The warming sun and brisk air of the morning still echoed in my chest around noon as my thoughts were compulsively drawn out of my office in the city into the open air, to escape and breathe the waterly winds at the harbor side. I decided to take a walk to pier 34 during my lunch break and sit on one of the two fingers of the boardwalk that connected the Holland Tunnel Vent Shaft to the Hudson river boulevard. It was only a ten minutes walk to the river from my downtown office, but rarely did any of my coworkers exceed the two blocks radius around the office. Instead they choose to confine themselves for lunch and restrict their lunch time to eating at their desks take-out in foam boxes from the Korean owned deli’s, a sugar coated doughnut from the Bengali breakfast or gyros from one of the many Middle Eastern street carts on the sideways of the city. I resented this imprisonment as if it formed an self-chosen exile of the imagination, a preliminary taste of death.

Close to noon, I scurried out and walked toward the corner of Broadway and Houston. I looked briefly at the two artists suspended in a carriage above the traffic, applying a new advertisement design to a blind wall of the office building on the south-east corner. They painted over an old DKNY wall advertisement of a silhouette of New York City. In their hands the scaled blueprints of what appeared to be a new advertisement for Hollister in a dull sand brown. Dulling! I thought, there is nothing left to chance. Every day tourists had halted to be mesmerized by the DKNY ad facing the Adidas flagship store and had their picture taken in front of it. It was the face of advertising in New York, and in the last year it had become iconic, the closest expression of artistry in a world that sucked the talents of a manifold crowd of youngsters.

I turned the corner and walked west by the Angelika Film Center. Posters hang in large window frames advertising the latest new movie ‘Whatever Works’ by Woody Allen, the archetypal clown of the city, a movie called the Baader Meinhof Complex about the Rote Armee Fraktion, and Extract. I passed the entrance with its round chrome steps leading to the cashier behind her fishbowl glass window, which always left a kind of magical impression on me, reminding me of the sad state I was in. Here was a world to escape to. Here you leave behind the numbing reality with it predictable routines and you stepped into the unpredictable world of erratic dreams and impossible hopes. The threshold to enter was eight steps high, but who had time to. Then, temporary for a lost gap in time, le grand plouf into the world of imagination. Forget your worries, forget boredom, live the life of the stars, your dreams coming true for a moment, before you were puked out again on the potholed asphalt of the New York City streets two hours later facing the bored reality that you could trust was always there waiting for you.

I crossed sixth avenue and stopped at the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market to buy an olive chiabatta, still warm and crunchy, and a square of soft Hudson Valley goat brie for lunch. I meandered through the narrow streets of the West Village toward the pier, and passed the West Side Highway. On the other side of the highway, I peeked through the entrance of the pier 40 building at a group of static kids throwing a baseball at each other in the grass field of the inner yard. I continued and sat down on one of the benches on the southern finger of the pier, letting the sun grown warmer and warmer on my face with my eyes closed. I stared at the oversized seagulls by Ron Baron, in the dark water below, which I had mistaken for real, living if somewhat fat crane birds, the first time I saw them, as I was blinded by the sun that was set high in the southern sky. I was afraid they would hover over me like a thief at the theater, preying for my lunch. An occasional jogger ran by before me, the sun shone intensely. I took my shirt off, revealing my pale, incarcerated chest, void of life, while I unpacked my bread and cheese. Through the fierce beams of sun light I distinguished a squeezed view of the diminished Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. Her torch burning, guiding the refugees of the past, toward the promise of a better future. But for many there only awaited the bitter disappointments of peddling the remote and dangerous countryside of the mid and wild west, or the inhumane sweatshops where they shared the fate of a day laborer no better than that of the negro slaves. And yet this illusion, this false dream had never died and stopped to appeal new hopeful huddled masses. How desperate is the soul of mankind to hope against reason, to believe rather than to know with certainty, to prefer the illusion of certainty over the truth of uncertainty.

I tore some bread apart and chew on a piece of brie. How perfectly calm I felt with a simple meal, rich in taste and filling the senses rather than filling the stomach. I became swallowed by the afternoon, by time, eating my lunch and feeling the river’s breeze against my heated body and face. The senses, taste, smell, feeling, it all came back to me, my imagination. From a distance, staring east away from the sun, I saw the undisturbed silhouette of the financial district’s skyscrapers, the palaces of capital incorporating the hectic of bankers and beggars, the gains and losses, the human greed, and the human suffering, greed and pity. This greed never stopped, it always rushed on, behind the the pale glass reflection of the silhouette. Behind me, the world of advertising and fashion, that fed and was fed by this greedy capital, that so many chased, higher and higher, reinventing beauty, because it always remained volatile, no matter how persistently these modern Tantaluses pursued it. I lost my sense of time and place in this pursuit. It was life that was filling me now. I realized that I was at the banks of a major sea port on the Atlantic and not in the middle of a blinded labyrinth of sky scrapers. The odor of the Hudson water, although not very salty, even at the river’s edge you never smelt the sea, its sensation was refreshing. I felt the approaching sun, closer and closer on my flight back to life.

