[7] After you finish eating you walk two blocks north and get on the E-train, going uptown. Destination 5th Ave. The compartment, and perhaps the train, is full of suits. And even though you are dressed quite formally this morning in slacks and a button down, you feel comparatively underdressed. When the train pulls into 5th Ave station, you get off with most of the compartment. Going up the escalator, you get the impression of a human assembly line, bodies, nay clones, packed into business suits and ties.

You have the thought that since most business depends on the ability to bullshit beautifully, these folk -meatpackers of another kind, need to wear such assembly line uniforms, so as not to let shit stick. Your mind is behaving subversively for what do you think you yourself will be doing soon? You have to let go to the engineer’s ethics and the resultant wariness towards all hotair: the predominant coin of business, and other subsets of business like politics and organized religion.

You also suddenly remember advertisements for clothing you have seen a long time ago in tropical India, where to wear a suit is to court certain death by steam cooking, from brands called Grasim, Raymonds and suchlike. You laugh at the absurdity now – Indian men dressed in suits, walking around as men are walking around you here in the street, trying to sell this style in a country where temperatures hit 45 C in summers.

[8] You walk down the Avenue of The Americas, wondering why such a broad claim: is it supposed to include the whole American continent, be representative of the whole American continent, or is it just an echo of President Wilson’s claim to his sphere of influence: that exclusive backyard of Uncle Sam, with all those banana republics, all those dictators, and all that CIA meddling? Castro, however bad sonofabitch he may be, has certain legitimacy when he shows US the finger.

You arrive at the point of your business, and see all around you headquarters of the major book publishers; McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster etc. Gutenberg would be rather proud of all these bookies, who could make fortunes down the years off his idea, which was, wasn’t it, to propagate the Holy Book? Are Gideons then Gutenberg’s true inheritors? You also have a five second day dream of winning the jackpot and going up these steel towers to meet the bookmakers, the literary kingmakers, the suited ghosts, the men with blue pencils.

[9] The security guy barks at daydreamers like you: get in the line. Yes. Yes. You want to go to another country and you can’t bloody well wander across and around without papers. Watchtowers, barbed wire, border patrols, human trackers, the Great Walls of the West, and the hungry tide waiting, looming, for a piece of the fruit cake, for the good life, on the other side of the dam with closely monitored gates.

Yet this human fluid like water does manage to seep through the rock – the universe is full of boat people, full of all these wetbacks. What about you? Are you not a legal wetback? No sir, a legal alien. And if you wait for a few years, you might hope to become an earthling again here. Now, now, no more monologues in the line. Get moving. The guard barks at you: get your papers out in the right hand and sixty dollars in the left. Stand straight. Jump up. Bow down. Skip and hop as required. You have been through this before. Be curt. Answer to the point. Keep your voice low and clear. You mustn’t get excited. You mustn’t stammer.

You are to prove that you are ‘safe’. Are you safe? Isn’t there the snake of all sins coiled at the bottom of your spine as well? How to scan murder that lurks in the heart? Monsters arrive in iron birds, howling. A line from an Eagles’ song: everything can change in a New York minute. Yes, last night you looked down and saw the hole through which cold calculated murder went on its way to a supposedly tricked up paradise. And then perhaps a God, if he exists somewhere, wept.

[10] Forty minutes later, you are done. You feel exhausted, beaten. Make a mental resolution to become Roman, to cross over to the “first” world as quickly as possible. But what about psychic borders that remain uncrossed? And meanwhile, in the city, it is business as usual; suit twirl around you, tweeting, chirping into cell phones, the sky is clear, and you sit on a bench and breathe the air mixed with the aromas of the Indian food kiosk at the corner.

You disinterestedly thumb through the guidebook; the section for this part of the city is a litany of names, of architecturally significant buildings, various schools of architecture, and building material: glass, steel, marble, concrete. And a church every block: “You shall praise the Lord, and bring your tithes to Him joyfully. And He will call your transgressions off, i.e., Quid pro quo.”

You also note that a famous museum of modern art is right around the corner. Perhaps you should pop in there and transport yourself to the wheat fields of Arles, to a smoky room where peasants are eating potatoes, to a sky full of drunk, hallucinating stars, to streets where whores, postmen, their wives and sun walks? But your find this impulse unappealing. You can’t wrestle with that soul in a glass tower, where he is also business. Yes, aren’t those shell-shocked, flaming souls, well preserved in a fort worth a lot of business?

[11] After sitting in a café - drinking coffee, writing notes, watching a psychotic old woman at the next table have a continuous and a passionate conversation with an imaginary person, a bearded intellectual type/hobo reading a thick book (what is it about? who is the writer?) – for an hour or so, you step out into the panorama of Fifth Ave and walk southwards. You have lost all interest to absorb architecture on this trip, so you put the guidebook away and don’t even look up at the spires in the sky. In the distance the scalloped top of Chrysler Building etc. Fogget-about-it.

This feeling persists when you step into the celebrated Grad Central Station – deservedly celebrated and much photographed because it is quite a beautiful building. You can’t imprint it on your mind however any differently from Hal Morey’s famous photograph of light streaming through its high dormer windows. And also those painful passages in Elizabeth Smart’s ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept’. Is this then a case of media fucking up one’s perceptual abilities? Deadening them? You walk out with this question on your mind, and soon enter the Public Library.

[12] You walk up to Asian Reading room, pull out a volume from the shelf and begin to read away the sense of isolation that has been creeping upon you in the last few hours. Perhaps reading this summation of Ferdowsi’s opus will make you feel light again. Already you are lost in this other world, where someone audaciously composes 60,000 rhyming couplets telling the history of a people in poetry for a daughter’s dowry. And alas never getting the 60,000 gold dinars sent by the Sultan in time. The camels bearing gold entered the city through the Camels River gate as Ferdowsi was departing through the Gate of Razan, as well as through the other more permanent gate.

As you read of Rustum, who lived to be six hundred years old, you make a note to undertake a similar history of these past few centuries, mixing imaginary dragons and beasts with all those real ones they have seen. These are other bits you find writing in your notebook: Gayumarth, the primal man who fought the Evil Principle with lions and tigers; Hushang, the first iron worker, who discovered fire when he hurled a boulder at the menacing dragon, missed and struck sparks; Tahmurath who learnt writing from the Demons (is writing then fundamentally a demonic art?); Zahhak, the Arab with serpents embedded in his shoulders that needed to be fed two human brains a day; the great white haired Simurgh rescuing a baby; and then Rustum again, the boy drinking with men, the baby with ten wet nurses, striding away into a New York afternoon on his horse Rakhsh or Lightning.

You are invited to join an e-mail listserve on the life and lieterature of Rlizabeth Smart. Just e-mail elizabethsmart-subscribe@yahoogroups.ca

nice monologue, there. I wrote something similar, on Philadelphia in a much lighter tone though. Please to glance if you have time.

rajamohan.blogspot.com.

Found you from uber's blogsite. Thanks!