Day 1: It got rainy

Hotel
Times Square
Evening harbor cruise

Day 4: Untitled

Albert Einstein School of Medicine
NY Botanical Garden
Hotel

After a brief promenade on the dusty campus of Albert Einstein School of Medicine, I visited the NY Botanical Garden in the Bronx, a few minutes within reaching which I took some pictures of the Haupt Conservatory and its surrounding greenery.



It was around 3pm when I checked email at the Garden library. I quickly decided that the best thing to do would be to return to the hotel room and spend the evening there. In my last hour at the Garden, I passed by some willows and took a brief excursion through a rock garden. Planted tightly together, in what nature could call a horticultural freak-show, were rock plants carried from the Andes, Appalachia, Mongolia. I couldn't help thinking that even in their crowded beds, each plant looked distinctly lonely under the Bronx sky. At 4:30pm I took another bus through the Bronx back to a Manhattan subway station.

I was happy to finally be outside the oppressive quiet of the Garden. As I looked around for almost 5 minutes for the Uptown 1 or 9 lines, among hundreds of strangers who in all probability I would never see again, I felt strangely secure. As an approximation to that illusive home, NY was better than home itself. And for the first time in almost 6 years, I felt a quiet release. It had only been 4 days and yet I could sense the creeping hour of departure.


"We the readers, the sole witnesses of what was said between the huntsman and the deputy of the community of Riva, learn little of the fate of Gracchus, except that many, many years before, in the Black Forest, where he was on guard against the wolves which still prowled the hills at that time, he went in pursuit of a chamois - and is this not one of the strangest items of misinformation in all the tales that have ever been told? - he went in pursuit of a chamois and fell to his death from the face of a mountain; and that because of a wrong turn of the tiller, a moment of inattention on the part of the helmsman, distracted by the beauty of the huntsman's dark green country, the barque which was to have ferried him to the shore beyond failed to make the crossing, so that he, Gracchus, has been voyaging the seas of the world ever since, without respite, as he says, attempting now here and now there to make land."

Vertigo - W.G. Sebald

Back in the hotel room, BBC News and a re-run of The Daily Show.

Day 5: Getting on, getting off the sea, under a cloudy sky

State of Liberty
Ellis Island
Chinatown
Bus

Day 5 was 4 hours of forming queues at the port and lowering ass onto wet benches among screeching school children, European tourists and tomorrow's forgotten pictures of thumbs, the Statue and the sea. An officer at the New York harbor pulled me aside and asked me if I was a teacher or if I intended to become one. He said I looked like a teacher. I should have said: no, engineer or economist, but an invisible hand reached into my brain and seized the words before they could form.


At the Ellis Island exhibition, I had the incredible urge to scratch onto a wall: Mother, I was here. She had visited years ago. My futile impulse would take this message to its intended recipient only if time folded onto itself and she found her way back to Ellis Island and to this gallery wall documenting the lives of unnamed disembarkers at a foreign land.


"From 1892 to 1954, over twelve million immigrants entered the United States through the portal of Ellis Island, a small island in New York Harbor. Ellis Island is located in the upper bay just off the New Jersey coast, within the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Through the years, this gateway to the new world was enlarged from its original 3.3 acres to 27.5 acres mostly by landfill obtained from ship ballast and possibly excess earth from the construction of the New York City subway system.

"First and second class passengers who arrived in New York Harbor were not required to undergo the inspection process at Ellis Island. Instead, these passengers underwent a cursory inspection aboard ship; the theory being that if a person could afford to purchase a first or second class ticket, they were less likely to become a public charge in America due to medical or legal reasons.

"This scenario was far different for "steerage" or third class passengers. These immigrants traveled in crowded and often unsanitary conditions near the bottom of steamships with few amenities, oftenspending up to two weeks seasick in their bunks during rough Atlantic Ocean crossings. Upon arrival in New York City, ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers. First and second class passengers would disembark, pass through Customs at the piers and were free to enter the United States. The steerage and third class passengers were transported from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone would undergo a medical and legal inspection.

"While there were many reasons to emigrate to America, no reason could be found for what would occur only five years after the Ellis Island Immigration Station opened. During the evening of June 14, 1897, a fire on Ellis Island, burned the immigration station completely to the ground. Although no lives were lost, many years of Federal and State immigration records dating back to 1855 burned along with the pine buildings that failed to protect them."



The sea is heaving. We all are heaving. It is time to go home.

Day 5: Rm 329

When I returned to my dormroom today, there was a diamond-shaped piece of red paper stuck on my door and incredibly loud music playing inside. For a moment I was disconcerted. Could it be that someone else had claimed my room? I knocked once. After one full minute it dawned on me that the music playing was Ian Brown's Fear. Inside, patiently waiting for 5 days, were a small fridge and 2 large boxes.

The weather in Boston is worse than in New York today. It is raining, and the city is darkening outside the rain-spotted windows. I am trying to block out the sound of water flowing through the pipes behind the walls. As my mind turns to the trip, I try to imagine what kind of living arrangement Kobo Abe had while writing Kangaroo Notebook, a book I had taken with me to New York. Was it a one-room affair? Did snake-like water pipes run outside the walls and explode into tightly gnarled sprinklers? Were the city lights dimming before even midnight? For now the answers lie between these 2 covers, in a universe to which I will shortly return, where a radish sprout-sprouting patient rides on an automatic hospital bed on an inexorable psychosis of a journey.

The schizophrenia of sharing time

i would much rather die than
pour myself down those deep dark
bird nests that i have seen on tv.
who knows what nightmare 
or evil-looking 
mucous baby birds
await there.
and as i ease myself into
the bird nest
the soggy inside, quivering with animal life,
would probably eat my face

and yet, in some damp nest at nighttime,
the flash of a pair of yellow eyes:
mother!


the concept of burial bothers me.
i do not want to slip and fall
and hurtle down from this precious 
place at the top of the food chain
i must be special
it must be a crime to recycle this body

and yet, father inches along through the ground
eyeballs rolling against the pressing soil
guiding me to my body wrapped in gauze:
a veritable feast


and a few feet away, in a moss-covered pond,
a toad finally springs off a frond
plop!


smoking, feeling,
at the center of my cuboid room,
the immanence of experience

and bound within this immanence,
in each second,
experience - schizophrenically 
clamoring and clashing against
experience

sky jostling brick walls,
and the color of cement
here, there, everywhere
rising
into a raging gale at sea

and somewhere across the sea
a wall of ice
has torn itself off of Antarctica
and is sinking