Chicago turns cold, and bright
Chicago is an embodied practice. Yesterday, it turned very cold, with a high around 10 degrees and a razor-edged wind. When it is this cold, even a 25 mph wind seems like a hurricane. The wind bites down the street and improbably turns a corner where you do. I walk a mile to the train station in Wilmette, catch the Metra to Davis Street stop in Evanston, and then pick up the el to go downtown. These train platforms are bleak in cold weather, but the CTA has installed little heater lamps in sheltered niches. Ben calls them "chick warmers," because they are like incubators.
I am bundled up in a turtleneck sweater, parka, hat, and gloves, but the cold penetrates through every unprotected space, cheeks, nose, chin. Still, there are businessmen wearing only their suits, no coat, hat, or gloves. Teenagers in sneakers with no socks and sweatshirt jackets, unzipped. We pass a woman in a short skirt and light jacket. It is incomprehensible. No human metabolism can compensate for the difference between 98º and 9º. The overcast sky and shortened days mean twilight by 3:30, and the city looks drab and bleak from the el platforms where we shiver and wait. We hurl ourselves into the overheated el cars with gratitude, and study the advertisements for Community Colleges, the Chicago Housing Authority, syphilis testing.
So when we emerge at Grand and make our way up the dingy stairway to the city streets and find ourselves on Michigan Avenue we are dazzled. The broad street is lined with trees glittering with tiny lights and the stores are huge, their vast windows filled with brilliant clothing, exotic games, outdoor adventure gear, diamond jewelry, bestselling books. The sidewalks are mobbed with shoppers: women striding along in full length mink coats, children in candy-colored snowsuits, families stopped to take a head count and gaze at a window filled with computers and cameras. Buses and cars can barely move or turn through this rushing river. In the distance we can see the fantasy of Millennium Park and the Art Institute. Here you can find the perfect chocolates, sweater, party shoes, stereo, pocketknife, sofa, DVD. Everything seems much larger than your dreams, and more beautiful. It is a shared hallucination of a life more gracious, more luminous and spacious than our minds can grasp. Yet that more spacious, brilliant life is all about us every moment. It is there for the taking, leaving our credit cards intact. It cannot be purchased or sold, given or taken away. It surpasses and includes every fevered dream of late capitalism, socialism, fascism, fundamentalism, and every other ism. It is simply this now.
I am bundled up in a turtleneck sweater, parka, hat, and gloves, but the cold penetrates through every unprotected space, cheeks, nose, chin. Still, there are businessmen wearing only their suits, no coat, hat, or gloves. Teenagers in sneakers with no socks and sweatshirt jackets, unzipped. We pass a woman in a short skirt and light jacket. It is incomprehensible. No human metabolism can compensate for the difference between 98º and 9º. The overcast sky and shortened days mean twilight by 3:30, and the city looks drab and bleak from the el platforms where we shiver and wait. We hurl ourselves into the overheated el cars with gratitude, and study the advertisements for Community Colleges, the Chicago Housing Authority, syphilis testing.
So when we emerge at Grand and make our way up the dingy stairway to the city streets and find ourselves on Michigan Avenue we are dazzled. The broad street is lined with trees glittering with tiny lights and the stores are huge, their vast windows filled with brilliant clothing, exotic games, outdoor adventure gear, diamond jewelry, bestselling books. The sidewalks are mobbed with shoppers: women striding along in full length mink coats, children in candy-colored snowsuits, families stopped to take a head count and gaze at a window filled with computers and cameras. Buses and cars can barely move or turn through this rushing river. In the distance we can see the fantasy of Millennium Park and the Art Institute. Here you can find the perfect chocolates, sweater, party shoes, stereo, pocketknife, sofa, DVD. Everything seems much larger than your dreams, and more beautiful. It is a shared hallucination of a life more gracious, more luminous and spacious than our minds can grasp. Yet that more spacious, brilliant life is all about us every moment. It is there for the taking, leaving our credit cards intact. It cannot be purchased or sold, given or taken away. It surpasses and includes every fevered dream of late capitalism, socialism, fascism, fundamentalism, and every other ism. It is simply this now.
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