Moving four blocks.

Moving four blocks in New York City can mean moving between countries. When I changed apartments from Rivington Street to Grand Street, this didn't seem like a big change, geographically speaking (since I would still be using the Delancey subway stop). Culturally speaking, however, this was a massive shift. Whereas before I was living in the rowdy, music-filled streets of Puerto Rico, I now found myself housed in a much more sedate Central European enclave. Out my study window I could see China, which itself has all but colonized Italy.

It seems.

It seems she has given me the pink slip, as it were.

Is anyone else.

"Is anyone else being woken by the robin that is singing before dawn? If so, please contact me by phone or email, so we can arrange for management to deal with this problem."

So reads the rather ominous flyer plastered near the elevators in my new apartment building. First Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Now this. We are in the middle of Manhattan, and people are freaked out—tormented, even—by the tiny flecks of nature still perched on this island.

She and I.

She and I both suffer from Garbo syndrome. To want to be alone, but to have one's absence sorely missed.

I met.

I met a collector of grace. An old, frail gentleman, who had each encounter catalogued in his mind, painted in mnemonic brushstrokes on the inside of his eyelids. An elbow here. An eye-lash there. A silhouette. A hesitation. A blush. A certain stoop to talk to a child. The minute movement of the mouth, registering a monumental internal decision. And yet he claimed none of these belonged to the body which expressed it. Grace, for him, was a trick of the light, like a fragment of rainbow, created by a prism. Take away the radiant source, however, and one is left with transparent crystal. On this point I felt I should disagree. But held my tongue.

New York is not really.

"New York is not really part of America," everyone says. It's not really America but a foreign land. New Yorkers will tell you this, and so too will 'mainlanders,' the former with resignation, the latter with resentment. But perhaps it is really the other way around. New York is all that's left of the real America." McKenzie Wark Dispositions. Cambridge, Eng.: Salt Publishing, 2002.

An interesting idea. In any case, I cannot help but feel that this city is being destroyed by too many immigrants. That is to say, by those affluent refugees from the mainland. Pamperers of pug-dogs. Pushers of Bugaboos. Swillers of skinny lattés. Soft- boiled potato people, bringing a blithe sense of entitlement in their wake.

A statistic: the average salary of a white family in Manhattan in 2007 is $300,000. The conditions are ripe for a new Terror, aimed at the inhabitants of these Versailles-in-the-Sky, as well as those who cower in its shadows.

Pristine guillotines fly through the air.

Reunion.

Reunion is the wrong word. That suggests there was a "union" in the first place. Rather a recollision.

We lie in the fragrant wreckage of tangled limbs and damp high thread counts: the bloodgates opened internally.

While I am still trying to figure out if it is really her, she tells me she wants to make an open promise. Not to promise anything in particular, that is, but simply to make a pure promise. A promise to promise whatever I might insist upon in the future. A signed blank check on which a figure would be traced at a time of my choosing, and according to a value my self of many morrows might ascribe.

This is either the most precious gift I have ever received, or the romantic equivalent of that old business mantra, "the check is in the mail."

Recently I spent.

Recently I spent at least twenty minutes trying to explain the difference between "middle America" and "Central America" to my Japanese friend, Koichi. Whether I really succeeded or not is an open question complicated by the fact that there are middle Americans in Central America (tourists), and Central Americans in middle America (immigrants).

Moves are afoot to build a giant wall between the US and Mexico. Only one more reason to invest in a T-Shirt spotted in the Lower East Side: "USA out of NYC."

On January 22, 2006.

On January 22, 2006, the roof of the First Roumanian American Synagogue on Rivington Street collapsed. Whether the rumors were true or not–that the congregation had allowed it to fall into such a state of disrepair in order to sell the now lucrative property–this holy site was left exposed for more than a month. It was exposed to the elements, and to the prying eyes of people walking by, as city officials argued who was responsible for demolition and removal. Everything was left untouched, so anyone across the street could see the candelabras, the pews, the stained-glass windows, all waiting in the rain for a ceremony which had been infinitely postponed. The sacred spilled onto the curb like a pile of bricks, leaking out into the profane and unsettling those who prefer their religious spaces to be hidden from few. "I don't care what they do, as long as I don't have to see it."

One could be forgiven for thinking that God himself had lifted the roof like the lid of a saucepan, or the top of a cupcake.

Twenty-one people.

Twenty-one people lost their lives in 1919, when a ninety-by-fifty-foot tank filled with hot molasses, and located in the heart of Boston, finally burst its walls. The owners of this tank were well aware of this possible calamity, since they had painted the exterior brown, in order to hide the many leaks. Kids and dogs often burnt their curious tongues, but still the dubious operation continued. One day, the pressure became too much, and a lava flow of liquid sugar suddenly extinguished many lives, and injured dozens of others.

Reading about this anachronistic industrial disaster, I find myself wondering if this is where the phrase "sticky end" came from.

No two people.

No two people visit the same city. Perception and judgment depend not only on the light or the season, but the company, the neighborhood, the footwear, the bank balance, the blood- sugar count, the police-tape, the languages acquired, the guide- books consulted, and an infinite number of other contingencies and variables. And so we are in the realm of chalk and cheese when discussing cities. "Oh, you didn't like Amsterdam? It's my favorite city." "Oh, you found Beijing dull? I must say that sounds preposterous." Etc.

As for myself, I wonder if I moved to New York because my subconscious shepherded me toward one of my earliest dwelling places: the stoops of Sesame Street.

