CROSSING THE GREAT APPLE
This Taxi leaves from Bet-Stuy, a lively and colorful neighborhood in the middle of Brocklyn. Four drops are beginning to fall and the city is filled with the traffic of these hours. This makes the car almost stopped in the middle of a traffic jam crossing the East River by the Brooklyn Bridge. Halfway to the center, the rain intensifies but this does not prevent us from seeing the impressive views of the rain falling on the river's flow. It's his second day in NY, and he will not be able to arrive in time to a jazz session in one of those avant-garde art galleries that open in the South Village, in the well-known neighborhood of Soho. In exchange for not being able to arrive, perhaps the best thing is not to regret and be able to enjoy the views from inside the car.
This yellow and black car enters fully into the island of Manhattan with all its sidewalks, bars and restaurants, libraries, places of all kinds, people of many different cultures. All observed from the slow movement of the car. It's already starting to get dark and this coupled with the rain makes all those unexpected new visions. Each time it fogs the glass more and sculpts it with innumerable drops of water that go down and down without stopping.
Everything becomes too diffuse and it is difficult to be fixed in something concrete, but instead of desisting all the senses are sharpened now directed through the eyes. The eyes open like those of a child who is seeing all that new and unknown world for the first time. So, his head is moving to the sides, backwards fast, now upwards to contemplate those skyscrapers so high that he can not see, stores deformed by glass, people blurred by the rain... Everything more and more subjective. Although their pupils are designed to capture the most beautiful images these do not just settle in the brain. In view of the little success and fatigue, the gaze is then directed towards the only place that was missing, down...
That road is now full of puddles and raindrops are falling on them, also sprinkled by the wheels of this and all other cars, by the steps of the travelers who splash again and again creating an explosion of infinite particles in suspension . It is difficult to say now what this road has become... There, in all that chaos of water movement, that water reflects and points to all those lights of headlights, signs, traffic lights, lampposts, shop windows ... all out of focus, diffused and etéras, bright, intense, full of nuances, warm and cold, that turn on and off as if it were one of those great shows that are celebrated here, on broadway. Flashes that open on the glass as if it were a transparent canvas, taking discontinuous shapes of circles that open and close again to reopen in entirely new ways.
The African-American taxi driver in a red turban tells him something fast he can not understand, something about time he thinks he is listening to, but he's too absorbed in trying to figure out what's going on outside to pay attention to that now. He is totally caught and fascinated by all that interminable action that is happening ...
Now, trying to capture through sight all those objects that are happening so fast, is like trying to catch and retain each and every one of those drops that explode against the asphalt. That city and all those streets have been diluted in rain and become light, color and shapes, which are impossible to conform through the crystal of the mind. Now, in here, I could be in any taxi in the world and it would be the same, in Oslo, Sao Paulo or Buenos Aires. The notion of city, taxi, street, people has disappeared. All these are like drops of water that, while falling, are diluted in this species of vast ocean of consciousness. The only thing there is is conscience, sensitive, innocent and curious. Each drop dynamite all the senses to turn them into pure feeling bright and total.
Beyond what I had foreseen that afternoon, I could never have imagined such enjoyment, pure spectacle of light and color, unexpected and improvised, surprising and fascinating, but most incredible of all, tremendously simple, natural and ordinary.
