Metropolis
October 10, 2007I constantly move through crowds. People in motion; people everywhere, somewhere, elsewhere, going and going: on and on it sometimes seems without breath. As though all this were taking place under glass: under a microscope. Or underwater. In the late afternoon in the West to East the sun casts its light the whole length of Wigmore Street so that all is sidelit, a vast lengthening room to infinity that finally diminishes into the tungsten darkness with sunset. Does everyone breath the same air? It is difficult to believe that they are not phantoms populating a ball around which revolves a diorama of shopfronts, screening the real air beyond ticketed by an invisible collector of tickets; and in this way stretching to the imaginary. A baby carried frontwards in a pouch, eyes like two small headlamps, so intense is the look that it is inhuman, it perches wondering at what is before it, expressionless, socially uninflected; utterly contained by the capsule of its mood. And golden blue; its mundane cocoon not in the same place, carried by the dad who is a fig of its ambidextrous weight, moving just as I am, in old motion through the smoke. I finagle a route, stepping at right angles to the quick heels oncoming. Someone is puffing out a cloud in glass and so using my head I punch through it shutting my eyes. One walks in straight lines, diagonals, vertical. There are few things that are actually what one wants them to be. Iconic of themselves; things of which one can say: Here is a street; there is a corner. Instead they seem poor approximations. Comfortless. The sun is not visible, everywhere is white grey. Dim. Here is an approximate pavement; there is an approximate letter box. Past the approximate shop front. Past the approximate plate glass. Past the car parked on the kerb. Someone on their hands-free, again a fag waving, eyes down, feet shuffling, head tocking, engaged in not here. On the underground, the brown tiles are a satisfactory underground stuff; past the barricades. You look out of the tube carriage and only people from the trunk down are present. Headless, they collect, someone has her hands together, as in church, her left hand clasps the fingers of her right, two are holding each other’s hands, some arms are folded, others reach out as though to speed their approach to the door, all these shifting figures jostling, gathering, to suddenly appear complete through a door, the faces miraculously restored, trunks rejoined with their owners, an assemblage of bags stowed or otherwise situated as each expertly decides where to stand. At the stations we run past and halt before portions of adverts slide in front of me like disassembled faces, each feature solitary, shattered by movement. The fragment of a giant black O and the fullness of an S visible in hot orange between two coats. Then in one window I see a crowd scene. The faces are blurred but one can guess at the expressions. Each in some way ecstatic. And yet no-one is glancing in exactly the same direction. They are perhaps all moving towards something. What it is is hidden - in perspective terms located somewhere behind the seat where I sit gazing at the flat surface beyond the glass. We move off. The next station is that side the platform. As I get off the train, I slowly shuffle, patient, easing forwards blankly, with the crowd, everything is moving slowly; the muscles in the backs of my legs form my thoughts; the ease with which they move; like perpetual motion. I move slowly like this and it takes so little effort that I am excited by the idea that this energy is boundless. As before a race. You crouch at the starting blocks with a sick feeling in your stomach but all the time feeling the effortlessness of it, too, the sense of the race just about to begin, so that imagination flys ahead down the track to the end and victory: it will be effortless; except you are aware that everyone else has the same idea; so that confidence and imagination dissolve into anxiety. So that as I slide frictionless along the flat to the escalators, in a single sustained moment, I am in stasis, an anxiety, a waiting and expectation that now that I reach this point reduces back to a few newspapers and books and the ‘trained’ neutral faces that being everyone else are not me; they carry all the day’s news on their smooth surfaces. The women standing in various poses of desire, they like to glance out the side of their eyes for someone, someone who is nice, someone whom they will never probably connect with, everyone impatient with their own lives, their own purposes, their own conceits, imaginary, but with whom they could have a cup of coffee and a chat with in the Pret but in the end preferably female in sex. We collect at the bottom of the next flight of escalators. A thick spool of people, we are unwound upwards into our worlds of upward motion. Threaded shadows airborn and free of the steep track of the earth from which we emerge! We ascend the castle walls, staff the ramparts as soldiers of fortune, but weaponless, vanishing into a portcullis of bright adverts. Where the air beckons, where above ground buildings stand, beyond the silence that slips invisible under the crackle of slow shoes on glazed tiles shuffling. The twinkling screens of the ads lining every vertical surface in gently sharp pleas; in the overt act of brainwashing us friendless and static, dispiriting: but they have an exemplary forthrightness, a clarity that fills out in every dimension as we look at these idylls of perfection for the imperfect. Our conforming feet marching on; on we go past; a foghorn voice telling us all to keep to the right and affirming, for all, that the lines are running a good or a not good service in the service of this good.
