The Streets Remember Our Steps is an observation by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, January 09, 2008. It is part of Journal.
Watch where you walk.
1. Delirious New York, 1978.
The massive grid of Manhattan, stretching from Houston Street to 220th Street, was imposed as part of a drive to transform a frontier island of hen houses and goatherds into the Empire City. Rem Koolhaas1 called the 1811 model of the grid, “the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, nonexistent.”
A map of New York City released in 1803.
Beneath that grid, though, there’s a tangle of small streets that still follow the plan inscribed upon maps from the 18th century; roads that were laid out atop dirt tracks that replaced footpaths used by the Indians, which were, ultimately, widened animal trails.
Those streets are an earthen memory, preserved in tarmac, of a time before there were Europeans in the New World, maybe to a time before mankind reached this island at all.
It occurred to me one day, while walking along one of those streets, that our minds are made in much the same way. A memory revisited, a skill practiced, a mantra chanted, a mood sustained — our neural pathways grow in proportion to the frequency with which they’re traversed. One’s mind contains, physically, a map of one’s life.
How wise is it, then, to construct a neural superhighway between one’s thumbs and eyes via dedicated video gaming? Or to build only a dusty dirt track to serve the entire continent of poetry?
For myself, I’m resolved to grant melancholy a minor access road with a locked gate, whereas joy shall have an interstate.