Bridge of Thanks: James Cox

James Cox, 2020.

Artist James Cox in Staten Island has shared on Instagram  his new colored pencil drawing depicting the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which connects the boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn, held up by a range of front line workers engaged in the struggle against Covid-19.  In the center of the span are gowned health professionals, flanksed by a firefighter, police office, a paramedic a pizza delivery guy, a grocery worker, letter carrier, and barrista.

At a time when New York City is the national epicenter of the outbreak, this is a particularly heart-warming tribute to those who every day put their life on the line.  The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the longest span in the western hemisphere,  serves as a dramatic connecting frame for the portraits in profile, who, rather like Atlas holding up the earth at Rockefeller Center, keep the bridge, and all of us, aloft. 

Writing in Staten Island Live, Dr. Gracelyn Santos reports that Cox came up with the idea for the image while picking up pizza at a local cafe, thinking of all those he was indebted to for staying on the job during the emergency. He is currently seeking crowdfunded support to produce posters to the work to sell to raise money to acquire urgently needed PPEs for first responders.

Those seeking to support the project on GoFundMe should click here. 

Gazing at Cox's drawing, I am reminded of my recent discussion of philosopher Martin Heidegger’s fascinating meditations on bridges, as articulated, for instance, in his essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking”:

For Heidegger, the bridge encapsulates the miraculous qualities of human-built things, which actively transform the spaces they occupy into meaningful places, gathering together normally disparate or opposed aspects of experience. The bridge not only unites opposed banks of a river, but makes distant destinations proximate, and grants to those who cross it a shared sense of wonder, a sense of together being momentarily between worlds, of being lifted out of our ordinary existence, being grounded on something that is emphatically not normal ground. Crossing the bridge, we are lifted up for a soaring moment towards the sky above, even as we have not entirely left the earth.

For this reason, Heidegger suggests, medieval bridges often displayed a statue of a saint, blessing all those who journeyed across it; the bridge offers a momentary passage into the Other World of the great beyond, and in that sense presents in microcosm a vision of our great journey through life and across domains of existence. As Heidegger puts it, “The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.”

Cox's frontline workers are not, strictly speaking, saints. Yet it does seem to me has rediscovered the ancient idea that a great bridge is hedged about with the sacred, and connects us to powers greater than ourselves, who may be be appropriately honored through images. He has thus appropriately positioned his heroic figures as integral components of the bridge, like great statues reminding us of our better angels, lifting us all up at the time of his city's greatest peril.