12nd July
There is arose in Spanish Harlem
The song flooded in.
I lay back and calmed myself, hoping the rest of the dream might come to me that way.
Instead, a translation, There ears arose in Spanish Harlem.
2nd July
Open
In the shower the images:
last night arriving from twenty-four hours of one day’s light. The crowd around the aperture of customs people mobbing me yellow cards in my hand for a gypsy taxi. The obstruction from passengers with trolley-loads of more and more bags embracing their families or random strangers, maybe all embraces are random?
Then the taxi I stumble out and catch, with R.I.P.D. drawn in texta on the plastic light box, on its roof.
I’ve no idea what that might mean and I forgot to ask.
“So there’d be some bar or something open now, wouldn’t there?”
“Man, it’s twenty-four hours.”
Endless crowding of 10.37
Landscape
Walking, up ahead, with tree tattooed along shoulder blades. Pauses momentarily in front of me to text.
Change
You broke a coin. Συμβολα.
The Ancient Greek system of sumbola: symbols, tokens, broken halves of coins. You gave one to your guest.
Whoever brought that broken half back, and it fitted, was entitled to be your guest again. Your meaning.
The view
out the window
seen by the 3rd floor
of the Guggenheim Museum
(Kandinsky in Paris 1933-1944)
A white, concrete overhang in the upper left of frame, a pebble-laden roof at its base. Three lights rearing from what must be street below. Thick, ever-green foliage behind lights. Glimpses of a lake. Heads jogging up and down through leaves. Body parts glint from occasional bicycles. Above the trees a sky of fast-moving cumulus clouds against a strangely deep, deep, but also very light, blue. A plane traverses at ten times cloud-speed. A bird, velocity untracked. Cotton on a wound.
Emergency of 14.37 am
Shakespeare and Co Booksellers. Hunter College East. Wheelchair Priority Seating. Guy in greyish-green shirt and slacks, bald with hat, under wheelchair sticker. Cambridge Chemists Established 1941. Sel et Poivre. Woman seated to left of him, elderly, stooped, mouth open. Guy in drivers’ seat of truck at lights throwing hands up in air violently, I assume in violence, but guy next to him repeats the same gesture, in agreement. Ultimate Spectacle. Eyes Examined. Walk-ins Welcome. Body Work. Deep Tissue. Won’t y loveheart u please give this seat to the elderly? World of Nuts. Woman on pavement rubs forehead in the humidity, resumes texting. Lexington Ave. Geox. City Camera. Man at the lights, short hair, shirt and tie, holding strap of shoulder bag, bag dangling at his ankles. Get Your Salad on. All July’s Slot Losses Refunded. July 1-31. Revell. You Can’t Lose. I Can’t Lose. Those are the dates of my trip. Emergency.
Sleep like a bus
23nd July
Dream job
I don’t know his name, but have a vague memory, ‘Manuel’.
The Good-well Centre.
Man, whole.
This is a dream job.
I decide to test my misgivings. I tell the union’s HR officer my ideas about the creative arts party anarchist activist research organisation to see. She seems to find it all just fine.
“Producing perhaps even more instrumental research than before.”
During this conversation I am draped across the ceiling rafters, and at one point tumble —
I guess the daylight reference here is to a loft. Maybe because I was on Bowery Street yesterday. Also the busker.
(“Even more instrumental”).
Saxophone and open air sax-case, out in front of the Metropolitan Museum I walked past, after the M103 stalled long enough in the traffic beside the hobo with the air conditioner and the hole in the road for first dream to take hold. About two hundred people were on the stairs, watching as he played wildly and you run up and down the pavement and dance, dance wildly. Throw it all away.
His sax-case is full of dollar bills. Snakes. Saxophones.
Busker. Busk her. Cast a bust of her. A bust.
I now have a daydream of interpretation, as a famous politician. It’s for my contributions to New York City.
They’ve busted me out.
