The Tube

All around the city the bright and symmetrical face of the London Underground logo smiles at me, beckoning me into its twisted, subterranean labyrinth. Passing through the gates with a swift swipe of my Oyster card, I step onto tireless escalators, seemingly unbothered to suffer underneath an endless sea of commuters and tourists. As I’m swallowed into the cavern below and poured onto the platform, I am careful not to stick out, always following proper Tube etiquette: stand on the right, stay behind the yellow line, keep to yourself, mind the gap, mind the doors, keep your voice down, avoid eye contact, allow people off the train, offer your seat to the old woman, move quickly in the corridors, have your ticket ready, become another cog in the great machine churning beneath another far greater machine.

On the platform, adverts provide company for me, indeed for each of the isolated souls awaiting their locomotive rapture. Though large and ubiquitous, the adverts don’t shout and badger but attempt to make their cases like barristers from the Inns of Court. Soon the rails begin to click, a light appears at the end of a dark tunnel, the wind begins to rush, and like a red, white, and blue streak of toothpaste the train squeezes out of its tube. Oxford Circus, Covent Garden, Paddington, South Kensington, Westminster, Bank, Pudding Mill Lane, Goodge Street, Hammersmith, Aldgate, Mansion House, Tottenham Court Road--each stop comes and goes as I’m whisked through the dirt and clay and rubble of London. Above me, Beck’s precise and elegant map gives shape to what is mostly a dark and unknown world. It is a marvel of design deserving a placement alongside Warhol, Mondrian, and Lichtenstein in the Tate Modern. Each colored line holds the promise of dozens of stations, each a different microcosm of the heaving, buzzing, dense organism that is London.

Below ground, in tunnels that have known 140 years worth of beauty, hardship, prayer, joy, suffering, tragedy, and romance, tunnels that are weary with life, tunnels that hold more stories than could fill a library, the rest of the city becomes a memory. Weather, time, season, horizon, and direction become irrelevant. Darkness and light, stillness and speed, emptiness and suffocation; the reality of the Tube oscillates between two poles too dull and mechanic to be called extremes. Trains shoot here and there, back and forth, like pistons driving a colossal engine and I, alongside hundreds of thousands of others, am simply coal to stoke the fire. The bellows blow, the fire roars, the wheels turn, and like smoke belched from a smokestack I find myself rising to the surface miles from where I once stood.