lazarus archive

 “I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” 

― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 

Manhattan is a city that demands more, eluding depiction in the weekly travel column or observation through the lens of another’s camera. It must be lived. 

Morning broke, and the day prepared itself for existence. A pentimento of the hopeful, the resigned, and the confused bled to the foreground. All descending upon the city. There’s a certain affability in commuting, a commonality amongst the uncommon. Like a singular organism, unitary in function, varied in form. 

The land fell away behind me, sporadically being faced with my reflection set in stone against a tunnel’s umbra, diverting my eyes. The industry of America’s century laid waste as a through fair. Twisted metal and plywood rot surrounds the city in a suburbia of rust. 

Soot stricken causeways, dangling in darkness, funneling you though, heads down, hands firmly in pockets, marching forwards, following the tartan scarfed grey coat ahead. You can smell the city now, garbage and expensive perfume. It’s warm in the subterranean, there’s a fetid dryness that hangs. 

A clock bathed in gold luminance, subsolidus beneath the celestial mosaic, a key to the persistent moment shared and a premonition of the departing train tardiness missed. 

Volleys of electrons diffused through the city along kinetic rails. Arrays of diodes crackled, lavishing vectors of eclectic light. The City’s diaphragm scaled a melodic texture, witnessing itself in conversation, as a leitmotif traced the phonetic skyline. 

As your feet wander the streets, your eyes keep them company, like a blank verse, matching the city’s pentameter, sometimes joining in composition with another’s, as you return their momentary gaze. In every glance a mirror follows you. To look is to see oneself, not to look is to lose oneself. Out of fear of one’s own reflection, many are lost. 

Haberdasheries of chaos pepper the street corners, sewing textiles of cloth and turpitude, lining its bespoke innards. The hellacious racket of perpetual sirens and horns perfectly explains the city’s moniker of being the one that never sleeps, constantly jostled from its sedation whenever the minutest of deemed infractions is committed against any one of the thousands of drivers, who all, of their own estimations, possess the right of way, simultaneously. 

The Bridge, like a sort of Melvillian leviathan ascending from the depths of the East River, a pulmonary channel, distills the city’s oxygen from its aortic innards, a frenetic joy emulating from its beating heart. Sinews draped along its spine, interconnected lacings of limestone, granite, and steel enmeshing the city’s acutance. 

It has reached the heights, with great devotions. As its buildings scrape the skies of ambition above, below in the cavernous depths, decrepitude suffocates. 

Manhattan, promising all with one hand whilst taking all with the other, a city of dreams that never sleeps, a concrete jungle of mirrors and glass, an Ovidian labyrinth, a Vaudeville fair, a reflection of life’s oxymoron, all its wickedness and cruelty, its honesty and character, its charm and wit, leaving an unadulterated reflection, waiting for the next passer by to stop, look, and see beauty staring back at them. 

– H. J. Reeves