3rd July
Recollection
of information from a plaque yesterday on a wall
called “Wall” because the original Dutch one was here. Six feet high, higher than a person then. Abandoned. Street.
View
Grand Central Station’s, towards Vanderbilt Avenue
In an immense lens.
Closely-woven, black metal lattice over the surface of hundred-foot high window. Against it, four levels of plank scaffolding. A cleaner walks backwards along the second level. Is one tenth the size of window. Pushes the broom or mop forward and then back a few times, before another step back. Repeat procedure with every step. A tall building dimly intuited behind his. It seems the day is cloudy though it might simply be window, opacity.
In Vanderbilt Hall around me someone bald in a suit speaks into a mike. I’m sure I’ve seen a person shot here, in a film. In fact, a massacre.
Soundtrack in the ears
tickets to that and the Yankees
I know, but I’m just sayin’
pues, alli
He’s like Santa Klaus
911
Remember 119?
Remember that?
Oh fuck. 119!
Waitin’ for him, I think you were doing
Well, my older brother
el mundo progresssa
If you wanna make a day of it
Andale!
Dvyenatsats dollarov
What’s up?
Now if this was back in the day,
Restaurant’s View
from the fifth floor terrace of the Museum of Modern Art
To the right. Exterior wall of Museum.
Courtyard below.
Directly in front. Five stories, each walled in glass. Three people in café on the third. Another waiting for the lift on the fourth story. Another for lift on fifth.
To the left. Luminescent tin-roof, rain-stained various pigments of green, all visually pleasing. Two chimneys on the roof to the left again. Further back, a grimy, brick facade, its floors extending up and down out of sight.
In the background to these scenes. Further facades of buildings, together like the collage I saw in the Guggenheim yesterday, a Kurt Schwitters, no sky visible at all.
travelling you are in some ways stripped back to them, to clothes.
34th July
Trigger
Masses, overwhelming everywhere electric signage, in downtown Osaka, here in the heart of the USA, Times Square exhaustion, jet-lag, fifteen minutes like a television set changing channels every three seconds.
I can’t sleep 3.26am.
On a promontory.
A moon shadow in the water. Spot-light. Surf blood-red in the dark night. At one point compacted into a fleshy lump.
I think we are on Fraser island, in Australia.
A guy downstairs wished me “Happy Independence” getting out of the lift and I had no idea what he is talking about?
Popping up of muttering, mad people all over, the subway, on the pavement.
Tuesday’s hole in the road covered by a garbage bin by an insane man hauling an air conditioner down ave.
Memory in dark, attempt to stay asleep, my brushing into that car somewhere Greenwich Village. There was a ten year old kid in the back, next to an officer, two officers in front. I hoped they were taking him a place of safety.
A guy inside the centre, on the floor above me, is reading a government education pamphlet through a microphone. It says there’s no such thing as class, students are not to be thought of in these terms, all are level playing field and the guy says through the mike, though as if just to himself — and I will if he doesn’t — ‘Oh bollocks.’
He looks like my former colleague, Michael.
Everyone is being called upstairs for the picnic. Many are heading up there, to the headland.
Head land.
(microphone, michael).
At Grand Central Station.
The quote from the Sex Pistols (“Never mind the bollocks…”) must have been drawn from the work curated inside the tunnel on the first floor. Museum of Modern Art. A series of light boxes, displaying objects in pistol shape. Driftwood that a kid might pick up and play with as a gun. A glove with fingers arranged in pistol formation. A pamphlet-folded gun. Bits of tin. Screws. Anything that can assume that rough shape. Lots of things. Dreams.
4th July
View
by Metro Line F from Greenwich Village to Coney Island
Window, black while underground, reflects face of woman facing it two seats to my left, and guy, three. She is gesticulating, he is nodding behind sunglasses off to sleep, wearing blue pinstripe shirt with white collar. Window now lit up by grimy, tiled, station interior. Window again black, with previous reflections, but also the occasional flash of fluorescent blue light, and more frequent yellows. Train pauses we apologise for any inconvenience and now the reflection burns away and I see in its place on the window an afterglow of the Rothko that transfigured me yesterday, the fuzzy depths of its black, the red. Beneath and partially obscuring this: a grandmother, seated with weathered esky between legs. Two small children next to her, one playing a computer game. The other child is looking on, mother and father in the corner looking on too. Daylight breaks through.
