There were some vaguely illuminating discoveries in the 45-minute journey, seemingly granted to me by my literal shield of secrecy, beneath which I could stare and think as I pleased with no fear of interruption. I was candid, and let my eyes rather than my head lead the way in forming my experience. It started on the platform at 145th as I was waiting for the 1. It was bitterly cold and dark down there, it felt like the basement of Life, and I was in a jacket that gave me the sumptuous silhouette of the Michelin man. Shades firmly on, taking up half my face. I paced warily around the platform, stumbling here and there as I could barely see anything underground. I broke out into a little jiggle dance to keep warm, accidentally veering into a group of teenagers who may have been increasingly worried about me (were they? Couldn't see em!).
The train came and I sat down. As usually a pretty calm and unnotable-looking person, I am not familiar with inciting fear in people (not to my knowledge), save maybe for in the 2nd grade when I was top dog on the Four Square circuit, or my time in France working with Maria, the sheltered and cloyingly maternal Danish girl who worried that I was a nihilist (was it because I justified not wearing my seatbelt that one time? This musing and more for another blog post). Although it may be exaggerating to say that I instilled fear in people on the subway, I felt a mild confusion from people directed at me, the slightest kind of disorientation as they glanced over, once, twice, like they weren't sure what I was about. "People are trying to measure how weird/troubled I am," I reported in my iPhone notes in realtime.
There seems to be a "if I can't see you, you can't see me" kind of assumption when I wore the sunglasses. People gave me longer stares, dead in my face, just as I, unknown to them, gave back at them. I was inciting the opposite of "benefit of the doubt": call it "drawback of the doubt," singlehandedly creating the creeping feeling in each person that my Easter Island face was staring at not the guy next to you, but YOU. Yeah, YOU.
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| What i felt i looked like |
Speaking of phone notes here are some more that i took on the train:
Delighting in feeling like i look like a Crazy humming tunes and mumbling imagined conversations, jiggling around the station, body loose save for head which is cement firm and angled with disturbing possibility towards not just the uncomfortable looking strangers' faces but also twds their souls.
Shades allow me unselfconscious voyeurism as if i am watching a movie. Aha, I now inhabit the Being of those literally shady dudes I recall at the nudist hot springs in Colorado in 2018. Thy were rotund and pale and the only ones in shades AND the only ones not fully nude- cheating on two counts. I hated them. They killed all the delicate precious innocent goodness that there was/ couldve been at that hot springs.
I am now on their side of things, letting eyes rest on people long enough to form full questions about them, invent stories about them. Each trainstop is a new scene, with old characters getting off and new ones getting on. There was an especially good scene in which a mother displayed very intelligent unsentimental parenting to her child. Another stop saw wht lookd like horrid parenting, a woman with talons of fake nails brushing her baby's hand away repeatedly saying "STOP IT" to its affectionate gestures. Anothr of a guy with a very cinematic face- whats with all these cinematic faces. so many uniquely beautiful people; everyone really, when you look long enough. a guy who looked like a legend of the hollywood Golden age, perfect tan, piercing blue eyes, steady eyebrows, and aesthetically perfect large moles cast across the side of his face. hair color of straw and so perfect that he looked untouched even while standing in the crowded car
IN CONLUSION: It was a study of myself-as myself but also a kind of someone-else-in-the-world, the latter caused by how it felt very much Not Me to be closing myself off in such an unnatural, illogical way. Despite being confidently self-imposed, the experiment bred an uncontrollable and authentic kind of self-consciousness, growing like little weeds. But it was cool because it let me come to know my innate type of self-consciousness in real time, and with its being self-imposed, it was a bizarre combo of my old confidence, a new kind of confidence, and sheer embarrassment. I wish I could "highly recommend" creating a similar project of self-imposed self-consciousness to everyone, but I am not quite sure how much I valued anything in the experience other than its simply being a new experience. Maybe newness is enough of a reason.