Letter from New York

The spiritual is stronger than the physical. The soul is permanent, the flesh transient. Two great lies of civilization. Two great lies New York is built on.

If you were to construct a history from those lies, they would not be lies, but manifestations of the work ethic that built the five boroughs from marshes and stone, transforming the physical, making it accord to a principle caught in the soaring verticality of New York, with its skyscrapers jutting towards heaven and defying the gravity of earth. They would be embodiments of the spirit of commerce, the sharp trading acumen of Peter Minuit, fleecing the Manhattans of their island, and through Wall Street taking that ethic to the world. They would be the core of the will to master the environment, to lay straight street and rail over curved land, and to extend that will across a continent, concentrating its wealth and power into 22 square miles of hard rock, the greatest city in the world.

If you believed that the spiritual is stronger than the physical and the soul is permanent and the flesh transient, you would believe that the greatness of New York was the expression of the will of its people, gathering, pushing, building, trading, in accord to a divine principle, be it God, History or Markets.

I believed it eighteen years ago, when I first came to New York to play at CBGBs, the famous punk club in the Bowery, decrepit then and decrepit now, a filthy dive of a place with bad drinks and bad sound, all of which is irrelevant, because the spirit there is unique and transcends its tattered physicality. I believed then that out of such dives came the pure spirit, the hardcore that could purify and transform the corruption and ignominy of a place like New York, and America, the province of New York, built on slave trade and slave rapes, the genocide of the savages, brutal exploitation and industrial feudalism, the post-Gutenberg indoctrination.

I thought myself a revolutionary. I believed we would change the world, because the world could be changed by those who had divined the true spirit within themselves and held to it, uncorrupted by the world, by petty Mammon, by easy compromise. We made music so loud, so hard, so fast, that only true acolytes joined us. We were marking out boundaries. Establishing a community of the spirit. Building an army. Or so I thought.

Schopenhauer said that music communicated directly to the soul, that it is an invisible appeal to an invisible essence. His Platonism was to me electric eighteen years ago, when I was afire with the ambition that me, my little self, and my great music would be a catalyst for change, for recovering the spirit and idealism that made America the new world. We had discovered the hardcore of rock ‘n’ roll, that pure American music. We were playing it for all the world to hear, an appeal to the like-minded: anti-authoritarian, freedom loving, determinedly opposed to the evils of old politics, old money, old vices. And all the while, it was right before me and I could not see it: rock ‘n’ roll communicates to the body, not the soul. It is music of the flesh, not the spirit.

Well, times change. In Schopenhauer’s day no one would have questioned the transcendent narrative of New York’s greatness, the manifest destiny of America. Whitman asserted it absolutely. Josiah Royce saw all history conforming to its shape. Little more than fifty years ago Sandberg and Dos Passos penned odes to the transcendent genius of Americans, busy reshaping the physical in accordance to some mystic plan. A generation ago Martin King redefined the meaning of the black experience in terms spiritual. And Reagan, according to script, touted a transcendent America relentlessly.

They are the same, the celebrants and critics of America: they believe the spirit transforms the flesh. The celebrants laud a civilization that can zip up its pants and get down to work; the critics damn a society so crassly material that it forgets its most noble goals. But none of it is true.

Slowly, in the centuries since the Reformation insisted that the human community was possessed of a divine spirit and the good Protestant burghers built New Amsterdam, the physical has intruded. The old power, the sheer force of the world, has undermined all the heavenly pretensions. Life is appetite, greed, dominance, sex, material need and material satisfaction, the body, the collection of salt and water and fading cell and the spark of intelligence absolutely fixed to it—ending, like everything physical, in decay. And Spirit has protested, but the evidence weighs heavy on the side of Material, as does medicine and railroads and Darwin and spaceflight and Nietzsche and all the therapeutic and expressive art of this century and 80 million souls slaughtered in the last hundred years.

So by that material standard, New York is not so much the embodiment of a divine spirit that settled a continent, but a sheer physical place. It is steel and stone and asphalt and electric light and all of it sensory. Buildings that loom above you. Traffic that hurdles past. It is overwhelming. You feel small. There is no horizon.

And on the cusp of the new millennium I am in New York during a political scandal where the president of the United States is pilloried for his inability to master his flesh. Clinton is supposed to be above all that, but he is not, no more than any of us.

Well, the material grinds you down. With time, it becomes more and more the center force in life. It humbles you. You learn. Which, I guess, is a clever excuse for my current opinion of New York, eighteen years after I came here to destroy this decrepit place, to cleanse it by sound and word and pure will: I like it. I enjoy the city. It’s better than it was eighteen years ago. Cleaner, less menacing. I walked through Chinatown and enjoyed the bustle; drank, for old time’s sake (and for Dylan Thomas) at the White Horse, jogged through Central Park and for the first time saw the magnificent view of the city from the north side of the reservoir.

I suspect that New York is no different than it was, that were I in the same circumstance as eighteen years ago it would still be dirty and menacing and worthy of destruction. But by luck or curse I am richer and can do more and so experience a different city than I saw from the dives. And most important: I am older. My gut sags, despite my (spirited) efforts to keep it taunt. Physical surmounts spirit. I am caught in the material.

My last night in New York--Saturday night in New York--Gitter and I were going out on the town like old times, to dinner and then CBGBs, to hear the great punk band Pegboy. We went to a Chinese restaurant in the village and by the second bite my stomach was in an uproar, and my body began to shake from a deep interior place, where the soul should be. And I hung on for old time’s sake until a bar in St. Mark’s Place by which time I could not go on. I could not will myself.

I did not see Pegboy. I spent the night puking in my hotel.

In New York, and in America, the province of New York, the vast multitude still cling to what they know is not true: The spiritual is stronger than the physical. The soul is permanent, the flesh transient. New York is an expression of the American Will.

They believe this because although we live in the twilight of the Reformation, politics—despite the appetites of Clinton, JFK, Ike, FDR; of countless political philanderers, shills, and professional venalists--remains the ability to manipulate people by convincing them there are things greater than the physical, that the spirit is manifest in the triumph of the will; in a death to the glory of God; in the enlightened mastery of the flesh and the transformation of the physical. But they also believe because it helps them before the end, because then they are not dependent upon the material for meaning, because then existence is more than the simple play of force and power, of hunger, of sex, of the incessant din of Midtown.

But now, to me, eighteen years after I came to New York with all my conviction and force of will, the transcendent perspective is a diminishing, a lessening of the quality of the day. It undermines the simple pleasure of being, suggesting the view from Central Park is not magnificent enough (compared to heaven) and the lights of Time Square are not exciting enough (compared to paradise). The measure fails me because, in a truth that is everywhere evident, men age and grow weak, the beauty of women fades, and people get cancer and die for no reason of their making, soul and all.

Meaning that now I can live without defying all the world that is and all the death in it.