I have heard word.

I have heard word that she is in Tokyo, albeit only briefly. I picture her in the window seat of a JAL jumbo jet, pensively pushing her cuticles and waiting for the Xanax to kick in. If she presses her forehead against the window, she can see the ground-staff, lining up and bowing low as the plane taxis away from the gate.

"Melancholy," she once said, "is the state of affairs."

To be a harem of one. A destiny of sorts.

Film Allows Us.

Film allows us to linger in cities before we have actually had the opportunity to travel there. Oftentimes this is no doubt the least risky way to experience them, as is certainly the case with City of God. I don't think a single feature film has yet been made which uses Canberra as a backdrop, which is a shame, for alienation has rarely been rendered so methodically, and in such concrete terms. Geneva was the location for Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red, although that's the extent of my knowledge on the subject. I imagine there are others, but the fact that they don't come readily to mind is significant. The great Harold Lloyd used the early megastores of Chicago for some of the most memorable scenes in silent cinema. While Paris and Rome, of course, have played the muse for generations of auteurs.

It is safe to say, however, that everyone who has seen a film or a TV show, has lived in New York City, at least for a while. And perhaps this accounts for the variety of people here, since many come here seeking different versions of the place that they have seen on the screen. How to reconcile The Warriors with Sesame Street? Naked City with Top Hat? Westside Story with Batman's Gotham? Woody Allen with Spike Lee? Andy Warhol with Friends? And even within Martin Scorsese's output, we have Edith Wharton's genteel brownstones juxtaposed with Travis Bickle's squalid apartment, as well as 19th century Battery Park gangs, and After Hours' darkly hilarious portrait of 1980's SoHo.

An uncomfortable thought.

An uncomfortable thought: that your eyes never stop staring. That even if you close your eyelids, your pupils are still boring into the back of the thin, tender skin. Constantly swiveling and seeking, the oracular orbs indulge their insatiable appetite for images. A desperate search for the imprint of light on retina. Even after the other organs have ceased to function, perhaps. The eyes still staring. Registering the scene before them, without a brain or memory to record it. A camera without film. Even after the living gently close the eye-lids, in respect for the dead.

THE NAME OF GOTHAM CITY.

The name of Gotham City can be traced to Washington Irving's 1807 work, Salmagundi. As far back as the 15th century, however, the sobriquet of "Gotham" had been used to refer to "places with foolish inhabitants."

IT IS IN CHICAGO.

It is in Chicago that one can experience the surreal site of prisoners, dressed in orange overalls, looking down on the free folk, as the latter go about their business downtown. The recreational facility of this prison is a barred roof, thirty stories into the sky. Here the inmates presumably smoke and talk and spit on, as well as dream of being, one of the anonymous ants that scurry along Printer's Row: a neighborhood famous for its history of publishing and procurement. (Here the sons of Gutenberg came to press the flesh.)

An interesting corrective technique. To give the criminal a bird's eye view of that which they are denied. An absurd observatory, creating tourists held hostage in a Brunelleschian canvas. There is a sadism here, too. Allowing the prisoners to watch the storms roll in, yet barring them from sharing the muffled, rye-flavored solidarity of the locals, against the common enemy of February lake-effects.

In a Chicago winter, the chattering of teeth suffices for small talk.

Between here and there.

Between here and there, it would take two hours on a plane, twelve hours on a train, perhaps six days on a Segway, and several weeks on foot. The weather comes from there and arrives here a day later. A day after she has experienced it. It is second-hand weather. Pre-loved or pre-loathed, depending on the forecast. Sometimes, I believe I can scent her presence in the rain, and divine yesterday's cooking in the sun-bleached breeze.

And yet,here is an hour ahead of there. So the paradox is this: Time occurs here first, while actual events (i.e., the weather) occur there first. I fear I need more than a scientist to explain this to me. It is an enigma beyond the geophysical spider-webs spun from the astral-arachnid body of Greenwich observatory. It is beyond the Delphic banality of meteorology.

The answer, I suspect, is neither here nor there. In which case it would be . . . where, exactly?

In 1595.

In 1595, Sir Francis Drake and his armada attempted to take the city of Maracaibo, underneath the cloak of night. His plan, however, was foiled due to almost constant flashes of lightning over Venezuela's Catatumbo River, illuminating the hostile ships, and alerting the city's defenses. Drake was thus pinned down by forks of electricity, his ambitions devoured by the perverse appetites of Fate. Even today, this lightning persists: a storm which has lasted for many centuries. Scientists continue to argue over the reasons for this atmospheric anomaly. Some say it is due to rising gases, others because of the air currents created by the Andes. But whatever the explanation, it is reliable enough to use as a navigation aid for pilots and mariners alike.

An impossible voyage.

An Impossible Voyage, Georges Méliès fantastic cinematic tale of 1904, began its first screening with a live narrator, who explained the events unfolding on the screen: "Gathered to discuss the proposed voyage around the world, we meet the most influential members of the Institute of Incoherent Geography. President Paul Hunter announces the arrival of engineer Crazyloff, progenitor of a marvelous scheme. Krisiloff explains his project which will employ every known means of locomotion–railroads, automobiles, dirigible balloons, submarines, boats, etc. The institute enthusiastically votes to proceed with the unparalleled plan." The engineer's name is "Mabouloff" in the original French transcription, meaning "Scatterbrain."

