It happens.

Like two organisms in a symbiotic relationship, you and your city become tethered in unexpected ways. One moves in sync with the pulse of the other.

I am tethered to the enormous, slobbering dog I walk by everyday on my way to the train just as he is tethered to his leash, guarding his owner’s bodega.

I am tethered to the homeless man that jingles his cup of coins on the subways steps, for he was there years ago when I first came to New York and he is there still. I have changed, the world has changed, but he is still right there, writing himself into my story.

I am tethered to the the pitter patter that comes each night when the toddler upstairs decides to run sprints across the apartment floors. The rhythm of his feet against my ceiling have become a sound of home.

CHANGING

And each tether, I am learning, changes you.

It was sixty degrees the other day and I went out in a t-shirt. If it’s sixty in California, people pull out the puffer coats that they shouldn’t even own. I am beginning to understand the lines of the trains. No longer are they like strands of spaghetti strewn haphazardly across the floor, but rather like the blood that flows through my arms. Some are like arteries, carrying you away, and others are veins, bringing you back home. One is always turning it’s contents over to the other, looping throughout the city like blood through a body, keeping it alive.

With each day, I am memorizing those loops. The succession of train stops have become like letters of the alphabet of a language I am just learning to speak. Chambers, Canal, Spring St. A, B, C. Greenpoint, Nassau, Metropolitan Av. D, E, F. Like a child learning new words, I can understand the world that buzzes around me in ways that made no previous sense.

FALLING INTO BOOKS

I took one of those suddenly sensical trains into Williamsburg the other day with the clear purpose of making a return only to inevitably get sidetracked by vintage thrift stores and book shops. I wandered into a book store, lured by the table of discounted coffee table art books they set out on the sidewalk for people with my same weakness, and fell right through the doors.

I am a firm believer that there are some things you can find, and some things that you must wait and let find you. Art, really cool jackets, funky hats, and books are among these things. It is the reason the walls of my apartment are still mostly bare. I am waiting for a Basquiat print to find me on the sidewalks of Manhattan, thrown out by a bitter divorcee who just can’t stand to look at the thing anymore. That happens here. You wouldn’t believe what happens here.

Anyway. I was standing in that bookstore, browsing titles I know and love, running my fingers across The Bell Jar, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Consider the Lobster, when I saw it. The bubblegum pink cover of Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.

I could not believe I had never heard of it. A devoted fan of The Lonely City, it should have already been on my shelf. Yet it was there, in the middle of Brooklyn, being picked up my hands for the first time. I bought it from the storekeeper who happened to be discussing Basquiat with his employee, only to open to the first chapter moments later and see that it happened to be about Basquiat. Strange moments of cosmic coincidence.

I read the book on the train ride home, feeling Laing’s prose melt like butter in my hands. Her ideas of art as something that can and does save our lives, as opposed to the elitist, purely aesthetic enterprise that it is often falsely equated with, feeds my soul.

She writes,

Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

New material with which to think. New spaces to step inside of and feel your way around. Art scrambles and rearranges your brain, concocting new patterns and modes of perception that you had no prior access to.

It’s magic.

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