Still Sundays

Today doesn’t need a date, 2012.

Trying to understand how I see New York City and how an artist sees what is and is not really there. 

A weekend ago I was saddened by my inability to successfully articulate to another what is it that I “saw” in New York City. It is like a fairytale that is true only if you believe it. I questioned whether the lens through which I have viewed New York City is tainted with unearned affection. Something I have just made up!

I know many people who live here because they have always lived here. There are also people who have no desire to visit other towns and cities. And frankly some people who are transplants as well as those who are originally from here are very ignorant about the rest of the country and the world. I am grateful that for whatever reasons my energy seldom attracts such people (somehow I only bump across exceptions) but it still happens and it feels like a siren in my reality.

Cities and towns are living, breathing entities to me. They have a spirit and a body in the form of topography. They upset and disappoint me like people. They surprise and welcome me like people too. Some cities despite the changes imposed on them never lose their spirit. I like towns as much as I like big cities. I find it amusing when people say, “Oh, I love that city/town but I could never live there! Ever!”

I can live in Prague, Paris, Durban, Jo’burg, Lahore, and a small village farm town where my parents live in California. I have lived in those cities. There are cities I have visited but I have not lived in that I could easily live in too. Rome comes to mind. And there are places I would love to visit and visit again but I can’t imagine living in them. And only Kansas City and Lawrence come to mind when I think of places I have lived but can’t imagine living permanently although both are beautiful and filled with diverse history, personal and geographical. But most places I desire to visit again and again happen to be those cities or towns where I could easily live too.

Yes, Vienna might be as good as Berlin to some, or Los Angeles and New York City different sides of same grand coin, or Kansas City and Chicago big enough with same offerings (and accurately so) as New York, New York.

My affinity towards a place has seldom been due to the city’s official resume. I have never sought a destination to ‘get away’ or for what it can offer me professionally but simply as a trampoline jump to get closer to some calling that I can barely hear. That being said, following this inexplicable desire to explore does end up offering me much for my writing and professional endeavors, but it is not always linear.

I do know that whenever I have visited a “new” place longer than a month that felt like “home” there is some ancient quickening within which preceded it. 

There is a peculiar smell in the soil of the earth in certain cities and towns to which I am persistently drawn. This particular scent is stronger than urine, trash, plants, people, and food. It smells like a residue of Time on land itself, an exhale from the crust all the way from the inner core, made from ancient stars and many civilizations. I can’t always pick it up but eventually it is there in the wind.

Then there are noises that only certain cities make or rather certain cities have the vocal chords to carry universal sounds: a car screech that reminds me of the scooter belonging to the man delivering milk in Lahore; the sound that makes me feel if I closed and opened my eyes I just might find myself in Paris; the lightening disco from the thunder in the sky that can only belong in Jo’burg; wheels rolling on cobble streets that form a setting for a Prague morning…

I live in New York City because I don’t know where else to live where I can hear the entire world. Sometimes I do desire to live in a town where I didn’t hear any other sound but just the earth. Most frustratingly I don’t know why I feel compelled to justify my love for New York City. So many people live here who love it and don’t know why and that suffices.

And then through some happenstance, as if all happenstance occurrences are a helping hand with a dictionary through the hole of Time, a friend of mine, an artist, sent me a very long letter updating me about her personal life. I have seen her work and have tremendous respect for her efforts to evolve and consider her work special and remarkable. However, I have never seen photographs of the original references from which she draws inspiration to create her paintings and drawings. She shared a photo of one such fashion model and attached was a drawing she had made. I was transfixed by the drawing. It looked nothing like the model and yet…

A painter of average talent would have drawn and painted the obvious that which is visible of any fashion model: the cleavage, the pouty mouth, the sensational hair, the curves if he or she was skillful at drawing. He or she would have offered us the mainstream version of so called beauty which is often simply decoration of and around sexual organs that may or may not arouse any sensations, even if just physical, given our society is abundantly saturated with such images.

But then another thought shot like an arrow in my thinking: what if she too, very much like me, had some lens that was bending reality! Instead of rejoicing in this fact I was a bit concerned for both of us! I have known many creative people whose perceptions about reality are sadly disturbed. They are not offering another way to look at something but they really can’t see the original for what it is.

I recalled the photos I had recently taken around 3^rd Avenue in the most dilapidated parts of South Bronx to offer what is still beautiful despite gut wrenching poverty and a hardness of people who are surrounded by it. Yes, there was a difference between not knowing what is and offering and knowing what is and yet offering another perspective. But I—and neither this friend (I know the way this friend ‘functions’)—had to place certain goggles to view things the way we did so as to ‘create’. It isn’t an escape to tap into some deep connecting with something bigger, it isn’t an attempt to portray something supernatural, it is what it is. And it isn’t.

I called my father and inquired about delusional disorder! To see something that is not there. He offered a short familiar reply, “Everyone knows an artist sees what everyone misses. That means it is there but everyone misses it.” I wanted more. I needed something tangible.

What Van Gogh offered us was more than a starry sky, a pair of shoes, a sunflower. Those are every day things but through his perception and what took place between the occipital cortex and the primary motor cortex we felt something otherworldly on this very earth.

How do you know Van Gogh wasn’t crazy? I joked.

Someone who is suffering from some perception disorder cannot consistently offer us a functional, believable alternative reality.

Visual is in the occipital cortex with conceptual pathways in the right parietal and temporal regions (the so called ‘right brain’) and the center for hand thumb coordination, the writing center, is in the left precentral gyrus (the Motor Strip). Look up homunculus.

I did.

My research inquiry was supposed to land me on discovering more about cortical homunculus which is the portion of the human brain directly responsible for the movement and exchange of sensory and motor information of the body.

Instead I landed on the definition where this is related to alchemy and homunculi can be found in centuries worth of literature.

I tell you this: Stillness is some magic wand for understanding.

My friend drew a woman who was not just a fashion model being paid to create an air of promiscuity to sell a certain product but a woman who deep down wished she too could be seen as more.

The New York City I see is very real albeit within the confines of certain neighborhoods that I prefer.

In my friend’s case, you can’t ever look at the original model for comparison to walk away with the sense of another world beauty which her drawing offers. And goodness knows we can use more real beauty!

In my case, you can’t just see New York City through my eyes unless you have been around awhile due to some inexplicable desire that brought you here in the first place. And the way I see New York City is not a reflection of some lack in other cities and towns.

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