Crepuscular Dreaming: Kirpal Gordon’s New York at Twilight

 

New York at Twilight is available from Amazon using the following link: https://www.amazon.com/New-York-Twilight-Selected-Gothams/dp/1958266051.

 

 

     Gordon’s marvelous book of short stories, now available in a substantially revised edition, is well-titled, as the mood of New York City pervades every narrative in the book.  It is recognizable to those who know the territory – with mentions of the Kosciusko Bridge, the 79^th Street Tunnel in Central Park, and the Orpheum Theatre at the corner of Second Avenue and St. Marks Place, but it is familiar also to readers.  Gordon’s New York City is Eliot’s London, an “Unreal city, city full of dreams,/ Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by,” and it is as well Baudelaire’s Paris, “a teeming city, full of dreams, where specters rise before the walker in broad daylight.” 

     The oneiric quality of the modern metropolis for Gordon is founded neither on the sometimes confounding apparently random mashups we might encounter in our beds at night nor on a stale and reductive notion of Freudian wish-fulfillment.  For him the liberating function of dreams is their capacity to leap beyond experience into the truer than truth of art.  This is twilight of the title, poised between the obtrusive phantasmagoria of everyday life and the nirvana of the deepest sleep.  These stories arise from artful play which through indirection and figurative language may express so much more than ordinary language.  In the African-American tradition such rhetoric is called signifying, and in the discourse of some Hindus and Buddhists it is, as Gordon tells us, “twilight language” (sāṃdhyābhāṣā).  Gordon’s characters vary in gender, ethnicity, and location within the capacious New York City hive, but all are “jonesing” (as several of them would put it) for that ancient heavenly connection that shows us with a shock that we’re really at home.

     Like earlier epiphanies in Bodh Gaya, Bethlehem, and Dublin, Gordon ‘s characters open their eyes a bit wider in the middle of their daytime dreams and see through the illusions that enable daily life: distinctions like personal and universal, local and cosmic, crowded stage and utter emptiness.  Sometimes the revelations are more-or-less explicitly metaphysical: In “Portal to the Lost City” the reader learns of the City of Karmic Completion.  The persona in “Erasing the Separation” aims at nothing less than the explosion of dualities: “I’m making it either/or, but seen together these opposites tell the fuller story.”  Or a lovely longer flight in “Petals of Pushpema”: “unfurling cosmic dance of Generate-Organize-Destroy-Silence which she felt was the universe’s benevolent, four-chambered G-O-D-S’ heart pumping blood through her veins and likewise the veins in the leaves of the tulip tree above her.” 

     Eros gets its due as an avenue to enlightenment.  In “Say the Word” a Beatles fan named Walter Rusk mutates into a walrus and becomes thereby a better lover, while Stavros from Astoria seeks his opposite in the Aryan Helga in “The Zeitgeist of Peace and Love.”  If love can be a skillful means (upaya) with the potential to bring awakening, so can art.  Thus the reader meets a new incarnation of Orpheus (in “Orpheus in Heavy Metal”) able to “kill sorrow with an awesome solo.”  Revelations won through both art and love mingle as the playing of Thelonius Monk underlies the vision of “Venus Rising over Brooklyn Bridge.”  In “Lustrum at the RKO” Colleen seeks through Hector’s physical love and the arts of soul music and B-movies to escape the bonds of her Catholic upbringing.  

     Metaphysics here, as in lived experience, occurs not in some empyrean, but in the middle of quotidian life.  One leg of Gordon’s compass is set firmly on the ephemeral data of sense impressions, urban ambulances, park benches, and cathode-ray television sets, while the other rests just beyond the horizon.  He thus reminds his readers of their own most insightful moments, moments which occur for everyone but which, like dreams, evanesce if not captured in words.  These stories are every bit as concrete as they are abstract, as locally specific as they are universal.

     All this may sound somewhat abstract and philosophical, but each story in the collection is a solid narrative with varied fully-formed characters and plot development leading to denouement, a structure not always evident in contemporary experimental fiction.  Furthermore, Gordon is a consummate artist in sound and a leading practitioner of spoken word performance who crafts every phrase so cunningly that the reader is tempted to just turn off cognition and listen to the music of his words.  The stories cry to be read aloud, a worthwhile exercise whether one is alone or among friends.  Should you try this in a public space, whoever is within earshot is likely to be beguiled and engaged and eager to hear what happens next.  What nobler quality could a narrative have?

