I love the subway. Even when it’s crowded. I love the solitude in the crowd. I like the act of faith of hundreds of bodies pressing into a machine so far underground. I like that it has mostly served us well for over a hundred years. I love it when it’s empty. I even probably love it when I’m cursing it, when it’s letting me down. It’s like family. Or it feels like home. Familiar.
I remember riding the subway as a child. My mother holding my hand on the platform. The train literally covered in fantastic, colorful graffiti. I remember one rush hour when I was a young girl, mom clutching me as we squeezed in (or out)–and my shoe, one shoe, was left behind–on the platform, or in the car. I don’t remember what happened after that. I loved falling asleep on mom’s shoulder when we were riding the subway on the way home. Yes, I loved the subway as a child, but I was also taught that it was dangerous, and sometimes, late at night, I have felt that fear.
I love watching people on the subway. I like the sociality. But I like the solitude you can also find in that intimate, public space. I like reading and writing and knitting on the subway. I like doing mindfulness meditation on the subway. My mind often blooms on the subway. Poems or ideas or things to be written bubble up. I take them down. Revisit them later. Leave some as is, subway artifacts, and take others up, tinker, expand.
What is it about the subway that stirs creativity? The noise-cancelling, rhythmic whoosh and rocking–is it like being in the womb? Being underground, in the subway, does it tap the unconscious in a distinctive way?
It’s not just that creativity breeds there. Violence too. I have seen the spontaneous eruption of hatred, racism, burst into physical violence. I have seen teenagers fighting. Children being spanked and hit. Women too. I have sometimes tried to intervene with one sentence, as if to bring someone to their senses. I have then wondered if this didn’t make things worse later.
I’ve seen and been involved in acts of kindness on the subway, too. And moments of shared humor. Or just shared moments. A smile. A conversation. A performance. It’s all there. In the subway. What racist pitcher John Rocker hated about the subway–the mixture and mass of humanity in all of its difference, and glory, and failing, and rage, and vulnerability–I love.
What kind of song of himself, of our world, would Whitman have penned on the subway?
Do you have a subway story? Or an unexpected place that tickles your creative bone? I’ll close out this ditty and turn it over to you with a poem that sprouted up on the subway.
COMMUTERS
By what right do I
conjure you,
stir you from sleep,
snag your attention,
turn you around?Would an invitation
blunt the blow
reduce the weight
the freight
of solitude?Oh, unintended companions,
by rude strokes,
I pray to you on this downtown C.Tired man, pants rumpled,
I worry for your shoe untied.
I thank you, woman and child,
holding hands, blinking,
silent in the crushing rush
of our wondrous speed.
I see you, young man, opposite corner,
steady in the shelter of a book.
And you and you and you –
all signposts of everything else there is.Like this, I come to my stop.
