NEW YORK CITY: A NEW HEAVEN?

by

Sarah A. Odishoo

My brother and I disagreed about what cities we thought conducive to living well in the United States. He loved New York City, and I adored Chicago. But we both agreed that San Francisco is a toy city. He says San Francisco is a movie set, a façade, an idea of a city rather than a real on-the-dice city like New York—a city you can bet on, one that has substance, the currency of life. New York, he said, was unique, one that had everything a soul could desire.

What I started to realize is that the city one lives in is the citizen’s windowless view of a landscape that mirrors everything in that individual that takes time, given the geography, to develop. It is the territory where the like-minded gather to observe the darkening and lightening, the dashing back and forth betwixt and between the natural world and human artifice, and how much the gathering can tolerate that darkening and lightening landscape of the soul. That’s why people move. The place stops reflecting them in the way they want to see themselves.

My brother lived in New York City for most of his adult life. He ran away from Chicago. It had started closing in on him. He and his girlfriend packed the car and headed east. It was the seventies. New York, he said, was the center of the nation, misplaced on the East Coast. 

I had visited New York with my husband in the sixties and vowed never to return. My husband was an artist, and he wanted to see the art galleries. So we came with little in our pockets, and the city of cash and compromise was haunted by poverty and the impoverished according to our budget. We stayed in the YWCA where the drug addicts, the needy, and “the wretched and the tempest-tossed” stayed. We heard them all night long in the hallways and through the walls. In the daytime the streets were glutted with trash bags and the sidewalks with the disenfranchised, begging, sitting on the curbs, wandering up and down crowded streets, watching with glazed, preoccupied eyes. We ate at storefront diners in SoHo, bought hot dogs at the street carts in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and after we couldn’t see any more art, when the streetlamps lit, we took a bus to the Y and slept an obsessed sleep.

When my brother asked us to visit, I said, “No, thanks, I hate New York City.”

He said, “No, no, I’ll show you some of the most beautiful…no, stunning…parts of the city. You’ll love it, I promise.”

So we went again.

He was right. He had fallen in love with the energy of the city, its intellect, its moods, and its beauty. He found its consciousness. It was everything he didn’t know, and he wanted to track whatever vibration he felt while his attention was strong and could take it in. Attention is the task we all share, and to keep attention strong means to follow, track, trail, chase down, stalk, pursue, hunt down the vibration—be mindful so its meaning comes into focus. What he probably didn’t know consciously was that mystery he was tracking was him.

He took us to the Brooklyn Bridge, and we walked across and back and dined at one of the oldest restaurants in New York, the River Café, under the trestles that loomed outside the small windowpanes, reminding me of the industrial structure of the city. Sitting at the tiny table facing the small pane of a window, I could see us wedged in the fulcrum of the bridge’s ironworks, as well as see the world’s arc in the East River’s flow, seeing the two connected somehow. Then we walked to his tiny one-bedroom apartment on Eighty-eighth Street, across from the mayor’s Gracie Mansion on East End Avenue. 

We went to the Strand Bookstore, the writers’ hangout. We walked everywhere as we tramped from the east side of Central Park to the west side, stopping at Tavern on the Green and ordering wine as we sat at the café tables, and he told us about Balto, the snarling statue of the dog safeguarding Central Park. 

We set off for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, whose dome rose out of the horizon long before we reached it. Inside we were transported to Europe and the holy of holies. Within the massive doors the aisles led straight through the darkened here and now, lightened by the dome’s stained glass windows, and the stories imaged in the parallel universes of a sainted time lined our journey to an altar that was circled by what seemed endless chapels in praise of the mystery the city couldn’t contain, and neither could the church, but its structure pointed up and up, just as the city did. The confluence of odd combinations struck me—the city’s glint of muscular ambition and impoverished anybodies, and the medieval mysticism of the church with its boxer’s stance reminding passersby of the city’s internal rhythms.

Then on to Columbia University and its greening campus and academic dark walls. Then to Zabar’s, the West Side’s answer to hungry rich, with its ripened fruit, exotic sauces, fractious butchers, and entranced customers—the glut of gluttony overcome with sweet thoughts.

In SoHo, after we saw enough galleries, my brother did the unthinkable. He asked if we wanted to stop and eat lunch at the Prince Street Bar. The last time we came to New York, my husband’s sense of budget and priorities meant we could neither eat nor drink in a place for which he perceived we had no currency—both materially and socially. We did not dine. We ate at noon and at 7:00 p.m. after the galleries closed. My brother said he was going in. My husband said no; he was going to look at more art. Then he stared at me. I looked at him, then at my brother, and I said, “I’m going with my brother.” 

That choice was a kind of epiphany for me. I somehow did not know that I could choose outside of my relationship with him. As my husband doggedly went on to more art galleries, my brother and I ate and drank and laughed and played as we had as children in the hour he was gone. 

In a gleam of inspiration, my world changed as the city offered itself to me. I leaped ahead of myself and justified the impossible: I managed to stand outside the messy reality of my past—my preexistent conscience—and see a new order of reality: A New York Moment.

My brother’s New York unspooled as I kept leaping until my brother’s enchanted eyes drove an industrial steel bridge into my glassed eyes, the panes unclouding.

What my brother showed me about the nature of New York City was the paradox of freedom—a freedom to choose among choices, a freedom to be audacious and address my own limitations, an energy of bustle and hustle that relies on a kind of street intellect to get to the spiritual, and a principle of discovery—the unknown, the mystery, even if you never get to the meaning, is exciting, edgy, and incautious. 

What he finally showed me was that some of the charm of New York comes from its scope and its capacity to hold the opposites in tension—its surprising, conflicted, bloated, self-inflicted, mouth-foaming license to do and be anything, alongside its guilt-inflicting moral judgments of itself and others—the leftover platters of the American pilgrims, hedonistically turned on by both food and fasting, appetite and abstinence, orgasmic delay understood as God’s delight.

When I looked down from the plane, the city’s island gave a new context—one that floated outside the mainland. It revealed a deeper structure—a city packed tight with contradictions turning in on themselves, abruptly awakening a sleeping spell-cast soul to imagination and craft, the necessary acts of transport and transcendence.

What I realized is New York is a spiritual playground. The stakes are high and the outcome? Freedom itself. Freedom to see outside accepted contexts. The caveat: You choose—Heaven or Hell?

photo: Harry Rajchgot