for the future
31st January 2006
0525
Train stops in endless night
lights on stalks and tracks
gleam sodium monochrome
0745
Ultraviolet tunnel from station to terminal. Moving walkways & silence, suitcases rolling smoothly. It is the future imagined in the 70s, it is a beautiful space-dream, Martian colony. I travel in slow motion.
It is a grey day in England & it fell away with incredible grace & finally we emerged in perfect sunshine in this crazy machine, this monified war machine
Flying over Liverpool & Alex & the Mersey Ferry, flying over the cold Atlantic ocean blinded by a cloud sea
Solitude suddenly terrible & desperate trapped in everlasting day. Should be precious minute by minute but instead there's aeroplane waiting, with invariably dazzling view that send you numb.
On the map is Canada, Labrador and here is no local time. Travelling this way we're getting older. I'm chasing the morning and sleep is chasing me. It's nine o'clock in America and up here is the only place on earth with fine weather
Plane making its faint siren sound in the wind
Lost in cloud over New York.
America is a faint yellow colour with beautiful saplings lining neat roads
Old paint and concrete.
Plastic houses, bare branches, dead ground, toy cars floating along. But the birches will be lovely in Spring
Whole fields of pampas grass...
Graveyard is stuffed to the gills
Coach descends through rainbow industrial masses with flares and robots into a tunnel and emerges in pale grey magnificence Manhattan.
It is silent and graceful, Chrysler impossibly elegant for so many stories of stone. From a distance, in the mist, it looks like some kind of post modern cathedral.
One expects a cathedral air from it, a vague religious terror rising out of the earth
And it is sober and authoritarian and embellished
But not pious, not shuttered and impenetrable
It offers itself and demands no libations, no prayers, no confession
Steam pours from the ground & it roars like a living thing
What is New York standing on?
This piece of the Earth is human made to the quick, quarried stone and planted trees.
This is a yellow insomnia night with desperation at the ends of its corridors
It is exit sign loneliness
accent
A guy on the edge of SoHo wanted us to buy, he made his voice bounce like a ball. Another guy looks at my camera, tells me to go down that alley for a million to one shot, Miss.
New York is made for you like a salad
New York looks silent and complete
The end of the world
where the lions weep.
But it is not, it is truly carnography
It has a lived-in feeling
It holds you gently
You can't lose yourself or starve
New York is served up & there's no need to dress
Skyscraper canyons
Streets vanish over the earth's curve
City of cities
Same wretched, incomplete soul
Ten tongued city, rushing past
ten thousand souls a second
Tai chi rhythm & espagnol
The way music translates the landscape into Russia by violin,
Ireland.
In New York everything has a beautiful name
Manhattan
Manhattan
It has a voice and a long coat
The night sky glows
reflected yellow light
Metal plated earth
City under the sea
I am a falling star
I left my heart
I cannot even open my eyes
New York, I want to stay
even though the vacuous departmentstore demons
I want to stay, for the smiles and sweet apple accent of Spanish and black in bag checkers' waitresses' and store keepers' mouths
I want to stay because you are big enough to be lost in forever
It's true that here sleep is worth nothing
You just become tired and worse, night after night
Until your eyes are bloodshot and your legs are numb and your heart goes blank
And your blood runs glitter & blackness, fragments of glass
Behind my retina
New York image
Isabelle's eyes
& old Japan
& when I die it will all be lost
Parchments degraded and finally burnt
The NY public library does not feel like Alexandria
Information is light
Information in itself, about anything, is light.
Messages in the pavement 41st East
The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms
In New York the world soul rocks and sings to itself and can be heard by everyone
In such a high concentration of humanity the general love and pain and holiness is in the atmosphere
In Harlem on the main street (125th) just after dark there's music and joy
In New York every café is part of the one café & we are all partaking of breakfast in the knowledge that we are eating Christ's body together two thousand years
New York is one art gallery and one movie theatre
It is a pleasure garden
Nothing is hidden, it is only not found yet
Pastries, pies, pasta in heaps and stacks
100% pressed apple juice from Nantucket
Natural Artesian Water
I can walk one block to the convenience store for vegan sushi
You anticipate it cold and terrible
Eye windows of dollars & dead souls and smoke pouring from the ground
You cannot enter New York without passing through its graveyards
In the lift to the top of the Empire State your ears pop faster than aeroplane ascent.
