Guy Kettelhack, lives in New York City
(1975-present) (answer to a Quora question)
To me that’s like asking what, in all its dimensions,
does your own mind teach you? Oddly, with its legendary bounty of distractions
(though, pertinently, no more or less bountiful than the distractions in your
own mind), New York can, for some people, become the occasion of discovering a
greater sense of calm than they’ve known anywhere else.
Anyway it’s done that for me. And I think the reason
it has is that it reflects every aspect of thought, feeling or fantasy in my
own mind: nothing I’ve ever felt or wondered about hasn’t met with an answering
response from some resource in New York (people, concerts, museums, chance
absorption of an overheard voice or something scribbled on a wall) that
precisely fits it.
The best examples of this may be too private to share.
A sexual fantasy you grew up thinking sentenced you to complete aloneness turns
out to be the basis of a number of thriving groups in New York. Your
fascination with particular edible grasses or types of salami or translating
Ancient Greek or barely known Indian sauces or arcane branches of folk music or
cutting edge neurological research into schizophrenia will find itself
passionately reflected in human company to be found here. New York is like your
‘id’ - Freud’s hypothetical unconscious furnace of drives which feeds
everything you are. These drives seek release in whatever forms they are
wittingly or unwittingly provided: they’ve no moral interest in the outcome,
though the rest of the selective you may. But it is New York’s immoderate
capacity to fund you with every imaginable response (often amounting to
solution) to every imaginable desire or curiosity you bring to it that is its
real glory.
New York has taught me how profoundly ‘place’ can
merge with, and therefore suggest to me, ‘who I am.’ That the same can be said
of Thoreau and his Walden doesn’t vitiate or erase the impact of this
discovery, it enlarges our understanding that the ‘particulars’ of place
potentially have meanings to anyone receptive to them. The universe (as
infinite in rural New Hampshire as it is in Manhattan) reflects us; we reflect
it - if we’re temperamentally aligned with the angles of its transmission. And
New York’s got the angles for me.
In short, we’re never lost - or anyway perhaps never
need be. The profound calm thismakes possible can be explained
simply. You feel heard, corroborated, embraced by a ‘condition’ which tells you
you’re where you belong. It’s my experience that this (arguably greatest) human
anguish of feeling lost can, in and by New York, be answered and assuaged.
Existentially, and with as much crème fraiche on top as you
can handle.
.
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