Libidinal City
For my fellow New Yorkers — and for anyone who's known and loved New York
Readers note: we use libidnal here from libido in the psychoanalytic spirit. Not just sexual desire, but eros in the broad sense: the animating drive toward life, toward connection, toward creation. The force that makes you want things, pursue things, build things. Vital creative energy that can be cultivated or dissipated.
Bobbing and weaving, moving and grooving, the wind on my skin as the soft setting light adds a golden sparkle to the concrete-steel-glass towers all around. Speaker strapped to my bike, I push down, pedal forward to the beat of a soulful 70s refrain. I duck through Washington Square Park, past a 5-piece jazz band sprouted in front of a fountain, along a child showing her mom just how fast she can run. All this human expression, compressed together on this island and overflowing in the form of music, art, one-of-a-kind characters; it’s perhaps the greatest concentration of human spirit on Earth. The sights, the sounds, the energy coursing through my sinews, in this moment I feel ALIVE, mind-body-and-spirit.
I moved to New York City at 26 with a mission — kick ass and get out. Eighteen months to complete Columbia’s post-bacc premedical program, a way to pull together the disparate threads of mind, body, and spirit I’d been circling around. Surely, by that time, this nature-loving treeophile would feel the concrete walls crashing in and be ready to bounce. Yet at the end of those 18 months — a grueling 18 months — I was not at all ready to leave.
On paper, New York should chew you up, spit you out, grind you down and sap you of life — living in a shoe box stacked on top of thousands of other shoe boxes, constant sonic sensory assault, sirens, alarms, the inorganic, pungent august street smells of fermenting trash, times when you can’t even see the sky. The God-knows-what effects of the electromagnetic chaos permeating you in every moment. And yet, E.B. White called it “the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents.” And it's even more than that — it’s that you can plug into it.
The density of New York City is such that the entire outlay is not just a constant play, but a play of which you are a participant. YOU are a part of the drama. And it is incumbent upon you to find your way, your role to play, your way to plug into that energy. Once you do, it’s like plugging into an umbilical cord. Once you do, it sustains you. And the life the city then gives you is something completely unexpected. At least it was to me. There are many who were truly chewed up and spit out, leave in 12 months without finding their way in. You have to look. For some it’s obvious — you come here with that cord already tethered. Maybe you’re an off-Broadway performer. Maybe you have a niche art community in Bushwick. Maybe your grandfather was part of the OG rollerblader disco dance crew that parks out in Central Park every Saturday Spring through Halloween. Perhaps you understand that the spiritual descendants of the Harlem Jazz scene are still grooving. Maybe you joined an experimental university in Brooklyn. Or you work hard and save your money to be in perpetual exploration of two lifetime’s worth of culinary delights.
For me, there are many avenues, many cords that plug me in. Riding my bike is one. I hop on, strap a Bluetooth speaker, and drop into the flow, find myself riding a line, a current of the city, like a light bike in Tron — into the scene, the colorful unfolding, the creation. In this, there’s an aliveness, a lighting up of my soul, a joy. Bobbing and weaving, becoming part of the unfolding scene in the park, part of the currents of downtown Manhattan, part of the pulse of traffic.
Running my bike out to catch the sunset magic hour along the shores of Brooklyn Bridge Park, I was flagged down by a bespectacled man holding a camera. Now, of course, this gentleman was dressed to the nines in a light grey 3-piece suit — because why not? This Gatsbian fellow, with large, silver circular wire-framed glasses, sleeves rolled up and coat draped over his arm, flagged me down to say that he’d been “compelled” to capture a shot. He took down my email, and promised to send it my way.
Laughing at the absurdity and only-in-New-Yorkness of the moment, I rode on, West. And I had one of my favorite evenings yet in this city, coasting the shores of Brooklyn on an early Autumn evening as the sun set behind the industrious glory of Downtown Manhattan alongside the beckoning symbol of it all — the proud, tall-standing Statue of Liberty.
Minnesota, California, New York. What a beautiful series of contrasts it’s been, it continues to be. I never really set out to live in any of these places — life has just kind of taken me. But here I am — moving through one of the most interesting parts of the experiment that we call 2018 modern urban life. And while I won’t be here forever, I find myself loving New York more and more with each passing season, feeling closer and more connected to its contents, its energy, its people. More and more appreciative for the chance to be here, now. A moment in time. A good one.
Robert Moore1, writing on Mircea Eliade, talks about the perennial definition of the sacred across times and peoples and ages as more of that — a “regenerative power and libidinal force that could be tapped into for personal and social regeneration.” This is the sacred, this is the divine, this is the creative life force. We plug into this in many ways — whether it’s a ritual space, prayer with God, communion with nature, soulful conversation, shamanic trance, creation of art — and uniquely so, through this human-constructed organism of New York City. This is the magic.
And if you are an outsider, or even someone who lived here and couldn’t find their way in, and take delight in hating the city — of course, on one hand, you’re totally right. And yet on the other, you live in a darkness and have not touched the light. That doesn’t negate the darkness existing, but it does mean you are missing something.
Now, as I emerge back from a hermitage chapter — the last four years spent deep in the woods of Vermont and New Hampshire, a pendulum swing from years in Los Angeles and New York, a return closer to something of my Minnesota upbringing — the contrasts are on higher relief as I get to go touch back into the city and explore what it looks like to once again be more connected to the inspiration, to the life-givingness, to the umbilical cord of this strange, beautiful, twisted, tangled, dirty, alive, disintegrating yet somehow-still-integrating, one-of-a-kind, perfectly imperfect masterpiece that it is — New York City.
Robert Moore, The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001), 27: “’Sacred’ does not equal ‘God’ for Eliade. The consistent factor in premodern times was not belief in God but belief in some kind of regenerative power or libidinal energy that could be tapped into for personal and social regeneration.”