{"id":31079,"date":"2012-05-07T15:05:36","date_gmt":"2012-05-07T19:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=31079"},"modified":"2012-05-07T22:00:56","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T02:00:56","slug":"stillspotting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/05\/07\/stillspotting\/","title":{"rendered":"Stillspotting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sitting in an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. It\u2019s a nice apartment, with decidedly un-Ikea furniture and mild-mannered art on the walls. It feels well kept but welcoming, gently used. The room I\u2019m in is a classic New York living\/dining-room combo, its zones delineated by, on the one hand, a multicolored wood table and, on the other, a sleek white couch.<\/p>\n

\nThe couch looks surprisingly comfortable, but I have no idea if it is; I\u2019m sitting back-to-back with it, on a triangular block of foam. There\u2019s a semicircle of these foam stools filling the room\u2019s neutral territory and six people sitting with me. As we wait in awkward and anticipatory silence, I notice the sunlight streaming in from the windows. It glosses the shiny floors, which stay that way, I assume, because everyone who enters this apartment has been told to remove her shoes, just like in my home growing up.<\/p>\n

\nI don\u2019t know who lives here. According to a map the Guggenheim has given me, this is \u201cErin\u2019s House.\u201d Erin is nowhere to be found, but she has generously loaned out her living\/dining room for a few weekends in April and May, for a project called Stillspotting<\/a>. As its name implies, the project is a search for still spots\u2014quiet spaces, moments of respite, refuge from chaos\u2014in New York.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nMore specifically, though (and continuing the trend of imaginary words), this installment of the program is called \u201cTranshistoria.\u201d A rough translation of that might be \u201cacross history.\u201d It\u2019s the third edition of Stillspotting that the Guggenheim has produced, in the third borough. For \u201cTranshistoria,\u201d the architects at Solid Objectives \u2013 Idenburg Liu (SO \u2013 IL) commissioned essays on the theme of stillspotting from six Queens writers and chose six spaces throughout Jackson Heights, one of the city\u2019s (and country\u2019s) most diverse neighborhoods. They then chose actors and readers to bring the writing to life inside the various spaces. <\/p>\n

\nVisitors to \u201cTranshistoria\u201d are given a map with a brief legend and access to four still spots of their choosing. Thus equipped, they set out into Jackson Heights, wandering the streets in search of stories. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a>My first stop is Erin\u2019s house, where a woman with ruddy brown skin sits at the table and soon begins to read Ishle Yi Park\u2019s \u201cOhm. Home.\u201d She seems a little uncomfortable with the language, tripping over some of the accumulated words that layer and build in unpredictable ways. She tells us afterward that Park is a former Def Jam poet and poet laureate of Queens, but it doesn\u2019t sink in until weeks later, when I see an excerpt in writing, that \u201cOhm. Home\u201d is actually a poem.<\/p>\n

\nPark grew up in Queens to Korean immigrant parents, and she writes about trying to move beyond \u201cthe squinty-eyed, polite \/ racism\u201d and find calm there, \u201clistening \/ to that old man \/ with his wooden harps \/ humming beneath the grates \/ on 74th & broadway\u201d or sitting on a rooftop behind McDonald\u2019s. But though she has \u201cQueens tattooed on my heart,\u201d she ultimately leaves, finding peace instead in the most stereotypically peaceful of all places: Hawaii. I take this as an omen. Erin\u2019s house is wonderfully quiet and subdued, but I leave with the sense that real stillness can\u2019t be found here.<\/p>\n

II.<\/p>\n

At La Gran Uruguaya Caf\u00e9, the still spot is outside. This is a questionable choice, as the caf\u00e9 sits on a stretch of Thirty-seventh Avenue filled with jewelers, pizza places, ninety-nine-cent stores, bodegas, delis, liquor stores, arepa, and ice sellers\u2014and people constantly spilling in and out of them. It\u2019s one of many loud, busy streets I find in Jackson Heights; I\u2019m sure the sixty-five-degree-and-sunny weather helps with that.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nI ask the reader, an actor named Jeremy, about the sidewalk decision, and he tells me that the still spot had been inside the previous week; however, there\u2019s also a TV inside, which had been showing soccer games simultaneously, forcing him to keep one eye on the screen and time his story around periodic bursts of \u201cGOAL!\u201d plus accompanying cheering.<\/p>\n

\nAfter a few minutes of chatting and eating ices, Jeremy and I decide that no one else is coming, so we settle in for a one-on-one reading. The piece is by Roger Sedarat, titled \u201cMy Dinner with Joe and Steffi.\u201d It\u2019s almost the opposite of Park\u2019s \u201cOhm. Home\u201d\u2014a postmodern story about the search for a story that truly represents the spirit of Jackson Heights. <\/p>\n

