In New York art lovers are devoured by sculptures on a daily basis–God knows how many we’ve lost to the LOVE sculpture? Generations have disappeared inside Grant’s Tomb drawn to their end by a joke. In Queen’s cemetery they break ground daily for the unraveling books of the dead tossed daily from the city hospitals and morgues. The dead fall in a drizzle and their stories are told only to roots.

In NY people climb into metal worms and are taken places they do not want to go, and to job they dare not comprehend. Their long faces are the faces of those that stand on the shoulders of the dead. I’m told that is a “New York Face.” Not even iPods can save these faces from one day shouldering the living.

No matter the price of fame in NY, it is infinitely better to be Lewis Carroll than to be Alice.

We live in apartments with 100 coats of paint. Each coat of paint knows the different languages of conception, 1000 words for backhand, and 10,000 words born on alcohol’s breath. James Dean lived in every apartment in NY so at least one coat of paint per apartment bears the imprint of his hidden life.

Here a race with fading tattoos disappears into the past. Work has not made Freedom. Work just makes work.

The universe has everything, so anything can happen in New York.

Here Dante descended into the Inferno in the South Bronx. Achilles sulked in his tent near the leather bars on Christopher Street. Grendel rose from the East River, a golem of pollution. Ulysses finally took Penelope to bed at The Plaza. Loki led the way into Walhalla at the Tombs. Christ hung from a cross on 42nd street. The Passion is the empty hole at Ground Zero.

An here life’s purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first closed.