Central Park, Part Three

Central Park, part three..

            In summer we are restored to the playfulness of light, and the sounds of life.  One hears the carousel before one sees it.  The hurdy-gurdy music pumps from its organ, songs by Stephen Foster who was inspired to music by a dead old dog named Tray, a dead old black man named Joe, and little Annie Laurie, who was trampled to death by a runaway horse. 

            The horses in the discreet brick building that houses the merry-go-round won't run over the children who clamor to climb on their painted backs, but one must wonder if those children have nightmares after riding one.  The horses are painted with bright bands that streak to form a rainbow when the carousel moves, but these horses are ferocious.  Built by immigrant Russians and Poles, these are the savage steeds of Cossacks, straining  at their bits with arched necks and nostrils  gasping for air.  Above them, on the outer band of the carousel are angels -sweet little cherubs with cotton-candy wings.  One cotton-candy cherub  is shooting a hare with bow and arrow; another holds up a dead chicken whose wings flop listlessly to the ground as if to dramatize its condition.  Even the clowns on the inside of the carousel are diabolical looking, but the business of clowning is one that  always peers into the interstice where the normal and the grotesque meet.  Do none of these children know fear?             

            Facing the carousel is a sloped, sunny bank where one can rest and watch the show put on by strolling parents with carriages that shelter their new born infants, and by children rushing to get the large horses on the outside ring of the carousel.  Off to the side of this warming spot, two small boys  bend over a pile of pebbles.   Deep in conversation, they are as grave as scientists with a portentous discovery.  Pebbles are important business.

             One year ago I paused on this bank.  One year before that, I paused on this bank.  The same small boys squatted over important pebbles last year, and the year before that.   The same children rushed to get a large outside horse on the carousel, and the same parents smiled and strolled, pushing the same carriages that sheltered the same infants.  Perhaps time hasn't moved at all, and I am sitting in the me of one year ago, of two years ago, for this is the pattern of life displayed before me, and not the specific details of a single, unique history.  If such thing as history can exist here, it is circular, not linear.  Children and carriages, strollers and smilers, we move in this green space as foam moves above, but within the body of a wave.  We belong; we inhere; we are part of this unity.  Individuality is nonexistent; we are but aspects of one life, bits of glass in a kaleidoscope of shifting patterns.  Time is a measure known only to human beings.

*

            Who can I claim to be when I am sitting alone on a rock, my legs extended in front of me, my feet flopped to the side?   Through whose perspective can I see myself on this island of stone?  To whom do I show myself?           

            Who here knows my name?

            I have no name in this park.  The I of me collapses as soon as I think this thought.  I stare at shoes -my shoes- on a pair of feet, and they project at a rather odd angle, thank you kindly, for those feet are sweaty and tired.  My feet.  Sinew, muscle, the shell of me, encompassing me.   According to science my brain is wired to be me and only me, but when I look at those feet I am not my brain.  I am beyond thought.

            Who am I?  I AM a pair of tired feet. 

            Identity is the game we play with each other and for each other.  I find you and you find me because we put on the same emblematic identity.  We affirm each other's existence by recognizing our sameness.  I am this and you are this; all's right with the world.  But badges and markers are useless in the Park, for everything in the park is immanence- the trees, the grasses, the becoming of a path whose destination is unsure.

            I hear the sound of automobiles from the unseen street, their motors resonating like the vibrations of a tuning fork.  I lean into the sound, am absorbed by it, suspended above myself.   I collapse further into the inchoate,  but I am not afraid.  As I slip away, I expand into the possibilities of my own being.  The less I exist, the more I exist.  By negating myself, I become me more strongly and more purely.                         

            I lean back to look at the sky, listening to the voices of the park: a dried branch objecting to the weight of a squirrel, a roller-blader falling in a crash,  a sun-bather wiping sweat, a page being turned by a reader in a shady nook, an organ mourning Old Dog Tray, a hint of voices talking.  I hear a speech from Hamlet,  rock music in a jogger's ear phones, an operatic chorus in the band shell, applause from seasons of crowds on the great lawn, voices of many eras swelling as one.

             At the very edge of myself, I am tossed upward past this imagined world into the open.  Rocking back and forth in time, I expand over the park; my own being encompasses everything here; I am trees and hills and rocks and grass and water and child and adult.  I am, I am I am, I am. 

            I am alive in Central Park,  I am alive in the liquid heart of an opal, endless with light.

Central Park  Part Two................

Christopher Columbus and William Shakespeare face each other at the head of the elm-lined  mall that leads to Bethesda Fountain, and all that separates them is a circular flower bed.   They are the oddest of odd couples, incongruous fragments of separate pasts, thrown into perpetual confrontation with each other.

Columbus's tenacious feet are caught in the act of moving forward, striding securely on terra firma, terra nova.  His eyes look outward; his chin is stubborn.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, has been caught pausing to think.  He clutches a book to his chest, a finger marking the page where he stopped reading others' words in favor of dreaming his own.  Incongruency is the meeting point between the two.

Robert Burns and Walter Scott face each other as one starts down the mall.  They are dim lights in the literary pantheon, another odd coupling, but they are adequately pensive, one looking upward for inspiration, the other finding it within.  Then, one comes to Fitz-Greene Halleck.  Though he has a book, and is positioned on Shakespeare's side, he has more in common with Columbus for his posture is expectant and ready for action.  He is a little smug, this forgotten poet, Fitz-Greene Halleck, but then who wouldn't be self-satisfied if enshrined in the company of Shakespeare.

In summer the trees behind Shakespeare are so dense that they hide the distant skyline.  Shakespeare is at home with this show of nature, but in the winter density is stripped bare, and the city asserts its exclamatory presence through the naked branches.  Then icicles form on Shakespeare's ears, his eyebrows, the tip of his nose.  "'Tis in grain, sir,  'twill endure wind and weather,"  Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night.  He was  speaking of a woman's unadorned physical beauty, but when one stares at the statue with the rambunctious city outlined behind its reflective eyes, the interpretation of his words assumes its own meaning: hold standards in grain, so wind and weather will have no effect. 

*

The face of Shakespeare, that knower of all things human, is the face of genius, as much a freak as the elephant man, but one who serves us well.  We have a use for him, and so we worship a freak.

            When I look at the legs of this genius/freak, I see he is wearing tights that bag around his ankles.  Perhaps baggy tights are the secret component of genius.  No wonder men have produced more works of brilliance than women: men are more comfortable, not constrained by undergarments.   Fervid and grave, I vow to give up panty hose. 

Central Park:  Time’s Kaleidoscope

I remove my watch before I leave.  I walk alone, bringing only my silence with me.

 The boundaries of time collapse when one enters Central Park.   Once upon a time is now, the good old days are today.  Newly seeded lawns are old, ancient trees are young.  Time approaches, giggling with the immediacy of roller-blades, then retreats, hiding within the slowly shifting shadow of the Egyptian Obelisk.  In an ever-changing, changeless realm, time is rhythm and pattern rather than the crude ticking of an individual clock.   The present exists like a thin veil through which past memories and future plans are constantly being pulled.  Yesterday, today and tomorrow exist simultaneously, nothing more than rhythms shifting in a circle. 

*

            We call it winter light, and there is no denying the color of the mummifying sheet of gray that suspends energy in taut strips over the park.  This is unsaturated light; seen through a prism, it would still be devoid of color.  Death prevails in its inertia. 

            Winter shadows are linear and motionless.  What we miss in winter is the alchemy of light filtering through leafy trees, playing hide-and-go-seek with itself, teasing us with surprise revelations.

to be continued