The Mannahatta Project

"The patrons, that morning, consisted of a group of summer campers engaged in a scavenger hunt, and a fleet of hospital patients in wheelchairs, attended by a few nurses. A man drifted by on a bicycle, with “Brick House” playing from a boom box. As tempting as it was to rue the absence of otters, egrets, and acres upon acres of spartina grass waving in the breeze, there was something beguiling about this assemblage in the Park on a summer weekday morning."

"Looking down Sixth Avenue, Sanderson gestured toward the herds of pedestrians stretching away from us and said, “You see all those heads, and you think that the six hundred Lenape who used to live on Manhattan could have fit on that one block.”"

"We tried to explain. He said that he knew nothing about any pond and then gave us a look suggesting we’d better just move along."

                Life is fleeting. Its active nature carries us, the many entities, around and around, often clashing with each other and bringing out a multitude of change and variation. New York, the focus of extravagant difference reached from differing ideas or opinions, has progressed through life, changing similarly to the life of a human being; New York took on its "birth", crashed through its gawky adolescence, and glided into its newfound adulthood. Paumgarten, through several pieces in the work The Mannahatta Project, expresses the idea of self-possession, overabundance, and tabled attempts and actions. This MOE is done through the concept of the idea itself, self-possession in humans brought about the eradication of the native New York environment, impacting indigenous species, both people and not, both living. The MOE more personalized through human interaction between themselves and each other  is particular to me specifically because of the foreign concept of such a congested area. There are very few places in the world quite like New York, and once you find yourself in the area, you become enthralled in a way, be it to a particular feeling that rings from inside, like the idea of inescapable companionship but still apparent loneliness. Do you know the feeling of having something on your mind you would like to say, but decide to not say it? There is a failure at the missed connection we as humans have when conversing with each while second guessing ourselves and our thoughts.