9th Avenue has branched into Hudson Street, which I am cruising down to the next stop on my mission. I'm drifting - avoiding thought to make way for impressions that stream in.

I bump into Ken and his team.
-Where is art and life?
-What?
-Well, where do you think that art and life fuse?
- Art and Life is on the street. In the neighborhood. There's a creative picture going on right here. It happens all the time. Take a look around.

Again, by coincidence if not by miracle, I came across an astounding observation. All it takes to catch life and art as they unfold is "a look around. It happens all the time", or in Italo Calvino's words, "At every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence" (Hidden Cities 2, in Invisible Cities, page 149).
 
 
 
 
 
 

noon:
Hudson and Grove: I stumbled into a fold in the sidewalk. It's called St. Luke's Thrift Shop. It is a sand bank of washed up 'junk' - in the least pejorative sense.
 

It contains nothing special and is all the more special for it. The objects on display are infused with human histories. They show signs of use and abuse, they are defaced and smelly. The objects in St. Lukes would almost be subjects if they had the capacity for reflexive consciousness.

Moments later: I'm sitting in Greenwich village on some entryway steps. Is it time to drift on?
 
 

I'm going pretty slowly.  I wonder whether I'll actually get to the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm still strolling down Hudson. The streets are pretty empty. It's still now.
I feel devoid of content. I lack words, a subjective position. I'm just the private eye, a term 'abducted' from Paul Auster's novel City of Glass, as I can't even produce an individual metaphor describing this condition.
Walking unbearably slowly, doing nothing, seeing nothing. No centers of attention. I feel like in a waking sleep. My body is awake but my mind is shut off. I just soak up. No interaction just one-way. It feels delirious, it doesn't feel right. Just cruising, breathing, taking notes. I am alive - but in a different way. The city is not of glass.
 
 
 

It is me. I have merged with the exteriority.

The photograph is analogous to my condition. The exteriority depicted, the bar, contains me now. I have become part of the city, so to speak. The ego has dissolved and made way for simple consciousness. Ironically - and of course by coincidence - the sign in front of the bar saying, "Why are you still out here?" makes sense in the discourse of the dialectics of inside and outside, subject and object, exteriority and interiority.
But the string of coincidences does not end there. To my surprise, just as I finished writing the sentences, "The city is not of glass. It is me", A man approached me and asked, "You're not Aaron, are you?" I shook my head in denial but actually wondered - based on my current state - "Well, why not?"
 
 
 
 
 
 

I look at the pavement a lot for clues and as a way of ensuring that I'm focused on the here and now; not the imaginary, conjured up by the glance off into the distance. The pavement under my feet at any given moment, is the only point positioning me in reality. The truck driving by, the building ahead, they are just vision and sound, light rays and vibrating air. They are not real - they're assembled in my head. The ground beneath my feet, at any given moment, is the point of intersection, of touch, between reality and me. Or is it?
Oh, I just remembered another coincidence: My friend Kimsy has subway maps of her hometown on her wall and as wallpaper on her desktop screen. Maps, depersonalized, utilitarian objects, reappropriated as the most subjective and powerful souvenirs.

12:48pm

I just arranged to meet a friend in front of Dean and Deluca at 1:45pm. I have to keep this in mind, as I am walking slower and slower. I try to glide through alleys, take detours. The city sounds different at every corner. Here, it's the hissing snarl of high-pressure rinsing, or generator buzzing and rattling. There, it's the sound of car wheels covering, smothering themselves in cobblestones. A plane hushes past.

If I concentrate only on the immediate points of contact, I feel like I'm staring the city flat in the eye. An amazing phenomenon. Outside hindsight and foresight, simply in the present, there lies a new beginning.

Coincidence, of course. Just as I was pondering about new beginnings, visions, and eye contact, I stumbled across the depicted scene, which I immediately captured on film. The phrase next to the baby's face says "New Beginnings".
 
 
 

I'm still walking down Hudson. It's 1:04 pm. I was trying to meditate, tipped off by a little sticker on a lamp post that advertises meditation classes. I wanted to have no thought, calm my unconscious to the point where my consciousness is just clear perception. I am continuously  intersected by thought. Not always self-directed thoughts but thoughts nonetheless.
I stroll so slowly that I am forced to concentrate not to speed up.

1:10pm

As I crept along and just concentrated on the fact of cruising slowly, I heard an affirming click from the circuit box of a close-by traffic light. Surely, I wouldn't have heard it if I were walking at my regular pace. The point is though that I heard it as I was slow-walking. As if it is only perceptible on a different level of life (?) altogether. If one is dislocated, the click is audible and meaningful - but what does the click stand for? What does it lead to? Mocking laughter from the right.
The reader must excuse my philosophical musings at this point. The writing is, as previously stated, a linear transformation of the handwritten notes scribbled on the various depicted notebook pages immediately as events unfolded. To my defense, I must state that such drifts make for intensive experiences and atmospheres which are quickly interpreted in (pseudo-) philosophical terms. It is of course a total coincidence that at the moment of my most profound musings a burst of laughter interjected my train of thought and resituated my senses firmly in the present.

On another note, I'm 30 - 40 yards away from West Broadway, a place of excitement and activity. A stark contrast to the melancholy of Hudson Street. But the two worlds coexist ideally. I am not Quinn, who to see ground zero threw Babel out of the window. Whatever that may mean, the sentence is not premeditated. Just came out.