New York is a place where everything is just a little off kilter, pushed and angled by unwavering momentum, but there is flow and the hope of flow working in the depths of personal metaphysical craft, there is the dewy first light of possibility and the wisdom of the tempest-tossed, if —as Kipling says it— “you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.
The city breathes and compresses, inhabits and yearns, makes patterns and delights in the rupture of unnecessary patterning, it aspires abruptly, consistently, and seeks self-definition, is wounded and implored and billowing with the call for anything more like or less like its oblique time-wary self-fashioning : every woman is a woman and brings all the joys and abilities of woman to the metaphysical calamity of feasting, and every man is a man and brings all the hardships and fantasies of man to the physical incarnation of the feasting dance : no matter what harangues and woodjumbles, what indelicate armors or ill-encumbered sanctities we assign them on first or second sight, or on the last flitting edge of visual contact, the tired judgment, the game of collapse collapsing within and draining away the sound and the sense of things, pushes for an even score, and then beyond into something more complicated, more unabashed.
It is an other-world, a mix of cultures, of acute binging instances of culture beginning, a weave of timing and tempo, of taste and absence, a place where solitude bleeds into reflection, concept, the sticky whimsy of a place that is also a form of place, a soughtafter lover for the placeseekers, a continuation of inward lacking and of the rhythms of spheres of memory and indication, halfway between being-here and not-being.