Watching a restored print of this film, in a private screening booth of an archive in Italy, I am thunderstruck by two things. First, the very notion of an Institute of Incoherent Geography. Surely I am an honorary member of such a society, if not necessarily an "influential" one. Second, she is somehow on screen, playing one of the ladies on the platform, stage-left, as the engineer explains his ambitious plan to circumnavigate the globe.

Of course it cannot really be her, I tell myself. True, she has certainly been known to frequently play tricks with space. Yet I fiercely resist that notion that she can do the same with time.

Upon further reflection, I am distracted and torn. What if this is indeed her? Does this increase or decrease my chances of encountering her again?

We had to.

"We had to break up this aura that surrounds acts and bodies for them to be able to meet by chance in the street, concentrate in such great number in cities or camps, draw close or melt into each other in love. A very powerful force was required to break this magnetic distance where each body moves, as well as to produce this indifferent space where chance is able to put them into contact. Something of this refractory power remains in each of us, even at the heart of the modern secularized spaces, even in the use we make of our emancipated, spatially liberated bodies . . . Chance, therefore, along with the statistical probability that characterizes our modern world, are unclean and obscene modalities. Right now we must accommodate all of this in the name of freedom; one day, this refusal–this untying that makes multiple meetings possible, accelerating the Brownian movement of our lives–will return with a deadly indetermination and indifference, and overwhelm us. Chance not only tires God, it tires us too." Jean Baudrillard Fatal Strategies. London: Semiotext(e). 1990.

I attempt to calculate.

I attempt to calculate the chances of running in to her on this rickety verandah café, if I am willing to come here every day for a year. Even the philosophers are beginning to talk about destiny again, without irony. ("Relation is already a descent into its own particles.") Perhaps it is inscribed within one of the spilled tributaries of the Milky Way, even as the night sky slides southward with each passing orbit. For while the constellation of Crux was once visible to the Hellenic astronomers and poets of classical times, it has long since slipped under the nocturnal horizon into the lower hemisphere. That is to say, the Southern Cross was once visible in the North, suggesting even stars fall prey to a nomadic gravity, a celestial wanderlust. Graham Harman Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002.

Serendipity.

"Serendipity," she said, her eyes widening like a child, presented with an unexpected piece of cake. "Why, that's my favorite type of dipity!"

Like a Codex.

Like a codex which has been etched and erased over many generations, the city is a barely coherent palimpsest, and today's inhabitants seek their own story on the other side of celluloid. Melbourne. The antipolis. So much less than the sum of its parts. New York. The cosmopolis. So much more.

Here we have a young woman from Russia, who laughs with giddy shame when she confesses this fact to strangers. Here a business man, perhaps from Seoul, sitting in the park with a suit, tie and no shoes. Here a homeless man trying to give away ten dollars, much to everyone's consternation. Here a couple in their fifties, tripping on ecstasy, celebrating their first wedding anniversary. Here a young girl, wearing a Santa hat in the middle of June, trying to save a sick pigeon. And through windows, glimpses of possible lives. A violin in the early stages of repair. A bookshelf filled with the same book, over and over again. And hanging from a café stool, signs of a bachelor's life: the presumption of a toothbrush tucked in the inside pocket of his jacket.

"It's possible that in places like New York people can remain in a kind of positive, happy fluidity, a state of transpearing. But most people experience it as a kind of liquid terror." Jean Baudrillard Fatal Strategies. London: Semiotext(e), 1990.

Maybe I'm projecting.

Maybe I'm projecting, but the pigeons in Venice seem to have more style than those in London, and most definitely more than those in New York. These last seem even more wretched than the junkies in Tompkins Square Park, asleep in the hot sun, on pillows of vomit. I half expect these oily, frazzled, limping pigeons to accost me as I distractedly read on a bench: "C'mon man. Spare a breadcrumb? A piece of corn?" The pigeons in Geneva, however, are plump and complacent. During sun-rise and sunset they sound like throaty people, making love. (Which is fitting, given that the couples of Geneva sound like obscenely cooing pigeons when they fuck.)

They are prepared.

"They are prepared for the strangest names–nothing can surprise them–for, as frugal as they may otherwise be in experience, in this city they nonchalantly abandon themselves to the most extravagant possibilities. In their usual existence they constantly confuse what is extraordinary with what is forbidden, so that the expectation of something marvelous, which they now permit themselves, appears on their faces as an expression of coarse licentiousness . . . They let themselves be excited by the almost deadly confessions of music as if by physical indiscretions: so, without even beginning to master the existence of Venice, they surrender themselves to the lucrative swoon of gondolas." Rainer Maria Rilke The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel (1910), trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1982.

I once met.

I once met a Polish Zen master who loved reggae. He told me of his pilgrimage to Kingston, Jamaica, and his sense that all the locals were somehow tuned into the same music. Music that outsiders could not hear. The people of Kingston walked with a shared and languid rhythm, as if the very trees and buildings were broadcasting a deep dub sonic plate from the bottom of the ocean.

This can easily be contrasted with the cacophony of New York, in which millions of people move in distinct ways to jagged, clashing, treble-heavy soundtracks.

Some aural graffiti I would like to add to the mix:

cacophony → caca phony → phony caca → bull shit

The experts warn us.

The experts warn us against ID theft. Credit card and social security numbers are enough information to enable one unscrupulous individual to masquerade as another. But I have yet to hear anyone caution us against the dangers of id theft–a more Freudian, and thus intimate, crime. Stealing a person's public persona is one thing. To steal the deepest core of their primal desires is another. And just as you may be a victim of identity theft, serenely oblivious until your bank account is empty, you may also be an unknowing victim of id theft. Only much later will you realize that your most naked impulses have been snatched from inside your most intimate hiding places, leaving only the ego and superego to coast into the future–a vehicle blessed with direction, but bereft of drive.

