M5 (a paper for Red Burn's class: Applications of Interactive Technologies)
The most beautiful women I’d ever seen just walked onto the M5 heading uptown.
'I used to be pretty, so thin you could count the ribs, all the way up my back.' We exchanged glances. 'I think there's something about me that makes me forgettable.' I whispered softly, sullen and indifferent ‘We're born alone and we die alone. Maybe you just remind people that.'
He shakes his head.
I could tell him about the routine of life, how I glide a few inches above it. I could tell him about the Panama coast, how it turns orange at the end of the summer or how the skies turn red in the middle of the Tibetan mountains when no one else is looking but me. I could tell him about how I am never in any of my dreams.
[we are waiting, stillness in a standstill of traffic.]
'If time is immeasurable, then how do you know when you're finished?' He wanted to ask.
I sat next to him, a newly reborn New Yorker. ‘We don’t listen you know?’
[Sometimes when I ride the F train, I put my headphones on, without any music, just to see if someone will stop me just to talk. . . They never do.]
I took out my camera in an attempt to end the dialogue.
We are all hypocrites.
[The bus continues uptown,]
No one smiles in the city. Expressionless walking. . . forward, always walking forward, dead perhaps.
[Its warm today, and all I can smell is diesel in here.]
‘What am I doing here? In a city of over eight million people, what’s one less person? I am not so egocentric to believe that my presence makes any difference to anyone else here but me.’
[Now in the high 100s, Harlem. Homeless, More dead walking but the city shifts from white to black.]
We are all equal, but are we?
I find that ‘New York City Black’ has a whole new meaning in the 100s.
Why was I born into an upper class family, with parents who love each other, and love me? With enough money I never had to worry about starving or how to feed my siblings when I was 13 and parentless. My parents never hit me; they never called me stupid or dumb, (even when I was).
Why was my childhood relatively easy and for some it appears to be nothing but a struggle followed by struggle?
New York is a lot like what I’ve seen in India, there is an extreme excess of wealth and extreme excesses of poverty living together, side by side, on same street sometimes, but with very different addresses:
12 Central Park West or just Central Park.
We have lost our middle class, now you are one or the other.
Life is not fair. No one is born equally in the land of equality.
[We continue uptown, farther then I have ever been]
Born into classes and our social status is born at conception. We are all granted choice in the city, some more then other, simple because, because that’s just how life is- not fair. As far as I can tell, Money means choice, money means you are worth someone else’s acknowledgement.
Nowhere is this more apparent then in New York. Most of the minorities and immigrants live way up town or way down town and just like ants, the queen’s live in the middle, in a bubble of haute couture while the worker ants scurry along on the outskirts.
I live on the lower east side, right next to the projects- my rich relatives refuse to visit me,
[I have to go uptown to them].
Consumerism defines wealth:
Labels determine your worth: Gucci, Prada, Tiffany’s.
Money = love; Love = money.
[The bus continues, there is more traffic. The paradox of artist to millionaire is always apparent by the brand of the purse, the sunglasses, and the shoes. Most artist, well, we have no brand, only ourselves to define our self.]
My mother has been a financial consult since I was born; her clients consist mostly of multi-millionaires and trust fund recipients. If there is one thing that has stuck with me since childhood it was hearing here say ‘the most miserable people I’ve met in my life were always the richest’
The homeless tell me money buys happiness. Money buys a life. Money above all else buys acknowledgement from others you exist.
[Note: without money, people walk by you with your cardboard sign, you are invisible.]
My psychologist tells me I am detached from my emotions, that I need to ‘live in the present moment’ and I do anything but that in this city. One day at that time, one hour at a time, that’s as far as I can handle.
No one smiles and when I decide to stand,
[Its getting crowded now, the rush hour is upon us.]
I bump into someone, “I’m sorry, excuse me” I said.
He looks at me; people loose their manners in a soup of eight million … or a bus of fifty.
New York is not natural, People are not meant to exist in places, without nature but nature always wins. New Orleans. Thailand. And I wonder if maybe we are next?
Homeless sit on the sidewalk still even in the ‘nice’ areas of town; they are invisible too- just like me. If they disappear, people would notice- even if they don’t see them now, they will see their absence later. . . (but I am already absent).
[the bus starts to go back down now, in an hour or so maybe I’ll be home.]
Nowhere is numbness more apparent then in New York City. No one smiles here, no one says hello or holds the door open, we are overcrowded and under-loved. New York City, as far as I can tell, is a paradox. There is the part of this place where there are artist and musicians and bohemia Taoist searching for truth with or without financial means, who in the deepest part of their soul believes they can change or create beauty among these concrete canyons and the suits, who’s sole purpose is acquisition, money and more money because they know better then to believe they can change the world.
Here is the last stop. . . I am almost back to my windowless room…
[I have this home, but I am still homesick.]