For example, there was no way those Zuni priests could have known that this fellow they were hanging by his thumbs was going to turn into some future savior of their tribe. Here was a drunken bragging window-peeper who told the authorities they could all go to hell and they couldn’t do anything to him. What were they supposed to do? What else could they do? They couldn’t let every damn degenerate in Zuni do as he pleased on the ground that he might, at some future date, save the tribe. They had to enforce the rules to hold the tribe together.
This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike? Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution.
It was almost a custom for people to come to New York, prophesy a doomsday of one sort or another and then wait for it to descend. They’re doing it now. But so far the doomsday has never come. New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there. Always changing. Always changing for the worse, it seems, but then right in the middle of the worse comes this new Dynamic thing that nobody ever heard of before and the worse is forgotten because this new Dynamic thing (which is also getting worse) has taken its place. What looks like hell always turns out to be something else.
When something new and Dynamic wants to come into the world it often looks like hell, but it can get born in New York. It can happen. It seems like it could happen anywhere but that’s not so. There has to be a certain kind of people who can look at it and say Hey, wait a second! That’s good! without having to look over their shoulder to see if somebody else is saying the same thing. That’s rare. This is one of the few places in the world where people don’t ask whether something’s been approved somewhere else.
That, Phædrus thought, is how the Metaphysics of Quality explains the incredible contrasts of the best and the worst one sees here. Both exist here in such terrific intensity because New York’s never been committed to any preservation of its static patterns. It’s always ready to change. Whether you are or not. That is what creates its horror and that is what creates its power. Its strength is its looseness. It’s the freedom to be so awful that gives it the freedom to be so good.
And so things keep happening here all the time that have this Dynamic sparkle that saves it all. In the midst of everything that’s wrong, it sparkles.
Like the kids. You don’t see them but they’re here, growing like mushrooms in secret places. Once Phædrus went to a museum on a weekday morning and there were hundreds of them pointing at all the minerals and dinosaurs and grabbing each other’s arms and holding hands, laughing and watching their teacher from time to time to see if everything was all right. Then suddenly they all vanished and it was as though they had never been there.
What you see in New York depends on your static patterns, What makes the city Dynamic is the way it always busts up whatever those patterns are. This morning, in the restaurant, this black, jet-black thug-like guy with a dirty wool cap pulled over his head comes in. Dirty blue satin sports jacket, Reebok shoes, also dirty. Orders a coffee which they have to serve him because it’s the law and then what does he do? Does he pull out a gun? No. Guess again. He pulls out a New York Times. He starts reading. It’s the book review section. He’s some kind of an intellectual. This is New York.
Wham! You’re always seeing something you’re not set up to see. It’s not been all bad, this rich-poor contrast. When you pass a lot of static laws to cut out the worst, the best goes with it, the sparkle disappears and what’s left is just a lot of suburban blandness. It’s been a psychological fuel that’s jet-propelled a lot of people into doing things they might have been too lazy to do otherwise. If everybody here had the same income, same clothes, same background, same opportunities, the whole city would go dead. It’s this physical proximity and incredible social gulf that gives this place such power. The city brings everyone up a notch. Or down ten notches. Or up a hundred notches. It sorts them out. It’s always been that way, millions of rich and poor all mixed together, skyscrapers and parks, diamond tiaras in the windows and drunken vomit on the street. It really shocks you and motivates you. The Devil is taking the hindmost right before your eyes! And just beyond the beggars go the frontmost, chauffeur-assisted, into their stretch limousines. Yeow!! Keep moving! Don’t slow down!
You see the people who smile at you and are ready to cheat you. Sometimes you miss the ones who scowl at you but secretly support you in every way they can.
When you talk to them they treat you with a ten-foot pole, but at the other end of it you sense this guarded affection. They’re just survivors whose rough edges are all worn smooth. They know how this celebrity of a city works.
It was getting darker now. And colder too. An edge of depression was approaching. Sooner or later it always appeared. The adrenalin was about normal now and still dropping. His walking had slowed down.
Phædrus reached what he recognized was the edge of Central Park. It was windier here. From the northwest. That’s what was bringing all this cold weather. The trees were dark now and billowing heavily in the wind. They still had their leaves, probably because it was nearer the ocean here and warmer than back at Troy and Kingston.
As he walked along he saw the park still kept its quiet, genteel look despite everything.
Of all the monuments the Victorians left to the city, this masterpiece of Olmstead and Vaux’s was the greatest, he thought. If money and power and vanity were all they were interested in, why was this place here?
He wondered what the Victorians would think about it now. The skyscrapers all around it would astonish them. They would like the way the trees have grown so big. He had an old Currier and Ives print of the park that showed the park almost barren of trees. Probably they would think the park was fine. Elsewhere in New York they would have other opinions.
