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?