By NYTimes reporter Dan Barry:
On the Bow’ry, The Long Story of the Building at 104-106 Bowery. (nytimes.com)
About New York; Last in Flophouse, Alone With Bowery Ghosts. (nytimes.com)

I remember walking by the Stevenson hotel. Bowery is still a street with two homeless shelters where the homeless sit in front of the entrance on the sidewalk, sipping from plastic cups of warm coffee, after they are probably required to leave the shelter in the early morning. In the winter morning they would huddle together as New York’s poor masses like puppies in a nest.

The slow radiants of the sun fell still weakly into the room through the open window above the head end of my bed. I rolled over toward the light, turned my head in the pillow and felt a cool breeze of air. It was the gust of wind that made me realize that I was awake. It was the first realization of the new day. The slow rise of aurora’s carriage at the western slopes must have awoken me. Maybe it had been the singing of the birds. The birds too were awake and a harmonious cacophony of chirps came from the highest branches of a Turkish pine.

Our bedroom’s window faced the east. From the mountain top’s ridge the sun slowly announced its rise. The days seemed shorter than they really were, as the sun rose later and sank sooner behind the mountains. I listened to the meditative disharmony that reminded me of Stockhausen’s spiral saxophones and shortwave receiver. The chaffinches hid in the tree’s roof and I could only distinguish the echoes of each other’s rivals marking their territories.

I couldn’t decide what had awoken me and undecided I lay daydreaming. One of many ways in which the brain displays its incapacity to register reality correctly, even within the limited margins of human perception, there was no reality that we were capable of linearly perceiving without the falsifications of the mind. Any logical system could only be defined within its own premises, knowing there were an endless number of imperceivable other systems following their own logic, and all being far from the truth. In consequence, the human mind was mistakenly conceived to be rich and complex but it was just incapable to be simply consistent and it was predictable only because its errors were endless.

This incapacity for truth was probably why there existed such a word in the first place, being without representation in the outer world, and why it played such a mesmorizing role in the imagination of human kind. Every generation, every era, men searched truth, they found it, priests called it god, scientists called it science, philosophers preferred simply truth, but it was all the same joke. And new men came, and searched for a better truth, namely their own falsity. This was their cycle of suffering, truth.

No matter how often one reminded oneself the adage of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, to know thyself, man would never be capable to know oneself, simply because the brain would prevent it. So now, I believed the breeze awoke me, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, it had been licking my face all night and I had slept like a baby, and the only condition that had changed was the light. The same was true for the birds, but they did not wonder about truth. They had been up at dawn long before I opened my eyes and sang their song without thought. Perhaps the bird words were full of truth. And the changing of the light, the end of darkness, one could not tell one second apart from the next. It could have been pure randomness. What else than apparent chaos, the volatile chemistry of the body that governed the capricious will, could have woken me.

There was spring in the morning air. I had planted some seedlings a week ago, tomato in white plastic cups, aggurki makri or cucumber and piperia florinis or red peppers in earth colored pots. I had placed the pots and cups in the window sill. The white stems of the tomato and cucumbers had broken the surface of the ground and rose up toward the light. Along the side of the road purple lupin reminded me of the thyrsus of Dionysos, yellow white daisies and yellow gorse covered the bright landscape as if gold dust had fallen down, grains of the sun spread violently across the universe of the back garden, settling on the wet winter soil. Here and there a single blood red poppy disturbed the pattern, already signaling the advance of spring and progress of time ahead. But these signs were deceiving as well. Winter was not over, rain would torment the island again, fierce winds wrap the houses in long whistles, sucking out every last degree of warmth, the electricity would be lost again.

