Open City

by Teju Cole

Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones.

It was here, on the outskirts of the city at the time, north of Wall Street and so outside civilization as it was then defined, that blacks were allowed to bury their dead. Then the dead returned when, in 1991, construction of a building on Broadway and Duane brought human remains to the surface. They had been buried in white shrouds. The coffins that were discovered, some four hundred of them, were almost all found to have been oriented toward the east.

At the Negro Burial Ground, as it was then known, and others like it on the eastern seaboard, excavated bodies bore traces of suffering: blunt trauma, grievous bodily harm. Many of the skeletons had broken bones, evidence of the suffering they’d endured in life. Disease was common, too: syphilis, rickets, arthritis. In some of the palls were found shells, beads, and polished stones, and in these scholars had seen hints of African religions, rites perhaps retained from the Congo, or from along the West African coast, from which so many people had been captured and sold into slavery.

There had been, in the 1780s, a petition by free blacks in defense of their dead. Black corpses were frequently singled out by cadaver thieves, who passed them on to surgeons and anatomists.

in 1789, the New York Anatomy Act was passed. From that time forward, as was done in Europe, the needs of surgical anatomy were to be met by the cadavers of executed murderers, arsonists, and burglars.

I liked the smell of new cloth and, for me, the intimate wonder of getting measured for clothes was like that of getting your hair cut, or feeling the warm back of the doctor’s hand nestled against your throat as he checked your temperature. These were the rare cases in which you gave permission to a stranger to enter your personal space. You trusted the expertise proffered, and enjoyed the promise that the opaque maneuvers of this stranger’s hands would yield a result.

Stoss, Leinberger, and Erhat brought a complicated material knowledge of lindenwood to bear on their carving of it, and their attempts to marry the spirit of the material with its visible form, craftlike though it is, is after all not so different from the diagnostic struggle that doctors are engaged in. This is particularly true in the case of those of us who are psychiatrists, who attempt to use external Signs as clues to internal realities, even when the relationship between the two is not at all clear. So modest is our success at this task that it is easy to believe our branch of medicine is as primitive now as was surgery in Paracelsus’s time.

I viewed each patient as a dark room, and that, going into that room, in a session with the patient, I considered it essential to be slow and deliberate. Doing no harm, the most ancient of medical tenets, was on my mind all the time. There is more light to work with in externally visible illnesses; the Signs are more forcefully expressed, and therefore harder to miss. For the troubles of the mind, diagnosis is a trickier art, because even the strongest symptoms are sometimes not visible.

the source of our information about the mind is itself the mind, and the mind is able to deceive itself.

But what are we to do when the lens through which the symptoms are viewed is often, itself, symptomatic: the mind is opaque to itself, and it’s hard to tell where, precisely, these areas of opacity are.

Ophthalmic science describes an area at the back of the bulb of the eye, the optic disk, where the million or so ganglia of the optic nerve exit the eye. It is precisely there, where too many of the neurons associated with vision are clustered, that the vision goes dead. For so long, I recall explaining to my friend that day, I have felt that most of the work of psychiatrists in particular, and mental health professionals in general, was a blind spot so broad that it had taken over most of the eye. What we knew, I said to him, was so much less than what remained in darkness, and in this great limitation lay the appeal and frustration of the profession.

EACH PERSON MUST, ON SOME LEVEL, TAKE HIMSELF AS THE CALIBRATION point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good.

And so, what does it mean when, in someone else’s version, I am the villain?

Mahler’s mind was perpetually on last things: Das Lied von der Erde, with its pained notes of farewell and its bittersweet sound world, was largely written in the summer of 1908.

Mahler’s final works—Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, the sketches of the Tenth—were all first performed posthumously; all are vast, strongly illuminated, and lively works, surrounded by the tragedy that was unfolding in the life. The overwhelming impression they give is of light: the light of a passionate hunger for life, the light of a sorrowful mind contemplating death’s implacable approach.

I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them.

But Mahler’s music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question.

Then, out of a calmness that seemed to have all in the auditorium holding their breaths, the sweet, hymnlike opening of the final movement, carried by the string instruments, filled the hall. I was stunned: I had never before noticed how similar the melody in this movement was to “Abide with Me.” And that revelation steeped me in the deep sorrow of Mahler’s long but radiant elegy, and I felt I could also detect the intense concentration, the hundreds of private thoughts, of the people in the auditorium with me.

The music stopped. Perfect silence in the hall. Simon Rattle was stock-still on the podium, his baton still in the air, and the musicians, too, were still, their instruments up. I looked around the hall, at the illuminated faces, all flooded with that silence. The seconds stretched on. No one coughed, and no one moved. We could hear the faint sound of traffic in the far distance outside the hall. But inside it, not a sound; even the hundreds of racing thoughts had stopped. Then Rattle brought his hands down, and the auditorium exploded with applause.

But, in the dark spaces between the dead, shining stars, were stars I could not see, stars that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices. Their light would arrive on earth eventually, long after I and my whole generation and the generation after me had slipped out of time, perhaps long after the human race itself was extinguished. To look into those dark spaces was to have a direct glimpse of the future.