THE HOWL

The title is borrowed from Allen Ginsberg's poem.

New York at night. A walk across the city from dusk to daybreak, on the side it does not talk about by day. Doorways, back lots, empty buildings, the last stop on the line. Gangs marking territory. Trade conducted in the open, because there is no longer anyone watching. Women standing under the streetlights all night, selling access to themselves at a price that drops by the hour. People high and people sick for it, moving between the two as if to a timetable.
The city is coming apart at a rate you cannot see in a single night. Plaster comes off in sheets, grilles grow into the windows, ground floors keep the signage of businesses that closed. Refuse is not collected, only moved. Whatever breaks stays where it broke. And people sleep through all of it — in cardboard, in alcoves, on the vents that give off heat. Nobody removes them, because nobody counts them.
The social organism does not function here as a whole, only as the sum of separated circuits. People occupy the same space without occupying any position in relation to one another. Physical proximity signifies no relation; it is purely a matter of coordinates. You can pass within arm's reach of somebody's end and register nothing.
The bodies move correctly. They walk, they wait, they pass within inches of each other, light a cigarette, turn their heads away. Every action is intact — what has gone is whatever used to stand behind it. A look that stops on another person. A movement nobody ordered. Motion remains, performed for no reason by creatures that have stopped feeling that they are.
This is not a catastrophe that happened. It is a decay that advanced slowly enough that nobody noticed the point at which it stopped being reversible.

Ginsberg built his lament out of enumeration — its force lay in the fact that there was someone worth enumerating, and a community on whose behalf the voice spoke. Here enumeration is no longer possible. What remains are figures without names, episodes without resolution, movement without destination. The camera neither accuses nor mourns, having no one to do it for. Daybreak resolves nothing. It only raises the light enough to see it all. A postcard from a city that exists nowhere beyond the limits of imagination.