The feeling of a cusp
Chapter 10: Very long walks, a six-hour disco playlist, the hippocampus (sea monster), a car called 'priest', D'Angelo's impossible anatomy, the MacArthur Park Suite
Dear reader,
Good morning from New York! I’m back in my friend’s apartment in East Harlem. I love it here. The other day I met an 80-year-old artist in her live-in studio in Chinatown. My friend, a painter whose work is incredible, used to work as her assistant and invited me along. The artist told us about moving to New York in the 1960s when rent was $175. We talked about politics and psychoanalysis and the phallus, because that’s what her work is about. Probably more on that next week. Today I might go for a walk in Central Park, because it’s perfect. I love parks. I could write six chapters about parks, and I probably will, but for now maybe I’ll space them out. Maybe I won’t, who cares! Welcome to my little life everybody, it’s nice to have you here, xo.
I like to go for very long walks alone. Last weekend it was very cold, and in the morning barely anyone was in the streets. These are my favourite times to walk: I wore three sweaters, two pairs of pants, a parka, and I walked for four hours. Every time I took off my gloves to write a thought in my phone I lasted five seconds before the phone was back in my pocket. It was perfect. I walked to my old neighbourhood, my old coffee shop, my old park. I passed my old apartment, where I lived for six years. In the last few months of living there I could already feel that life ending, even before things started to change. Every day after work I’d ask him, the person I lived with, to go for a walk with me in the park. We used to do that all the time. But in those last months he usually said no, so eventually I stopped asking. Then I looked forward to walking alone every day.
The park near our apartment was a big park, the biggest one in the city. It’s so big that when you’re in it you forget there’s a city all around you, because all you see is trees and hills and water. On my walks I always had the same destination, and getting there took exactly the length of Donna Summer’s 1978 MacArthur Park Suite. It’s a little over seventeen and a half minutes. I’d listen to the song on the way there, and again on the way back. That was the year I got into disco. I made a six-hour playlist and listened to it constantly — Cerrone, Moroder, Sister Sledge, Kiki Gyan. Disco is just horny virtuosity. My spot in the park, the destination of those walks, was at the edge of the big pond on the west side of the park, lined with soft marsh grasses and massive willow trees. I’d bring a blanket, two red plums, and a book, and I’d read and write until it was too dark to see the words. That was the year I started noticing the colours of flowers. It was September and they were either purple or yellow. On the last day of summer I picked Autumn Goldenrod because it grew everywhere in the park, and I pressed it in my notebook. Another name for it is Golden Fleece, from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. That flower has always reminded me of endings, because the end of summer is always an event.
My favourite class in university was on the cognitive neuroscience of memory. I loved it because my professor, a neuroscientist, was always in awe of her subject. Every class she reminded us that memory is mental time travel. It lets us relive life over and over, and each time we relive it we rewrite it with slightly different words. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that lets us remember. It comes from the ancient Greek word for seahorse, which translates to “horse-like sea monster.” All mammals have two hippocampi, one on each side of the brain; they’re curved and domed a bit like sea monsters. People who’ve lost their hippocampi from an injury or surgery can’t relive their memories. They may remember facts or remote events, but they’ll never re-experience them. They also can’t imagine the future. They can’t fantasize. I remember feeling in awe of that fact — that the neural structures for re-experiencing the past were the same ones for pre-experiencing the future. It was a relatively new scientific finding when I learned it in school, and my professor was so excited to tell us. It changed the way I thought about remembering, about the architecture of memory itself. It meant that imagination, the act of constructing our mental worlds, is in a sense the foundation of mental life. It holds both the past and the future, a confluence of memory and desire, always inside of it.
In my old apartment, the one where I lived near the park, there was a very old man on our floor who owned a mid-90s Ford Taurus. The car was burgundy, and the license plate said “PRIEST”. He rarely drove it. Over six years I saw him very often, but I only ever saw him wear two pieces of clothing. One was a burgundy bathrobe which he wore with slippers on the porch, including in winter. The second was a pair of green coveralls, which he wore with black leather shoes. I saw the inside of his apartment just once. It was a tiny room with a hotplate and blackout curtains over his bright south windows. There was barely any light in the room, and the space was filled almost entirely by an elaborate iron frame bed. He’d invited me to see his unit because the building had bedbugs again, and he was showing me how he’d protected his room. He showed me the thin strips of double-sided tape he’d laid across the middle of his burgundy velvet duvet, and along the edges of his maroon black-out curtains. To be clear, this is not how you deal with bedbugs. I told him how we were managing across the hall, but he waved me away as soon as I spoke. We’d had bedbugs on and off in that apartment for years. My therapist used to ask me why I stayed for so long. I told him it was always like that in old buildings. It was a 1920s mansion converted to a dozen units in the 1970s. Some of the tenants had lived there for decades. I’d found the apartment listing in a print copy of the newspaper at my favourite café on a Sunday. It was the kind of place where things don’t change. Whenever I’ve told my therapist about those years of bedbugs, indoor smokers, and stolen laundry, he’d laugh and say, “Well the location must’ve been fabulous.” And it was, because it was so close to the park.
There are certain spam emails that always bypass my spam filter, and the messages are nonsensical and mysterious. The last one I received was: Sunday nights for a long time past and I am used to him. / Crisis within the next year do write me I feel annoyingly out of. / Hand the rest — New York a girl’s room. They’re meaningless but some of them feel good, to the point where you almost want them to mean something. There’s a pleasure in imagining the mind of a young neural net gleaning text fragments from an endless Web, sweetly discovering salience in scanned e-books, leaked emails, and monitored phone calls. There’s a brief intimacy in each fragment. The messages feel private, and that’s what draws you in. Each sentence is cut off at the most crucial moment — we see suggestions of meaning, but never the whole thing. It’s like watching D’Angelo in the music video for “Untitled (How does it feel)”. It’s a video you can’t forget: the camera edges lower and lower down his flexing naked torso until we think we’re insane, we’re actually screaming, haven’t we already seen it, haven’t we panned down far enough? But we’ll never actually see it. We rewatch the video because we can’t believe it’s true, how can it be possible that we never see his penis? “How does it feel?” D’Angelo moans. He knows exactly how it feels, because in the song he’s screaming too. I feel the same way about the mysterious spam emails. It’s the feeling before reaching a cusp, the hill you think you’ll climb forever without seeing the other side. It’s the edge of what feels unknowable just before you know it.
The lyrics to MacArthur Park feel like nonsense, but they’re beautiful when Donna Summer sings them. Her version, produced by Giorgio Moroder in 1978, is a cover of the original song written by Jimmy Webb in 1968. The lyrics of the chorus are famously annoying: “Someone left the cake out in the rain / I don't think that I can take it / 'Cause it took so long to bake it / And I'll never have that recipe again.” In interviews Webb said the cake was about the end of a love affair. Webb and his girlfriend used to meet for lunch in MacArthur Park, which is in Westlake, Los Angeles. His girlfriend ended up leaving him and marrying another man in the same park. I’ve never been to LA but I might go this summer because a friend in San Diego is getting married. When Webb sings MacArthur Park, the song is full of self-pity. When Summer sings it the song is pure triumph. Listen to her voice, it’s perfect. She nailed the track on the first take, and that’s the take we hear on the recording. All the moments in the song, even the sad ones, revel in the full force of an ending. It’s the feeling after the cusp. Listen to how happy she sounds when it’s over. She sounds so relieved.
Love,
E
P.S. Here’s the Youtube link to MacArthur Park if you don’t have Spotify. Get to the cusp at 1:50 and tell me you haven’t just talked to God. Anyway, see you all next week <3