They certainly put their stamp on this city. It’s still here, under all the Art Deco and Bauhaus. The Victorians were the ones who really built New York up, he thought, and it’s still their city deep down inside. When all their brownstones with their ornate pilasters and entablatures went out of style they were considered the apotheosis of ugliness, but now, as their buildings get fewer every year, they give a nice accent to all the twentieth-century slick.
Victorian rococo brickwork and stone work and iron work. God, how they loved ornateness. It went with their language. The final ultimate proof of their rise from the savages. They really thought they had done it in this city.
Everywhere you still see little signs of what they thought about this city. All the baroque brownstone friezes and gargoyles waiting for the wreckers' ball. The riveted iron bridges in Central Park. Their wonderful museums. Their lions in front of the public library. They were sculpting an image of themselves.
All this unnecessary ornateness they left behind: that wasn’t just vanity. There was a lot of love in it, too. They gussied this city up so much partly because they loved it. They paid for all these gargoyles and ornamental iron work the way a newly rich father might buy a fancy dress for a daughter he’s proud of.
It’s easy to condemn them as pretentious snobs, since they openly invited that opinion, and ignore the history that made them that way. They did everything they could to ignore that history themselves. What the Victorians never wanted you to know was that actually they were nothing more than a bunch of rich hicks. For the most part they were rural, backwater, religion-bound people who, after the Civil War had disrupted their lives, suddenly found themselves in the middle of an industrial age.
There was no precedent for it. They really had no guidelines for what to do with themselves. The possibilities of steel and steam and electricity and science and engineering were dazzling. They were getting rich beyond their wildest dreams, and the money pouring in showed no signs of
ever stopping. And so a lot of the things they were later condemned for, their love of snobbery and gingerbread architecture and ornamental cast-iron, were just the mannerisms of decent people who were trying to live up to all this. The only wealthy models available were the European aristocracy.
What we tend to forget is that, unlike the European aristocrats they aped, the American Victorians were a very creative people. The telephone, the telegraph, the railroad, the transatlantic cable, the light bulb, the radio, the phonograph, the motion pictures and the techniques of mass production — almost all the great technological changes that are associated with the twentieth century are, in fact, American Victorian inventions. This city is composed of their value patterns! It was their optimism, their belief in the future, their codes of craftsmanship and labor and thrift and self-discipline that really built twentieth-century America. Since the Victorians disappeared the entire drift of this century has been toward a dissipation of these values.
You could imagine some old Victorian aristocrat coming back to these streets, looking around, and then becoming stony-faced at what he saw.
Phædrus saw that it was nearly dark. He was almost at his hotel now. As he crossed the street he noticed a gust of wind swirling dust and scraps of paper up from the pavement before the lights of a taxi. A sign on top of the taxi said SEE THE BIG APPLE and under it the name of some tour line, with a telephone number.
The Big Apple. He could almost feel the disgust with which a Victorian would greet that name.
They never thought of New York City that way. The Big Opportunity or the Big Future or the Empire City would have been closer to their vision. They saw the city as a monument to their own greatness, not something they were devouring. The mentality that sees New York as a "Big Apple,"' the Victorian might say, is the mentality of a worm. And then he might add, To be sure, the worm means the name only as a compliment, but that is because the worm has no idea of what the effects of his eating the Big Apple are.
The hotel doorman seemed to recognize Phædrus as he approached and opened the gold-lettered, mono-grammed glass door with a professional smile and flourish. But as Phædrus smiled back he realized the doorman probably seemed to recognize everybody who came in. That was his role. Part of the New York illusion.
Inside, the lobby’s world of subdued gilt and plush suggested Victorian elegance without denying the advantages of twentieth-century modernity. Only the howl of wind at the crack between the elevator doors reminded him of the world outside.
In the elevator he thought about the vertical winds that must be in all these buildings, and wondered if there were compensating vertical downdrafts outside. Probably not. The hot elevator winds would just keep rising into the sky after they left the building. Cold air would fill in from horizontal currents on the streets.
The room had been cleaned since he’d left and the bed had been made. He dropped the heavy canvas sack of mail on it. He wouldn’t have much time to read mail now. That walk had taken longer than he’d thought it would. But he felt sort of tired and relaxed and that felt good.
He turned on the living room light and heard a buzzing sound by the bulb. At first he thought it was a loose bulb, but then he saw that the buzzing was coming from a large moth.
He watched it for a moment and wondered, How did it get up this high in the sky? He thought moths stayed close to the ground.
It blended with the Victorian decor of the place as it fluttered around the lampshade.
It must be a Victorian moth, he thought, aspiring eternally to higher things. And then, reaching its goal, burning to death and falling to the dust below. Victorians loved that kind of imagery.
