So my period of being stranded on the farm is one in which I am trying to put to good use. To contact old friends and do detestable tasks, such as making an artist's statement, and writing my biography or CV. This last task was the subject of an insomniac review between the dreams of 3 am and those later on.
Really, I thought, looking up at the dim ceiling, I'd like to steal that title from the Ozu film, "I was born, but..." (but who am I? and how will I know until I find my true home?) (the retort of good sense: don't you know by now? and aren't you a bit old for such an adolescent question?)
THESE WERE THE BRIDGES HE HAD TO CROSS
The last day of my last visit to my old haunts in Manhattan, I walked from my bed and breakfast in my old neighborhood in Ft. Green across the Brooklyn bridge and back. This was a trek I had often made when I lived there 17 years ago. I lived in a spacious loft in a neighborhood which was then rife with crack wars--one day I stepped over nine bodies left in body bags on the street near the subway exit. Why they were left there, so close to the police station, I will never know. My best friend, who lived with me, was in the first stages of AIDS related dementia, and had pulled the phone from its socket, and had attempted my murder once. I was broke, and alone in this situation, and unwilling to leave him, lest he do violence to himself, and so daily I walked to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, reciting prayers, and looking for work. Now I was prosperous, and had survived that time, and found myself eating a cheese burger in a restaurant I had often passed hungry.
On the Brooklyn Bridge I suddenly heard the words, as audibly as if they were spoken, "These are the bridges he had to cross."
They came from a dream from this difficult time, which I had forgotten. I am once again in the heavenly library, in the music section, which has all sorts of non-existent works--the missing correspondence of Bach and Couperin, for example,which was used for sealing jam-pots on this terrestial plane--as well as things that really didn't get done in earthly reality--Debussey's Fall of the House of Usher, Beethoven's opera, MacBeth--and there was a manuscript of the MAHLER second symphony, each part of which was in vibrant color, bronzes, golds, oranges, maple-leaf yellows for the horn parts, violets and blues for the winds, etcetera, confirming the beliefs in synasthesia of such composers as Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, and such authors as Nabokov and Rimbaud. At the back of this manuscript was an old fashioned post-card album, with sepia post-cards held in place with black paper brackets, which were of the bridges of Prague, London, and Paris, and beneath each in gothic letters but in English,"These are the bridges he had to cross."