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July 31, 2002
In And Out Of Place
In Montana, along the Smith River, you could look up (and I mean straight up) to the top of the Morrison Formation, where the eroding limestone supports a picturesque line of conifers. Perched among them could be seen, not a bird, but a work of human kind, familiar, yet appearing strangely out of place in that context: a television antenna.There's something jarring about the sight, offensive even, to a sensibility that seeks a seamless view of nature, but it should really come as no surprise; hardly a view can be found, even in the rugged west, that does not betray the presence of our species. Antennas, transmitters, and power lines are widespread signs, but even in the most pristine, protected wilderness, the practiced eye is likely to descry at least the fading contrail of a passing jet. Fly where you will, you just can't get away from us.
Central Park is a get-away within the city. As such, it's hardly seamless, or rather the seam is its main feature. The contrast between the foliage, all soft green billows, and the hard, sharp planes of metal, glass, and stone in the surrounding buildings comprises the signature aesthetic of the place, though such a scene was unimagined in the pre-skyscraper days of the Park's conception. Now it's the perimeter that is central, and the view of the midtown skyline, rising out of the trees, has become the quintessential Central Park view. It is the city that makes the Park unique, and the city will not be ignored.
Not without some effort, anyway.
Those of us who turn away from the towers and the thoroughfares, screening the city with a scrim of briars, are not really aberrant, just a bit extreme. Everybody wants to get away at some point. New York itself is an exotic locale, attracting escapees from other quarters. Amid its grid of indiscriminate stimulation, you don't have to be a tourist to catch yourself staring. But live here long enough, and some sort of respite will become a necessity.
There's getting out of town, and then there's getting into it, but turn far enough inward and the city diminishes. At the center of Manhattan is this heart of green. Turn your back to the skyline and you might soon forget the world of right angles and crooked deals.
Except that,
peeking through the briar laces, or bordering an open field, vibrating on the periphery of vision, or pieced together by the eye's mind from behind a filigree of leaves,
that other world always shows through.
The Park is built upon the City, which is built upon the Land, and neither sits easily upon the other. You might think the Park is a hole, an absence of the City, but of course it's thoroughly landscaped, with slopes that are always in need of shoring up, and underlain with drainage systems forever under reconstruction. Belabored by heavy use, without continual maintenance the Park would deteriorate into a rather less artful (though perhaps more "natural") condition.
Just so, the City never quite subdues its situs, and is ever in danger of falling to pieces, like a crackled scab falling from the living flesh of an Earth that seeks to heal itself, no matter the depth of the wound.
So the City and the Park try to slide off of one another, but have long since slid into each other, and are inextricably linked, or one and the same, altogether. But it still comes as a shock, and a disjuncture, when you see through one and into the other.
There's a phenomenon I call a flit slit.
If you're looking for birds among the woods and meadows, then you're looking for a certain sort of motion: on a small scale, but across a wide field; maybe just a glimpse; a flit... You become sensitized, learn to discriminate among things half-seen, but even then, your eye is tied to expectations. Looking into the withy-web of Willows in the Loch, I often (if the time of year is right) see the tell-tale flits of Warblers, but also something else, that I can hardly tell from birds. It seems a flit, but proves to be a movement on another plane, as through a slit in the greenery I catch a glimpse of the hillside beyond, where a paved road runs, the main Park Drive. I can't really see the Drive, but now and again some vehicle, a runner's lifted heel, or a wheeling bicycle is caught for a split second in one of these slits, collapsing distance, producing an uncanny semblance of flitting in the forward plane, leading me to raise the binocular to my excited eyes, only to see all my illusions of a seamless natural scene dissolved and disabused, scattered before the ongoing civic parade.
Is there revenge for such frustrations?
Is that what squeezes its way through sidewalk seams, splitting the pavement, cracking the concrete?
Nature, in its turn, intrudes upon the City, flitting among the sheer facades, forcing slits of its own, where coarse grasses spring up, or Ailanthus grows, in any passing spot where we, sated for a moment, pause in our domination.
And I watch Kestrels nesting in the rotten metal eaves of a church in Queens.
It's not revenge, but reciprocity.
There must be exchange between the City and the World of Green. The terms are hard to fathom, for the City is enriched, while Nature seems to be destroyed, but if the slits are open and free flowing in between, we will learn that there really is no separation, only circulation. And even if "nature" must vanish, we may at least come to live in a park that takes up all the World. We will plant our antennas among the trees, and as long as we can't actually see the broadcast waves of radiation clouding our skies, we will learn to live with such "necessities".
True wilderness is not for us.
This is not much to hope for, but better than most of what I see, squinting at the future through the slits afforded me.
Better than the alternative which would have us peering through another kind of slit, such as is preserved in the old fortification of the Blockhouse: a slit to shoot through, and a wall to cower behind. When the wall crumbles (as it must, being built around an emptiness), there will be free passage in all directions. Until then, contrasts will continue to confound us: the outrage of an aerial among the mountains; the beauty of a city grown taller than the trees.