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My Glass is Already Broken © Jean Stimmell 2012
“In swearing by what he saw, the author stands behind the notion that bearing witness, if only for a second, can alter one’s life...[i]”
We traveled to the city in deep sadness
to attend a Friday evening memorial service for a dear friend. While I expected it to be a moving experience,
I never expected to have an epiphany – but I did.
No doubt I was predisposed to have such
an out-of-body experience grieving Josh’s death and reminiscing with his many
friends at the memorial about how remarkable he was. Looking back on it, the events that lead up to
my revelation fit the definition of what Carl Jung called synchronicity which,
according to him, occurs when separate events reveal an underlying pattern –
beyond the realm of time and western scientific understanding.[ii]
My tale starts next morning after the
memorial, waking up at our bed and breakfast to a splendid, warm and sunny, spring
day. Reading the NYT’s Book Review with breakfast, I happened across an essay, Convergences,
by Douglas Coupland about recent cultural shifts he attributed to the rise of
the Internet.
Coupland
cited fashion as one example of such a change. It used to be that, as a society,
most of us followed the fashion trend of the day, whether it was crew cuts or
perms. But now, every style is in fashion at once – and continues to stay in
fashion – from bald to hirsute, bare feet to high heels, formal to the absurd.
Another example of this new reality is
what he considers a new genre of literature: novels that “cross history without
being historical” and “span geography without changing psychic place;” novels
that collapse time and space. According to Coupland, these convergences point
to a major societal shift: “we appear to have entered an aura-free universe
in which all eras coexist at once – a state of possibly permanent atemporality
given to us courtesy of the Internet. [iii]
While I found Coupland’s observations
about the nature of our new postmodern world interesting, I felt assured that I
had fully digested his thoughts with my bagel and was done with the topic of “atemporality”
for the day.
After breakfast, we set out on a walking
tour to explore the Chelsea District of Manhattan before returning home. We
soon found ourselves engulfed in a sea of art galleries. Out of 200 possible
choices, we randomly entered the Gallerie Richard, featuring the Spanish
artist, Dionisio Gonzalez, who constructs spatially and socially complex worlds
that, according to the gallery, “challenge the histories of photography and
architecture.”[iv]
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Using Photoshop, Gonzalez interweaves
imaginary elements of modern and contemporary architecture into straight photographs
of Brazilian shantytowns. The effect is both disturbing and disorienting.
I felt some unseen presence permeating my
brain. What was it that felt so strange? Then it came to me: atemporality was rearing its head once again, a
fact that was confirmed when I read the exhibit flyer: “These photographs
are heavily processed accumulations of time and information, condensed
seamlessly into a single moment.”
What are the chances, I mused, of going
directly from reading Coupland’s essay on atemporality to becoming lost in Gonzalez’s
shantytown collapse of time.
I found myself falling under Gonzalez’s
sway as if hypnotized, moving from image to image, studying each intently as if
in a trance. As I did, the hard crust of my mind – and all I thought I knew –
softened like the earth after a gentle rain.
Feeling dizzy and needing a break, I headed up the nearby stairs to get
some fresh air on the High Line.
The High Line, for those that don’t know,
was originally built as an elevated railroad spur line to move freight traffic
30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s
largest industrial district. After the
spur line was abandoned by the railroad, it was redesigned and planted as an
aerial greenway, running from the Meatpacking district up through the
neighborhood of Chelsea to the West Side Yard.
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| J. Stimmell: photos from the High Line 3/10/12 |
Stepping
out onto the High Line, I had a brief moment of respite as I mingled with the
ornamental grasses and flowering shrubs; that is, until I gazed out over the
city and was stunned by what I saw: rather than relief for my overstressed
brain, I discovered an uncanny recapitulation in brick and mortar of what
Dionisio Gonzalez had created on his computer screen:
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| J. Stimmell: photos from the High Line 3/10/12 |
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J. Stimmell: photos from the High Line 3/10/12
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| J. Stimmell: photos from the High Line 3/10/12 |
Spotting
the old landmark diner at 10th Avenue and 22nd Street, I sought refuge inside,
hoping to step back into a more traditional time and place. Instead, I found to my dismay that it had
been transformed into a crowded, hip food joint, vibrating with myriad
conversations and blaring music so loud, I lost all ability to concentrate, even
to remember my name.
Something
snapped. This final assault on my normal, everyday reality was too much!
Time slowed
down. The frenzied clatter of the diner
faded away. Suddenly I was gone.
Like a
thunderclap under a clear blue sky, I was jolted beyond all time and space by a
sudden Satori-like moment. Mesmerized by
a kaleidoscope of reflections competing with reality through the diner window,
I became transfixed by an old man who was clearly me, very feeble but serene,
looking out of place in the fast-paced bustle, trusting his caregiver to guide
him expertly into a beat-up Honda, shoehorned between an Audi Quattro and a
Cadillac Escalade. Then the caregiver got in and slowly drove away until I
disappeared up 22nd street.
I shook my
head. What was happening to me? I knew that, according to Jung, the universal
archetypes we all carry in our collective unconscious have no sense of
time. Could it be that being subjected
to this succession of atemporal earthquakes had triggered a tsunami wave that
demolished my cozy linear world of modernity, freeing my unconscious mind to
surge into my waking life, melding past and future as one in the present
moment?
While some
might call my experience a psychotic break, I choose to imagine Josh was
communicating with me from another dimension, revealing his secret on how to
live life to the fullest.
In this
brief moment of enlightenment, Josh was teaching me the true meaning of
impermanence, the same lesson taught in the classic Buddhist teaching story
where the master says:
“‘Someone gave me this glass, and I really
like it. It holds my water admirably and it glistens in the sunlight. I touch
it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may
knock it from the table. I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it incredibly.’”[vi]
So it is
with me. Thanks to Josh I now see clearly that my glass is already broken, so I
am going to enjoy it incredibly.
XXX (1283 words)
[i]Jennifer
Wallace, (The Mastery of Non-Mastery,
Los Angeles Review of Books, 3/30/12) comments on anthropologist, Michael
Taussig’s methodology in his new book, I
Swear I saw this.
[ii] The concept of
synchronicity was a big deal to Jung, providing persuasive evidence to support
his belief that all of us share a common, collective unconscious that
underlies our entire human history.
Synchronicity, Carl Jung (1952)
[v] To see
my photographs of this unusual melting pot of architecture, go to: https://picasaweb.google.com/118213167342657062327/NYCHighLIne31012?feat=email#slideshow/5719178738598235874
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