Subway

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.

33 comments

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    • srkp23 on May 2, 2008 at 06:19
      Author

    I should have been writing something else, but I wrote this instead.

    Ok, back to work, in a sec …

    • H2D on May 2, 2008 at 07:19

    I’m a huge train nerd.  So much so in fact, that I actually moved from NJ to Oregon via Amtrak.

    I have too many creative spots to count, but back in NJ I had a spot in the woods along a rarely-used freight-line spur that I used to just hang out back there for entire days sometimes, and I even slept back there more than once when times were rough as a teenager.  Later I branched out a bit, and came to love oceans.  And then fell in love with rural Wyoming, and I will eventually retire on some land out there one day…

    Ah, but back to trains.  The SEPTA Market-Frankford Blue Line in my favorite big city in the world.  A subway and an el.  I used to do my best writing on the trip from Newark to Trenton via NJTransit, then a quick walk across the street over to the NJT Riverline Light Rail; take that to Camden, then get out and walk downstairs to the PATCO at Broadway / Walter Rand and take that up and across the bridge and then back underground again to 8th Street in Philly…

    John Rocker’s a total prick, and one of my few regrets is that I never got to boo that bastard on one of my trips out to Shea when I lived out that way.

    I mostly take buses nowadays, but I currently live only a few blocks from the large Union Pacific Brooklyn freight yard out here in Portland, Oregon.  It’s not quite like Conrail’s Oak Island yards back in Newark, but it’s still beautiful and inspiring in it’s own way nonetheless.  At least two or three times a week, I get this urge to just jump on one of those trains and take it to wherever it ends up…

  1. and this sweet moment…

    Tired man, pants rumpled,

    I worry for your shoe untied

    i remember a tall texan with the 10-gallon hat, standing, his hand around the pole. we didn’t notice him at first… until he said, in a big, booming Texas drawl:::

    Gawd, you people do this eve_ry_day?

    we all looked up from our NY Times, books, or morning stupor… and then, on cue, we all slide right back into NY form, without so much as missing a beat.

    I was an occasional morning commuter, leaving my boyfriend’s studio in Brooklyn Heights on a Monday morning to catch an early train upstate to get to work.  i never forgot that guy…

  2. in places like the subway…that there are as many different places to go and ways to feel as there are people..and that, for that moment, our paths intersect.  there’s something comforting about the parts of our journey we get to share….

  3. and our asshole Repub Governor just vetoed the next development of mass transit in the area (BIG story around these parts, but not so interesting elsewhere.)

    What your essay reminds me of is a few years ago when I lived in a duplex in a pretty rough neighborhood in Minneapolis. I went to the local laundromat regularly because we didn’t have facilities in the duplex.

    While it was a pain in the neck, it was also the most interesting slice of life I’ve ever been exposed to. At first I would take things to read while I waited, then I didn’t bother. The stories on display were always much more interesting.

    Just one as an example, I remember regularly seeing girls coming in with a small backpack of dirty clothes. From a distance, they looked aged and sophisticated. But on closer review, they were probably in their late teens. Single young girls, a few dirty clothes, the weight of the ages in their heavily made-up eyes…the story wrote itself.

    This takes place on a bus, but reminds us to look a bit closer at the stories of people’s lives.

     

  4. from the Upper West Side down to Coney Island. Somewhere in Brooklyn, a man, maybe 55 or 60, short grey hair, well built, stands up and just starts singing at the top of his lungs, in some Eastern European language (Russian, Polish?), very passionately and beautifully. The whole car just watches him until he finishes. And then he sits back down, without looking at or saying anything to anyone. Left a stunned silence, completely transformed the atmosphere in the subway car.

    I’ve seen so many characters on the New York subway who had something to say to the ready-made audience there — saxophone players, evangelists, political people.

    Crowd a million New Yorkers into a small space and there will nearly always be some human drama or comedy to watch.

    I haven’t seen quite the same thing in the subways of other cities.

  5. … subway memory: The car was really crowded and hot and the air conditioning wasn’t working … and then we stopped between stations.

    You could strongly feel the vibe, folks getting frustrated, ready to fight.  A bit of shoving, a little pushing.

    I looked over, there was a tall, elderly man standing in the crush, a very kind look on his face.  He smiled and looked down at one of the passengers, a woman, a stranger, and said very softly “shall we scream?”

    It was really amazing … how his attitude changed the atmosphere in the car.  The woman laughed, everyone calmed down, even those who probably hadn’t heard what the man said.

    Ripple effect!  lol

    Great essay, srkp23 … brings back many memories.  I take the train every day and I feel the same way as you, it’s a great place to meditate and just take things in.

    • OPOL on May 2, 2008 at 16:07

    I could get virtually anywhere in Paris and the surrounding environs for pocket change.  The system was easy to learn and very efficient.  I remember there being an accordion player on the route I took most often who played the most beautiful and haunting melodies.  I still remember how the tile-covered tunnels would amplify the music and how it would echo through the hallways providing an aural backdrop that was somehow quintessentially French.  I fell in love with Paris and le Metro was a big part of the romance.

  6. doesn’t have a subway, but it does have a light rail station in a tunnel that is the “deepest transit station in North America, and the second-deepest in the world”.

    My biggest problem with trains is they tend to ease me into sleep…

  7. …the F or B to work.  The A from the airport.  Others at need, but those a lot.  Love the scream of the brakes and the long long way away you can see the light.  The little furry baby rats, or are they mice?  It used to be my waiting hobby, seeing how many little baby super furry rodents I could spot.  Amazing how often you’d see them, my little bit of nature in NY.  One night in Prospect park I was waiting for the train and counting baby rats (I was up to 3) and I looked up to see (in embarrasment) that there was someone else on the platform.  I noticed he was studying the grouting, looking for (I think) empty spaces.  Waiting for the train or an OCD diagnosis, both of us.

    Taking the train back from Sally’s, on 43rd, before Rudy cleaned up Times Square.  At two ayem, a nonpassing tranny in a short skirt.  The looks of desire that I knew, if they came too close, could become something else.  Alone on the car with one or two men, or no one.  Wanting to get home safe, thundering beneath the city, coming up at Essex.

    And I had a great love of my life lie down in front of the F.  Four cars.  Lived, is well, is happier than I.  But that’s another story; I only mention it for completeness. And because it makes the brakes sound different, when I’m back in the city.  

  8. About a million years ago, my grandfather and dad took me to my first baseball game.  I was about 9.  Warren Spahn was pitching for the Milwaukee Braves; Willie Mays was playing for the Giants.  It was a night game at the Polo Grounds (in upper Manhattan).  We got there, of course, by subway.  The train began from what would later become WTC (Cortlandt Street?), the end of the “Tubes” (later “PATH”) was the start of the line to the Polo grounds, where the E begins now.  The train had wicker seats.  And ceiling fans.  And the seats faced each other.  We sat in the last seat of the last car of the train.

    Eventually, we emerged from wet, crowded, subterranean darkness, through milling crowds, to the upper deck of the Polo Grounds behind home plate.  Before me, an amazing contrast: the most green, most velvet, most sparkling ball field I had ever seen, with hot lights and crisp white lines, filled with my boyhood heroes.  The sounds of baseball.  The smells of baseball. It just doesn’t get any better.  

    • pico on May 3, 2008 at 21:12

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

    Petals on a wet, black bough.

    The Moscow metro is something to be seen.  Some of the stations were built with the most absurd luxury – chandeliers, fine art, marble…  It’s nuts.

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