7am, time to rest.

Despite my desire, I can no longer justify calling this an evening - the light has risen on yet another day and the birds are tweeting in what would usually be a charming manner, but at present it just reminds me of the fact that I am still WIDE AWAKE and it's 7AM.

Oh the joys of jetlag. This is my third night that has passed into daylight without a wink of sleep, and I've been told that I must break the cycle and set my alarm for 9am sharp tomorrow and get up, by hook or by crook.

I have diligently set my alarm for ten (well, 9 is just plain ridiculous), and will be dragging myself up in a couple of hours to meet the morning instead of stumbling into the outside world just as it is returning to its rest.

So after reading, listening to 'calming music', meditating, lying on my belly, lying on my back, arms by my side, arms flung out, swiveling 180 degrees in the bed for a change of scene, I am up and back at my computer - the one thing NOT recommended for a relaxing release. But fuck it, at least I'm getting some writing done.

I think somewhere underneath this somnambulistic state, I'm grieving. Yes, it is possible to grieve the loss of a city as much as any person, to feel a bond with it the same as one feels with a lover or kin.

Saturday night I made love to New York for the last time, stomping up rain drenched streets in unsuitable boots which got quickly soaked, cool liquid eating up my socks, creeping all upon my skin. A wild night, a beautiful night, where the wind came from all directions and the rain was all consuming. New York was sublimated, taxi cabs came and went, and I was adrift, timeless, a black halo bouncing in a room of light.

I will never forget the first time I set eyes on her. The plane had begun its descent towards Newark Airport, the air was grey as a dirty rag, mist swamping the distant landscape. And then, there she was, out of the corner of my eye, one of the strangest sights I have ever seen. New York, one of the biggest cities in the world: a giant, a deep complex force of laughter and aggression, splendid, unanswerable. But here she was beside me like the cutest toy town, her skyscrapers not menacing, not awe-inspiring, just strangely, disturbingly, endearing and small.

Shrouded in a charcoal mist, she looked so dirty, so smeared with grime: she was to me a filthy graveyard, her tombstones ludicrous and enchanting, blackened epitaphs to the pain of this city which was all I could see. The Statue Of Liberty was a stunted figure of mockery, looking out to the ocean from deserted swampland. And I knew, from this initial sight that this was a mystical city, born out of time and within it, built on dirt and grey, filled with the emanence of light.

I had told Chall a place we could meet in the city. We were to meet next to the painting "St Anthony In The Wilderness" in the Sienese section of the Met. A great, ambitious idea, I had thought, but as I strode with my weighty backpack in the rain and up inside the Museum doors, I was bluntly informed that I could not enter with such a large bag. And so instead, it was to be a first meeting beside the bins in the rain outside the Museum. As I waited for Chall to come out, I couldn't help finding the idea of this amusing. Finally he loped out, in a fawn coloured jacket, a stranger who had become a friend, who was still a stranger.

We went and ate a sandwich nearby. I felt ebulliant, he ate quietly, a pendant in the shape of a bird hanging from his neck.

Saturday, 21st April

It's my last day.
Chall left last night at about eleven pm to pick up his car in New Jersey and then begin the twelve hour drive back to Asheville through the night (crazy motherfucker). So we ride the subway back from possibly one of the best restaurants I've ever had the delight to be in, and he gets off suddenly at 14th to make his connection, hugging me briefly before jumping off, disappearing with the closing subway doors. I stay on, making my way up to Emily's place, jumping out at Times Square to make the connection...and there's this black guy with a voice like diamonds singing Otis Redding on the platform and everyone is joining in, singing along, swaying in time to "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay". I love subway riding. I take the C train uptown, get off, and walk back to Convent Avenue. New York is feeling like it is becoming mine.

God knows where the restaurant we went to was, somewhere around St Marks. We were taken there by Gelsinger after roaming the Metropolitan Museum Of Art for hours until we couldn't take any more in. What an incredible place, the highest ceilings, blossoms in the foyer. In the modern art section, I came across one of Yves Klein's Blue paintings, enormous, across a whole wall. It was startling, and a loud "fuck" escaped from my mouth before I could do anything about it. The rest of the Museum faded into silence, the Picassos and the O'Keefes disappeared into fine dust. I have never seen colour like that, an all enveloping blue, so beautiful, angels singing out from the resin and the pigment.