Marie Menken (1909-1970)
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)

1. Pier 34
2. Room with a View
3. Diptych on Falsity, Part I: On Beauty
4. Think Coffee
5. The Liturgy of Bureaucracy
6. American Labor, La Condition Human
7. The Annunciation (The Enforcement of Normalcy)
8. Diptych on Falsity II: On Perception
9. Murder at Nine a.m.
10. Flight from the Island

‘I just had the worst day of my life,’ she spoke leaning against a lantern pole. The light colored her face white and pink, her eyes looked bright and transparent like the water of the Mediterranean.
‘I am sorry to hear.’
‘No!’ she clamored as if I had just offended her. ‘I mean, everything today, from morning until the evening, got fucked up.’
‘I am sorry,’ I repeated and placed the back of my fingers against her soft cheek. She didn’t cry, she didn’t smile. She seemed fragile, but calm and unbroken, unbreakable. She looked at me with an angelic force. I did not know her, but she felt familiar.
‘This morning,’ she paused, continuing, ‘my family, it is a mess.’
I laughed a bit, out of discomfort perhaps. The absurdity of her disturbed statement simply appeared like an hilarious echo of my own perfect family. How disconnected and a world apart did the words family and mess sounded to me. The absolute normality of my upbringing, the devotional love of my parents and the unshakable security, I could imagine family to be boring at most. I could not control the emotional reflex and smile.

I stared at her glance that brightened her face. I was fascinated, a bit concerned. I trusted upon her strength, I insisted on my autonomy, wanting to take her into my arms, but being afraid to. A feeling of sympathy, empathic compassion pulled me closer and closer to her. Why couldn’t I resist this irrational gravity of emotional identification and burden myself with this replacement of suffering. I was making her pain my own, although I could not connect to it. I concluded it was possible I loved her.

The tears that welled up never showed. The sadness remained below the surface. I would not have mind if she had burst out, fell into my arm, entrusted her self to my care, but she did not. She looked at me, not revealing her thoughts. We looked at eachother, guessing, never bridging the unoutspoken desire to hold eachother.

Mechanically, I gently kissed her mouth. I placed my lips against her hair that smelled like aloe vera shampoo. She forcefully smiled tenderly and unconvinced.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ She repeated the phrase with a resigned sigh and turned away her face.
‘You are fine now,’ I countered.
‘Look at the deep sky, the longer you look, the more bright dots there appear.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she leaned toward me, grabbed my face, and kissed me. Her hand lay in my neck. I wondered why people close their eyes when they kiss.

I knelt down before her naked pussy and touched her smooth skin. I kissed the pubic area, my lips softly pressing against the shaved hairs. My nose pressed into her belly, I stuck out the tip of my tongue, curled it around her clitoris, and tasted the sweet secretion of her vagina, emphasized by the soft smell of blood from her menstruation. I pulled the swollen tissue out by its string, leaned back and observed the primal cycle that was consumed by the cotton pad she had walked around with all day. Dark clots of blood dropped to the hard-wooden panels of the floor in the living room, smaller parts stuck to the white cotton that dangled between her legs and which was still remarkably clean, given the deluge of blood it was freed from. I became obsessively intrigued at that immediate moment by the primally charged vision of the tissue. It was colored with forgone motherhood, here before me, the naked mother of my seed, receptor of my baby sperm, her swollen breasts and hardened, overly sensitive nipples pointing down upon me, the son, the father.

I spread her legs apart by pressing the backs of my hands against her inner thighs, opening her moist cave. The gate to her essential sexhood opened before me, like the thieves’ den in the story of Ali Baba, and I Kassim enter. I could easily take this citadel of womanhood, with or without force. She has surrendered to the whim of my benevolence or brutality. My heart peacefully pounded, slightly aroused but with calm observation, and I bathed two salving fingers in her wet cunt. The sensation of passing this river is close to entering the bliss of heaven. I can feel the course surface of her womb’s wall with the soft tip of my index and middle finger, which I twist around in slow circles, while I lick her clitoris. My nails scratch against its surface, as I push deeper inside, until my fist presses against her loin. I licked her faster, vibrating my tongue alternatively vertically and horizontally, up and down, sideways and slowly kept fingerfucking her pussy. Every few seconds I looked up and stared at her face, touched her breast and squeezed it with my free hand, looked at the muscles of her abdomen tensioning up and relaxing.

