As William Shakespeare astutely put it, “All the world’s a stage.”
Whether we like it or not, we are all characters in a production designed by something greater than us. Whether it is a higher power or simply the power of our collective memory and consciousness and the environment, the world and society we are part of are something much greater than each of us individually. Our days are directed by our families, our friends, the people we pass on the street, and the streets themselves, among other things. Taking a second to step out of this play and observe others is one of the best ways to see the orchestration. Lewis Mumford maintained that a city is “a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.” New York City is quite possibly one of the largest “theaters” of social action, a stage for the incredibly diverse and mostly unpredictable denizens.
Madison Square Park is paradoxically both a bustling center of NYC life and a quiet corner of the universe. Its very layout seems to demand a performance of sorts. The area surrounding the fountain in focal center of most points in the park and is the stage for some kind of act nearly every day. This day, it was a woman making music with what looked like a mobile version of her home studio- a mixing console, huge speakers, and a saxophone. Her ambient music reverberated through the air and everybody in the immediate area seemed to move in perfect sync with it. I chose to sit on a bench a little further away from the center, however. Here, the most perplexing interaction I witnessed was between a homeless man and a police officer. The man was smoking a cigarette on a bench by one of the park’s chess tables. His demeanor did not change at all as he was approached by the officer, indicating that he was familiar with this situation. The police officer then proceeded to inform the man that smoking cigarettes within the park was illegal. The man put the cigarette out, flicked it away, and apologized. The officer responded with
“Now you littered!”
This scene seemed to be an interaction of two archetypes that society has instilled in us- an interaction that most likely never would have occurred between any other two people played out because of a perceived power relationship. Small scenes like this that we participate in every day are just smaller part of the play that is taking place across the span of our entire world. The entirety of our lives are nothing but our own side stories; we are all secondary characters in each other’s motion pictures.
Veronica Funk
I love your word choice when you use “orchestration” to describe the organized cacophony of people’s activities within the park. I think it directly relates to what Mumford mentioned in the passage about how a city can be a sort of “collective drama,” where the term “orchestration” would very accurately describe the way people experience drama or conflict in their own interactions in a mutual area, in this case, Madison Square Park. You made some very detailed observations. Great blog!