On Site - Grand Central Terminal
I often wonder at what age do we form our own character. We develop a character, or rather, ideal image of ourselves like an old fashioned B/W photograph… a wonderful image that crystallizes and sticks, perhaps for the rest of our days. Lacan coined a child’s mirror stage (the first time a child recognizes her/himself in a mirror…and certain processes are triggered) but I am talking about the adult, internal mirror.
It is a good thing.
Whether or not we can always express it, our ideal image is a bookmark that we can set in and out of the pages of life. To reflect…reset…confront…comfort...question. (I am not talking about an ephemeral FB image that we create.)
I think mine was around 18 years old. I was walking along ruins at Delphi with a notebook in my hand. I described what I saw: fragments of walls, a shimmering sea, marble columns, a road. I couldn’t express anything deeply, but I sensed that I felt deeply. And I liked this feeling. It continued to emerge while I was in the Peace Corps and shared adventures, secrets and histories in far removed places.
This image - free, far away, adventurous, driven by chance but carried by trust - at a certain point engulfed me. It is certainly not everyone’s ideal image character…as yours might be entirely different and even the reverse.
With it, though, I feel like a bit of a ghost sometimes, walking in New York City, trying to hold on to a piece of the crowd, while feeling a distant river rushing through my fingers.
Don’t get me wrong. I am just like everyone else, here, actually. You wouldn’t notice a thing. No different…really. I am probably even looking at my IPhone when you pass by me on the street.
But often, I break and run into Grand Central Terminal to look up at the city’s painted stars. How to navigate the seas with the stars? I still really want to know this.
Standing in the center, next to the giant clock, I wait until the light show goes on. And I twirl around looking up, smiling, feeling euphoric here in Grand Central Terminal. Here, where we are all "alone - together" the stars are reversed. All of them - except for the great hunter, Orion.
Grand Central Terminal ceiling. Photo taken October 2013.