Consider a snow globe. Inside the glass, there is a house with nothing in it. Its frosted, wall-to-wall windows reveal a featureless interior: no bed to sleep in, no table to eat at, no sofa to sit on. Outside, new grass peeks through the snow. It’s February, maybe, and it’ll always be February. The house’s front steps are shoveled, but nothing else is because the snow-covered ground drops off, suddenly, at the edge of the glass sphere. The trees are made of wire. Nothing else exists.
Turning it over in my hands, a memory surfaces like bird tracks in the snow — something unnameable. I ask my mother about it — who else would buy a snow globe? — and she says it was once the house of a famous architect. The place became a museum after his death, where they sold little replicas of his home — encased in glass, devoid of interiority.
It’s an odd thing to come home to: a city full of its own replicas. New York is awash with them — bobbleheads, T-shirts, Statues of Liberty — and through them, it tells little half-truths. Inside the snow globe, there are no roaches, no rats. No homelessness, but no homes either. No dust but the white powder. Through the snow globe, New York traffics in its own artificial mythos — the story of the city that people want to take home. A city that only exists in a gift shop.
Much has been written, moaned and legislated about summer in this city. But for one day in July, the day of my trek to the gift shop, all of that noise went away. A high wind brushed away the summer heat; the air was not so thick; the roaches all slid off. The sweat lifted from my back at last. No summer day since has been so forgiving.
A couple blocks north and the mouth of Hell approaches: CANAL STREET.
One does not linger at Canal Street. It’s one of the widest roads in southern Manhattan, and its automotive patrons have no regard for human life. For its street vendors, Canal represents a constant arms race with the cops, giving it a near-hourly turnover rate. Tables resplendent with purses and plushies one minute can be packed up the next. Waiting at the crosswalk, a flyer implores me to purchase two loving bloodhounds (photographed with all the fidelity of a CCTV camera) from a random address on Elizabeth Street. I consider the offer. Then I cross the street.
Damn near every store on the lateral part of Canal Street is a gift shop. They’re all laid out identically: sunglasses out front, perfumes by the door and snowglobes in the back. (And behind all that, dupes of Prada bags.) The globes on offer, unfortunately, are also made from the same mold. Everything, save for the Statue of Liberty, is in Manhattan: the Empire State Building, the Woolworth, even the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The fluorescent light didn’t flatter them, either: many looked frankly decrepit, the edges of the plastic bleached and sanded off. In one globe, I was surprised not to see the Statue of Liberty — until I discovered her floating in the water, disconnected from her usual pedestal base. (This is, of course, the one I purchased.)
I have to assume people still buy these things. They’re still everywhere, by the shelf-full. They’re abundant in the way that toys in a factory are abundant, where you’re left with the keening awareness of so much plastic. But outside the gift shop, you will still be surrounded by media images — what’s one more, a thousand more, to tide us over? In an age of portable high-fidelity photography, their unique ability to capture a place is obsolete. Being forced to reckon with the snow globe’s obsolescence, over and over, made the object feel slightly bizarre. We’re sick on media images. The desire it captures is alien to us now.
Standing in the gift shop, a feeling welled up in me from New Years’ Eve — the feeling I get every time when Frank Sinatra sings us out of the last year and into the next. When the distance between our time and his grows wider. There’s something laughable in the way we hold on to him, something deeply disconcerting.
For all this, I thought, I have no business with the snow globe. They represent a relationship with a place that I’m keen to avoid; too explicative of their desire to have this place forever, on your shelf. In other words, they’re for tourists.
But something compelled me, last week, to log into my twelve-year-old Roblox account. When I made the account, I was so young I had used my parent’s email. Logging in for the first time in half a decade, I discovered that, for years, I’d been acting out this compulsion to recreate my memories in private servers. Shelves upon shelves of them, trapped behind the glass of my screen.
Consider another snow globe, of a kind. It’s one you can boot up online: it’s a server I made on Roblox in the eighth grade. We’d spawn in a puddle of beer. A can’s tipped over and the streetlight catches the circular edge of the spill. The entire scene is contained on a single hill — in this server, nothing else exists. We’d trudge a little ways up that hill and, on the way, we’d see a girl gazing up in wonder, her mouth frozen in a perfect O. She will spend the rest of time, maybe, watching the motionless stars. On the crest of the hill there’s a bench, lit from behind: a neon sign depicts two men holding each other. Their embrace casts an eerie blue pall on the flat grass — until the grass drops off. We’d sit at the bench. At the edge of the windless world, the glass is in view; and from this view, the stars are so bright.
This world’s as real as a pillow fort. The “sky” is just a giant box. The grass is a flat plane. And yet! Memory is so potent there; walking around, your mind fills the inadequate scenery with life. Perhaps it’s that failure of detail that makes it feel like a memory: that we can only hold on to so much.
At what point will the world inside the snow globe go from memory to fantasy? I can’t remember the last time New York looked anything like that. The winters of my youth now belong there; the world is simply different now. Hotter. Less hospitable.
Last month, a data journalist at The Pudding traced climate predictions for cities around the world. He projected what they’d be like in 2070 when global temperatures are up two degrees Celsius; when the seas rise and the glaciers melt; when, for all I know, the Rapture comes. In 2070, no city of the 70 he tested, aside from Moscow, would qualify as a “cold climate” city. In forty-odd years, New York will be hotter than Tokyo is today. Nothing like Boston or Chicago would exist on this planet. A whole species of place will disappear. We will watch it happen; Frank Sinatra will roll in the new year, and the next, and the next, and the snow inside the globe will begin to haunt us.
With each passing year, the fact of winter — this mute snow, those dark trees — goes from seasonal inevitability to remote fantasy.
In the mid-2010s, two artists created a series of high-art snowglobes that sought to violate the safety, the childlike-wonder associated with the snow globe. Their globes were a stage play of slapstick cruelty. In one, a tree grows clean through a house. In another, a clown prepares to hang himself. These scenes feel less radical to me now — less radical than the snow globe’s first promise, the promise of shelter, the promise of a world untouched.
In the preamble of an interview with author Ruth Ozeki, Pepper Stetler says that snowglobes contain “possibilities of alternative existence”. Perhaps the melting world will make collectors out of all of us. Inside the snow globe there is another world. It is not enough to want it quietly.
Statement Contributor Amina Cattaui can be reached at aminacat@umich.edu.
The post An exit through the gift shop appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply