Observation #4 Looking at Babel

Living here is a Faustian contract. Life in the great cities of civilization must have always been so. But as much as there is poverty and hardship, there is also a powerful energy full of optimism.

(the illustration is generated by AI)

I realise that as a newcomer to New York my observations are not original. Nowhere has been more written about and commented on. But like all clichés, there is truth in the well-worn. Moving here has been a whirlwind. This really is the city that never sleeps. In the early hours of the morning the sirens blare down Twenty-Third Street and I lie awake pondering the life which has brought me here in my sixtieth year.

In these wet but warmer weeks of Spring, the bitter cold has retreated and the night shift of drunks stalk across the city blocks, bawling their grievances to the empty streets; their cries attempting but never quite reaching the rooftops. Later, as commuters begin their daily routines, they step over the rough sleepers, the insane and the addicts who sprawl in doorways in a mess of belongings, barely more than trash, washed up on the sidewalks.

Witnessing the sharp and ruthless contrast between the fortunes of the people who live here has been perhaps one of the hardest experiences to overcome. More than anywhere I have lived before, there is little mercy here, no time to give way to others; ambition is the touchstone, everyone needs to reach their goal. This is a city where you mark out your particular groove on a turntable of urban survival. If a person falters, as so many do, they will be left behind. The sheer number of homeless and destitute is overwhelming, so I focus on where there is something I can do. I talk most days to Ted (Ted Believes in Miracles) and sometimes buy food for a veteran who holds open the door at the grocery store. I pay for chocolate I don’t want from the young children of an undocumented Venezuelan in the subway. These are all people with stories and lives that should be better. They too aspire to better things.

Living here is a Faustian contract. Life in the great cities of the world has always been so. But as much as there is poverty and hardship, there is also a powerful energy full of optimism. And I am quickly learning to navigate with my own sense of purpose, working hard to mine the riches this city has to offer. My search is to understand how it all works, to find inspiration, and to nourish a sense of belonging. Which is not so difficult since I am living in Chelsea, historically the home of so much creativity and innovation. Easy access to the astonishing range of world class exhibitions has been a practical way to get to know both my neighbourhood and Manhattan more widely; from the reserved echelons of the Upper East Side to the shimmering chic of Soho.

Last month I went uptown to see an exhibition of the German photographer Andreas Gursky. A small number of large scale framed photographs were on display, each in dialogue with parts or the whole of a familiar old master painting which was papered onto the walls next to them; works by Bruegel, Turner and Caspar David Freidrich. The centerpiece called Eisläufer is a contemporary photograph of crowds on the frozen Rhine in Dusseldorf. On the opposite wall is a huge reproduction of Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap. Quite quickly, switching my gaze between the paired images they seemed to merge, working together to create a kind of uber painting. Each of the pairings carry a different focus of intention but as we view them, the new overlay and connect with the old. In this striking visual echo chamber, Gursky seems to be challenging the viewer by showing how the works we know of great painters, though buried in the subconscious remain etched on the mind’s eye like palimpsests. In one case, he takes an iconic natural scene and asks how memory and art coincide under the shifting landscape of climate change. The gallery experiment worked masterfully.

Looking out from where I write in my own privileged apartment block while making these observations about life in Manhattan, a different Bruegel painting has occupied my thoughts. As a child I was captivated by the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel. A king commands a great construction to be built, reaching up to the heavens, where all peoples will live, speaking the same language and where human endeavour will be eternally celebrated. God is displeased by this, recognising that such an achievement will give his creation too much power. So he confuses their language and scatters the people across all corners of the earth, leaving the Tower of Babel to remain as a derelict symbol of man’s hubris.

While this may seem like too far of a stretch to describe life in New York City today, there are certainly some obvious parallels. My windows open up to the rooftops and buildings of Nomad, the area just above Madison Square Park. Over to the east, 262 Fifth Avenue, an 860-foot pencil-thin skyscraper, is being constructed. It will be an apartment building for the extravagantly rich with their super yachts and limitless wealth. Its presence has caused a considerable furore amongst local residents, not least because from a certain perspective looking north from Broadway at Union Square, this still incomplete building partially obscures that great symbol of New York’s god-like grandiosity, the brooding mass of the Empire State Building, built almost a century ago.

And thus the life of the city goes: political compromise, conflicts of interest, the power of money, ambition for betterment, the inexorable desire to literally reach for the sky. There are countless layers of existence here, from the lowlife tenements of the Lower East Side to the lofty mansion blocks overlooking Central Park. None of this is new, but like the vaunting ambition of Babel, one cannot help wondering where it might all end.