Observation #2 First Steps

I must push myself out onto the streets to find what I will learn to love here, to map the outline of my new city beyond the superficial impressions. To see it as it really is.

Photograph taken at the Skyscraper Museum

This week I went to the Skyscraper Museum. Part of the permanent exhibition is given over to images of the construction of the Twin Towers. An original architectural model sits before a monochrome photograph showing their ethereal ascension over Battery Park in the 1970s. Despite the cityscape changing so rapidly and new buildings seeming to grow like supercharged saplings, in my mind New York is both what it is now and what it was before. The One World Trade Center dominates the skyline where those iconic symbols of modern life once stood. But somehow one still sees the spectre of the towers haunting the horizon. It’s true that wherever we go, we bring what we already know, the expectation and experience of a place, along for the right. In his literal giant of a novella The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead writes:

“You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it.”

Unsurprisingly, the city has a different rhythm altogether from what is familiar to me. I know it would be easy to park behind my writing desk looking out at the unruly chaos of the rooftops, as if that will inspire me or imbue me with some feeling of belonging here. But I must push myself out onto the streets to find what I will learn to love, to map the outline of my new city beyond its superficial impressions. To see it as it really is.

As I go, I ask myself the questions about where I feel at home and what that even means, which experiences will sustain me, how I will connect with the city? It is all so new and vast to grasp in its detail. And often during this precarious spring weather the dour drizzle can almost fully shroud the buildings, leaving mere generalities of scale. On other days, the light is so sharp, my focus is drawn to the bricks holding these blocks and buildings together.

I am relishing each new discovery in New York and enjoying the thrill of its exploration. It has taken me a few weeks and many tests of memory to work out which side of the street the subway heads Downtown towards Brooklyn or Uptown to the Bronx. I start to map out the names of the districts close by; Chelsea, NoMad, West Village, Gramercy, Meatpacking and Flatiron. They each draw out their boundaries as the map of Manhattan unfurls before me. And familiarity comes with just walking, and walking more, block after block. By navigating the grid, the avenues and their connecting counterparts, the city gradually begins to make sense. Looking up, I try to note the landmark buildings above me. At street level, it’s so easy to miss them.

Home is perhaps the ease of the known, the simplicity of being led by the nose. Here I am still taking my first steps. I need to be decisive though, have my feet firmly planted in the direction I intend to follow and calibrate those bearings from the outset. When I leave my apartment building, it is to spill immediately out into the thrust of the city, where there is no time for hesitancy or doubt. Manhattan is like a giant ice rink and teetering unsteadily around the edges will not do. I must dive into the whirl of skaters, energised by their movement. Daring to do this can feel uncomfortable at times, but it brings good results and I build confidence from sheer determination.

It would be a deadened heart too that does not bear the imprint of each lost mind and broken life barely surviving on the streets and in the subways: people with perhaps more right than me to own some refuge here. Urban survival has taught us to step over the misfortune of others. We tell ourselves that we do what we can, we reward a street musician but recoil from the filth of the destitute and insane for whom only the open streets offer succour. The doors and stairways remain closed to them. Once the city spits you out, there you remain. How easy it is to become an outsider even on your own home turf.

I have been rereading the writer Alastair Reid. A Scot, like me he was raised in the rural lowlands and escaping as soon as he could, he spent most of his life getting away from his homeland. Reid lived for many years in the West Village and was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. His poetry and essays often focused on ideas about place and belonging; both the uniquely objective perspective and entirely subjective sense of ‘otherness’ one has as an outsider. In ‘Notes on Being a Foreigner’ he explains:

“The foreigner’s involvement is with where he is. He has no other home. There is no secret landscape claiming him, no roots tugging at him. He is, if you like, properly lost, and so in a position to rediscover the world, from the outside in.”

That is how it is for the traveller, for me here now. I find myself regaining a childish sense of wonder at so many absorbing new signs and signifiers. You lose that when you have lived in a place for a long time. To understand the nature of this city, I have not only to explore its regions, but to seek a rediscovery of myself in this setting, to see myself in a new context. Though I bring with me some residue of the places I have been and the experiences that have shaped me, nowhere else claims me. This is both liberating and daunting, which is surely how life should feel at its best.

‘The strangeness of a place propels one into life’, writes Reid. As the days pass and the vistas across the city expand, my own inner landscape is coming into being, its contours measured out by a growing sense that home is not a place but the kernel of an idea that I carry with me.