5th July
View
of 3rd floor, which has no windows, in The New Museum.
Ellen Gallagher Exhibition (“Don’t Axe Me”)
Each canvas is abstract but features row upon row of miniature eyes in minstrel make-up. And then, great swathes of space away, in some other part of these large, skin-beige canvasses, there is row upon row of miniature minstrel mouths. As if a body of eyes were separated from their mouths, just tasting or perhaps still looking.
The guard paces in circles around the room. Something won’t let her.
Another is a three-branched tree, ten foot high, in sheer black gloss, painted on sheer black gloss.
In the next room: outlines of heads with afro hairdos cut out of black card and set on bright, yellow backing paper, eyes also excised, pure yellow paper stares through. Sixty-five of them.
A set of jelly fish in imaginary places, named after the names of African-American wig designs from a bygone age.
A window with view of outside between floors three and four. Ignore its view. Turn around.
Facing you then, a framed sheet of white card with faces scraped into it almost to invisibility, scraped in patterns reminiscent of the jellyfish below.
*
Fourth floor “an immersive environment consisting of sixteen mm film and painted slide projections inspired by a species of undersea worm that burrows into the bones of dead whales.”
Soundtrack in ears
I was no good and she was no good.
What happened was
Go ahead!
But we’re both way too old for shit like that.
You just want. You just want.
What differential?
Yeah, there’s some of that. You can find that anywhere.
But it’s a misconception, because of some
I feel the same love.
ruined my brown shoes.
Is there anything else you want?
Awesome.
Twenty.
Everything’s beautiful down there.
I’ll take that, man!
There’s nothing to take.
¿Por que?
¿Quantas llevas con el agua?
Everything’s computerised.
And in ears above
low humming with rhythmic pulse, surge. Though not loud it has a deep bass sound and must be a city full of diffuse traffic heard from its thirteenth floor.
56th July
A slice
Visual of a record player not playing.
“Where are the spoons from the night before?”
Knowing me, knowing you, ahah
there is nothing we can do.
A park, and greeting me at the gate is a guy I know from home, he died last year.
He says, “All the gear is up there.”
He’s referring to a picnic on the hill up above the winding gravel path.
I think to myself, I have two oranges.
A girl is taping signage to the wire fence and asks if it’s okay to do that. We both say yeah, it’s fine.
Head up.
All the gear: drugs, heroine, even fences. But why oranges?
They served me a thin slice of orange in the diner near the New Museum yesterday, before I saw the Ellen Gallagher (“Don’t Axe Me”). A Colombian breakfast of refried beans, eggs, avocado, fried banana, cob of corn. Plus a slice of orange.
What do you do with the orange?, I thought then.
6th July
The whirring of a computer component
no, same hum as last night, reduced (but louder when I close my eyes). Those birds with the on/off chirp discernable there too.
Sound
of it to breakfast.
There’s no time without it other than sleep. I’m in a sack of traffic. But not when asleep my dreams keep going back to the other side of the world its characters its dramas Fraser Island Canberra Melbourne maybe one doesn’t really travel at all so that when you take a holiday your unconscious half is actually always back home surely this changes the more you come to live in a place but not fast I’m convinced this has something to offer our understanding of the aesthetics of travel is this why such a narcotic, involves opening your mind back home overseas but this digression and then the question of hearing versus vision in the unconscious how can our senses work there anyway and where dreams go amongst that. I’d better get to work.
