Born Back Ceaselessly Into the Indelible NYC Underwelt

I blogged once before that Mr NYC is an underworld, an underground, a secret thing all its own. This blog remains totally uncorrupted, pure and free from any ties that bind. It floats through time and space, hurtling like ... a basebell .. forever into the infinite. In my mind, I combine the notions of the underground and the underworld into the "underwelt."

Allow me to expound.

Recently I decided to re-read Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a massive novel about the second half of 20th Century America. It follows two people, Nick and Klara, who used to live in the Bronx. After a short affair in 1952, their lives go in dramatically different directions until they meet again, briefly, in the Arizona dessert in 1992. As we follow their paths over five decades and 800+ pages, we also encounter their various friends, lovers, and family members, we hurtle through some of the most dramatic events of the Cold War, and we literally end inside the place that would come to rule the incipient millennium -- the Internet. The novel's various plots and touches with history are held together by one thing -- a baseball, the very homerun ball hit by Bobby Thomson on October 3rd, 1951, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World." Tracking that ball over these decades becomes the thread that holds the whole unwieldy empire of the novel together.

So what's the underworld part? How does that relate?

Throughout the novel there is this recurrent theme of trash, of waste, of buried nuclear weapons and radioactive debris, of discarded objects and people, of loss. The threat of nuclear annihilation hangs over the novel, the Cold War ruling it completely, married to the irony that a baseball is roughly the same size as the uranium found inside a nuclear weapon. This is the "underworld" of the novel, the stuff we want to forget, the stuff that falls away (it is also literalized as an early 1930s German movie called Underwelt that, at one point, Klara watches -- as ominous a piece of media as ever existed). 

The underworld, the underground, the underwelt, defines itself in opposition to the above ground, outside world. It is a constant friction, a perennial resistance. Like the aforementioned trash -- we want to forget it, we want it out of our lives, but it never goes away.

Quite simply the underwelt is anything buried, anything like ...

... secret worlds, worlds within worlds, worlds not easily found or accessed, worlds that both tempt and repulse us, worlds that can trap or set us free, worlds with no rules, no laws, no obligations, no reason, no compromise, worlds of pleasure and pain and big messes and invisible orders, worlds free of logic or logics that exist on their own terms, worlds that only a chosen few can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, taste, worlds that we create, that belong to us, at odds with ... the outside world.

And what brings these underworlds above ground into the outside world? What makes the imperious ... pervious? What kills the resistance, ends the frictions?

The Media. The Law. Money. Time. Mother Nature. Death. 

They exist to root out anything buried, to burrow into these undergrounds, to conquer these underworlds -- to corrupt and change them, to make them public and own them, to put them on display, to disrupt the "underwelt."

So where does the underwelt exist? Where do we find it?

Some are literal, physical, or spiritual, or "other": travel, sex, crime, excitement, horror, secrets, memories, trash, fringe culture, back alleys/basements/attics/hallways. Any place where we believe we can go and do and see and feel and touch and taste and hear whatever we want, all personal inhibitions and societal strictures disregarded.

Now more than ever the Internet is the ultimate "underwelt" as well as the ultimate "underwelt" disruptor -- a paradox that our society struggles with every day and that rips it apart. But those are not the only underwelts we live in. There is one ultimate underwelt one we all wish we could travel to, one that is forever out of reach -- the past.

The final sentence to the prologue of DeLillo's masterpiece is, "It is all falling indelibly into the past." It can't help but remind me of the final sentence of another 20th century American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." This underwelt exists everywhere, around us and inside us, and yet ... we can't go there. We want to, desperately, we all want to hide away inside it, we all want to, as vernacular of this particular present goes, "quarantine" there. 

Yet we can't. We try and fail constantly, it's the most quixotic of quixotic undertakings. Pointless. 

The past is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. The past exists but we can't possess it. The past is forever conquered by the future. 

This blog explores the underwelt of NYC. It is both within and outside it, both its captor and its hostage. It's part of the present, even the future, and yet ... it is borne back ceaselessly into the indelible past, into the NYC underwelt, both drowning and unable to swim in this empty, overflowing pool.

If you want to explore the Mr NYC underwelt, what it means in general and what it means to me, go here.