Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

Albany

Albany In the night that doesn’t pass I saw a man crumple beneath another man’s fist. My instinct in a moment of crisis was not fear but rage and I ran screaming towards them. Having always been a coward, always shied away from the most important bravery I was alarmed to discover my inner nature was not that of scholar or dissident but warrior. The man rose with my help, well-built, handsome, a trickle of blood coming from his nose. He was as shocked as I was, saying “I didn’t see him. He hit me.” I was the slight one, the dark one, skinny and unsure, trained to obey. Yet that night I was the one rescuing. Arriving in the city of stone with my book and little else. On February 8, 1990, I called my friend Nadya, unable to sleep, awakened by loud roommates. She invited me to stay overnight at her place downtown so I went. We talked for a little while and she said I should keep a journal which I said I couldn’t do because I could never write in it, lacking any discipline. Nadya said, why do you have to write in it every day? Just get a blank spiral notebook and write in it when you feel like it. 80 | My aunt told me that she keeps journal too, only she destroys them. She’s saved only two: one is the account of her pilgrimage to Mecca and the other the journal of her period of convalescence in the hospital after serious surgery. The two fragmented periods of her life, the parts she left written. Are they the real ones or the unreal ones? Mom packed a small box for me for my first kitchen when I moved out of the dorms at the beginning of my junior year of college. In it was a pot, several wooden spoons, some knives. I still have the pot, still have one of the knives, a wooden spoon. Also she bought me a set of plates, bowls, cups and saucers that I still have most of. One bowl and one plate are broken, two cups gone missing, but the saucers are all still there. I lived in a neighborhood beneath the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. My favorite places were Nepenthe, a vegetarian café, and a performance space called Artists for a New Politics. Both were gone within five years. That winter was so cold, far away from campus, accessible only by the Wellington bus, a long walk under the highway for me. I’d separated myself because I felt my life was sinful and wrong. Is that how it happens: one day you turn around a corner and your body is suddenly different and you want something you never wanted before. How it all gleams and reminds me. Cocooned in Mansion Hill, forgetting myself, I tried to write my first novel. Eventually novels would evaporate to politics, politics would splinter into poetry. | 81 I could finally start to see books as condensations. The campus of the University at Albany, some said, was designed to be the University of Arizona, hence all the wind tunnels. Designed after the government plaza of Tehran, others said. Either way a place not a place, a place which had become not what it was destined to, a strange channeler of extreme psychic energy and distress present on any college campus. When I sought to read it was either the landscape, the ocean floor, or the flat black page of the sky. You seek to define. And then a Plank in Reason broke— Fine after coming I spoke to my advisor to change my major from Political Science to English, I no longer wanted to go to law school but wished to become a writer, her first question was: “Have you told your parents this?” I said I had. And she said, “But did you tell them you wanted to go to the desert, that you want to paint it purple?” Judy was also the first to teach me about Emily Dickinson, that her books had been broken apart, that her poems even in their “authentic” versions had been relineated. So everything I knew had actually come through decades of editing and authorizing. 82 | So it was possible after all for a suppressed voice, a redirected voice, a suffocated or strangled one, to still speak...