Distance: 5.70km
T0:33:13′45

View Armenistis-Nas, Icaria, Greece in a larger map

Out of the fog that danced in the mountain air with the gaiety of solitude, I saw arise the small chapel of Agios Dimitrios Stavri. Although nothing but a small chapel of simple solid stone coarsely hewed from the mountain rock, it stood on the top of the road on a pedestal of climbing rock with such might and awe, that it grounded the faith of man with unshakable firmness. I stood still and admired this mystical appearance out of the clouds. Agios Dimitrios and Agios Georgios, patron saints of the Crucades, were widely venerated on the island, which was for the longest time, occupied by the Ottomans. This island was the frontier, it was deserted, it was barren, it was impenetrable, it was vulnerable. I was on my way to the castle of Kastro tou Kosikias and the chapel of Agios Georgios tou Drogana..

I looked around me, peeked in the distance, and saw the mountainous landscape of Ikaria flow before me. I took the unpaved road that lead away from the asphalt of modern life and the populated coast and followed a stony dirt path deeper into the protective womb of the island.

The vapor in the air had risen from the immaculate Aegean sea below to the mountain tops hundreds of meters above the coast line, and enclosed me from the inhabitable lower parts of the island, while the clouds were driven further up the steep sides by a strong northern wind. Hidden by the waves of hard stone and a potent maquis green of shurbs and trees, here and there, I encountered flocks of wild goats tacidly grazing the gray pastures, fleeing my intrusion.

I walked up the dirt road that meandered into the mountains. At a less steep part of the hill, I left the road and crossed through the shrubs. Everywhere I stepped, my feet landed on dried goat droppings that covered the landscape. Maybe as short ago as twenty years, the landscape was covered by a dense forest that in long past centuries had protected the Ikarians against pirate invasions as well as the Ottoman census. But the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy that provided subsidies to subsistence farmers on the island per goat has catalyzed a boom of the goat population that had destroyed the century old habitat.

I turned a bend in the road, and there towering high above the surrounding plain and mountains, I saw in the distant height, the castle of Koskina. Nothing more than the dilapidated walls of a ruin, once a Byzantine fortress, now only the restored chapel of Agios Georgios was clearly visible, while the castle walls around it had dissolved into the rock from which it once rose. I hoped to find here at least a clue, but maybe even parts of the treasure. The fortress was the most obvious place to seek, because it was a fortress, and thus it must have been build to protect something or someone. For this reason, I decided first to set out for the castle.

At the foot of the mountain, I looked up at the impressive climb. At the side of the road, hidden between shrubs and stones, the remains of a small round building, a guarding tower perhaps, or a shelter against the sun for a shepherd or a farmer tending to his vineyard here on the small stretch of plain cultivable land.

I loved to get up before the break of dawn. There was little as fullfilling as to walk along the emptied streets in the morning, and to admire the twilight that beholds the city in a mysterious covering which is neither cold nor warmth. I lived on the south side of Williamsburg and took the brown line into the city. Seated in the shaking aluminum subway car across the Williamsburg bridge, passing over the East river, filled with a few half sleeping, half awake ghosts, I looked at the rising sun that stood low at the horizon, casting an orange red glow over the silhouette of New York. The illusion of the sun caused by the atmospheric refraction in the morning showed a more romantic perspective of the real world with its dull practical commonalities, even if it only formed an imperfect impression compared to the full light spectrum of the day. Through the H-beams of the bridge’s construction I discerned the futurist, fragmented view of the island in full motion. I recalled the soul of a soulless city by Nevinson.

I tried to imagine a view of the island as it must have appeared four hundred years ago, when Hudson sailed into the bay. A thick treeline of rich forest with a few rocky hilltops and some open fields. The lowest tip of the island was only half the width it was now and at what is now Pearl street, a glimmering waste belt of oyster shells lay piled on the East river’s shoreline, like the glass skyscrapers of the financial district now piled along the shore. The real richness then was the beaver pelt trade with the natives. The symbols of this origin are still visible on the city’s seal and the same motley crew of rough characters and odd nationalities made up the early settlement as the current city.