Much has been made.

Much has been made of so called "tipping points," no doubt because this phrase sounds more scientific than "turning a corner." 2006 was a momentous year in human history, because–again, according to the experts–this was the point at which the planetary balance shifted. More people now live in urban spaces than in rural or sparsely populated areas. Humanity has voted with its feet, and decided that it prefers living in the city rather than the country. (Or at least, that it has more chance of surviving in the city than in the country.)

The same year was witness to another staggering reversal. That being said, the ratio of artificial agents on the world wide web began to outnumber those of humans. As of 2006, there are more bots, spiders, and other AI entities probing the reaches of cyberspace than people.

Not only are the great migrations continuing and concentrating, but a new injection of species has arrived on the scene. Galapagos now.

Perhaps the dyslexic solicitations of spam are in fact the early attempts to speak by the emerging singularity: the artificial intelligence network. Will these immaterial creatures help us find our way? Will they lead us safely through the silicone steppes? Or will they leave us to languish online, without so much as a mirage to fall into, cracked lips puckered for a kiss that never comes?

Shouldn't all.

Shouldn't all moments have the right to be momentous?

I was strolling.

I was strolling in a park in Barcelona. The park itself was dry and sprawling, with more dust and gravel than grass, but enough of the latter to convince some of the locals to take a nap or read a book during siesta time. Every fifteen minutes or so, this park was punctuated by enormous monuments, completely out of scale with the people, like corpses of fascist elephants. Sitting in the shade of one of these marble behemoths, on green metal chairs, next to a small fountain, I noticed a very appealing couple. She was well-dressed, in a fashionably anachronistic way, and could have been anywhere between 18 and 35. He seemed somewhat older, but still in the prime of his life, exuding a quiet, albeit slightly resentful confidence. They were playing chess, and I tried to ascertain, from the concentration on their brows, whose turn it was to move next. But neither one did. Every now and again she would tug at an earlobe, while he would say a quick witticism that would raise barely a smile. Pigeons cooed around their feet, but thankfully did not mistake them for statues. It occurred to me they were lovers, or at least once had been. But now here they sat, literally in a stalemate. And yet the couple were clearly resistant to starting over, or abandoning the game. Indeed, a few days later, after torrential rains, I found them again, at the same table, with the sparse and melancholy chess-pieces in the same desultory positions. Their clothes had reversed chromatically, but they still seemed incapable of any decisive mood. The scene became so oppressive to me, that I nearly approached the table to cut in, as one does at a ball, in order to save a lady from her dance partner, or her own foolish enthusiasm. But my ignorance of Spanish forbade such a move. And so I simply sat with them from a distance, an unacknowledged witness to their mutual inertia.

The French.

The French have been known to describe people, especially women, in terms of organic engineering. Both genders can be heard praising or criticizing a woman's "architecture," meaning the way her body has been designed and put together. Some of these fabricated forms seem hospitable, others hostile. That is to say, some, like Sacre Coeur, are sentimental and nostalgic. Others, like the Eiffel Tower are aloof yet available. While others still, such as the Centre Pompidou, seem to wear their hearts–and perhaps other organs–on their sleeve. Indeed, the cleavage is described in the same language as "le balcon," or balcony. In English, we go so far as to say someone has a nice build, but do not explicitly link it to the art of dwelling. Claire's Knee dir. Eric Rohmer. Les Films du Losange, 1970.

But if our bodies are examples of architecture, then who is the architect? Must we be restricted to God or Darwin? More to the point, who is the client?

I ponder these questions in terms of she that shadows me. Does she rent her body? Her being? Or does she own it outright? Moreover, what will replace the emotional moats and libidinal drawbridges of yesteryear?

IF GOETHE IS CORRECT.

If Goethe is correct in postulating that "architecture is frozen music," does that mean music is liquid architecture? Johann Wolfgang van Goethe "Conversation with Eckermann, March 23, 1829."

Other music.

Other Music is a store located on East 4th St, just around the corner from Lafayette, in Gotham City. Its name is a direct reference to Tower Records, which used to sit aggressively across the road, casting its shadow over the indie kids who disdained the Top 40 hits and supergroups of the 1970s. The staff and clientele at Other Music were always very proud of the fact that they had opted for an alternative to the mass- produced and mass-marketed sonic swill one could find amongst the gaudy stacks of Tower Records. However, the new digital economy soon began to cull companies that were old-fashioned enough to hock material wares, such as compact discs, taking down the dinosaurs first. Today, Other Music is perched precariously on the same site, conscious of its current existence as a non-sequitur.

How terribly traumatic, to be suddenly deprived of one's Big Other.

There is a girl.

"There is a girl," says the editor. "But I want to know more about her."
"So do I," replies the author.

Where exactly.

Where exactly is this Point A and Point B that everyone keeps talking about, and traveling between? This must be the world's busiest road. Moreover, Point B must be far more populated than Point A by now, since people rarely seem to make the return journey.

THE INITIAL OYSTER BAR CRAZE.

