Walk with me.

I am standing on a street corner somewhere in Greenwich clutching my trembling umbrella as every car within a mile radius sounds their horn for reasons never to be disclosed.

The man next to me can’t take it anymore and begins to scream, adding marvelous notes of frustrated, feral release to the metropolitan cacophony. And I, I am laughing.

Laughing because this is New York and I am standing in it and the whole thing is still just a bit surreal to the touch. Laughing because back in San Diego, everything completely shuts down in the rain, people terrified of the apparent acid hailing down from the heavens as they lock themselves inside. But not here. Nothing stops here, not now, not ever. Whether three in the morning and twenty degrees out or three in the afternoon and pouring rain, the streets are nothing short of carnivalesque.

MORE ON THE HORRORS OF CATHOLIC SCHOOL

I remember learning about the tradition of Carnival back in high school. At fifteen, I sat next in a classroom that had a view of the Pacific Ocean and listened to one of my favorite teachers of all time explain the utter chaos that humanity allowed itself to devolve into for a short period of time just before Lent.

If you are not religious, or did not have the undying pleasure of being subjected to the utter horrors of a Catholic school until the already-too-late time of the 8th grade as I did, then all you really need to know if that Lent is a period of time before Easter where you fast, pray, give something up, and just generally behave yourself.

If Jesus could spend forty days in the desert resisting the temptations of Satan, you can go a month without chocolate Jimmy. That’s what they told us anyway. At the time it was quite a serious affair, really. We all made our vows and either gave something up, or, the cop out, vowed to be better in some way. This Lent, I promise to be nice to my brother, or I promise to do the dishes for my mom were the words that we all scrawled onto little crosses that the teacher would then hang up around the room for all of Lent as a constant reminder.

I remember this one girl was really into god and would always vow something truly outrageous and admirable for a fifth grader, like, giving up all sweets or abstaining from television. Meanwhile, I was in the back, completely chilling because I knew that I, being an unbaptized heathen, was apparently going to hell anyway. They really should have considered the implications that telling me this so early on would have on my willingness to obey anything going forward. But they could have many things more thought. Looking back, this was quite a horrific affair to endure and I am a little bit shocked I got out as relatively unscathed by serious psychological trauma as I did. Relatively.

CARNIVAL FESTIVAL

Anyway.

Escape I did, and not without a decent amount of knowledge about Christianity that helped me academically in history courses moving forward. Which brings it back to sitting in that classroom, learning about Carnival.

Essentially, Carnival was a festival where anything and everything was allowed. It was a chaotic devolution into primal, animalistic behavior that humanity had long since relinquished in favor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lovely social contract. We sacrifice a portion of our autonomy in order to allow for society to function within the bounds of something that is supposed to resemble peace. Anyway. Carnival said to hell with all of that and allowed for people to be drunk, promiscuous, violent, comical, and messy animals. You could eat, drink, and run naked through the world. It was a purge before Lent. A glorified spring break to put it into a contemporary understanding.

My first thought upon learning this information was that my teachers in Catholic school definitely failed to give us the full experience of Lent. We were shoved right into Lent without any mention of this so-called Carnival. Maybe they could thrown us a bone and let us untuck our shirts or wear socks that didn’t cover our ankles for a day, but no.

So naturally, the idea really stuck and stayed with me up through college when I was learning about Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary characterization of the carnivalesque, or a type of writing that subverts cultural norms and indulges one’s animalistic, primal desires. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was used as an example, where a young lad flees from his strict home and becomes king of a wild jungle. I found that fascinating and began to see the carnivalesque manifesting itself throughout nearly all popular media. There seems to be an undying urge to shatter the confines of organized society and indulge in the terrifying liberation of chaos.

NEW YORK AS CARNIVALESQUE

Which, brings us back to standing on that street corner in lower Manhattan in the pouring rain. For it hit me then, at some point between the honking cars and screaming man, that people fall in love with New York because it is the living, breathing epitome of Carnival.

It is a place where anything goes and no one blinks an eye. It is a place where people run wild on Saturdays no matter the weather or time of day, wearing leopard print pants and hot pink fuzzy coats. It is street performers dancing on subway cars and graffiti artists slinking down the train tracks. It’s everything all at once, lit on fire and spinning before your eyes and you can’t ever look away. You just can’t. It’s rigid, corporate America towering over the liberated, broke youth that run in their glitter tights right under the most powerful buildings in America. It’s binaries, multiplicities, contrasting identities that flip and turn, reverse and chug forward like the trains.

People always say it’s alive. No one ever shuts up about it’s aliveness, its “energy”. You think, my god, it’s just a city. But it’s not. Not once you’re right in the middle of it listening to the entire world scream all at once.

You come to New York and all at once you know that it is never going to be just a city ever again.

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