I got off at Bowery station and walked up to Houston and Bleecker, passing a group of homeless men sitting and chatting in front of the Bowery Mission. At Think Coffee I ordered a large latte and sat in the corner with my back to the wall, facing the Morrison Hotel Gallery and the Project Renewal across the street. I took my book out, and placed it next to my notebook, my pencil and pen. I often came here in the morning before going in to work, to breath the brisk air, sip hot coffee, and fill my heart with the inspiration of early thoughts before my mind would be shattered. For one to two hours I was free to imagine and I felt myself before it would all be taken from me for the day. I read for about thirty minutes in Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller, his most authentic book I believed. Ideas sprang forth from reading, and occasionally I jotted my notes down.

I looked up when destracted by the movements of the door opening when someone entered or left, if tables or chairs were shuffled around, and at times I was smitten by the tick of a face, a leg or a gesture. Across the street another group of homeless gathered before the entrance of the Project Renewal. While I was burdened by the petty responsibility of my job, these wanderers without any obligation had total freedom. The poem The New Colossus engraved on the pedestal of the statue of liberty by Emma Lazarus came to mind: give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They only had one real problem, and that was food. All other ills were imaginary, but food was no problem to me, all other ills were. Mother of exiles, where had I lost my self?

- Interrogation Inc. 2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake (nytimes.com)

Behind the industry of advertising there is a factory that creates the grand delusion of beauty. Out of its chimneys pours the steamy vapor of poisonous white forms into a make-belief sky. Above our heads, we bend our necks up, to see an ideal world in the clouds that slowly drift by. Behind the factory walls ambitious youths work relentlessly, each one believing they are the critical vanguard, the outstanding heroes of progress, the representatives of a new future. And each generation has its own haughty youth. There was a generation of the steam engine and the railroads, a generation of the automobile, a generation of television. There was the generation of the computer, an internet generation. Each generation runs their mills with its own chimneys of deceiving smoke, its social change as a result of technological advance, and each generation has the accompanying smog of pollution and imploding parvenu egos that float atop and measure their volatile image of beauty by their fleeting sexy potency.

Near the end of the work day, around half past four, I started to feel more and more anxious, and I was incapable of doing any more work for the remainder of the day. All day, I battled to work on the practical assignments that added another little feature or implemented some improved business logic to the larger system. But as I fought to concentrate and complete these chores, I completely lost my spirit. The modern capitalist system was magnificently balanced to exploit you without exhausting you, allowing you just enough days in the week off to restore your composition without gaining your strength, allowed you just enough time for lunch in the middle of the day to gather yourself again for the afternoon, but never to find yourself again. It was humane enough not to collapse, for you must be able to keep going, always this endless turning of the wheels. Unrest built in my heart with the prospect of leaving soon, to be able to regain a little of my strength, getting away from my screen and desk that sucked me empty, evading my coworkers’ dull faces that stared back at me with equally half human looks, reflecting my own dullness, and I kept weighing when it would be reasonable to get up and leave or what excuse I could utilize, keeping a balance between provoking the worst and keeping the best. I angered myself thinking of being stuck, having let myself be trapped, raging inside, so strongly that I was ready to explode with hatred. I had always carried a seed of primal, rudimentary angst, like any healthy teen but it had never sided, which under the right circumstances could burn up to smoldering flames of anger enlightening engulfing fires. As a teenager I was an angry young man, be it not channeled, but in the course of the years I had funneled my energy in a passionate obsession for literature, easing my worst anger. But now a fire raged in my chest, so high it scorned all my reasonable thoughts.

By the end of day, I run out to escape this deteriorating predicament, which really becomes unsustainable at this point. I have to prevent myself from evolving into an uncontrollable eruption of gory violence, I must leave, no matter it’s early still. I feel losing my mind, approaching the edge of an abyss that I fear, afraid to lose my inner calm. The absolute self control that I possessed normally did little to sooth my fear of self, for there is nothing so sacred as self. To work however was impossible. So, I pushed my chair under my desk, grabbed my book and coat and hurled out. I exited the elevator in a hurry, stepped out and standing in the street, immediately, I felt utterly relieved. All my disquiet absolved in an instant, as if it was the inner walls of the building that were bewitched. I walked up Broadway and turned on Bleecker street, regaining the pace of being myself. The ability to appreciate life, that outside was everywhere, in the smiles on people’s faces, in the sexy fashion, in the bright light, the shadows, and a feeling of consideration for others, for myself reemerged, and with it a sense of identity. I still felt empty, mentally exhausted, but also vigorous for having lived another day, for still owning tomorrow.

