FALLING IN PLACE

255. FALLING IN PLACE (nyc, 1967):

Had I not known better I would have thought I was falling - the catalogue of things presented to me in favor of that proposition was startling : the very first night I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge I was struck by the confluence of noise and wind and the lights of the city on either side of me and in each case there were startling motifs staring back at me - the Brooklyn side with its 'Watchtower' sign just a little less overwhelming while being so totally different too from the screamingly intense and vastly intricate layering and interweaving of lights and depth and canyons and towers which the Manhattan side presented and it was as if I was flowing through a system of blood and people and sound and volume and light and space all together in re-entering that atmosphere from another time and place which in reality was just across the water and on the other side of the bridge - and the bridge walk itself was a tonningly burdensome lightness (as paradoxical as that can seem to be) stretched between two points and over a confined and busy stretch of black water; this again was long ago and the river traffic was different and the cars and trucks were different and even the road-surface upon the bridge was different (it does no longer but did once resound with the constant drumming and bass noise of all the vehicles upon it thrumming their way across the metallized road surface - which resultant and constant noise was a dark deep sound akin to something being drummed and dragged along and that sound too accompanied all else - the wind the stars the lights and the river below) and wherever I looked it seemed there was something different : in one direction the eastside towers of all the housing projects thrown up in dreary and sordid arrangements to house the poor when they were poor - some strange municipal effort to lift up the downtrodden from their misery and implant them simply somewhere else twelve floors higher up but not really different in station and in another direction the stanchions and factions of Chinatown and all those broken-down Tong War refugees trekking the streets amidst produce and fish and restaurants and all the tiles of Mah Jongg games and dominoes too while - just south of all this - the masterful thievery and awesome presence of the finance crowd and all those Wall Street boys in their buildings and towers and counting houses and exchanges - it was all a very weird feeling of displacement for sure and each time after that as I experienced it all I underwent the same rigorous form of self-examination and displacement as if it again were the first time - I was always just unable to get over the fact of where I was and who I was to become - one a mystery and one a cipher and all of that together was for me too bad and too unknown to be comfortable with.
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Sometimes among the people I knew I would sense various attitudes and world-views which I couldn't understand or fathom and mostly they stemmed from upbringing and/or money and the sorts of families and lifestyles they'd enjoyed (which by contrast I could say I never had and most certainly had never 'enjoyed') and privilege being a pre-requisite of taste I was often left holding the bag as it were - seen as the low level representative of some alien life form of the sort which did sometimes come into and inhabit the city - a case of 'new-money vs. old-money' as it were (except that in my case the old money was no-money) - and in most every aspect of taste there were huge differences which also in my case of twenty-five cent soup and muffin meals meant that any outward expense of more than that was trouble - while they went about in their own allegorical fashion eating filet mignon every twenty minutes and with perfect silverware and service at that - it was just really too much of a divide to cross and so it stayed that way YET I managed and they welcomed me in as much as they could and whenever they had to - which was nice always when it happened - but I held no grudges and went about my business learning everything and watching as closely as I could too all that went on so as to absorb from it as much as I could -- there was no telling when at any time something might come up into which I was drawn and where my very own personal points of views could be different enough to perhaps show them something new or different by simply expressing a viewpoint or approach which BECAUSE of their upbringings or attitudes they simply would not think of - which was sometimes just as much a revelation for them as most often their stuff was for me : an odd converse of events which sometimes amused : and I liked it all well enough and I kept carefully within my own precepts and parameters which mostly meant things like not volunteering any information or at least not letting anything slip until the very last moment or when I actually had to - that was one means of holding it all close to the vest as it were and thereby harboring as many aspirations of seeing what was first expected and what was considered 'a'propos' and normalized from their points of view as it related to whatever situation was at hand - I spent time reading and reading carefully those things I liked and it didn't much matter there they stood on any scale of propriety or taste : I loved what I loved and delved at will through anything I could find which fixed my interest and which related in any way to the art-philosophical-psychological points onto which I was trying to focus and set my course and I spent plenty of time as I said (as much as possible) with the likes of Morton Feldman Philip Guston and all the rest of those around me at the Studio School as I possibly could and those who were not near me - in turn - became as real to me through their words as I could make them and the constant referencing of unseen peoples and forces around me led to some startling and scary events for me too - almost hallucinatory in nature sometimes these things were - but just as much edifying and instructive and (for all those reasons) my friends were legion and mostly unseen.