Pack:
Phone
Microphone
Upstairs, air-conditioned eatery
footsteps in wooden heels down to deli counter below, footsteps in runners now across floor to my side, the slightest rubber screech with each step, clack of plastic container lid flipped open, gentle heaving of air-conditioner, heavy humming, feels contented, input from cough radio tuned to advertising, or radio voice announcing, sounds like advertising bien, gracias male voices at nearby table harder for me to discern, mumbling, while woman I could hear clear words of having gone to change the milk returns.
Street
car beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep five seconds, beep thirty seconds, beep adjacent car alarm five seconds, beep and car alarm five seconds, beep and siren five seconds, beep and siren of black Cadillac wagon car alarm can’t stop itself has no consciousness.
Ooze
low oozing of cars slowly down the street.
at 14.55am
driving beat of low bass house music, clattering of plates, cutlery, knives and forks now being poured in a huge heap, truck’s approaching from behind left ear, getting louder, retreating, and bass, driving bass resumes amid clutter of dishes, sound of water hose washing now prominent beats retreat for song change and radio in kitchen becomes audible in the space, four bells toll out over all other noise from Our Lady of Pompeii church across street, clutter of children behind left ear assuming all aural space now you don’t really get a flat screen of sound with sound the way you seem to with vision I mean with vision you can feel you grasp all within view like postcard there’s a total view however illusory according to what theory of illusion, of course you can focus in on some particular in your visual field always but even then most of the same background remains until you move your body closer to the thing under focus (the eye is not a zoom) with sound you focus in and have no overall backdrop maybe you get the sense of the total sound of a space as you enter it maybe but this diminishes quickly and is hard to maintain long listen to every sound in your environment right now without focusing in at all just catch the whole sound of the space including every single sound which is not like trying to see everything in front of you but more like trying to visualise in your mind every single thing in the world right now all at once not successively but all in one imagining perception.
then 22.17am
as I empty it of content crinkling of plastic bag clicking sounds, all around running of water through piping and a more constant, still rhythmic rotating sound click a machine set in motion, flush of suds flowing running water through pipes and its rhythmic, but I suspect the rhythms here are like those we hear when we perceive the rhythmic swaying of a clock tick tock the clock actually goes tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.
the washing
My dream, I now realise — it comes out in the wash — What do you do with the orange? I wondered.
Oh, you dream with it.
67th July
Pre-programme
Recollection of 301st July I tell the woman from L.A. next to me on the plane who has just done an internship at a superannuation fund in Sydney and is heading back to college in Boston to study finance and commerce that I am one of a team of professors interviewing eighty poets across the Anglophone countries as to their experiences of poetic judgement and that in the course of it I’m writing a travelogue founded in the dreams I have of places like San Francisco and New York City where I’ve never been. She asks where I’m a student.
And how I remember my dreams.
I say I pre-programme myself going to sleep to remember to break out of them just as I am coming to and I also have to remember then waking to still myself till the memories flood back; for they otherwise instantly vanish in the shock of wakefulness.
She replies, a friend is into superheroes and pre-programmes himself to dream he is flying with Superman, nightly.
I say, I will learn from this. (Pre-programme your dreams by nightly auto-suggestion. Tell people about the dream project and incorporate their reactions. If someone mistakes you for a different person, take them up on that invitation, become their mistake.)
7th July
Whether Re
port
Birds chirping on and off, as before. I’m hearing elements of whistle in it now, and transitions in pitch. I’m also gaining, amid the density of multiple chirps, a discrimination between nearer and further away. Nature is coming closer, in an island of culture. I recall trees.
No
respite from surround-sound humidity, a cushion of air pressed against every exposed stretch of flesh. Clothed sweat.
Hot
acrid stench, from rails, coming like rubber burning, doors arrive train opens its onrush of cool air.
Direct, radiant, wet 91°
heat again surrounds.
White wall
with diagrams of archaeological dig at temple’s site on the Nile.
Woman with grey hair,
perfectly combed down and slightly balding at crown, guarding the Temple of Dendur.