I walked to the Village Tavern on seventh avenue and Leroy street and ordered a Yuengling beer. I sat at the window stool, staring out onto the street at the gorgeous women of New York passing by. The beauty of each one mesmerized me for a single second and washed away my disquiet in the instance of their impression. I felt so happily aroused, observing the sunset above the skyline, the dullness of the day slowly flowed away and stirred in me the happy inspiration of the orange night. I could be in love with each single one of them, even if I forgot the previous girl I had fallen in love with, as soon as I fell in love with the next. I sipped my beer and my eyes followed these goddesses on the street. The muscled, tanned calves, the exposed full breasts, the athletic asses and broad shoulders or the lean arms, the bright eyes, the fierce lips, the iron clad goddesses that battled on the front of each working day, these mighty birds and snakes of beauty that I would serve if I had the opportunity, if they were not so goddamn busy all the fucking time.

I could think again, eureka. I took my little notebook out and put it in front of me. I placed my pen to the paper and thoughts streamed out. It was as simple as that. The falsity of advertising lay not within itself, I realized, but within the falsity of men. It was worse than I had suspected before, but at the same time it gave me a motive to resign, to let my anger falter. Although I despised this caste of advertising, they served no other gods than any of the others did. They were all subject to the same submission to a dream, the same weakness of man that he could only overcome by the hope of something better. Man needs the delusion of a flight upward to accept the real limitations of life. The beautification of reality to create a lure beyond our resistance, to create an appearance of possibilities, was what made men get up in the morning, go to work, and be happy with their fates. To lure us by the best of illusions with the worst of products, simply in order to sell them, so that we want them, and so to boost the profits of the men who make or possess them, regardless of their utility and fact, regarding only their appearance, this was treacherous, this was advertising, but necessary within man itself.
It was innate to the mind of man to want to be better than he is, because we want to become better men, we believe we can do better, and as we aspire this ideal, no matter how false, to present ourselves to ourselves and to others in a better light than we could possibly deserve, and in the end simply to win over a more admirable beauty that we can never own. All this was treacherous, but innocent, necessary. Advertising is but the arena of this imperfect man, we cannot be perfect and stop advertising a better self to ourselves, this would be to admit to nothingness, and people choose to consume what they desire in order to become what they desire to be. All was simple, necessary treason. These are the gods we save by advertising. In the philosophical sense, advertising was an endless cycle of suffering, never sufficiently or permanently satisfying our desires to end them, but a suffering that brings at least a crumb of satisfaction and happiness to man. If man had a desire for honesty, if man had no desire for suffering there would be no advertising, but there is advertising, there is man, and there is suffering.

Patrick was a young ginger man with a freckled face who was adopted by the family of a Korean minister at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Flushing, Queens. He grew up with sermons from both the pulpit and the kitchen table. His parents offered him a home, but he felt excluded from their hearts. They strongly favored his older Korean brother and sister, who were their biological children. For a long time he resented his family for this.

From his eleventh to his fifteenth he lived in South Korea with his uncle who was a missionary in Seoul. He learned to speak English with a Korean accent and became fluent in Korean, which often astonished people who met him. In highschool he was a quiet dilligent student who graduated with honors and great hopes to save people’s souls and make the world a better place.

At eighteen he moved to Chicago where he studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Chicago. As part of his medical program he worked on the Pine Ridge reservation of the Sioux in South Dakota at an addiction treatment program. At Pine Ridge he discovered drinking and marihuana and decided he wanted to enjoy life. One night he went into the desert, drew a circle around him in the sand and expected Satan, but struggled with God.

