There is something strange about big cities. Something that draws me back often like some magnetic force. And yet something unsettling that gives me a kick in the gut every time I visit one. And this most recent visit to Chicago was no different.
People pack themselves tight onto subways or public transportation, folding themselves in like tiny petals into some massive, multifoliate, oxygen-seething flower. You find yourself pressed close against strangers, their knees pressed intimately against your thigh. Your breast jamming into someone's scrawny elbow as the train lurches forward and then back.
And yet there is this unspoken law that none of this should be acknowledged. That you will pretend that the stranger sitting close next to you is in fact hundreds of feet away, enclosed in their own little bubble of transportation, while you sit here all alone and untouched.
People shove and push you out of the way, as though you were just some subway door or errant garbage can blocking their way. No one makes eye contact, or if eyes DO lock, they immediately and guiltily flutter away as soon as it goes noticed. We see everything but don't see anything.
You walk down any given street and more likely than not, you will see a homeless person in a crooked heap in some doorway. Hunched under a tent of tarp or newspaper near a heating vent. Shaking cups of one or two lone quarters at every person who walks by. Occasionally an individual will awkwardly toss some lint-encrusted change from his/her pocket at them. Other times and other people will instead offer up the bold-faced lie "sorry, I don't have any" while embarassedly shrugging their shoulders. But most commonly, these homeless folks are just ignored by individuals scurrying by. As if they don't even exist.
They become extraneous urban architecture--a scarred lamppost, a bit of newspaper in the gutter, a chunk of uprooted, pockmarked cement next to a garbage can. We treat them as nothing more. We walk by and pretend we don't see them. And I'd imagine, after living with them on a daily basis, we don't even have to PRETEND anymore. We just DON'T SEE THEM. And thing is, from what I gather, it seems that they start to perceive
themselves this way too--as invisible. They seem shocked moreso when you actually STOP to talk to them than they do when you ignore them and walk on by. They sit without looking at you most of the time, shaking their cups, offering entreaties, not wanting to insult you with eye contact much less touch.
And thing is, I don't want it to be this way. I don't want to feel uncomfortable making eye contact with someone on the El. I want to extend myself to a homeless person, just offer up a few minutes of my time or my ear or my company, not just my change.
But in many ways, it seems an impossibility to do so. Especially if you LIVE in a big city. The caught-eye just darts away. The homeless are there
every single day and you can't give money to
every single one of them. And you can't really acknowledge or sit down and talk to every single one of them either, just like you can't (or wouldn't) really acknowledge every single person you walk past on a crowded city street.
And thing is, I don't blame people for just walking by. Ignoring. I don't blame them because at some point, that's how you end up having to cope. Much of this is just a matter of necessity.
But it seems to me that the way people shut themselves off in big cities is due quite a bit to fear. There is something there, something in the vast number of people seething around you at any given moment, that undercuts your singularity, that makes you recognize your smallness. There is something there, in the people living off handouts on the streets that jabs you in the face with a reminder of how lucky you are. But oftentimes it's an insidious, disheartening reminder.
Fear's not such a problem in smaller numbers. We bond in bars or coffeeshops when there's only handfuls to deal with (and alcohol to take off some of the icy chill). But it's the masses, the swarming teaming magnitude of the masses spilling through the streets, that is most overwhelming.
On occasion, when I'm just randomly musing over the weirdness of existence, I get overwhelmed at just the thought of the vast number of individuals alive on this planet at any given moment in time, fucking, eating, sleeping, working, walking, exercising, fighting, driving, breathing, dreaming, hoping. And just the sheer thought alone overwhelms me.
To be reminded of this on a daily basis on the steaming city streets, people like ants shoving around you and ignoring you and pushing forward forward forward always towards some point of destiny must get terrifying at times.
And I can't help but think of a quote that Eleven posted a month or so ago:
"it is, i think, because the notion of feeling one's way forward, of groping in the darkness or semi-darkness, implies a testing of the way with the whole body. and although this method may be painfully slow, it is much less likely to lead me astray than if i relied on sight alone and had an open country to cross and a bright sun to go by. in this way i will experience every inch of the way rather than suddenly finding that i have reached my goal with very little sense of the terrain i have passed through. if i can simply walk across the space that lies between me and my goal i may arrive there quickly, but then i will be left wondering whether i have really arrived or only dreamed or imagined it." (gabriel josipovici, touch)
Perhaps it is people that need to be our destination instead of places. Perhaps we need to remember our surroundings, to "stop and smell the roses" or at least remember they are there. Perhaps we need to embrace sight as we do touch, recognize that the warmth of eye contact can mean just as much as a hug to some.
In high school psychology class, we learned that some people respond positively to rewards in the form of verbal praise while others respond positively to touch. But essentially, I think we are all like sunflowers, bending towards the light of another person's touch, seeking it out and drinking it up for sustenance. It is part of what we need to live and make it through the day-to-day world, to drag ourselves out of bed in the morning.
We dehumanize when we rob people of our touch, of our acknowledgment, of something as meager as our eye contact. And often we dehumanize those who need our touch the most.
What am I trying to say? I really don't know, I guess. I'm just trying to work things out in my own brain a little, make sense of all this...
Maybe all I'm trying to get at, and maybe the point of everything Josipovichi is trying to say, is that a little touch can do wonders. And in the day-to-day activities that compel us forward and make us forget everything but our destination, perhaps it'd be good to remember this. To let your fingertips linger on someone's shoulder for a minute or two. To press your warm heartbeat hard against your significant other when you curl up in bed late at night. To hug. To be hugged. To let your ankle remain pressed against another's on the subway instead of shrinking away. To place your hand tenderly on a friend. To touch.
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