The walls inside say
A. Cavallaro
D. Callone 1821
Al Brad. . . 1891 of NY, US
M°I
1829
F
Droverti 1816
Σ.Ι. ΝΑΤΑΛ°Σ 1865
F.C. Casati 1891
I. Madox 1828
Visitors
move swiftly in and out of view from the past.
View
from another room of The Metropolitan Museum of New York (of “what he sometimes called ‘doors’ and ‘windows’ in luminous colour”, paintings)
Almost imperceptible
breeze. Bench. Shirt resting on shoulders, back, upper arms. Hairs slightly raised. Fingers in right hand feel pressure of holding grooved fountain pen. In left, touch of fingers clasping lid, blue. Book on thighs, a certain resistance and push with each pen stroke as hand and arm writes. Neck bent, slight pressure to hold head at angle to the page to inscribe, this. Paul Klees on all sides, refreshing.
Two t-shirts given ages back
the one with image in yellow of a bear in moonlight, black, the other black with white of Darth Vader’s face composed like concrete poem of lines from Star Wars REBEL SPIES MANAGED TO STEAL SECRET PLANS I AM YOUR FATHER SAVE HER PEOPLE AND RESTORE FREEDOM TO THE GALAXY LUKE implicit in that idea of 3rd Jul for me is that words, to which we’re also reduced when travelling, are clothes, clothes as homes.
Bodily frame
cushioned in eye-shut.
Limbs too exhausted to hold up pad and pen, at correct angle for ink, to flow
78th July
Destination
I have run for ages to get here, past my bodily endurance.
Including snaking through an “Opportunity Shop” and out the back room, things everywhere. A woman shows me the way, quizzically. Does she realise there is nothing but a garage out there, and that it offers no connection to the path other than if you crawl under a car your head is too big for?
I ended up taking some rope from a shelf.
Now at a place just below the bar.
We are in Cooma, country Australia.
He and I are getting nearer. Only he turns into an old man as we do so, and is telling me how he hadn’t expected — would be playing.
Then he becomes young again, how good this band is. But I don’t know the name he’s mentioning, I am too old.
So we enter and I’m in at the table, writing down a dream as people enter. I want to keep getting these details down.
I want to keep writing but would like the company later so I say sure a beer.
Bier.
I keep writing, feeling more and more oblivious as I do.
8th July
In a bottle
Man with dog, at curb retreating backwards. I see him but am under too much propulsion can’t dodge as he backs into me on Bleecker street near Mercer. Stumble to the left on Bleecker intersection with Crosby. Last night’s dream. Bullets in it. Grazing the fabric of a blue, short-sleeved shirt, while leaning back to avoid woman rushing by my right, hand, side. The building scaffolding in front of Le Pain Quotidienne. Our bottle necks. Gather it in. I’m about to drive in Manhattan on the wrong side of the road I haven’t driven for one week I haven’t driven on the wrong side of the night road for nine months in France I almost died killed in the wrong lane in a 130 kilometer an hour tunnel on the border with wrong thought wrong association end now.
Time to get to work.
You cannot be in U.S.A. without driving through your dreams.
Air-con plays scissors/paper/rock with the heat.
In the
scungy car park under Astor Place. Use the force.
G.P.S. eyes.
Senses rapidly forgotten as volume turns up and brain becomes cavity for music, its dreams.
drive down
the wrong side of the street
on the road on the rowed
in the Ford Fusion
97.1 Hot 97 FM Where Hip Hop Lives Trip J. Cole Feat. Miguel Bad (Remix) Wale Feat. Rihanna I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me) Jay-Z B*****S Love Me Lil Wayne Feat. Drake & Future {{{Blurred Lines}}} Robin Thicke B!@#C Don't Kill My Vibe (Remix) Kendrick Lamar Feat. Jay-Z.
B!@#C Don't Kill My Vibe (Remix)
Kendrick Lamar
Feat.
Jay-
Z begins to crackle as highway tips over the edge of Upper Pohatcong Mountain,
New York State. NYC increasingly lost to hearing,