He lost faith in Christ and forgave his parents. He stopped going to church and started to party, neglecting his studies. He became an adapt of Freud, developed a reborn passion for psychology and graduated. He worked in a Chicago practice for two years, writing some case studies that gained him some recognition. He continued his studies at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis where he specialized in the treatment of anxieties.

Patrick moved to New York and started his own practice on the Upper West Side. Within a few years he managed to pull in a six figure annual income from a class of anxious wives of stressed investors, children of absent trust fund fathers, and regular neurotics. During the recession, he bought a condominium in the West Village and lived a life without worries. He dated beautiful but average women and preferred not to talk about his work. In the evening he loved going to dinners, chat about idle affairs over wine, and was relieved that he did not have to think anything of it.

Early in the morning and being the first to have arrived for work in an empty office, I stared at the line of mesh office chairs pushed against the wooden tops of the deserted desks forming a lane of vacant work stations. The single sound to be heard on my floor was the buzzing of the ventilation system that conditioned the air in the office and was accompanied by occasional ticks of the heating pipes. With the lights still turned off, suspended in a lapse of importance, these two hours in the morning were the only hours I was able to work. I churned out line after line, inventing cleverly structured pieces of code that would process millions of rows of data, applying calculations, summarizing related information, forming output, and persisting results. This morning I worked on a feature that allowed online advertising in real life to be targeted by time of day based on the local system time of a user’s computer. The business logic was described in sufficient detail and satisfying simplicity, and the technical implementation was designed including the foreseeable bottlenecks like daylight savings exceptions and technical preferences. But quickly, I ran into the first unforeseen, unadvertised difficulty of ten percent of missing and unknown IP to geo location mappings.

Nothing ever was as perfect as was hoped for. Instead, always expect the unexpected. The rule of imperfection never fails. Intelligence was and had always been nothing more than an essential flaw. It did not differ from the nature of progress in evolution as an unforeseeable, random mutation in the process of reproduction, which by trial and error, more often than not failed, and by exception only found a useful purpose in a small number of cases. The problem in Artificial Intelligence was that it was still considered to constitute a higher disposition instead being based in error. Similarly reason was still considered to be deliberate, intentional and creative. But reason was simply the capacity to repeat a perception, to literally copy it, and only in failing to do so, intelligence as the error of reason, stumbled upon a mutation which fit better to an ever changing world that the attempted repetition of prior action. The rule always applied, it was the only rule never to fail. As a reasonable person more than I was intelligent, however, I believed still in perfection, the subsequent failure of reality was highly disappointing.

More difficulties arose as I approached a best of possible solutions, never minded all its faults. I degenerately lost my motivation to do any more work. Infrequent footsteps crowded the office, chatter filled the space, people flocked in alone or in small groups. I discerned the broken sentences of the morning chit chat of coworkers, the social compulsions of the shallow jokes they made, which were rarely funny, but did not fail to stir uncomfortable laughter so typical of uneasy company, careful murmur, occasional limbic activity, laughter, constituting a cautious cognitive awakening, excited by the expectation of soon-to-be pleasure that followed solving practical problems, the furnaces of people’s minds heating up, while in me these functions now reciprocally all died out. My irritation and agitation were simple signs of the social rejection that I enforced. I did not belong here, I was desperate to think why I was here. The energetic concern for petty tasks, the full mental involvement in this artificial group bonding that took place among a collection of random young professionals, to feel empathy for everyone’s shallow objectives, they made up the essential talent for success, and I lacked these talents passionately. I could not impose any sign of interest and convince others of my pretended interest veined for the useful purpose of business, and the whole house of cards, that forms a person’s career in life, collapsed before me, with the drought of other people’s presence scurrying around the office. It was a fate I no longer feared, but I had become lethargic toward, I went my way, and carved my path through the rock, chiseling patiently until the day was over.