Beneath the city is not real.
It is familiar but clearly a forgery. I have been there and there. Last night Isabelle and I stumbled 34 blocks for cinéma and strawberry chocolate parfait
clattering to the temple in wooden shoes
To say a girl-child prayer
The prayer of the whole heart. The one prayer of a life
And now I am cheating, I can see all the way we walked, to fourteenth & East Village
I can see lights in everybodys window
Thousands of lives caught in my fifteen minutes that slowly reduce in the cauldron of memory and in years will be flavoursome and provoke tears
Tiny taxicabs and human sticks crawling bathed in Godlight
This is the religious ceremony of New York
Climbing up and looking down, empathizing with angels.
How many suicides tonight?
How many lovers fight?
How many look out of the window in desperation and remember the taste of cherry?
Taking off in the direction of night
(The world is round, like an orange.)
At this point I can never stop crying
Old Spanish busker on the shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central Terminal
Plays guitar and his voice is the voice of the arcangels
Doesn't look up from his blind spot in the middle distance as dollars land in his tiny briefcase
The sound goes into my bones forever and I still remember the tune, and the brokenheart joy, the gratitude is good for a thousand years.
It is good to know New York.
You go there once and you know it, it is mapped out and named and famed with glorious transparency
I have been to Canal Street and Lafayette
Everything a sweet grid reference, familiar and faint with movie nostalgia already
It is good to know it and know what people mean when they say
we ate at the automat in Times Square
The cable car on 2nd Avenue
Yes. I stood there and felt the barely perceptible tremour of endless subway cars and body heat and human earthquake garbage and aeroplanes that feels like it might be cosmic vibration from all these souls in sync
New York is really there, it is not a set in a studio or a collective hallucination or a feverdream
And this is the astonishing thing, one expects it to at least hover slightly or shimmer with desert heat like an unreal thing.
And now afterwards it does seem unreal, how can I trust my senses sharpened and muddled with delayed jet lag and put-off sleep, the sun-through-trees blindness and holiness of first America?
Walked the wrong way around the reservoir and the buildings got rapidly smaller
As if this is the lake at the end of the world, into which all our dreams fall and sizzle and glow faintly at night
'This is America' says Jones 'this is my idea of America'
And I wonder who comes to New York for squirrels
I think of Sylvia Plath walking and counting the blocks
Their shadows will cover Canada
Our room in the Y
with its bricks & water tower view
Its blue dawn view and 24 hour traffic soundtrack and its television showing Seinfeld and shit in turn
Isabelle bent backwards comfortable and how beautiful a girl is, a slim girl lying back on one arm to watch television
a dazzling spectacle of beauty. And how this is tangled in my New York memory, Seinfeld and cereal bars and the accidental intimacy of a small shared room, sleep on the top bunk under sheet, blanket and a pink cover that means GIRLS
Hostel-clean daily, cradling my bones with universal love.
[epilogue - in main journal]
February 21st
Endless New York hangover
Immovable soul
What is the remedy?
I will endure rickety ladderless bunks
Communal shower
Eternal traffic soundtrack
(a warm sound that permeates black coma sleep, lullaby of New York joy)
Sleep, the small snatched hours
Modest, earned, ritual
Healthy waking to wholegrains unsweetened fruit
Underneath the swinging skyscrapers on the ninth floor... making forever in my life, moments chiming against the flow of the Universe, burrowing backwards and settling
I want
This plain Buddhist life, this middle way
I'd up and go in a day, I'm young, I'm hungry
Talking to the young Jew curator over wine
Blonde and broad and fine-voiced
I cannot speak about New York, I was there, things happened, a story will form
But the slow transubstantiation into the hard aching stuff of memory effaces it: stone forms in my heart, smooth Japanese garden stone, with sunsets and high windows and fine rain inside it.
I have grand central terminal. I have the Chrysler building and the Statue of Liberty.