The initial oyster bar craze in New York began around 1830 and ended in 1870, when it was pronounced that pollution from ever-growing maritime traffic had put an end to the safe harvesting of local oyster beds. Illustrations and restaurant reviews provide us with time-machines for those splendid houses of worship, dedicated to this most ugly and delicious comestible. No doubt there was a hierarchy of establishments, from the outdoor din of South Street, where guttersnipes searched for dropped coins amongst patron's feet, to the more refined and removed atmospheres around Wall Street, where women would pause in the cold scrape of cutlery to suck at the soft inside of these spiky shells, their ostrich feathers pluming from their satin-lined hats, irritatingly bobbing hither and thither, tickling the noses of those at the next table.

A little further uptown.

A little further uptown, there lay the infamous Bowery in its original squalor, of which only crusty residues remain. (Ironic, of course, that "bowery" originally meant "country seat.") No oysters were served here, given the grim and unforgiving conditions of the slums. The only hope for many was a drink which began as a rumor, but evolved into a genuine last resort. Known as "the solution," it was served in a saloon of ill-repute on the corner of Houston Street. No matter how stout or strong of constitution, the man who downed a glass of this libation would never walk out of the place again. Indeed, would never have to worry about anything again.

Nowadays.

Nowadays there is no evidence of oyster bars by the waterfront, unless you count Long John Silver's takeout in the food court of Pier 17. And it is impossible to order "the solution" even from the roughest of drinking establishments, forcing people to commit suicide homeopathically. Glass by glass. Which begs the question, can we register our collective losses without succumbing to nostalgia?

Turning my gaze further out into the water, where the East River meets the Hudson, I hope to spy her: the pirate's daughter, riding astride a sea-turtle, all the way from south of the equator.

WITH A POPULATION.

With a population of 21,500, Belgium's town of Gembloux, in the Southern province of Namur, is in no danger of being described as a city. Founded in the 10th century, this large hamlet features a Benedictine Abbey, an Agronomical College, a Renaissance Town Hall, and–situated near a "beguiling park"–a small cutlery museum. (To arrange a tour, call 081-626330.) One is inclined to wonder, however, what the tipping point might be between a large kitchen and a small cutlery museum. Twenty knives? Fifty spoons? Three rare dessert forks?

Also in no danger.

Also in no danger of being spoken in the same breath as the great cities of the world is the town of Cattaraugus (pop. 1,075), in western New York state. One Patrick Cullen, president and CEO of the Bank of Cattaraugus, as well as unofficial town spokesman, has ruffled feathers in the cutlery world by suggesting that the new American Museum of Cutlery (716-257-9813), is "unique in the Western Hemisphere." Clearly this institution has access to an impressive variety of eating utensils, given that the town lives in the withered bosom of a region which once boasted one-hundred-and-fifty cutlery companies. (Only six now remain.) The museum features "the full spectrum of cutting tools." And yet there is no mention of Gembloux, which–if our traditional maps are to be believed–resides within the Western Hemisphere. Thomas Hartley "Cattaraugus Opens New Cutlery Museum." Buffalo Business First, October 7, 2005.

The plot thickens, however, when we consider Laguiole in France (pop. 1,296), which also resides in this same cartographical quadrant, and which also claims to have an inimitable Cutlery Museum (05-6548- 43-34).

No doubt letters have been exchanged. A pecking order has been established, then reversed. After lobbying comes espionage, and even sabotage. For the good Lord knoweth that there is room not in the Western Hemisphere for three cutlery museums. And so, knowing full well the murderous capacity of a vexed Belgian, or a furious Frenchman, we should urge Mr. Cullen to lie in bed with his back to the wall, lest he want to sleep forever with a fondue fork betwixt his shoulder blades.

Cities are voracious.

Cities are voracious. They devour villages that stand in their way, absorbing them deep into clotted arterials. This famously happened to Greenwich Village, whose serendipitous, winding streets suggest a previous independence, before the grid imposed its uncompromising angles on the entire island. This also happened to Highgate and Hampstead, two idyllic villages which were once a day's horse ride from London, but now perch rather awkwardly on the tedious Northern Line.

Walking around Hampstead Heath, it is possible to recall this more pastoral time, when certain noble oaks dip their branches long and low, so as to form a perfect seat for a lady to sit comfortably side-saddle, while pressing petals into her favorite primer–all the while hoping each figure cantering over the horizon is her appointed rendezvous. Here among the bowers, it is difficult to believe in the "greater London," with its business parks, gated communities, and profligate prostitution to the new economy. "His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be." William Shakespeare "Sonnet CXXVII." 1809.
Theordor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (1951), trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.

The sun has long set on the British Empire. And yet there are summer evenings when the sun barely moves, indeed seems to travel, inch by inch, backwards in the sky. Here Alice snoozes by the village green, the white rabbit under her arm. And families dressed in their Sunday best linger over picnics with deceased aunts and uncles, in the warm crepuscular necropolis of Highgate Cemetery.

I hear.

I hear she is now in London.

One source (who cannot entirely be trusted, it is true) claims that she was seen dining the previous week with a gentleman friend.

Was he, by chance, an architect, admiring her flawless décor? In any case, my favorite city moves with her.

Cutlery poem.

As knife falls,
we fork,
and then spoon.

blissful is the road.

Blissful is the road which never forks, but merely winds. Blessed be the traveler on such a road, with no point of bisection: no need to make a decision of resolve or of navigation (two terms which amount to the same thing). When confronted with such a choice, the poet took the one less traveled by. Wiser, however, is the Zen sportsman, who said: "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Robert Frost "The Road Not Taken," Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt, 1916.
Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said. New York: Workman Publishing, 1998.

