Coreografía del anonimato, Maite Iracheta

You step out onto the streets of New York—an anonymous pedestrian—moving ceaselessly toward your destination; the kind of destination that, incidentally, in this city, is rarely actually reached. You enter the game of constant meshing and dodging—a trajectory improvised on the fly, set to a rhythm that the city’s pulse latches onto and matches. It is the metropolis setting the metronome. Bodies navigate the space, gauging themselves against other bodies so familiar in their anonymity that the choreography is precise, its beat unpredictable, exact. And if you are not following me, head to the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. 

Watch the scene from a bird’s-eye view: people walking, crossing paths, and weaving together for moments; suddenly knotting up, only to unravel with the next step and keep moving on like thousands more—part of that vast multitude. Even when a collision seems imminent, they emerge unscathed—no elbows thrown, no kicks or stumbles, not a drop of coffee-to-go spilled. They execute advanced acrobatics amidst syncopated itineraries, converging in sudden instants, and if they nearly crash head-on, at once they recompose and reconfigure into shifting sequences of earthbound murmurations, unlike the aerial calculations of starlings. 

Amidst such hurried, tightly packed lives, there is room on the thoroughfares only for improvisation. Or perhaps not: perhaps, over the millions of streets pedestrians have walked, each develops an internal compass—intuitive, forward-propelled—that guides them, one connected to an elementary version of topological, analog Bluetooth, the magic touch behind their street smarts. There is an invisible, immaterial antenna, one about which no books have yet been written (nor they will be), upon all that urban bipeds tune themselves to, mysteriously coordinated to the frequency of this haphazard dance.

Breaking away from the street’s high tide is difficult, but you manage to tear free of the current and take refuge in the public library at that very intersection—lucky you. You spend a while in the Rose Reading Room, quiet, breathing; you do not read, you are the book, a closed book. But before long you tire of the stillness, open yourself up and rise, hurry down the stairs, blow a kiss to Fortitude and Patience, who perceive everything—that incessant street tremor—and upon touching the sidewalk, you re-enter circulation, back into the choreography of anonymity.

You go armed: your reflections accompany you, along with a few brilliant ideas you will not remember once you have pen in hand (they were untamable; the destination is never reached). Your legs sway at the mercy of collective propulsion, obeying a familiar command (the mother of us all, admit it, is the street) that nourishes and regenerates our advantageous pedestrian intelligence. You coexist with the demographic explosion—you are, in fact, one of its countless booms, and for every boom, more pavement. In this multiplying urban swarm at rush hour, you become the ephemeral trace of an agitated, blurred hologram, a nervous current flowing through yet another day.

You sense that through its daily rehearsal the choreography revives itself, persisting in dispensing with a score. You are both part and side of a Möbius strip in the fluid geometry of the endless walking crowd. You think that this time, you’ll actually make it. You feel a thrill and wrap yourself up, twisting strangely to dodge everyone—cyborgs and vehicles alike—never stopping your movement through the city grid, even as surveillance cameras spot you, fix you in place, forever.