Three weeks ago I sent off a batch of portraits to new friends in Mumbai. I've been spending time in the darkroom again and I think I have about half my Run to the Noise project's 40 or so portraits finished and I've been posting them in the mail as I go. Someday I'll try to show them, but the real point of the project was to meet Mumbaikars after last year's terrorist attacks and, through photography, get to know them a bit.
This was originally written after Sep 25, 2001. I intended to post it eight years to the day later but was delayed.
It is 11pm on Tuesday the 25th and the wind is coming out of the South. I never noticed the wind direction in New York City before. It never seemed to matter.
It has been two weeks and I’m walking down Broadway, below 14th street, while the damp mass of befouled air passes around and seemingly through me.
Ground Zero is the pit from which hell exhausts. It’s the wellspring of this river of burning plastic stench and reeking battlefield decay; and West Broadway, Church, and Sixth Avenue are its sibling tributaries. Together they are channels of funk with dimensions made visible by smoke. They move purposefully and inexorably north, bounded above and to each side by the cool clean air standing aside to let them pass.
As I move upstream, the odiferous river intensifies at Canal Street and I am, with the combined effects of the stink and the knowledge of its source, beginning to consider the possibility of gagging. Beyond my physical reaction, I find the smell shameful. Somebody should open a window. Elder Zosima on that warm day at least received that courtesy. It is natural that the remaining physical presence of the innocent should decay, but we shouldn’t be compelled to remember them this way.
My mind wanders. I’ve always loved walking in this city, especially in the winter. The gift-shopping bustle, the beautiful women, the not-beautiful women who try hard, smoking street carts, and all those buildings - architectural monuments to the before with their fossilized intelligence and labor. Red marble columns supporting stone lace, or a mansard roof of epic proportions from an epic time; I am transported. Swimming the crowded sidewalk I’m a bit player in Helprin’s Winter’s Tale.
Of course this city isn’t a museum and around the next corner the now thrusts itself back into my conscience, infinitely tall and sheathed in glass. Those modern towers hold down the southern reaches of the city, maintaining balance with the Art Deco towers to the north. Or they did.
During those walks, rubbing shoulders with the empty I was exhilarated. The beautiful automatons, hollowed out stock traders, vacuous French-cuffed investment bankers, bums with soul but little else hurried through canyons that weren’t then rivers of stench and I felt alive against them as backdrop. Their gaze was invariably straight ahead; even those in the most humbling circumstances wore the haughty invisible smile of the aristocracy, the aristocrats of Gotham.
Back then when the air and wind was invisible, Hell’s vent was capped, and the skyline had balance, New Yorkers conveyed the sense that “I may be nobody, but I am somewhere, I’m at the hub around which this world spins. It may not pay me homage, but it is facing my way when it bows.” Evita's dressing maid might have worn that same haughty gaze as she stood in the background on that balcony, when the crowds reached and cheered.
Today the skyline’s balance is gone, and, as I walk along Broadway the pleasure of being at the center is gone with it. It has been replaced by the realization, borne on the fetid wind, that not every face gazing this way is friendly, and that the angry ones are not powerless in the face of such grandeur and energy. And though New Yorkers continue to view the world through eyes glazed with characteristic disdain, it’s an affectation without justification. Maybe the French aristocracy viewed the world through similar eyes in those first weeks after the Bastille was crashed.
