Brief Note on the Satanic Portal on 23rd Street

For some reason Madison Square Park always gets satanic pieces of public art that serves as taunts at or challenges to that very public, to which I belong. Last month it was the cube, one-upping Astor Place’s by actually complaining in whirrs and midi ejaculations as it bore the public’s abuse. Like all real New Yorkers, I visit the Empire State Building three to four times a week and, commuting home, I walk down to Union Square to greet the red racoons who live by playground and hear the Hare Krishna’s latest drop before getting on the subway, never able to fully steel myself against the creativity that assails me in the middle. Now, in a pedestrian flow zone, there’s a permanent communal video call to Dublin, to some traffic plaza that no doubt conceals just off frame their own LEGO store. Yesterday it was shut down (temporarily?) for “inappropriate behavior” that I can proudly say came from the New York side. My question is: what else?

Communication, which was already at the risk of becoming a common trough of clichés, is degraded even more. Any humane transmission is immediately foreclosed upon by the nature of this device—the stakes are raised at once by the impotence it imposes: what violent outburst, what extravagant vulgarity is needed to move these blinking, gawking idiots (of which you understand yourself to be only a mirror). At first, all you can do is wave: but the waves of your anonymous doppelganger register only with the desperate legibility by which we give little stories to caged chimps or to the infinite boredom of boxed horses: “Oh look! They’re in love!” At a pair of proximate apes, or; “He’s nervous for the big race!” To the wet and idle eye of an equine victim to sport. These are the self-aware consolating fantasies of the guilty, the guilt of the human race to a world it has emptied of communication, replaced only with the dull recognition of the purposive motion which our most authoritative biologists have promised us is the crown of life’s definition. 

And yet as you find yourself waving into the portal, by a reflex more idiotic than the whinny or the simian grimace, you realize that not only language here, but gesture is empty: the tics and leaps, the quotidian dance and idiosyncratic gaits of the world of our great grandmothers, all over these have been replaced with the conquest of the able, the homogenous repertoire of locomotion that leaves you unable to muster or shape a bodily eruption that can express anything more than the anonymous hallway’s mandatory “Hello.” “How you doing?” These carefully scrubbed of any deviance that could resemble divulgence, which would be received like the public disclosure of a rash.

How envious—and how, then, resentful—do you become of the deranged or perverted freaks of this city you have tried to ignore, whose lurch and outburst contains something you once only recognized as danger but, now that you find your piddling repertoire of gesticulation immediately exhausted, you shamefully wish you could wear—just for this moment, just to reach the idiot on the other side. But you can’t. And how painful is that phantom limb? Besides, you know some cop, some social worker would drag you away (and have dragged them away, you realize, glancing around.) So you stand there, waving, wondering how it came to be that nothing can be communicated other than “I’m insane” or “I’m a criminal.” How it came to be that, even if you could perform, against all prohibition, habit, discipline and practice, some at last articulate human plea, it could only be received as “inappropriate behavior”?

The Flatiron building has been dressed in modest scaffolding for over two years, so perhaps these increasingly satanic public works of art are a reaction of the community board to the perceived threat of their intersection’s obsolescence. Our confidence in physicality changed the moment that building designers chose to sever the ancient link that was an exterior’s reflection of its interior activities. The architect Rem Koolhaas calls this “lobotomy.” It has become so much the norm that we fail to see anything sinister in this severance which has graduated into concealment. The architectural term “facade” has, likewise, taught us its colloquial meaning as if each new structure is actually a public monument to the lie. The increasingly conspiratorial tone of society is just one effect of its physical plant’s increasingly opaque incarnation, and the contemporary glass walls that serve as puns on information technology or politics’ openness are as impenetrable as mirrors: they only reflect our less-curious faces up close or taunt the sky by showing it its own conquered infinity. So our gestures too, our glass facade, hide the shady financial business within with smiles as white as any stucco ornament. The Flatiron building should have been a laundromat. 

The incoherent inland lighthouse on the east side of the park, the celebrated Met Life Tower, calls us to beach our sense of reality there and be shattered against the fantasy of Manhattan’s shores. Tourists come here to see Dublin: why not? It is already contained in the dream of this island. “Italy” is permanently installed on the opposite street corner, to add Ireland is trivial. People travel thousands of miles to visit only to find their home for sale, they just can’t afford it here.

It started with radio, which came first to conquer loneliness. This portal is only the latest technology of communication that reveals, abruptly, its end. And in the end, this is all we expect from each other: what can be transmitted. The blur or interference is first ignored as an irritation on the way to cheap humanity, then presumed nothing. Just compression. Just touch. So we are diminished. When I first saw the portal, I was hopeful and afraid: it recalled the communal scenes, disappearing right as I came of age, that were earlier the privilege of the poor, forced to share a television set or watch a massacre across the world unfold in the cheery window display of a P.C. Richards, on a sidewalk made more public by reaction. But this show was simply too boring: it’s just us. So I read the little blurb on its flipside, remembering that art sometimes comes with instructions. Imagine my surprise, a human being, learning that this desperate device was put here to humanize me?

Last night, I walked past the punished portal, enclosed by a hexagon of police barricades, its bit of pedestrian plaza abandoned. It wasn’t off: the face glowed white light, like how Borges describes blindness. Approaching as close I could, I undid the sternum strap on my backpack and placed it on the curb. Reader, I cannot explain the sublime vulgarity of the spasm I invented there, rising to the dumb challenge of this machine, which had merely asked us to be human and therefore earned our hate and dread. And only then did I miss my anonymous Irish friends; and, on this side, the bovine, hungry crowd. Bring the portal back online. I’m ready.

(for my brother, who lives there.)