New York.

These smells, the sunlight, the water crushing and crashing the ripples that cool people’s fingertips as they throw their pennies down. A sepia kind of sunlight: The smell of cigarette smoke and burning juices, meat juices, dry pretzels stacked on metal cookers that line these newspapered, tar jammed streets. Smoke comes from all the little Sabrett blue and yellow striped umbrellas; a German, an Italian, a French woman’s voice. I don’t see these people, just hear them with the crashing of the fountain spoils, the spurts of incessant conversations like lullabies for day, constant, smiling, chattering like monkeys.

Honey roasted nuts, another piece of gum. More cigarettes. A small BMX bike outside, locked to a street sign down the side of FAO Schwartz: A kid on a visit to the Imaginarium. The pizza bikes, delivery boys, slow Sunday open streets, caved-in underground tunnels. Women are strong, men are weak, and the children ponder like tiny adults at the water’s edge. New York: Dusty and drunk with sirens, bus horns, taxi beeps, long noises, babies cough, cash machines, tax doubled, beds made, millions of beds, millions of heads, millions of legs which all move aside for each other. I guess you just need to know which direction you’re going. There is so much more of life to live, and each is not the other.

I come home from that, and sleep, and wake, and sleep again. And the world spins like any good cosmos should; where the ash from my cigarette drifts across me like snow did all those months ago. I wrote on that waltzing snow, and it went into my horizontal letter lines, as if all of it moving as all else. Even ash, even snow, even words fall the same direction with me.

I get up, I can’t write, I can’t not write. I read ‘Fear makes you fearless’ and realize there are so many thoughts which will all eventually slide from this light into that darkness, flowing across the horizon like ash and snow too. I realize I am not sure if I am the lion or the Jew. I am so hungry. I cannot stop devouring, I am so hungry that I leave marks on your skin, mess all around me, milk everywhere. I am not sure what beast I am staring into, perhaps a lynx, perhaps a leopard. One a bull, one a horse, one a moose: Maybe 5 moose would do it? Maybe I could understand better if only this, or if only that. Maybe my feelings are true: That one only has to see a certain sight, or do a certain thing, in order to unlock the next door of the story.

I have found myself following white rabbits which led inevitably to a labyrinth. It’s funny, the symbols that surround me and how much I know about them. I’m not sure if knowledge is everything, nor if it is succinct power. To me knowledge is a cage you lock yourself into: a cage as big as the mesh of the universe, and I knew I was going into a labyrinth – this is the thing. But still I went, and still I got lost, lunatized, turned into the moon and back, saw spiders rush at me beside loudspeakers; and dark gravestones bit with shadow; mossy trees I could rip open with my strong fingers for the fire.

There are plenty of ideas that make up this mesh that surrounds me, and while I might seem so free, a Frida Sophia, I am not feeling the freedom you think. These days I keep finding lone keys on the concrete walls, the pavements, my pockets. My hands are pressed up at the edges of the cosmos like wet sheets of glass, while everything spins all around me. I am not sure if I am still, or if I am spinning. This is my prison, this is my cage. I am afraid of my own lightness, the open chasm of my soul – or is it a mere flesh wound?  -  still, it gets all kinds of things trapped inside it. So much that I am afraid that if I saw a ghost, he would never leave my psyche, and become the loophole for all my life. That I could not understand the inexplicable – not ever? That is my fear. Once in, Forever without. I am afraid the keys would be sewn into my pocket, or remain on the floor, or flow with all the other dark matter into the edges of the Universe beyond that which I can touch.

A Lion, A Witch and a Wardrobe.

“There are people who cannot resist the desire to go into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled. They go even without a revolver or whip. Fear makes them fearless… For the Jew the world is a cage filled with beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not smell the dung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on in the cage. The cage, he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless, the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not even one lion has ever heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why, they can’t even get their teeth into him. “Give us meat!” they roar, while he stands there petrified, his ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A single blow of the lion’s paw and his cosmogony is smashed.

The lions too, are disappointed. They expected blood, bones, gristle, sinews. They chew and chew, but the words are chicle and chicle is indigestible. Chicle is a base over which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme, licorice. Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is O.K. [...] What has all this to do with you, Moldorf? The word in your mouth is anarchy. Say it Moldorf. I am waiting for it. Nobody knows, when we shake hands, the rivers that pour through our sweat. Whilst you were framing your words,  your lips half-parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, I have jumped halfway across Asia. Were I to take your cane, mediocre as it is, and poke a little hole in your side, I could collect enough material to fill the British Museum.

We stand on five minutes and devour centuries. You are the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words. Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but there are not and never will be enough bars to make the mesh. [...] I sit on the bed in a daze, thinking about man before his birth. Suddenly bells begin to toll, a weird, unearthly music, as if I had been translated to the steppes of Central Asia. Some ring out with a long, lingering roll, some erupt drunkenly, maudlinly. And now it is quiet again, except for a last note that barely grazes the silence of the night – just a faint, high gong snuffed out like a flame.

I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgeniev I put the perfection of Dostoievski (Is there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh’s letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of the individual over art.”

Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer, Signet Classic, 1995.

It strikes me that after so much light in this world we are inevitably travelling on strange boats towards the darkness. Natural though, that we would all slip there again. Perhaps this is where we all go when we die, and where we all come from before birth.  There are no locksmiths for this door though. I’ve tried to open it, but I think it remains perpetually fogged up like a window pane and my hands slip across it too fast. I think it opens horizontally, like everything else in my world – the snow, the words, the ash.

“There is a possibility that we do have the keys to the universe. The problem is the keys are locked up in the safe.”

(Source unknown)