That's the trouble for me with art galleries and poetry readings (cinema and gigs are slightly better, your face is more easily hidden) - if I don't like what I see/hear then it's pretty tedious, but if I do like it then I want to be able to respond accordingly, and that sometimes is tears, laughter, the odd yelp, a bit of screaming. At the 'Howl' reading the other night I got a surprise bout of hysterical laughter and longed to climb out of my seat and roll around on the floor behind the back row to the sound of Ginsberg's gorgeous voice speaking of watches and alarm clocks, anal sex and opening antique shops. Instead, Chall and I sniggered like Beavis and Butthead while the man beside us pretended to be engrossed, but was snoring lightly. Outside, the Underground Literary Alliance got ready for a wig wearing/mouse trap waving hijacking of the Howl reading, in the name of the true rock and roll spirit of Ginsberg's poetry. Fantastic. Thank god they were there, (even if they were a bit silly). But I digress, and that is another story...so I stand there in front of this painting, and of course I cry.. it is like the embodiment of every line from Rilke, truly terrifying in its beauty. And it shocks me that in a world such as art or a land such as poetry, that, let's face it are full of eccentrics and crazy people, that I feel so self conscious about having a strong response to something that I presume is meant for, well, having a strong response to. And somehow the polititude of artistic appreciation feels alienating, wrong. Even so, I stifle my tears, turn my back quickly on the Rothko (just to be on the safe side), and try to give the semblance of an impression of a concrete human being.

So when Gelsinger said he knew a great Indian restaurant, but wanted to just check neither of us were claustrophobic, I did feel a slight wave of trepidation. When we arrived there, I could see this was no ordinary Indian restaurant. In fact, as we climbed the steps and looked through the front door, it became clear that it was totally insane. Gold and red decorations hung from every single space of ceiling, as well as strings of plastic chillies, beach balls, happy birthday banners, merry christmas banners, globes of the world, lanterns. As we entered, it was like going into a crazy gypsy caravan that was about to start rolling down the hill. We got seated at a very small, very cramped table by an Indian guy in a wide American flag tie, and the music was some fusion mix of Bhangra/funk/electro/gay-beat (!), and it was LOUD. Chall went off to the shop to get some beer, and the second after he left, all the lights went out (actually pulled out at the wall by one of the waiters), and this strange Indian camp version of "Happy Birthday" came on loudly over the stereo, everyone in the place began cheering and singing and clapping wildly, like some insane camped up dionysian rite complete with tinsel and drunkenness. And then, just as suddenly, the lights came back on and all proceeded exactly as before. We ate shrimp puri and samosas before being requested to move to another, even smaller table..

So today I am waiting for Emily to arrive back home as I have her key, and then I'm off to the American Museum Of Natural History to look at dinosaurs . I fly home tomorrow. But there's still time for more adventures before my plane takes off high into the sky. Fuck, there's been too many so far to begin to tell.

friday through to sunday

Woh. New York, timeless and of time. Falling out of the bus I am met by hard lines travelling upwards, my neck craned backwards like a cock crowing. My eyes leave the sidewalk, again I watch yellow taxis pumping their fastness, steam from an extractor tube swipes the traffic lights out of sight momentarily, and the street is frozen in an image of perfect disaster and automaton.

The bookshop is closed, it is Easter Sunday, but chocolate cake is moist and runs down my tongue in the padded booth of the nearby diner. It is two days later. I sit silent with Chall, not eating, suspended before the front glass of the window, passersby craning back now and then, to meet our staring.

Unknowns and Knowns

Well its nearly two a.m. and I'm almost done packing. In a few hours I will be winging my way to the airport, and some hours after that I will be landing in Newark airport. And then, I know I will be setting eyes on New York City for the first time ever, alone, quite alone. And I know the buildings will be tall, and I know it will be beautiful.
The music on my stereo sounds so plaintive, so cuttingly, achingly beautiful. Meetings and partings. I leave those here for an unknown, unseen future. And I can't deny the wrench, the tear on my heart. But then I will be meeting my own future, as it comes into the present, and I will be meeting a certain Chall Gray, in some back room, somewhere in the city. And from there, the story will unfold.

Blood

I have had a hell of a day - the kind that when you arrive home from it, you want to cry with joy that it is nearly over. I tumbled through my door, on my last legs, my brain feeling like an oversized pea, my heart like a battered ocean, my only thought being how I could jump in the bath.

As I entered my hallway, I noticed a bright red puddle oozing under the door of my hall cupboard. Amazing in its brilliance, this red was the red of postboxes and London buses. It is also the colour of fresh blood. It had gathered into an alarming sized puddle on my hallway carpet.

I breathed in slowly and walked into the front room to collect my thoughts. Then I re-entered the hallway and approached the cupboard. An entire tin of vinyl matt emulsion had fallen off the top of my painting bag and landed face down on the floor. It was carnage.

I decided denial was the best strategy for now, since facing this devastating mess felt sure to send me over some proverbial edge. I checked my e mails. The phone rang. It was Jo. At the end of the conversation, she urged me to get an early night, look after myself, get some sleep. I agreed, "after I've cleaned up that bloody paint".