\nJeremy has the essay almost memorized, and Sedarat\u2019s writing is so heavily first person that at times I forget I\u2019m not listening to the author himself. \u201cHere, I belong to so many others that in a sense my true peace resides in a lack of firm connection,\u201d Jeremy says (as Sedarat). This author\/reader identity confusion gives me a sense of intimacy. It helps alleviate the fractured, artificial experience of listening to an actor read an essay by a writer about a search for authenticity in the neighborhood I\u2019m currently sitting in, surrounded on the sidewalk by that very authenticity but not participating in it.<\/p>\n

\nSedarat writes about \u201cfinding a more profound truth, a greater stillness, in art.\u201d I embrace this. \u201cThere is stillness in the disruption and vice versa,\u201d he says. This I\u2019m less sure of. I set off from La Gran Uruguaya Caf\u00e9 thinking about the difference between stillness and quiet and eating a pineapple-flavored frozen ice.<\/p>\n

III.<\/p>\n

\nThe serenity room at Elmhurt Hospital has tacky floor panels with images of grass and stones. A fountain covers one wall, and above it sits a TV screen projecting benign images of nature\u2014except there\u2019s constant static washing disruptive ripples over shots of flowers and open fields. The room is also severely air-conditioned.<\/p>\n

\nDespite all this, it\u2019s a well-named space. As at Erin\u2019s house, stillness here means quiet, and the sound of cascading water offers a cocoon in which you can settle and lose yourself. My narrator reads in a gentle yet animated voice, as if telling children a bedtime story.<\/p>\n

\nHis tone matches the simple language of the text, an essay called \u201cUp from Oaxaca\u201d by the chaplain of the hospital, Fr. William Alan Briceland. This is not the postmodernity of Sedarat or the poetry of Park, and with good reason: Briceland tells the moving story of a former patient named Agust\u00edn Martinez, an immigrant from Mexico who survived a terrible car accident. Martinez spent months recovering in the hospital, undergoing eight surgeries on his arms and legs, plus four more after his discharge. <\/p>\n

\nBut more than the physical damage, Martinez suffers from psychological trauma. \u201cHis life is now divided into before the accident and after the accident,\u201d the narrator says, and I find myself nodding in comprehension, tears in my eyes as I think about a friend still recovering from a car accident nine months ago and the way my own life has been split into before and after. <\/p>\n

\nMartinez has managed to find some peace at home\u2014\u201cHis room is the still spot in his life\u201d\u2014but he doesn\u2019t yet feel whole. I\u2019m reminded that stillspotting is an ongoing, endless process and that our refuges are often provisional, transitional. On to the next one.<\/p>\n

IV.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve finally found the quieter streets of Jackson Heights. I hadn\u2019t planned to venture this far north, but a volunteer told me that the garden at St. Mark\u2019s Episcopal Church was beautiful and not to be missed. She was right.<\/p>\n

\nThe garden is an expanse of grass dominated by a stunning, pink-blossomed tree (a dogwood?). Its low-hanging branches are covered with flowers and leaves, and dozens upon dozens of petals litter the ground, like pink confetti. A triangle of benches occupies a cozy spot underneath the tree, along with the requisite foam stools; I fight an urge to skip, rather than walk, to them.<\/p>\n

\nA middle-aged, blonde-haired woman delivers my final story, \u201cAt Home in the New World,\u201d by Maria Terrone, a poet and lifelong resident of the neighborhood. Terrone describes the thoughts that pass through her head as she navigates the \u201cchoreographed chaos\u201d of the sidewalks: \u201cSix out of ten people I pass on the street in Jackson Heights were born in another land \u2026 Did they flee famine? killing fields? violent relationships?\u201d She captures the rush I had felt earlier on the busy streets as Indians, Argentines, Ecuadorans, and Bangladeshis passed by me. For Terrone, the way to make peace with the neighborhood is through food: \u201cIn short, food equals home,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As the narrator tells her story of bonding with a neighbor over dumplings, I notice the sound of a bus stopping on a nearby street. Its loud gasp breaks my concentration, followed by the screams of children playing nearby in the garden. I\u2019m annoyed by these interruptions; I blame them for preventing me from achieving a zenlike state in such a gorgeous place. <\/p>\n

\nBut as Terrone\u2019s narrator talks about cooking as a way of centering herself, I realize that seeking out complete, external tranquility is an absurd goal in New York City. Our only hope, I think, is stillspotting as a state of mind.<\/p>\n

\nJillian Steinhauer is a Brooklyn-based writer and assistant editor of Hyperallergic.com.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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