Phædrus went to a large glass door that seemed to open onto a balcony. There was too much reflection from the room to see what was on the other side, so he opened it a little. Through the opening he could see the night sky, and far away, the random patterns of window lights in other skyscrapers. He opened the door wider, stepped out onto the balcony and felt the cold air. It was windy up here. And high, too. He could see he was almost at a level with the tops of the buildings way over on the other side of the huge dark space of Central Park. The balcony seemed to be made of some sort of gray stone, but it was too dark to see.
He stepped to the stone rail and looked over… YEEOW!!…
Way down there the cars were like little ladybugs. They were yellow, most of them, and they crawled along slowly, just like bugs. The yellow ones must be taxis. They moved so slowly. One of them pulled to the curb directly below him and stopped. Then Phædrus could see a speck that had to be a person get out and go into the entrance he himself had come in…
He wondered how long it would take to fall all the way down there. Thirty seconds? Less than that, he figured. Thirty seconds is a long time. Five seconds would be more like it…
The thought started a tingling in his body. It rose to his head and made him dizzy. He stepped back carefully.
He looked up for a while. The sky was not really a night sky. It was filled with the same orange glow he and Lila had seen at Nyack. Only much more intense now. He supposed it was atmospheric pollution or even normal sea mist or dust reflecting the street-lights from below back down from the sky, but it gave a feeling of not being really outdoors at all. This Giant of a city even dominated the sky.
How quiet it was now. Almost serene. Strange that way up here, looking down on all the noise and jangle and tension below, is this upper zone of silence. You don’t even think about it when you’re down on the street.
No wonder multi-millionaires paid huge sums for space up here in the sky. They could endure all that competitive life down below when they had a place like this up here to retreat to.
The Giant could be very good to you, he thought… If it wanted to.
18
Lila didn’t care where she was going. She was so mad at the Captain she could spit. That bastard! Who the hell did he think he was calling her that — A bitch setting up a dog fight. She should have hit him!
What did he know? She should have said, Yes, and who made me one? Was it me? You don’t know me! She should have said, Nobody knows me. You’ll never know me. I’ll die before you know me. But boy oh boy, do I ever know YOU! That’s what she should have told him.
She was so sick of men. She didn’t want to hear men talk. They just want to dirty you. That’s what they all want to do. Just dirty you so you’ll be just like them. And then tell you what a bitch you are.
This is what she got for being honest. Wasn’t that funny? If she’d lied to him everything would be fine. If she was really a bitch did he think she would have told him all that stuff about Jamie? No. That was really funny.
What was she going to do with these shirts now? She sure wasn’t going to give them to him now. She was tired of carrying them. She spent hours looking for them and now she had to take them back. Why did she have to try to be nice to him? She never learned. No matter what you do they always want to make you look worse than they are.
You’re not doing anything wrong, you know, you’re not hurting anybody and you’re not stealing anything, you know, and still they just hate you for it anyway, for making love. Before they get on you’re a real angel, but after they get off you’re a real whore. For a while. Until they get ready again. Then you’re an angel again.
She’d never been on the street every night. She wasn’t one of the bad ones. Just sometimes when she felt like it. She liked it. She always did. She liked it all the time. Every night. So what? And she didn’t like it always with the same man. And she didn’t care what people thought about her. And she liked money too, to spend. And she liked booze too and a lot of other things. Put all that together and you got Lila, she should have told him. Just don’t try to turn me into somebody else. 'Cause it won’t work. I’m just Lila and I always will be. And if you don’t like me the way I am then just get out. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. I’ll die first. That’s the way I am. That’s what she should
have told him.
A store window showed her reflection. She looked like she was hurrying. She should slow down. She didn’t have to hurry so fast. She didn’t have anywhere to go except to the boat to get her things off.
It was dumb to tell him anything. You can’t tell people like him anything. If you do, they’re gone. All he wanted her for was to prove how big he was. He didn’t care what she said, he just wanted her to be some kind of guinea pig to study or something like that, when he really thought all those bad things about her all the time.
He never talked straight, but she could tell he was picking on her in his mind all the time for things she said. Trying to treat her so nice. He always wanted to know what she thought but he’d never tell her what he thought. Always playing around the edges. That’s what she couldn’t stand. She never should have told him that stuff about nerds like him. That’s what did it. Nerds like him couldn’t stand to hear that.
She knew how to handle people like him. They’re not hard to live with. All you have to do is let them talk. You’ve got to build someone like him up all the time or they get rid of you. She’d probably be going on the boat to Florida tomorrow if she’d kept her mouth shut. She could have taken care of him whenever he wanted it. Jamie didn’t mind. Jamie didn’t care who she slept with. Everybody could have been happy.
Jamie didn’t like the Captain either. Jamie always knew what people were thinking. If somebody thought he was going to make trouble for Jamie, Jamie had him all figured out.
A black witch on a broom looked at her through a display window. It was almost Halloween time.
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 25