Far From New York: Openings In Present Tense & in Recollection

It's a hot bright day even if by standard old timer's reckoning it ought to be well into winter, today being the first of June. The morning sun did have to work through a few hindrances like the neighbors horizon obliterating old lilac & the general slope of the hill. No, not a lilac really or a sycamore. In fact I've no idea what it is except it resists light & lines of sight in a rather solemn & beautiful manner ( yes resists was the intended word, the better word, & not restricts, - restricts not befitting such grand wood. ). But a while ago I did find a patch of sunned on grass to lie down on just beyond the shadow of the roof, the bittersweet hum of coffee like a dark ballad in my mouth.


I'll be doing away with some things in this book. The names of streets or places I'll use only to ornament or clarify whatever idea I'm trying to coax to workable form. Names tend to too much automatic description & as an old friend from Nagano said over the phone: If you roll something in a plate of flour you'll soon have every intention of deep frying it. When I boil an egg there is a little mystery I am investigating. All streets in the world can be understood as the same. One can write & compare things neither moving too far or looking too long & is roughly where this small point stays.

Let me tell you two things about New York without telling you a thing about it at all. The first probably started out as a casual note about how names ( meaning reputations of place or character ) have a tendency to assert notions into a situation before more intimate impressions of its quality can be made. One goes to New York - well indeed how was it?. One makes a whimsical pilgrimage to Ganryu Island & so now wheres that? Whats there? And so life begins. Or ends abruptly depending. But where my train of thought derailed I have no idea. It is out there somewhere, wheels spinning towards some brightening opening sky though fortunately, as usual, without any passengers. And so now what seems on the surface to be a fragment from an unpublished story writing manual, more thorough rummaging will find to be the usual dapple of verve spilt in the face of substance. Anyway...

If anyone were to tell me they were sitting on a staircase in 3rd Avenue ( which is also in the great city of New York) any number of things could happen. The variations of mood in the average human being are both predictable and endless and should I disregard it with a shrug & pass it by, this is understandable. But I'd most probably be curious what that person's particular business is, sitting on a staircase in 3rd Avenue by their lonesome & telling me about it at all. I would probably want to know what mood they're in & the kind of things they are aware of , where the sun falls if there be sun,where the rain falls if there be rain & so on. Such things as the presence of music (even in physical form, as in the shape & appearance of the staircase). I would be interested in what the whole thing meant to them , how they've soaked the day into their experience of being, & alternatively, - if indifference was what prevailed - how they've left it alone. There are after all, many excellent ways to be indifferent.

As a rule I would probably allow 10 minutes or so to at least make a half decent approach towards the heart of the matter, for me to be able to sit down & smoke on that staircase, in a manner of speaking. If I began to think we were wasting each others time, I would of course start travelling back down some little street I've refused to name, to buy bread from an old man with green, slow moving eyes - an old style lullabye hitman who sells the best bread within 5 kilometers of right here, honorably inexpensive, excellently baked bread & he knows this & I know it too. It is also the same street where a woman I loved lived once upon a time when things between us weren't easy & 10 years later I bought her a hand knitted coat with what little I had left in the bank while I was waiting for my bread to come out of the old man's oven , a coat she said she loved & hardly ever wore but that is another story. There is good coffee down this street too. It is important to note that even in little uknown streets such as mine, good coffee is an everyday matter, as it should be.

I have nothing against New York. New York I've come to believe, is a great city. I believe Frank Sinatra sang Autumn Leaves there & enough times to have sung it through all the available seasons. I have to first heard that song in the tropics where its harder to discern autumn & my favorite version is the one with Cannonball Adderley on alto sax. Anyway my father loves Sinatra & in childhood I heard Autumn Leaves easily a hundred times in a place where there was no such thing as autumn except as an idea. I have read about how famous people to this day keep showing up in New York, to grease the wheels on the wagon so to speak & also perhaps, for any number of personal reasons. Famous people without a single truly excusable right to be famous unlike Sinatra who kept singing right up against the twilight, except that some silliness was endorsed by a largely insatiable & clueless populace, who kept catching everyone, including themselves by surprise & who made a handsome suitcase of dough for a particular few and not much more sense, nothing to weave over the hole in one's soul like Sinatra did so well for my father back in the day, although that also, is another story.

My next note on New York is less hypothetical. The first time my mother & father ventured to America, New York was on their list & they got there the day the worst blizzard in 20 years also happened in that great city so things were very exciting & also uneventful for them. I imagine they spent a distressing amount of time eating hot apple pie watching a beautiful white blur through a glass window. I recollect I was at a confused romantic age at that time & had requested my mother to bring me back some blizzard quality snow in a small bottle. I did not end up having my bottle of snow. She later explained all it would have been was water , at once excusing herself & pointing out the original fault of my request. But there was where we differed, for it would have still been a bottle of blizzard quality snow the way I saw it.

So let me start with the little things where I also intend to end. These notes of mine are for people who understand a bit of weaving may be needed over the hole, wherever they feel that hole may be, & who imagine that it may require at times the most subtle & precise movement, a degree of concentration possible only with a comfortable solitude & an obvious amount of natural light for the eye to settle on the appropriate things.

These are early days for me. I do not know if I intend to return & write here religiously. I am far from religious, although I do write from time to time. So from time to time it will be. Like blizzard quality snow.There may be days when I'll have the delusion of being a poet & may whisk by quickly to try & tap out a small sheet of verse. At times in the grip of the moment I may confuse everyone with mutterings only I have any reasonable hope of bringing to ground. I will be mistaken many times over but will endeavor to keep things steadfast & bemusing. It will be mostly spur of the moment, off the cuff writing, except when I share previous work out of laziness or sentimentality. Just like you, my direction is imagined but I hope it becomes noticeable that I tend to blow my smoke towards some source of light. If you dont know what I mean by this, its probably best you take some time to think about  it. It goes without saying if you like the things I write about you already knew them anyway. And if you dont, there are a great many other things for you to read. It is a long & busy street. I only deal in small lamps,obscure distillations & handmade maps. For the most part I'll stick to what I know. And the rest, well, that was always up to you. My father never paid any attention to Sinatra unless he was singing.