All could be doubted but doubt, I know to know nothing, all Cretans lie. Once you know, it is impossible to forget certain insights, nevertheless their simplicity. Once you seek to know the truth, to forget is to be lost forever, and who can ever go back to a state of falsity again, who can sleep with open eyes. I could serve my own falsities at least like in a game or experiment, but not those of others. I could only resign to being present to theirs.

The wall of murmur grew higher until it had reached the cacophonous flood levels of the working day and I was unable to surf the relentless rolling waves of stupidity and lack of meaning. My brain drowned in this endless activity of rolling up this stone up the hill and in the consequent state of nothingness I managed only to do nothing, sitting defeated at the foot of the mountain, defeated. The chaos of another day of boredom had arrived, passivity overwhelmed me. Some chairs were pulled back, the squeaking of plastic wheels and cheap hydraulic springs pressing down or veering up, announced the activity of other worker bees. The hollering of self imploded opinions with the air of presumed fact, the delirious buzzing, the back and forth arguments of arbitrary hunches, the rushed pacing of continuously running late, ever so being busy as a result, the glorious imposture of everything being eternally important, nothing ever ending to be, business as usual, we are now all enclosed by our own point of view, and each point relentlessly rolled over me like an avalanche. Papers rustling while being ripped from blocknotes, notebooks and personal computers starting up, pens scribbled down jots of thoughts. Sales reps should be able to reserve a campaign. But for how long by default, would it expire without confirmation, and should the forecasting consider a reservation before it is finalized? These were all very, very important and even more interesting questions. In a flash I realized these challenges could be my life, if only I grasped it. I immediately thought of killing myself. I rolled my chair back, stood up and went to take a pee. I locked the door to the private water closet. State regulation for multiple water closets in a row demanded them to be divided by separation walls. I unzipped my pants, pulled down my underwear, sat down, picked up the New York Post from the water reservoir and started reading the outrageous headlines. I pushed back the foreskin of my penis and started to jerk off. The sperm ejaculated and landed in the puddle of clear water in the bowl. The same water that was used to flush the toilet was used as tab water for drinking. The spring water company filled its tanks for its fountains with the same water before it was directed down the Catskills aquaduct heading toward the city, and drove the bottles in trucks down for delivery. I wondered why and how this was happening, ripped a sheet of toilet paper and dried my glans. I imagined each attractive woman in the office drinking a cup of water contaminated with large drops of my cum. Back at my desk, I stared with a dull interest at my co workers and couldn’t decide if I should say something. In the end I decided not to and I looked up the system of the Catskill water supply of New York City on the internet.

a dragon’s beak fixated
the eye shrapnel
like the moon without black iris
light whose day never expires
ill defined green night
medusa gazes down
anxious bursts of flaming mushrooms
on pedestals of shadows
only the after effect ever occurred
these walls of mighty troy
rise like the flood

voyeuristic angels stare
from within the windows
not from the inside out, but outside in
like whores from behind the freedom of their curtains
at the horizon
columns of gold
burnt down like ephese
horrendous shrieks
seconds in eternity
stream below these windows

vega single star all stars fallen
the melted day
stains like car horns
heretic shrouds of milky clouds
the whores again behind their windows
i cannot torn their ass apart
these mussels of goodness
remain closed
i here in the enclosed open
on my chest, on my back
fragile with forsaken gesture
alone in spasms of nothingness
their nightmare
their delivery

oh pray for civic chivalric cybele
to escape me and my nightly cruelty
the clouds drift by
like sand running through my fingers
measuring time
but i leave nothing standing
i alone and one star beneath me
the water’s rush of traffic
blind and burning windows
flickering amber
the sea awaits me
for ten long years
the siren’s song sings
in the ruffle of leaves
her naked breasts i suckle from
the maenadic orgy of the bronze night
i the orphan

Tom Baker, Village Night Song (for Langston Hughes)