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 79th
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?
