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New York Has Touched The Corners Of The World
I'm in New York, but I never want to open the curtain to look out of the window, even when I'm only four stories up. Although I often ache with solitude, I don't want anyone looking in. When I go out onto the streets it requires a certain amount of energy to be on guard. In order to live here, I would have to rise above my own desires and fears, to become less human and more like a landscape of buildings. Looking back out at New York I thought, it's great but it's the best we can do, and just look at it. So what? I thought of a small battery hen's body in my hands. Its perfection and how they tried to manipulate it genes and recreate what they never really understood. It's lovely breast and featherlessness resting there, and how perfect it is and the way in which we choose to gobble it down. We turn its life into human shit. New York overwhelms us and we cannot gobble it down. It gobbles down the environment around it and turns the oceans, valleys, rivers and air into shit. The city is a machine, a tool, a cutlery utensil, by which we use to feed ourselves the earth and turn earth to human shit. The buildings are the baby spoons entering our mouths as we consume in New York. We are hand fed like babies as long as we can pay for it with our lives, as long as we give our lives to New York, its regeneration and sustenance. So we stay to be held by it. Within the city we are full of our own self importance, because we are living in, where was it again? New York, New York, The Big Apple. The buildings fall like well sharpened knives to slice into the heart of the earth, which is the big apple. This city is great but also full of its own self importance. It is overly promoted, until we recognised each street and building and the Manhattan Skyline on our screens, half way around the world nine times a night. You can do anything you want to and as lousily as you like, so long as it's done in New York. The city that's so grand that they had to name it twice. New York, New York touches the whole world and I feel frightened. I fear that there is nowhere left for me to go where New York won't reach in. It's chubby bold fingers in through my coat and popping my shirt buttons to touch my skin, or where it waits in a weird dream park to suddenly flash its genitals at me. New York has become Hollywood significant in a way in that the Australian battery hen can never be. Yet god has seriously manifested deep inside the trembling life of the battery hen. Yet old New York, New York has never touched the battery hen, and it has never really touched my heart or made it tremble, in the same way that a battery hen has. We always say it straight out and brash in New York, New York. We have to say it twice and really mean it. No one ever told me that all my dreams of flying and of my dream city New York, would come to an abrupt landing. I wept as one does suddenly when a dream is fulfilled. For it seems as if all our lives we are working towards that dream, when it abruptly halts and lands as it is fulfilled. The plane of my dream that took me there has landed in New York, New York and is fulfilled. The greatest city on earth that had excited and disappointed me had died simultaneously. Again I learnt, that the best way to kill a long standing dream is to arrive at it. I needed to arrive at the world's greatest city of New York, New York like one of many mountains in a valley. That dream fulfilled, I slid back down the other side and hit the bottom. Now disillusioned and tired, I am aware that it was the process that got me here and not the arrival itself that is important. My heart picks itself up out of the dirt and I dust off my clothing. Well ahead of me I see the next landscape of valleys and mountains and of climbs that will lead me steadily towards its next great dream. New York has touched my corner of the world, and I have felt the heartbeat of this great city. Dreams are the great spiralling stairways of desires that have grown inside ones fearful heart since infancy. And you never quite know that it was fool's gold until you have struggled for it for many of your adult years. If I had never arrived in New York, but instead had spent my life rescuing hens out on Australian farms, I would have always wondered what it was like to arrive there. And somehow this desire would have made my heart heavy interfering with my work. Yet it was only after I had finally arrived in New York, New York, and found it extravagant and loveless, that I longed to feel the rescued battery hen's heartbeat in my hands. |
