As one of the four elemental spirits,
fire can never be extinguished.


Sun 12.18.11


At an underground station on the Lower East Side waiting for the number 6 train, this piece of graffiti etched on a post: The Streets Will Flow Pink. Hunh? Obviously a take on the sentence, The streets will flow with blood, but pink? Then it dawns on me, it's about the protest group named Code Pink. Clever.

A lot of smart, creative people on the Lower East Side. It occurs to me that there's nothing like that in Harlem, for whatever reason. The Harlem Renaissance done went and gone a long time ago. My off the cuff assessment, for what it's worth, is that African Americans are more and more entering the middle class, which is never a good nurturer of creativity.

At night I have a dream. In it my landlord and I are talking (yes, the very one I've been in deadly combat with for the past 3 years,) specifically about the building I live in and the repairs she has made on the 1st floor apartment. We walk to the park. I am tentative about our rapprochement. I tell her how beautiful the park looks. She says it is because the folks from the Lower East Side have cleaned up their act.

Looking at the dream's metaphorical language, which is how the dream speaks to us, the building is what I have made of myself, my structure; landlord, is what I permit to be part of my structure. What about the 1st floor apartment? In a brownstone, which is what I inhabit, the 1st floor is where the front parlor is located, where one receives guests. So there has been some straightening out in that area of my life. True, true. The park is the public garden that we all share. It is there where most of the change has occurred.

When I got divorced many years ago I had come to realize that marriage was a prison where one lost all freedom. It wasn't about growing up and commitment; it was entrapment, earning a living, consumerism, cars, houses, appliances, fancy china, and the mind numbing job you went to every day. What's worse, marriage itself cast you in a spirit-crushing role with its explicit duties, whether male or female. There was no way I was ever going to get into that trap again.

Tentatively, I made my way into the world, sneering at the middle class and the settled life. No way, I was going to roam the world, kick my heels, and taste as much of what life had to offer as I could. I would live an artist's life and have something to write about. I've lived on Lower East Side with fellow artists, on the Upper East Side among the middle class, and now I live in Harlem, in a very different culture than mine, with people, some of whom have negative feelings about me, and what they perceive as my people. It doesn't matter, none of it matters. What I've come to realize is that commitment is to the Self, and its core values, not to a people, or to a system, a role, or an anti-role. I don't belong to any of it. I had to build a home for my true heart to inhabit.

I have been reading Herman Hesse recently, a man who had the same kind of dichotomy in his life, rebelliousness against a bourgeois life and a yearning for freedom. I am currently reading Narcissus and Goldmund. Goldmund being the rebellious one who chooses a wanderer's life, going from town to village begging food and seducing as many women as he can. A gifted artist, but he doesn't want to become famous and be corrupted in the process. I weary of him and his fornications, and want him to commit to something. Not having finished the book, I don't know if he will. His kind generally gets a bad end.

Is it a coincidence that the Catholic Hesse and I grew up cloistered in seminary and convent with brothers and nuns?

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Current favorite this past month has been Occupy Gracie