 

Occupy Wall Street

     Several months ago I was discussing the decline of progressive politics with a friend who, like me, had been in university during the sixties. We marveled at the popularity of politicians whose actions harm their constituents and yet are elected repeatedly; radio hosts who gather enormous audiences while professing bizarre right-wing fringe views; and the size of a Tea Party that represents primarily the interests of a few masters of large corporations. Even more unlikely, the title of Christian seems to have been appropriated by people who share nothing whatever of Jesus’ pacifism or his solidarity with the poor, outcast, suffering, and oppressed.
     My friend said that large numbers of citizens will not oppose the fat cats unless middle class people can be shown how big business is picking their own pocket. He argued that ordinary people do not sympathize with the underclass; indeed, the respectability of some lower middle class people is built on contempt for a group beneath them. The anger arising from economic anxiety or distress even of educated people is often directed at the weaker and poorer rather than at the powers that be. According to this analysis, campaigns for such righteous causes as gay marriage or for the environment are counterproductive because they fail to appeal to the masses and, indeed, alienate some potential allies in the larger economic struggle.
     I recalled this conversation last month when the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began. Though the participants were criticized for lacking a specific set of demands, it is precisely this openness that allows people of all sorts to unite against the economic inequities in our system. The extraordinary tenacity of the New Yorkers and the remarkable proliferation of similar actions in other cities suggest that my friend’s analysis was accurate. Whether one likes it or not, most people will only move to seek their own advantage, and Occupy Wall Street has proclaimed the fact that nearly all of us are being cheated by the present system. The college students with onerous debt from student loan, youth who cannot find jobs, the transit workers whose new contract is worse than the one before, retired people seeing their investments shrink as social security is threatened, nursing home aides without medical benefits or pension, all these find themselves in the same slowly sinking boat. Only when these “mainstream” elements act in concert with advocates for smaller groups such as the disabled, welfare recipients, immigrants, gay people, ethnic minorities, and radicals can they move America.
     Many unions, which had had no part in Occupy Wall Street at the beginning, saw the potential for a strong alliance and declared solidarity. On October 5 I joined a bus from the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation to support the demonstrators. Traveling with me were a crew of young Teamsters (with shirts reading “kicking ass for the working class”), representatives of other unions (teachers and nurses were well-represented, though it was a work-day), and a few older activists lit by new hope.
     In the city we joined an even more diverse group: black and white; middleclass, working class, and underclass; toddlers and the elderly. The event itself was decentralized, in part because our numbers and the peculiar police lines kept the crowds in odd and awkward positions, leading occasionally to chants of “let us out” directed at law enforcement (as well as “Who pays the police? We pay the police!”). Far from a scripted rally (such as one sees at the national political party conventions), there was an amiable chaos. A loudspeaker carried some speaker’s words, but three-quarters of the crowd was more engaged with what was happening closer to hand. Three or four bands played in different areas, many people carried homemade signs. As the most popular chant of the day had it, “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!”
     In spite of the atmosphere of anarchy, people behaved in an exemplary fashion, obeying the General Assembly’s dictates about peace and orderliness. Once, when an excited marcher began loudly contesting with the only heckler I saw all day, several other marchers approached him to settle the scene. In the sixties, I had witnessed government agents provocateurs incite stone-throwing to justify a violent police attack. Such a gambit, it seemed, would have been immediately suppressed here.
     My support of Occupy Wall Street is based on these considerations.


1. The group points to the correct source of America’s problems: maldistribution of wealth and corporate control. Society’s inequities are particularly evident when one considers the financial sector which produces nothing whatsoever and yet is absurdly highly compensated. The favored slogan “we are the 99%” expresses the fact that, though we do all useful work, the corporate parasites and those living on what is properly called “unearned income” take most of the wealth.

2. The occupiers have somehow maintained effective order within their own body, insisting on orderly demonstrations and absolute nonviolence, while maintaining a direct democracy, consensus-seeking decision-making process at the daily assemblies. They have to this day no leaders, no spokespeople, only a community of equal citizens calling for redress of grievances.

3. Because of its general character and the lack of specific demands, this action has succeeded in motivating youth and many otherwise unaffiliated individuals. Union actions, like those by environmental, feminist, ethnic, and neighborhood groups, though they have sometimes attracted large numbers of participants, have failed to ignite the interest of those not directly involved.


     As filmmaker John Wellington Ennis said, “How can we not occupy Wall Street? Wall Street occupies US.”