To the untraveled.

"To the untraveled, territory other than their own familiar health is invariably fascinating. Next to love, it is the one thing which solaces and delights. Things new are too important to be neglected, and mind, which is a mere reflection of sensory impressions, succumbs to the flood of objects. Thus lovers are forgotten, sorrows laid aside, death hidden from view. There is a world of accumulated feeling back of the trite dramatic expression: 'I am going away.'" Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie (1900). London: Penguin Classics, 1981.

She has returned.

She has returned to my orbit. She is present, but oblique.
Questions are answered politely, but on the diagonal.
She dresses to entice.
Fishnet stockings: a dragnet for the sons of Neptune. (Or should that be Jason?)
Her legs, an academic lesson in "cool Medea."

Throughout the city.

"Throughout The City in History, Lewis Mumford favors the cool or casually structured towns over the hot and intensely filled-in cities. The great period of Athens, he feels, was one during which most of the democratic habits of village life and participation still obtained. Then burst forth the full variety of human expression and exploration such as was later impossible in highly developed urban centers. For the highly developed situation is, by definition, low in opportunities of participation, and rigorous in its demands of specialist fragmentation from those who would control it. For example . . . in reading a detective story the reader participates as co-author simply because so much has been left out of the narrative. The open- mesh silk stocking is far more sensuous than the smooth nylon, just because the eye must act as hand in filling in and completing the image, exactly as in the mosaic of the TV image." Marshal McLuhan Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

THE FIRST DAY IN ROME.

The first day in Rome I see a priest asleep in his confession booth, a little red light glowing for any passing sinful souls. I see glass elevators squeezed between ancient sandstone buildings. I see a sun shower swirling through the roof of the Pantheon. I see tour groups winding through the streets like Chinese dragons that have shed their scales, and their ethnicity, but retained their serpentine determination. I see a recent refugee in the Campo de Fiore, trying to sell a megaphone by talking into it. "Hello megaphone. Hello megaphone."

The medium is the message.

A constant battle.

A constant battle is waged in Rome between the nobility and the nubility. Sun-kissed women, drunk on the sap of their own youth, health, and beauty, enjoy the possibility of usurping their more wealthy and established sexual adversaries through the architecture of their bodies.

Here the cobblestones remind them of time's merciless pendulum, chewing hungrily on stiletto heels.

Scooters buzz through the eternal streets, under a Kleinian blue twilight sky.
A priest, nearly knocked from his virtuous thoughts, crosses himself, and continues across the square.

Vespers at dusk.

ON THE TRAIN TO POSITANO.

On the train to Positano, I meet two caricatured septuagenarian Southern Belles, from Macon, Georgia. One is talkative, the other almost silent. The first asks, "are you of Italian extraction?" To which I shake my head. She then launches into a monologue, several sentences of which begin with the phrase "My present husband." Eventually she catches herself, with the hint of a blush and a flirtatious grin. "My present husband," she says, lampooning herself. "Doesn't that sound awfully temporary."

Legend has it.

Legend has it that the Sirens sung ships to their doom from the dramatic cliffs around Positano. Indeed, the town itself is said to have been founded by Poseidon himself, as a gift to his favorite nymph, Pasitea.

The sirens in New York City—whether they be police, fire or ambulance—have the opposite goal of those situated near the Mediterranean. They seek to push people away, rather than lure them toward. (Unsuccessfully, sometimes, as in the case of sleazy lawyers, opportunistic photographers, and morbid gawkers.)

IN THE MID-19TH CENTURY.

In the mid-19th century, seventy five percent of Positano's eight thousand inhabitants took the same steam-ship destined for New York City. Instant depopulation!

Concerning this town, which clings to the cliff face in defiance of gravity, Paul Klee is said to have claimed: "It is the only place in the world conceived on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis." But what about New York?! Is that why the citizens of Positano fled to the capital of the New World? Did the oracle tell them that there would be higher dwellings? Higher than the sea-eagles? Higher than the clouds, even? With ghostly elevation machines, that sometimes stop of their own accord?

Who knows if these humble fisher-folk had an inkling of the future, and the techno-mythic city they would help to construct? For it is possible that they were simply trying to escape the infernal song of the Sirens, which claimed their sons and husbands, and deprived them of sleep.

CITIES GIVE US COLLISION

"Cities give us collision." So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1860. Around this date the very word "collision" was in the process of changing its meaning from a decidedly non-violent and harmonious "coming into contact" with the more jolting definition we are used to today. The fact that this change was also contemporary with the first railway accident is no . . . well . . . accident. The poets and essayists have written stanza upon tome about the rude shock of urban life: wheels crushing feet, elbows nudging ear-lobes, horses kicking ganglia, and so on. And yet, according to the perfect symmetrical logic of cartoon amnesia, the second jolt may help us wake up to ourselves. "London and New York," continues Emerson, "take the nonsense out of a man." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Culture," The Conduct of Life. 1876.

The gender of a given city

The gender of a given city has been the subject of much speculation. Paris, par example, is a man, according to John Berger, and a woman, according to Angela Carter. New York, according to the latter, is "a well-adjusted transsexual." How a city personifies itself is an intriguing phenomenon, leading to questions of not only gender but ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, politics, and all those other qualities and criteria used to match people on dating sites. In which case, Canberra is a grizzling boy scout with a scrape on his knee, Geneva a painted, withered harlot with a genuine smile, Amsterdam a shrewd businessman who dresses younger than he should, and Hong Kong a beautiful movie starlet that has recently escaped the clutches of her lecherous step-father, only to marry an old tyrant. John Berger "Imagine Paris. A city, a Walk, a Metaphor," Harper's Magazine. January 1987.
Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted Selected Writings. New York: Random House, 1992.

