A Hasidic Adventure in Psychogeography
Having lived in New York City for the past seven years, I have always known and enjoyed the cultural diversity that a person experiences simply by noticing the other people on the street. In previous years I have walked through Manhattan enjoying the experience of crossing neighborhoods, cultural thresholds, determined by history and its inhabitants. For my walking tour, I performed the Alternating-Travel adventure.
I moved to Brooklyn last May, but having started school in June, I haven’t had time to explore my new neighborhood. This particular mode of walking, one with out a designated end point, but with a specific set of directions, is a highly regulated dérive. Lack a specified end point imposed the quality of “mortal danger” that Simmel indicated as being a quality of the adventure. Was I going to get lost in the unending urban expanse of Brooklyn? I didn’t being a map and I was by myself. My the precision with which I was executing my instructions, turn right then left, etc., was my insurance that I would get home. As long as I didn’t deviate from my right-left rubric, I could retrace my steps.
Trust in this structure allowed me to explore to places in a new way. “But the derive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variation by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.” Cutting my serpentine path through Brooklyn rearranged both my perception of my surrounding and my conception of myself within it. I meditated both on the meaning of the cultural signifiers that I happened upon, as well as my relationship to them as an “outsider.” By having no destination, and no purpose other than the experience of the surrounding, I truly found myself a tourist in my own neighborhood. The very sensation of walking in this way, slow, methodical, my attention tried to details surrounding me, insisted of consumed with my person thoughts and anxieties, caused moments of disassociation. I would catch myself feeling as through I was back in a foreign country, where I have many times performed this manner of walking.
The foreignness of the adventure was heightened by the tremendous cultural disjuncture between the neighborhoods. I began in front my house, on the corner of a distinctly Italian neighborhood, and turned left into a little touch of Puerto Rico. Passing giant murals of the Virgin Mary, and Churches in Spanish, I entered into a notably black neighborhood. I was twilight, and while I trusted the relative safety of the area, as performing the role of the tourist, I couldn’t help but feel I was some place I shouldn’t be. I walked underneath the JMZ train, which marked my psychological boarder of my neighborhood, I embarked into unknown territory. It was dark now, and when I turned a corner and came face to fast with a housing project, I started to seriously consider the importance of the exercise compared to my personal safety. But I noticed something odd, three younger girls came out of the building, all modestly dressed in dark clothes. Now I live across from another project complex, and I knew because I was allowing the fun of being a tourist the danger was only in my head giving me a little adrenalin boost. But these sight of young modestly dressed girls going out at night was a clear indication of a neighborhood’s safety. The next thing I saw made everything make sense. A man walking with his two young sons were all dressed in black, all wearing the Hasidic curls, and the man had a circular hat propped on the top of his head, of a style I have never seen before. I looked around, and suddenly, from around the corners, groups of families looking just like this man, were walking, presumably on their way home.
I had never been to the Hasidic area of Brooklyn. I know they were there, every once and a while I would run into a Hasidic on the train, but having entered this little world, I was enthralled. Suddenly my Brooklyn was no longer mine, it was point of connection between American capital and industry and old world Europe. The effect of the psycogeography hit me like a ton of bricks, igniting my imagination and sensitizing my awareness. I felt like I was in Shakespeare’s Venice, only without the threat of violence which had followed the Jewish culture for centuries. Physically I was exploring a geographic area, but psychological I was reveling in the history of the Jewish people. From the pogroms in Russia to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, I had always been amazed and humbled by the endurance of the Jewish tradition. And now walking through a highly orthodox form of that tradition, I felt my own “shiksa” identity.
The encounter with the unfamiliar, with the ‘other’ so to speak, the key ingredient to an adventure, inspires the self-reflection that informs the value of the experience. Simmel wrote “There is in us an eternal process playing back and forth between chance and necessity, between fragmentary materials given us from the outside and the consistent meaning of the life developed from within.” The theory around an adventure, as a metaphor for the larger adventure of life, causes me to think of the medieval labyrinth. The labyrinth, found throughout the world, has its historical European roots in medieval Christianity. The labyrinth represents the course of life, a walking meditation full of unexpected surprises. While one is walking a labyrinth, the individual becomes spatially disoriented, and in this disorientation from temporal association, one if free to encounter abstract notions of God.
I wouldn’t say I found God in Brooklyn, but my temporary brake from my habitual world did invite me to cross the paths of multiple cultural labyrinths. I found myself on a parallel life adventure as the Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn reminding me how closely tied together this world is.