My sexual arousal grew more violent as her wetness increased, stirred to possess more and more of her, to control her body more directly. I pushed a third finger into the shaft of her vagina, warm and wet from blood and moist of her glands, and my other hand’s fingers started playing with her anus at the same time. First, tenderly directing the top of my index finger gently into her asshole at the right, flexible middle of her opening. Then a second finger, up to the first joint, widening her rectum. I licked her violently now, as her stomach jerked, pushing my two fingers deeper down her ass, twisting three fingers against the location of her g-spot. I could taste drops of blood flushing out and reaching my lips, sweet like the sacrament of the body. Nothing ever tasted more like Ophelia as her menstruation blood mixed with the mucus of her vaginal excrement. Not her bitter, salty tears, not the dripping, mineral drops of sweat on her forehead or back, not even the wetness from her pussy as she jerks heavily from her orgasm.

Ophelia was Ophelia. Ophelia in blood. The inner Ophelia, the essence of her. I never could get closer than drinking the sweet, bloody moist of her menstruation, the excretion of her motherhood, stronger than death. I pulled the fingers of both my hands out and looked up at her in utter, existential amazement. I observed my hands, my left hand covered in bloody clothes. I put my right hand fingers inside her and washed both hands in her blood, rubbing my palms against another. Then bloodied her breasts with my hands, and smeared out the red over her chest and belly, cherry like the watery color of her lips. Some clutters of blood stuck here and there as lumps to her skin in a fiercer red, a loving red, a passionate red.

Kneeled before her, admiring the mother goddess, my Gaia Ophelia, I felt as close to her as to be a part of her, forming one whole with the universe around me. What she felt, I felt, even if we were a billion particles apart in space, governed by the same ideas, reflexes and desires, there seemed to be no difference. The lust for her body overwhelmed me, I wanted to possess her, to submit her violently. I stood up and pressed her down to her knees before me, yanking her hair, pulling it in a tail behind her head. I placed my other hand around her throat, tightened my grip of her, and shoved my erection into her mouth. I started to push her head forward and pull it backward repetitively. She sucked the glans, exhaled it. I pulled her head away from me, directing her face upward to me.

‘Look at me!’
She opened her eyes wide as her mouth. I spat in her face, and in a reflex she squeezed all cavities of the face, her head jerked back.

The earth is a body that is raped. Forcefully the flesh is torn, the peal sliced open, the womb impregnated, the fruits reaped without question. The people that leach of the gifts, take without asking, they grow for their own benefit with no interest, without gratitude, without care. The earth is a body that is exhausted, never longing for a rest, being shoved with a brutal push downward, forward, back, and is never sorry for the events that take place.

“The plague is no worse than death by mediocracy, mediocrity, death by commercialism, death by corruption, which surrounds us.”
Artaud, on the plague and the theatre, Anais Nin, Vol. 1, p.192

I am a man. Now, take for example … say color. Since our dna only has three different opsis genes – green, red and blue – of which green and red are on the X chromosome, our comprehension of color is restricted to the wavelengths of these colors of light. You’re with me? But nature provides for the perception of a much wider range of colors, naturally, you knew this, and would it not be but a fairly simple procedure to code our genome to include a gene for … i don’t know, say infrared perhaps? And what would be so immoral about it? What would be immoral about decoding our own genome? Coding the genome of our child like a puzzle. Nature mutates our genetic code constantly and consistantly, and what’s worse, by mistake! How moral is that? And seen in that light, it would be immoral, no! inhumane! not true to the nature of kindness to intervene. Once you know, it is hard to forget. Only if you never knew, never had the faintest idea, can you talk about the immorality of genetic manipulation. Going against the laws of nature? NOT to mutate our own genes, would be against the laws of nature, don’t you see? We have an obligation to progress! And would it not be moral to better our selves when there is the opportunity? Don’t you owe it to your children?

I craved her, flesh and bone, I wondered if I could slaughter her, my lewd instincts, prevented only from crimes by the dull bourgeois dependency on stability that I inherited. Never, did I did want to touch her gentle breasts like a raptured lover. I did not desire to smell the blossom of her hair like the returned husband. I craved her like a beast its prey. Does the slave craves his freedom stronger, than the master desires to possess it? The master wants its fiercer. I wanted her, not for her, but for myself, cause I could not live without, as the master cannot, but the slave can without his freedom. The grounded odor of bones, the acid sweat of fear, I wanted it to be mine because I needed her to be part of me.

Within seconds, this murderous sense had evaporated again, my social consciousness awakened, weak again. The insanity of desire gone. This cruelty, God, was all permitted. I leaned forward and choked up. Lost all, all was lost. I had come down from the mountain, and walked into the forest, not wiser than before.

The struggle began anew, fighting to resist, to regain my strength. I put my full weight against the rock, and pushed, pushed with all my force, up, up, my eagle cried above. I was nothing, all had to be invented. The light that leads forward, covered in darkness, the path that guides my way overgrown. The old man, dead. At such moments, I could love and be loved, I could hate. The world was empty, everything about to happen. No one raised their voice, all were quiet. Everyone stared uncomfortably away, avoiding my presence. All and none.

I refused to want her. I rejected her with every effort I could gather. I tried to hate her. I hated her.

Leonard -1.5 laps around baseball park – 3+1+2+1 – Leonard
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