And if there's a god then god can only see through us
And maybe this is something you should accept in total silence because it's a benediction that can't be shared.
cobbled together site of my project
0525
Train stops in endless night
lights on stalks and tracks
gleam sodium monochrome
0745
Ultraviolet tunnel from station to terminal. Moving walkways & silence, suitcases rolling smoothly. It is the future imagined in the 70s, it is a beautiful space-dream, Martian colony. I travel in slow motion.
It is a grey day in England & it fell away with incredible grace & finally we emerged in perfect sunshine in this crazy machine, this monified war machine
Flying over Liverpool & Alex & the Mersey Ferry, flying over the cold Atlantic ocean blinded by a cloud sea
Solitude suddenly terrible & desperate trapped in everlasting day. Should be precious minute by minute but instead there's aeroplane waiting, with invariably dazzling view that send you numb.
On the map is Canada, Labrador and here is no local time. Travelling this way we're getting older. I'm chasing the morning and sleep is chasing me. It's nine o'clock in America and up here is the only place on earth with fine weather
Plane making its faint siren sound in the wind
Lost in cloud over New York.
America is a faint yellow colour with beautiful saplings lining neat roads
Old paint and concrete.
Plastic houses, bare branches, dead ground, toy cars floating along. But the birches will be lovely in Spring
Whole fields of pampas grass...
Graveyard is stuffed to the gills
Coach descends through rainbow industrial masses with flares and robots into a tunnel and emerges in pale grey magnificence Manhattan.
It is silent and graceful, Chrysler impossibly elegant for so many stories of stone. From a distance, in the mist, it looks like some kind of post modern cathedral.
One expects a cathedral air from it, a vague religious terror rising out of the earth
And it is sober and authoritarian and embellished
But not pious, not shuttered and impenetrable
It offers itself and demands no libations, no prayers, no confession
Steam pours from the ground & it roars like a living thing
What is New York standing on?
This piece of the Earth is human made to the quick, quarried stone and planted trees.
This is a yellow insomnia night with desperation at the ends of its corridors
It is exit sign loneliness
accent
A guy on the edge of SoHo wanted us to buy, he made his voice bounce like a ball. Another guy looks at my camera, tells me to go down that alley for a million to one shot, Miss.
New York is made for you like a salad
New York looks silent and complete
The end of the world
where the lions weep.
But it is not, it is truly carnography
It has a lived-in feeling
It holds you gently
You can't lose yourself or starve
New York is served up & there's no need to dress
Skyscraper canyons
Streets vanish over the earth's curve
City of cities
Same wretched, incomplete soul
Ten tongued city, rushing past
ten thousand souls a second
Tai chi rhythm & espagnol
The way music translates the landscape into Russia by violin,
Ireland.
In New York everything has a beautiful name
Manhattan
Manhattan
It has a voice and a long coat
The night sky glows
reflected yellow light
Metal plated earth
City under the sea
I am a falling star
I left my heart
I cannot even open my eyes
New York, I want to stay
even though the vacuous departmentstore demons
I want to stay, for the smiles and sweet apple accent of Spanish and black in bag checkers' waitresses' and store keepers' mouths
I want to stay because you are big enough to be lost in forever
It's true that here sleep is worth nothing
You just become tired and worse, night after night
Until your eyes are bloodshot and your legs are numb and your heart goes blank
And your blood runs glitter & blackness, fragments of glass
Behind my retina
New York image
Isabelle's eyes
& old Japan
& when I die it will all be lost
Parchments degraded and finally burnt
The NY public library does not feel like Alexandria
Information is light
Information in itself, about anything, is light.
Messages in the pavement 41st East
The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms
In New York the world soul rocks and sings to itself and can be heard by everyone
In such a high concentration of humanity the general love and pain and holiness is in the atmosphere
In Harlem on the main street (125th) just after dark there's music and joy
In New York every café is part of the one café & we are all partaking of breakfast in the knowledge that we are eating Christ's body together two thousand years
New York is one art gallery and one movie theatre
It is a pleasure garden
Nothing is hidden, it is only not found yet
Pastries, pies, pasta in heaps and stacks
100% pressed apple juice from Nantucket
Natural Artesian Water
I can walk one block to the convenience store for vegan sushi
You anticipate it cold and terrible
Eye windows of dollars & dead souls and smoke pouring from the ground
You cannot enter New York without passing through its graveyards
In the lift to the top of the Empire State your ears pop faster than aeroplane ascent.
