proximoception (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
proximoception) wrote2013-02-11 03:32 pm
proximoception) wrote2013-02-11 03:32 pm
(no subject)
I'm still new enough to subways to be delighted by them, like:
1. When you're in one where the cars are continuous and it goes around a bend and instead of being one of a dozen scattered, sullen strangers in an odorless Waffle House you're suddenly in a near-infinite, somehow beautifully bright corridor - the movement is like when the street folds in Inception, but inexpensively horizontal, or like when a mirrored door suddenly swings to face a mirror on the wall. Except with people. The ones a car or two away always seem so happy.
2. When a workman is in the tunnel and his head is right above the windowline and glides by, hard-hatted, looking blandly in at you sans body in the middle of dark nowhere.
3. When you pull to a platform but don't realize for a moment that you've stopped because you're facing a train moving the other way. I love the illusion that everything is always in motion (a perfect tonic for our senses' customary lie that everything isn't) as much as I love slopes, clouds, tall buildings making the world seem a place of levels (correcting the invisible air's lie that it isn't). Maybe the endless corridor effect is like this too, proving it always goes on past where you'd thought.
I'm so new that while waiting I stare down the tunnel where the train will come. Which sometimes contaminates people nearby before they notice and correct themselves back to staring ahead like a proper urbanite.
I love being responsible for behavioral contagion. I can't match Julie's creating a standing ovation for Richard Dawkins, but my best wasn't bad: at the Vatican (die sad and soon, vile froggy ex-pope) La Pieta is near the entrance in a corner, and the day we came someone had shoved an empty coatrack behind the glass with it. Literally no one was looking at it, but I of course made a beeline for the one thing that really matters in that building, dome included. My purposiveness created some kind of tourist-sucking effect and in minutes there was a modest crowd. Wasn't as neat as seeing La Pieta, but it's neat to remember that I cancelled out that artcockblocking coatrack.
For some reason that reminds me of this one time on highway 1 on the coast near Salinas when the car in front of us, an old woman from what we could see, was going ridiculously slowly but could not be passed (I forget why, maybe construction or traffic coming the other way?). We could see the line of cars back up miles and miles behind us on the successive shorefolds as the hours went by. We decided she was the secret source of all traffic, like that Douglass Adams character who unknowingly caused all British rain.
1. When you're in one where the cars are continuous and it goes around a bend and instead of being one of a dozen scattered, sullen strangers in an odorless Waffle House you're suddenly in a near-infinite, somehow beautifully bright corridor - the movement is like when the street folds in Inception, but inexpensively horizontal, or like when a mirrored door suddenly swings to face a mirror on the wall. Except with people. The ones a car or two away always seem so happy.
2. When a workman is in the tunnel and his head is right above the windowline and glides by, hard-hatted, looking blandly in at you sans body in the middle of dark nowhere.
3. When you pull to a platform but don't realize for a moment that you've stopped because you're facing a train moving the other way. I love the illusion that everything is always in motion (a perfect tonic for our senses' customary lie that everything isn't) as much as I love slopes, clouds, tall buildings making the world seem a place of levels (correcting the invisible air's lie that it isn't). Maybe the endless corridor effect is like this too, proving it always goes on past where you'd thought.
I'm so new that while waiting I stare down the tunnel where the train will come. Which sometimes contaminates people nearby before they notice and correct themselves back to staring ahead like a proper urbanite.
I love being responsible for behavioral contagion. I can't match Julie's creating a standing ovation for Richard Dawkins, but my best wasn't bad: at the Vatican (die sad and soon, vile froggy ex-pope) La Pieta is near the entrance in a corner, and the day we came someone had shoved an empty coatrack behind the glass with it. Literally no one was looking at it, but I of course made a beeline for the one thing that really matters in that building, dome included. My purposiveness created some kind of tourist-sucking effect and in minutes there was a modest crowd. Wasn't as neat as seeing La Pieta, but it's neat to remember that I cancelled out that artcockblocking coatrack.
For some reason that reminds me of this one time on highway 1 on the coast near Salinas when the car in front of us, an old woman from what we could see, was going ridiculously slowly but could not be passed (I forget why, maybe construction or traffic coming the other way?). We could see the line of cars back up miles and miles behind us on the successive shorefolds as the hours went by. We decided she was the secret source of all traffic, like that Douglass Adams character who unknowingly caused all British rain.
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In Gothenburg, on the other hand, you can not only take the tram to the seaside and continue by steamboat to one of the archipel islands strewn out like Wotan candy on the water that is sometimes so clear, cosmic vertigo comes closer than comfortable on the same ticket but also take a tunnel straight out into open space. If you start in one of the suburbs I used to live you go through more mountain than you´d realised you were living on top of and then suddenly the troll dance ends and you are being hurled across a fjord like a projectile, facing nothingness but moving fast across to the other side. Münchhausen would have loved it.
Staring into the tunnel to make the tunnelbana come quicker one lonely night in Stockholm, I heard the Devil laugh. I looked around me but couldn´t see him or anyone else, for that matter. I was the lonest traveller waiting for the last subway that never came. I could have stood there til the end fo time or morning broke but the second time the Devil laughed at me with an echo, I knew, I had heard him and was not crazy. It did happen. When I came up from his waiting hall I saw the man in the ticket booth smiling to himself at reading a thick book placed upside down no doubt, beside the microphone. I hope, he is well paid by his boss.
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