Iron Men and The Big Machine

This past Sunday, J suggested we take a field trip to see the iron men.

He'd heard about the statues—six-feet-two-inch-tall iron castings of artist Antony Gormley's body—years ago, when Gormley had installed them on disused beaches of his hometown in England. Solitary men cast in iron, keeping watch over the comings and goings of ships. Little Angels of the Northwest. When he read that the statues were coming to New York, he clipped the map from the paper and kept it in his pocket until he was ready to surprise me with it.

The actual iron men were relegated to the ground; Gormley had built special fibreglass men to install on various rooftops around Madison Square Park. Apparently the NYPD had to warn the public so that people wouldn't think the statues were suicidal citizens and inundate them with phone calls.

We crept around the perimeter of the park, shielded our eyes from the sun, and spotted them here and there on the skyline, lurking behind old disused water towers, or further up, high at the top of granite towers. Majestic and unexpected, we picked them out one by one, breathlessly pointing into the air, like the crowds spotting Superman in comic books.

There. Look! And up there!

***

Last night, a different event: a ground floor reading and discussion in Fort Greene with Victor LaValle and Maud Newton at Greenlight Bookstore.

I'd only recently finished LaValle's Big Machine, a curious book of faith and doubt, of supernatural encounters with stingray-shaped angels, and the down-to-earth realities of drug addiction and homelessness. On this night, the two writers deftly waded through the murky multitude of topics one could discuss related to this book and landed on the topic of horror.

LaValle defined horror as pushing the reader to feel something powerful and uncomfortable: the gothic stories of Flannery O'Connor, JD Salinger's story of his time at war.

"There are monsters in the book," said LaValle. His editor had wanted to scale back on the monsters, but LaValle insisted, stubbornly, that the monsters needed to be there. His editor eventually persuaded him to meet him halfway, keeping one foot firmly in reality while maintaining that the monsters weren't just in the head of the narrator. LaValle said "I will go with you in this direction, but you have to be willing to lead me there."

When asked where this fascination with horror came from, LaValle said simply that "horrible and unexplainable things can appear in your life and there's no way you can beat them."

Unexplainable things appear in our lives all the time, challenges and questions. What is this I'm seeing? Is it good, or is it bad? What does it mean to me? Will I be okay? It was the same way in the book: when the monsters appeared, to some they were angels; to others, devils.

***

This is how it is with the iron men. Some people might see them and become scared or sad for their implied fate. Others might see them and think of their own moments perched on a precipice in life, ready to make an insane decision, ready to throw themselves into something terrifying, unexpected, or unkown.

But I have a different viewpoint standing on the ground, looking up at these statues. They're not men who have given up on life, but superheroes, ready to leap a tall building in a single bound. Not iron men but Iron Men, waiting for our beacon to call them into action, watching over us, ready to save us from the things we don't want to know, or to remind us of how we can save ourselves.

On the ground, we look up to the sky, shout "there's one!" and point, beckoning others to follow the sightline of our fingers. These solitary heroes on the skyline, pushing us to feel something powerful, something possibly uncomfortable. Something vertiginous. Something altogether unexplainable and unexpected. To me they're angels, horrifying and beautiful all at the same time.

Monsters that need to be there.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.