Uncanny, from the german unheimlich.
Freud uses this to describe something which is out of your control: an animal which eats out of your hand is heimlich, while the one who bites the hand that feeds is unheimlich, uncanny. But also, Freud calls anything which seems to give you that creeping familiar, inability-to-place-something-feeling as uncanny as well. Deja vu could be defined as the sensation of uncanny.
I know this city and I have no clue where I am. For most of my adult life, perhaps it’s better classified as my entrance into higher education, I’ve been mediating between two islands: the island of my childhood and the island which seems to contain my dreams like a neatly gridded Pandora’s box. In fact my whole life has, in a way, been structured around the hour and a half that it takes a person to take the train from the Syosset rail station on Long Island to then transport themselves to Penn Station in the stomach of New York City. Meals revolved around the time it took for my mother and father to return home from their offices in the sky somewhere above Midtown. I would collect monthly commuter rail tickets, trinkets afforded to me during my interning days, like multicolored pearlescent notches in my belt. But now, that spell is broken and I don’t have the intermediary time or boundary that the train had afforded me. There’s always been a mystery which this city has been shrouded in. Until now. Now I pull back the curtain to dive in. There are too many opportunities here, hiding in alleys and under scaffolds I haven’t had the chance to investigate, that I couldn’t pass up. Now, I’m somewhere in the lower intestine of Manhattan, trying to figure out this behemoth. I gather that the best way to tackle the beast is from the inside out. So, this Gepetto has allowed herself to be swallowed up by the terrible dogfish of a city.
I have my hands quite full here. It’s day five. I am playing a juggling game with pins composed of 15 college credits, my acting career and sporadic auditions, an architecture internship two days a week, and the rest of my livelihood. Dare I say, it’s the most difficult stunt I’ve attempted.
The little things are starting to take effect: I’ve never had to cook for myself, alone. I’ve always cooked for a house of family or my honorary family of three boys in Ithaca. And if anyone has shopped at the Trader Joe’s on 14th street, you know precisely how difficult it is to play a life-sized game of ‘snake’ everyday up and down fifteen quirkily Hawaiian themed aisles of foodstuffs, shopping for one.
The city begins to reveal itself in cracks between building facades, fish-like people swerving through commuter streams, hidden between Stonehenge-like arranged sidewalk sales at The Strand.
Never before had I been exposed to all of these facets of everyday life in the city. I suppose I’ve only used it for my own interests, exclusively during the daytime, but now the city uses me and I get to become a cog in the ritualistic machinations of its diurnal urban life.
The studio, in its virginal days of assembly, is beginning to garner its familiar colorings; plants, slide rules, backpacks, coffee machines, and piles of yellow trace papers; crumpled and scribbled on alike.
The first day of work at my internship proved to be immersive as well. Within five minutes of completing the necessary paperwork, I was off adjusting Rhino models for works to be hoisted above Union Square. Being close to home, I’ll be able to watch the project unfold from my window in the East Village, and from my computer screen Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.
And I’ve set out to build a chapel in Greenwich village. Expeditions to learn the sensory geist of the site have resulted in a poem or two.
All in all its proving to be a bigger, better, and stranger Ithaca.
With six succulents gracing my windowsill, one job underway, and studio steadily sailing towards some semblance of a building proposal, I have to say life is looking pretty sunny under the glistening Manhattan skyline.