Beneath the city is not real.
It is familiar but clearly a forgery. I have been there and there. Last night Isabelle and I stumbled 34 blocks for cinéma and strawberry chocolate parfait
clattering to the temple in wooden shoes
To say a girl-child prayer
The prayer of the whole heart. The one prayer of a life
And now I am cheating, I can see all the way we walked, to fourteenth & East Village
I can see lights in everybodys window
Thousands of lives caught in my fifteen minutes that slowly reduce in the cauldron of memory and in years will be flavoursome and provoke tears
Tiny taxicabs and human sticks crawling bathed in Godlight
This is the religious ceremony of New York
Climbing up and looking down, empathizing with angels.
How many suicides tonight?
How many lovers fight?
How many look out of the window in desperation and remember the taste of cherry?
Taking off in the direction of night
(The world is round, like an orange.)
At this point I can never stop crying
Old Spanish busker on the shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central Terminal
Plays guitar and his voice is the voice of the arcangels
Doesn't look up from his blind spot in the middle distance as dollars land in his tiny briefcase
The sound goes into my bones forever and I still remember the tune, and the brokenheart joy, the gratitude is good for a thousand years.
It is good to know New York.
You go there once and you know it, it is mapped out and named and famed with glorious transparency
I have been to Canal Street and Lafayette
Everything a sweet grid reference, familiar and faint with movie nostalgia already
It is good to know it and know what people mean when they say
we ate at the automat in Times Square
The cable car on 2nd Avenue
Yes. I stood there and felt the barely perceptible tremour of endless subway cars and body heat and human earthquake garbage and aeroplanes that feels like it might be cosmic vibration from all these souls in sync
New York is really there, it is not a set in a studio or a collective hallucination or a feverdream
And this is the astonishing thing, one expects it to at least hover slightly or shimmer with desert heat like an unreal thing.
And now afterwards it does seem unreal, how can I trust my senses sharpened and muddled with delayed jet lag and put-off sleep, the sun-through-trees blindness and holiness of first America?
Walked the wrong way around the reservoir and the buildings got rapidly smaller
As if this is the lake at the end of the world, into which all our dreams fall and sizzle and glow faintly at night
'This is America' says Jones 'this is my idea of America'
And I wonder who comes to New York for squirrels
I think of Sylvia Plath walking and counting the blocks
Their shadows will cover Canada
Our room in the Y
with its bricks & water tower view
Its blue dawn view and 24 hour traffic soundtrack and its television showing Seinfeld and shit in turn
Isabelle bent backwards comfortable and how beautiful a girl is, a slim girl lying back on one arm to watch television
a dazzling spectacle of beauty. And how this is tangled in my New York memory, Seinfeld and cereal bars and the accidental intimacy of a small shared room, sleep on the top bunk under sheet, blanket and a pink cover that means GIRLS
Hostel-clean daily, cradling my bones with universal love.
[epilogue - in main journal]
February 21st
Endless New York hangover
Immovable soul
What is the remedy?
I will endure rickety ladderless bunks
Communal shower
Eternal traffic soundtrack
(a warm sound that permeates black coma sleep, lullaby of New York joy)
Sleep, the small snatched hours
Modest, earned, ritual
Healthy waking to wholegrains unsweetened fruit
Underneath the swinging skyscrapers on the ninth floor... making forever in my life, moments chiming against the flow of the Universe, burrowing backwards and settling
I want
This plain Buddhist life, this middle way
I'd up and go in a day, I'm young, I'm hungry
Talking to the young Jew curator over wine
Blonde and broad and fine-voiced
I cannot speak about New York, I was there, things happened, a story will form
But the slow transubstantiation into the hard aching stuff of memory effaces it: stone forms in my heart, smooth Japanese garden stone, with sunsets and high windows and fine rain inside it.
I have grand central terminal. I have the Chrysler building and the Statue of Liberty.
And if there's a god then god can only see through us
And maybe this is something you should accept in total silence because it's a benediction that can't be shared.
cobbled together site of my project