I work a day job these days, and my life has changed. A part of me desires to transform myself into an automaton: to wake, work, exercise, fuck, sleep, repeat. To move with brutal vigor, to thrash about with precision. But it is difficult to forgo elegance.
The dark of winter has begun to lift. I leave work at 5:30 and there is still light. The Bank of America tower, dare I say it, is thrilling, a shard that pierces the soft underbelly of dusk. The gentle blue of twilight has now replaced night, and the days grow longer. As with children, this happened overnight--the world does not equally and smoothly move, rather, its motion is jerky, like the growth spurts of children.
For no reason in particular, I wandered the streets of the Lower West Side, full of gloomy musings and uncertain convictions.
"In my dreams, I see shadows on the sidewalks..."
Many people who are small pieces of me have begun to fade from this life:
a Hungarian Folklorist, a last vestige of an old world that faded away after the first world war
a carpenter and artist, friend of Taj Mahal, who lived off the grid
a cantankerous Catalonian who couldn't stand the blues
a younger brother of my grandfather, who never could live up to the older brother he idolized, on whom the army experimented with lsd, who, alone and forgotten, lived out his days in a veteran's affairs hospital in Chillicothe, Ohio...
As have I myself begun to fade, my present looking at a distance ever further toward the present, a present which is the bright light on the horizon that indicates the disappearing sun...there are now many who live on only in my mind, in the minds of others, and I begin to feel the pressure that Proust must have felt, a pressure to imagine and construct a beautiful, immense architecture veiled in scaffolding, that builds itself again and again in the minds of readers, so that some of the dream of this life, this moment, may live on.
The new world grows up around the old, young grasses and daffodils shrouding the rusted idols which melt sadly into the soil. The future waits not for us to acquiesce to it, but streams through, steams on, blind, dumb, menacing.
"Different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves..."
"The lake's surface was barely wrinkled; the copper reflection of the ancient palace of the Sung was shattered into sparkling glints like floating leaves."
I've quoted Modiano and Calvino; I'll quote Calvino once more, on why the construction of a certain city never seems to end: "so that its destruction cannot begin." The inhabitants of this city, if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, add, hastily, in a whisper, "not only the city."
That's New York.
I'm reading Octavio Paz, his Laberinto de la soledad; last weekend I went to a factory party in the Bronx. No, it wasn't Warhol, no, not at all.
I think I may begin using drugs again. Thinking people use drugs, because they understand that addiction is impossible for them. Addiction is a condition--a disease--that will find an object and dig in its claws. It is a psychological disease born in the pain of life.
Unusual experiences keep a person growing, changing--we must become children again to feel at least ephemeral carelessness and delight in life. Sometimes lately I take magnesium.
DAYBREAK
Bebel Gilberto & Duke Ellington with His Orchestra
Donn Alan Pennebaker, 1953
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