Were Lacan a political pundit.

Were Lacan a political pundit in the 1990s, he would have vindicated Bill Clinton's notorious statement during the latter's impeachment. He would have done so according to his own dictum that "there is no sexual relationship."

Ergo.

He did not. Have sex.

With that woman. Miss Lewinsky.

ANTONIO AND GIUSEPPE.

"Antonio and Giuseppe were like many other Italian immigrants who had fled Europe in 1848 after failed revolutions swept the continent. Upon meeting in America, the two took a small house on Tompkins Avenue in the Clifton section of Staten Island, where Antonio worked on his electrotherapy machines and Giuseppe made smokeless candles. But Antonio and Giuseppe weren't like the others. The former's surname was Meucci and the latter's was Garibaldi. One invented the telephone [many years before Alexander Graham Bell tried to claim that honor] and the other unified Italy." L Magazine 2004.

More than a century-and-a-half later, the descendents of African Slaves, collected under the moniker of The Wu Tang Clan, used their own "electrotherapy machines" to make a new kind of popular talking music. In this music, they often refer to their home borough of Staten as "Shaolin."

FORBIDDEN CITY PACKAGE TOURS.

"Forbidden City package tours."

"One time forbidden, now time welcome."

"Act fast, and come in China."

"See performing Shaolin monks."

"Save more when book online." Babel Fish translation. http://babelfish.altavista.com.

On the other hand.

On the other hand, there is a type of home-sickness which comes from the inability to escape home. From too much home. (A being-sick-of-home, as Heidegger might have said, were he capable of such . . . were he allergic to blood and soil.) No doubt we are all carriers. Human spores. Infected vectors. And even if we reject many aspects of our culture, there is little we can do to avoid the super-saturation of its influence. That is to say, there is a very Australian way of being anti-Australian, a very Dutch way of being anti-Dutch . . . and so on.

The call to prayer.

The call to prayer echoes throughout the twilight city, each staggered from the other like theological car-alarms. For the faithful, it is the signal to suspend earthly doings and to display punctual devotion. They are figures who have temporarily escaped an ornate medieval clock, shepherded back to their neighborhood Mosque, and animated by a mechanism that I am not trained to fathom. For my American expat hosts, however, this early evening cacophony is known simply as the "call to cocktails." And who am I to shun local custom?

The city's poet laureate.

The city's poet laureate describes the invisible mist which clings to the walls, streets, and hearts of Istanbul as Hüzün: a collective form of melancholia exhaled from within the very particles of breath of the residents. These are orphans of empires, layered one upon the other like the rugs of the local merchants. Hüzün coats the slightly furry skin of obscenely ripe figs, just as it does the body-language of the young gathered in nightclubs, voting with their hips to straddle Asia and Europe (the former by day, and the latter by night). It is the flotsam of the new jet set–an oppressive awareness shouldered by the indigenous population, that greatness lies further behind each day, despite Ataturk's spectral and omnipresent promises. Perhaps this explains the thinly-veiled hostility shown to tourists, who follow in the footsteps of Byron in search of glimpses of Roman, Byzantine, or Ottoman pentimentos. I begin to wonder if I would have sensed this morbid belatedness at all, if I had not read about it first. That's the problem with poets. They can give an entire city a disease it did not have, through the mere act of diagnosis. Orhan Pamuk Istanbul: Memories and the City. New York: Vintage International, 2006.

THEY CAN PRINT STATISTICS.

"They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg that is no longer there." Graham Greene Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment. London: William Heinemann, 1958.

THERE IS A SURPRISING ABSENCE.

There is a surprising absence of steam in a real Turkish bath–at least in the venerable one I now find myself. Nevertheless, intense heat radiates off the glistening, ornate tiles, and beads on my skin: not pale enough to be outed immediately as European, but not dark enough to be mistaken for a Turk. The effect is of being naked in an ancient Church, while the sensation is giddy: a kind of pleasant, sensual vertigo. I lie face up on the stone slab at the center of the hamam, and gaze at the light spearing through the crescents carved into the dome. Yes, it is said Byron bathed here, and I cannot help but wonder if the ancestors of his own impassioned bacteria could be found here today, wedged between the crevices of the stone basins that extrude from the wall like petrified orchids. A chubby German- speaker, now mute with tension, is being pounded and pummeled by one of the surly attendants: yanked this way and that, soaped and rubbed with abrasive mits until he looks sunburnt, and on the brink of tears. I half-watch, rather smug in my good sense not to get the "full treatment," as two men now treat this naked, brutalized visitor like a giant baby, flipping him over and spinning him around, as his eyes plead to the humid heavens for mercy. Were this happening in the street, I would call for the police. But here the soggy slapping sounds are simply part of the architecture.

I encounter.

I encounter a woman of indeterminate age, and she consents to dine with me. However, I can tell within moments that it is not her. Nevertheless, I am happy to have some Anglophone company, especially from a local, who can give me some sense of the daily choreography whirling around me. She explains the elaborate rules of romantic discourse in Persian cultures. For instance, a woman is expected to say "excuse me for turning my back" when obliged to do such a thing, while the man is expected to reply, "a flower has no back." She also notes that the concept of a crush is foreign to the Turkish heart, since men especially are expected to leap straight from fondness to overwhelming near-suicidal passion (which does not, of course, exclude regular infidelity on both sides).

