Member-only story
Once and awhile you get on a mostly empty subway car in the middle of the afternoon with an attractive other across from or next to you; and you spend the entire ride looking at each other while pretending not to look at each other — each person operating under the tacit belief that is the other person who will say something. In my experience, the subway car is the least appropriate place to talk to a stranger, or to try to flirt with a stranger, because you’re trapped with them and they’re trapped with you: they can’t really chose to walk away, at least until they arrive at their destination. And everyone — every New Yorker — knows this, senses it intuitively. The very impossibility, the very offensiveness, of a subway encounter is what makes it erotic. We want what we shouldn’t want. These small encounters, or these non- or almost- encounters, these distances spanned only by eyes and mind, are becoming taboo to discuss or acknowledge; in 2018 there is only sex — sexual assault or hyper-sexuality: fucking or being fucked. We talk about, pursue, condemn sex, but what we don’t do is really experience the complex, potentially shattering effects of an encounter with another body. We are afraid of the little fragments of evil, lust and longing, that exist in every soul; we want sterilized, PC pleasure-production — that is what we have learned to want. Eros is amoral; this makes today’s moralists uncomfortable with eros. You and that person across the subway car are both beginning to fantasize about each other, but you won’t say anything — you don’t want to be inappropriate; inappropriate interactions are reserved for Tinder or Snapchat, where there are no consequences, because there is no responsibility.
