Luxury Apartment Buildings On Fifth Avenue West
Emerging from the Fog.
Sitting on the rock in Central Park on that chilly Autumn day, I was doing what I have done best since a child. I would find a place and remain there, very quiet and just look. It could have been a tree top, like the top of the cherry tree in Bad Homburg, Germany when I was eight years old. That old tower in the middle of a field upon whose battlements I stood, licking powder cool-aid from the palm of my hand also in Bad Hamburg. Or the cliff top where I used to camp out in Danbury, Connecticut, when I was fifteen, or in the rowboat with my dog, Tober, on tiny lake Wackawana also in Danbury, Connecticut. Or in the huge live oak trees in Charleston, South Carolina.
The secret is in the stillness. You have to get perfectly still and wait. Then the forest transforms into a voice that you can hear with your mind. I'm telling you something. This is a reality. But you have to get quiet first. A lot of times it doesn't take long. Sometimes it does. Sometimes you walk away having only benefited from the peacefulness. But most of the time in about twenty-seven minutes, you'll be in touch.
Is it better? A better way to be? Compared to what? There aren't words to describe this. In English it gets lost in translation, but something like, "Light water ocean mercury silver pouring stars distance greater peach went tomorrows on arcs in space dust plants here say you're growing". And that's not even close. I really irk a lot of people because I try. When I come round with something it defies their kempt inaccurate biased logic.
So I tell this to you, it would be your strength. Maybe in the silence is sanity like a hard drive de-fragmenting, but I'm sure there's really something to it. If you get to be rushing around and really busy, you may feel great, you may imagine yourself to be competent, but those are illusions commonly held. Art is not that. In the quiet you get something that you bring in seasoned with your personality, but you've brought in the beyond. What is not you, but something you're a part of. Or would you rather be some sort of biological fragment living in a broken machine with blatant hostility hiding behind it's myriad of masks? Oh, maybe I can put this in writing because I'm a little older now; I can work with a bit of a frame of reference. I can make a statement that's somewhat reliable and useful.
Get quiet. Get away from the screams, from the hype, from the social climbing, from the sense of achievement, from the machinery and sit on your rock. Wait beneath the stars and become a part of what you're made of. Enjoy being the outcast. It's an emergency. Why delude yourself? Look at reality and wait for it to speak to your being. In the quiet.
Sitting on the rock in Central Park, forever covers the city until only the nearby apartment buildings emerge like castles of some bygone era. I get comforted from my grief at having to leave the forests, and Tober. He remained with my family, by then in Long Island, but soon he too died -- hit and run, only a dog, they must have thought. I still see him in dreams. There I can give him a hug.
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