a seven hour truck ride with a rather doped up, carsick, and miserable Boo. The apartment is now caught in a stage of livable confusion, it has come a long way since the box filled moment of my beginning, but it has a long way yet to go.

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Levon Helm said of coming to new york from Canada:

A dream come true. Fascinating, scary. Kind of hard to take the first time. You have to go there about two or three times before you can fall in love with it. But that happens eventually. New York, it was an adult portion, an adult dose. So, it took a couple of trips you know, to get into it. You just go in there the first time, and get your ass kicked, and take off. As soon as it heals up, you come back and you try it again. Eventually, you fall right in love with it.

After a few days of wandering the length of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs, I thought about his drawling little speech made thirty years ago. At a high point in the day, after food, water, and a brief rest I laughed at its relevance. New York is an uncompromising city. A friend told to me it doesn’t matter if you have 2,000 or 20,000, you will never find a place for the price you want. Discouragement ran high by the end of everyday, and when it did I felt disgusted by anyone who would fight hard enough to live in such a place. For such a small packed place, Manhattan’s diversity is incredible. The city is torn apart by unwanted gentrification and poverty. The rich, high above the streets in door-maned buildings, don’t seem to notice their own reflection in the eyes of those around them. Spoiled students run rampant through the streets of the village spouting nonsense into their iPhone. Because everything is so difficult and expensive, discontent in general is high. Flying out of jfk last night the flight was delayed 20 or 30 minutes, which caused such an outbreak of anger and violent verbal abuse I was startled—do these people never fly? I wondered, as on time flights have become a thing of the past. 

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Do objects belong to people or places? I think they belong to places until they are moved, in which case they are forced to become ‘personal’ objects. Maybe it has to do with the amount of time objects have belonged in a certain place. When M first moved away from our childhood home she took what she took, and the first time I saw her place I was disconcerted—the objects were familiar but the place was not. The longer she has been on her own the more new things she has gathered, and the old seem like watered down versions of the childhood memories connected with them. I have grown used to her moving about, and am no longer surprised by new locations or objects. Old furnishings don’t remind me of Castaic, they remind me of her. They are her objects and they belong wherever she lives, rather like servants. By contrast I like D’s apartment because everything is so new, so clean, and so removed. The objects are what they are for, and are not holders of something sentimental.

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Road culture, as I understand it, was a subversive kind of travel, an inexpensive and interesting way to meet people and get somewhere at the same time. The blue collar workers nomadically wandering the country tied poverty and hitchhiking together with the road. For Kerouac’s intellectuals it was a kind of uncensored way of seeing the country. There seems to be whole generations that took buses, trains, and cars before commercial airlines. An elderly lady without teeth I met recently told me about taking her children on a bus from New York to Washington D.C., and it seemed instantly odd—they took a bus? Hitchhiking is the predominant activity in On The Road, and the novel seems more about who was met on the way than about the act of traveling from the east coast to the west and back again. Jumping into (and probably out of) freight cars was a practiced art and an acceptable mode of transportation. Neal Cassady stole and dumped cars to make his way across the U.S. And yet I have no idea how true any of these myths, for lack of a better word, are. What I know of “the road” has been passed down from movies, books, songs, various elderly people, and even images. There is something very mythic in the idea of driving great distances. Perhaps because of where I am from, the road is wrapped up in the notion of the west, expansive landscapes of nothingness, winding through farms into cities.

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