I tell her my theory that Turkish Delights are designed to look like the powdery, glowing coals on top of the hookah water-pipe, designed by some brilliant medieval confectioner, who came up with this trompe l'oeil in a moment of smoky inspiration. She looks at me like a slow child, who has only now figured out that the sun rises in the East every morning.

I would like.

I would like to be one of those men you see in the old-school barber shops. Not getting a haircut. Not working there. Just sitting in a chair, reading the paper, and adding to the conversation now and again.

You know those guys.

THE JAPANESE.

The Japanese are extremely punctilious. A bit like the Swiss, if the Swiss were distributed along the continuum of eccentric to crazy. Indeed, the Japanese dedication to duty and attention to detail–no matter how trivial or futile–inspires goose bumps of admiration. I notice a goth-lolita girl, stylized black top-hat barely bigger than a cup-cake, perched at an angle on her head, playing a video game that boasts a ukulele as interface. Her face is a study in concentrated absorption. I see a man in uniform, holding an electric blue glow-stick, walking in patient circles around a road worker, repairing a pothole in the rain. I see a woman bowing slowly and regularly, like a Geisha automaton, to greet customers at a shopping mall. (I watch her for five minutes, and cannot be certain of her status as human or machine.)

Conversely, I read a story in the newspaper about a man from Shibuya who had killed himself the previous day, because the government had cancelled his social security benefits. It seems he had given up actively looking for work. The deceased left a simple suicide note: "I just want to eat a rice ball." Daily Yomiuri. 2007.

This city.

"This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing." Roland Barthes The Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (1970). New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.

AKIHABARA.

Akihabara (otherwise known as "electric town") is the part of town residents of Tokyo go to buy everything from digital music players to sex robots dressed as French maids. I find myself wandering rather aimlessly in a giant, multi-level electronics store. This is a family concern, however, so no sex robots are on display. Nevertheless, the escalator ushers me towards a surreal scene, on par–in terms of unexpected epiphany–as Wordsworth's field of daffodils. Only this is an artificial field, populated with robotic horses. The horse itself, however, is missing, leaving only a mechanical saddle of various shapes, sizes, and juddering speeds. Not one of these animated saddles is dormant or unstraddled. Indeed, there is a line for the privilege of testing one out. So very incongruous, amongst the DVD players and vacuum cleaners is a drove of blank-faced housewives, bouncing to the unsynchronized rhythms of their acephalic machines. The popularity of the product is itself suspicious, and I think back to a history book I once read, dedicated to all the types of "social camouflage" afforded the female orgasm. But none of these women seem conspicuously aroused. Rather, they appear as robotic as the machines they are riding. And yet, I have the distinct feeling that if someone–their husband, for instance, or an over-zealous sales assistant–attempted to usher any one of them off the gently bucking plug-in creature, there would be an impassioned and negative response. Perhaps a handbag to the bridge of the nose, or an umbrella tip to the sternum.

And so I leave them to it: this band of middle-aged Japanese women, home on the range. Dourly riding in one spot, yet into the fluorescent sunset.

Let us consult.

Let us consult the two-headed turtle.

To the left head, with a yellow stripe down to its nostrils, we say "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

To the right head, with red circles around the eyes, we say "out of sight, out of mind."

Tell us, two-headed turtle, which of these common truisms speaks the actual truth?

Virtuality.

Virtuality is not the same thing as possibility, although it is intimately related to it. Structurally speaking, the virtual is to the actual as possibility is to reality, and yet the virtual evaporates in its own incarnation. In other words, once something actually happens, its potential energy has been sapped. Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press.

For instance, a banana peel, lying in the middle of the street, may or may not make somebody carrying a crate of eggs slip over in a slapstick collapse. Whether this happens or not is irrelevant to the amount of virtuality present within the object, and within the situation. Similarly, a hand, hovering over a secret beloved's knee, may or may not expose this secret by lowering the fingers on to flesh. A boy is a virtual man. A man is a virtual corpse. Friends are virtual lovers. Or enemies.

Some actualities are more inevitable than others, as each millisecond bifurcates and branches into parallel scenarios, only one series of which you will ever experience in real time. Potential energy is thus something like an intangible fan-belt, or invisible rubber ring which loops around a generator, creating kinetic energy. Alternative moments sacrifice themselves in order to usher in the being thus.

Deep down we all know this. We understand that the world is powered by what doesn't happen.

One thing.

One thing is certain.
Reality does not occur in real time.

A child plays.

A child plays with a spool of thread.
His mother has left the room. Is out of sight.
From his raw understanding of things, existence has made an exception in her case.
Inconceivable.
Fort/da. Here/there.
The child plays with the makeshift toy. His game is born of agony. Sigmund Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1978.

TO INTERSECT.

To intersect.

Over and over.

Again and again.

This is our new arrangement.

She assures me it is so. (And I choose to believe her.)

To pull cities together, and then push them apart. To feel their bricks crumble in our fingers like honeycomb, before fusing them once more between our palms. To hang the great capitals of the world from the crescent moon, like a nightwatchman's lamp. To fold them into origami birds that nest in our hats and pockets. To unpack them into radiant flotillas that span the placid oceans.

Together, we banish the pathos of the asymptote.

Apart, we disavow the tragedy of trajectories.

Geometry is our guild.

Divisible cities our province.