Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

New York City

New York City At the end of my years living in the City I didn’t know how to make a sentence anymore. I had a deck of index cards I carried around in my back pocket. It was May. When a thought occurred to me I would write a line or two on a card and then shift it to the back of the deck. On my way to work I would walk between an academic building and the big library. There was a small steeple mounted on a pedestal, part of the original library. Cities are like my deck of cards, one line after another, one thing and then another disappearing. Piece for a trophy, the summer the debate was about whether or not the university would demolish a brownstone Edgar Allen Poe had lived in for six months. What made history into a building? When only the outside of the structure was the same and the inside had long since been refurbished into offices with drop ceilings and fluorescent fixtures. I lay down on the little futon to read Finnegans Wake. Night after night I read Finnegans Wake to sleep. By day I did yoga and kung fu and studied dance. | 37 I woke early in my apartment on John Street and drank dark coffee and ate toast and white fig jam for breakfast. Caught the 6 train up to the Village. I was in exile, living out of a suitcase in a completely empty apartment in the deserted money district. On little cards I wrote a line and then another line in order to suspend the idea and pull it apart. But at the time my interest was in obliteration. What I want to do now is find myself somewhere or to disassemble into air. At the end, like every place I have lived, I left quickly. I packed my things up and rented a truck and called Sean and Tim to come down from Boston and help me. And drove my things up to Rhinebeck. August 2001. Mornings I rose with the feeling of hunger in my stomach. As long as I could I held on to that feeling. Dad told me about one hundred and four books supposedly revealed by God. Books revealed not written means meaning there only needs uncovering. Four are named in the Quran so he does not discount the possibility of others, in other nations, other tribes, at other points in history. Logically assuming that everyone has to have a fair shake at liberation. Close to what Krishnamacharya said when he said you did not have to have a vegetarian diet to be a yogi or even be a Hindu of any kind. 38 | Or as the monks chanted at the tokudo: “vast is the robe of liberation . . . ” I carried the notecards because it seems the clouds existed in snatches in the sky. That buildings grew from concrete the way trees grew from the grass. On the sidewalk around Washington Square the concrete buckles up in ridges from the roots of the trees. Reminding everyone that underneath the city there is landscape. It didn’t matter to preservationists that the Poe House was already gone inside. Peculiar I need reminding about that at this moment, a December morning, in my apartment on Marble Hill. But just one block north of me, beneath what’s now 228th Street, a creek used to run. Long since diverted when the canal was blasted through to the south of 225th Street. Now waterfront. But before the skyline was revised, before all the other part began, before the phone scorpioned in my hand. I lived in the lower end of the island. Near Washington Square Park, though briefly, after I came back from Paris, with only my backpack and a hunger, I had to stay down on John Street. Every day I went to the university housing office and asked to be moved back up to the Village. Russell advised me to go in and lose my temper, become angry and irrational. | 39 Which I couldn’t manage. The apartment complex I lived in was the same complex Anaïs Nin lived in and Hans Hofmann. Hofmann became my hero because his paintings were to me like New York: all foreground and background at once. Each changing positions as it liked. Anaïs became my hero because her novels and diary were the...