March 15, 2013.
Bodies in freefall. Levitation. Resurrection.
I know what everyone is thinking. Not another essay on suicide.
You dine on fresh fruit flown at extravagant cost from Chile. But you know you have become enslaved to a new global economy of produce, and so your fruit smacks of slave food. You want to buy it from the Amish farmer down the road, but there is no such farmer, and the road is a freeway, and heavy chains rattle and gall your flesh. What to do?
A woman from New Jersey stopped her black Dodge Durango in traffic on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, vaulted two guardrails and leapt—complete with handbag—200 feet into a surprised swarm of soft gray chill March water molecules, aguas de marco, “waters of March,” babbling in divine Português to the accompaniment of some non-existent Jobim soundtrack.
Needless to say, the water molecules presented a united front against the assault of this alien body hurtling 122 mph in freefall (terminal velocity—look it up on Wikipedia). A solid body, moving at great speed, tends to liquify in contact with stationary water. Splash.
Moral: Walk softly over the earth. Carry a parachute. (Sometimes awkward in the subway.)
The steel architecture of the George Washington Bridge continued to laugh and soar. (“Here steel architecture finally seems to laugh” said Le Corbusier in 1937 of “the world’s most beautiful bridge”—again, Wikipedia.)
In truth, the great GWB can stretch your heart on a rack. It makes the sky seem monstrous blue.
One feels impaled on harp strings, like the unfortunate in that curious painting by Bosch. One’s body ascends face-first to heaven on an elevator of twisted steel cables, which sing in the wind. There is music in the bridge.
Swan dive off the George Washington Bridge. I arrived at 2:05 or 2:10 pm, on my triathlon-rigged carbon Pinarello, bound for a training run in the untrammeled freedom of the New Jersey Palisades. The Palisades: curtains of towering purple granite that fence the mighty waters of the Hudson for twenty miles upriver. The sky was like a huge blue lung that seemed to breathe, collectively, for the entire human race, even for my mother, recently dead of lung cancer and emphysema. Hence the bromide “breath-taking.” Spectacle to revive the dead. Two police officers, already on the scene, shielded their eyes against the inhuman, superhuman glare of the merciless, mineral-blue waters, which spread out like a palace floor—a sea of agate trod by Thetis’ feet—beneath the bridge. Thetis, Greek sea goddess. Clutching the guardrail of the bike-path with one hand, the near officer swiftly released his visored hand from his brow and extended it down-river in a pointing motion like a military salute, mouthing the faint word “There.” “There” expanded deafeningly in the awful vacuum of azure space. A police radio chattered. A police boat raced upriver. A helicopter hovered frantically. Two attractive joggers eyed the policemen shyly. A sharp March wind kissed my face eagerly. It was like passing a funeral cortege, only “closer to life” as art connoisseurs say. Death as exhibition. Blue ruin.
But what lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds! Skittish, colt-like, curvetting effortlessly over heaven’s blue ballroom floor. You would have melted in blue admiration for those mild, melting, nursery-school behaviors.
I wrote a poem to the Hudson’s merciless beauty, dated Valentine’s Day, 2013 (one month before you jumped). I now dedicate it to you.
Hudson River,
George Washington Bridge
Unraveled from your rain spool, O mist-spun
River, a smeared jewel in the noonday sun
Crowned with a feast of aether! Stray clouds pass
Locked enthralled in your high tower of glass
Like parsley flowers strewn on a hillside’s crest,
Spars or ribs in Jupiter’s mighty chest,
Florentine tresses plaited with wildflowers,
Worlds on a dial of planetary hours
Enameled with celestial animals—
Flora and fauna that a light wind mauls.
Crushed like unwrinkled water I fall too
Prostrate under this avalanche of blue.
Thus the hours of day dream on the water,
Night-scales and day-scales of the ocean’s daughter,
And as time creeps toward his lightless deep
Under her steel-gray dragon mantle sleep.
( February 15, 2013)
Sleep well in the coils of the dragon, purse lady. The ghost of your Dodge Durango, dressed as if for a funeral, keeps watch for its mistress beside the guardrail, its passenger-side door still open in stunned disbelief (and no small measure of hurt feelings). I pass it three times a week on my way to the Palisades.
II
Strong and weak forces. Gravitation (die Schwere).
“Sons of the Earth” (Söhne der Erde) like the Rhein and the Hudson—said Friedrick Hölderlin in his hymn “Der Rhein” (1808)—are “alliebend” (all-loving) “wie die Mutter” (like the mother). “So empfangen sie auch mühlos, die Glücklichen, Alles.” So they bear their burden of happiness without effort. Mortal man, by contrast—der sterbliche Mann—“when he bethinks himself on his burden of happiness, and the sky he has heaved on his shoulders with loving arms”—
Wenn er den Himmel, den
Er mit den liebenden Armen
sich auf die Schultern gehäuft,
Und die Last der Freude bedenket—
is “terrified” and “dismayed” (“erschröckt” and “überrascht”).
Denn schwer ist zu tragen
Das Unglück, aber schwerer das Glück.
For happiness is a heavier burden to bear, says Hölderlin, than unhappiness.
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