goodbye new york

This morning I am eating steaming hot microwave sausage, and drinking flowery French black tea (with milk and brown sugar). The tea is called Mariage Freres 'Marco Polo', and comes in the most beautiful black and yellow tin. In France you can buy this tea in bulk at a miniscule store in the Marais, just try not to "accidentally" order a rare Chinese breakfast tea that will cost you 20 euro for a small bag.

The sun is streaming in my window-- I am wrapped in blankets, it is around 10 degrees in New York today. I am enjoying my last January here in this apartment-- I have made the decision to leave in March. I know this is the right decision because I woke up this morning as a newer, much lighter body--(head stretched to the wall, lazy feet diagonal). It feels good to stretch against this perimeter of fear that surrounds me in this-- the shock of doing something that is pure action-- active, new, and fully NOW.

At this present moment I cling to myself, and my work. This is one of the first times that my work/research has been the sustaining thing in my life. I don't know why I was holding on to the idea of this apartment being my constant (close on 3 years), what will really hold me up is the web of knowledge and poetic scraps, books, articles, thought screens/scaffolds that I have built up these past three years for myself. I was looking at my school transcript yesterday. For the last two years I have gotten straight A's (minus one B+), in NYC Art History GRAD school.

When I think about the ways I have taken my assignments, papers, tasks and expanded them to overlap with each other, and my continuing interests, I am so proud of myself. I have studied Japonisme at the turn of the century in silver vessels, English art pottery of the inter-War years, environmentally "friendly" and healthy houses in California (house as membrane), the Pueblo photographs of Laura Gilpin around Taos, NM, earthships, colonial landcape history all over our country from the 1500's on, French green arsenic-dyed wallpaper from 1715, rococo, Italian landscape and palace design of the 16th century, Renaissance gem and mineral collecting, old lapidary and medical texts, fold-out German anatomy books, Persian miniatures, Delacroix's watercolor sketches and journals from Morocco, Orientalism, Foucault, Said, Homi Bhaba, Shazia Sikander, the designs of IDEO, 16th-17th century French palaces and country houses, Boulle furniture and clocks, natural history dioramas!!!!!!

How does it happen that we start to own what we have studied? It becomes such a seamless, interwoven part of our own being it is hard to separate the strands from the fabric-- one from another. I guess I always have lived in my head-- but it seems to me the best writers are the ones that can identify each their own thought process and most accurately dumbly roughly dull-wittedly capture a coherent strain of this thought. To be comfortable with each and every current silly passing superficial or awkward thing that I write should slowly accelerate the timbre and polished quality of my own personal voice. I want to practice this, and become at ease with each flitting passing random profound facet of thought.

I am wrapped in brown flannel sheets that, admittedly, need to be washed. I really am too cold, and too languidly at ease with the books around my head (spread like caught insects on my bedspread) for this to happen. The walk from my apartment to the laundromat is not a long one, but it can be a humiliating one, walking past the bodegas trailing pink sheets and towels. It also takes some backbone emotional resolve to get (always) stuck waiting at the traffic light-- making awkward somewhat fearful eye-contact with the drivers of screaming semi-trucks rounding the corner of our block.

I am simmering small green french lentils on the stove, in my seasoned cast-iron pan. I cut up three huge cloves of garlic, half a white onion, one small tomato, and deglazed with a healthy dose of old white cooking wine, a dash of sherry and some deep amber colored chicken stock. It makes me feel so calm to have this cooking slowly on the stove, turning itself magically into a meal (maybe with a hard boiled egg on the side, lots of coarse sea salt and black pepper).

I may have been inspired by the A.J. Liebling book, 'Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris' that I am reading this morning, also the two Colette novels I just finished. Also, ever-present in my mind is the rising mirage of a far West Texas kitchen, with windows out to the backyard/desert/sky. The first thing I noticed about this kitchen were old-fashioned glassed shallow cupboards for dishes. I knew that my gold striped glassware would fit perfectly. The dish obsession has died down, I am down to essential remnants now. For Christmas Sam gave me a whole set of Japanese inspired china-- white with small pine cones and needles. There is a tall coffee pot and ornate small coffee cups. These will be perfect, and new. I can picture them lined in the cupboards, just so, like stiff but hopeful friends.....

(happy long sigh).