We hung up and I re-entered the terrible scene in the hallway. I'd decided that the best strategy for protecting myself during removal was to do it naked, and once I was, I set to work. Almost immediately though I stepped in a dribble that had separated from the greater puddle, and so, in order to prevent myself from treading it into the rest of the carpet, I began hopping about on one leg towards the direction of the bathroom.

Of course I stumbled, treading said paint into carpet and grasping at the wall with red painty fingers, leaving streaks all across it. I was scooping the paint into a tray, but it was going all up the walls. In the bathroom, red streaked the walls and towels, the inside of the sink. A futile hopeless affair. The hallway was looking like the scene of some terrible massacre, bloody hand prints up the walls, globules of red across the toilet seat. Grim.

You have to realise the state I have got myself into today. By seven o clock this evening, after an incredibly long day painting ceilings, filling holes, clearing up rubble, and vast long ruminations about my life, and my imminent, and now, slightly terrifying feeling trip to New York, my mind felt like it was capsizing.

So I gave up trying to clean up the paint, grabbed the spatula I was using to scoop it up, dug it into the fresh red, flipped it up and stroked it across the bare skin of my leg. Then I dived in another time with the spatula and did the same thing on my other leg. I didn't stop until my entire body and face was covered in red strokes, until my flesh had disappeared under a skin of bloody pigment.

I looked a fright. Like some kind of menstrual banshee. But the freedom felt compelling, and as I added each stroke, the day, and the hopeless circular workings of my ego left me, somewhere back at the traffic lights on London Road.

You know, sometimes counselling or a cup of tea just won't do. Sometimes I need to paint myself all over in bright red vinyl matt emulsion to get to how I feel. Now my flat really does look like the set from "Psycho", and the red puddle is still there, taunting me.

Afterwards, I sat in the bath. The paint had gone hard on my body, I looked less like some ancient warrior heading into battle, and more like some kind of voodoo doll. I peeled layers of the rubbery stuff off with my hands, red skin, revealing white skin, scrubbed and faintly stained pink. The water was turning ruddy, the water billowing gradually with colour. It looked like an image from a Sylvia Plath poem.

My Munch painting hung above me, on a red wall, painted with the same paint that had spilled so violently. This is not the kind of life my mother had cut out for me. And though it may have been some kind of necessary catharsis, some kind of shamanic re-enactment, at the end of it I sit, cold in the bath, exhausted, unrested and still full of a nameless raw fear about going away.

My ego is crying out "something must be wrong, you can't follow your dream like this!" My identity is shifting, and I am leaving important people in my life behind. And who will I be when I return? Will Clare as we know it even be coming back?

The answer is clear - I don't think so, I can feel it in my blood, I can see it in the stained hallway, this is what it is revealing : there is no taming my blood, no stopping the redness, I am taking my rightful place in aliveness, and the colour is too bright, I can barely look at it.

Living Out Your Love

I am on the right path, I know it, I can feel it. This is where I was always meant to be, going this way, along the high road, following the signs for my life as it should be.
This feels good, so good. I have been dogged by a feeling of 'wrongness' for so much of my life - opportunity, I felt, was for other people, not for the likes of me, happiness was for those folks over the horizon. No, in the family I came from, it was always tragedy I felt running in our blood, or, in the words of Coner Oberst, " i could have been a famous singer/ if i had someone else's voice/but failure always sounded better/ let's fuck it up boys/ make some noise.."
That is, except when I was small, before I started taking notice of such things as teachers and adults and stupid boyfriends. Before too much self-consciousness took hold, before I started believing them when they said my world was weird or pretentious, or just "too much". It can take so long coming, sometimes I stopped thinking it would ever appear at all, but I kept plugging away, sometimes without even knowing I was still plugging away, and then BAM! a wave of glory or fever or triumph or just plain, no frills joy, hits the bank and washes me away with it. Or else, tender moments of peace and wholeness come climbing up my back in the smallest shiver of perfection.

And I am writing this not to swell in my own sense of personal triumph, but because today, as I listened to a friend's download of music off his new website, I thought, fuck, all my friends are doing this too. I am surrounded by people living out their love. And it's hard work, living out your love, it can be lonely and harsh and embarrassing and maddening. It can, in moments, tear you apart, it's winds can be bitter, it's fruits, sometimes hung too high to even reach. But we all know the pith and the juice and the swell and the taste that such labour brings. And I am inspired to know and be connected to such inspiring people. I am moved by their triumphs and as equally by their failings, and, most of all, by the fact that they keep going. And the creativity keeps growing, it all has a knock on effect, a web of something so beautiful I dare hardly touch it by description here.

So I am writing this, to express my pride and my gratitiude to all those people I have connected with, and am connected to, who have touched me with their beauty and vision and inspiration. If you want to know some of whom I am talking about, just look at my links list, they're all there, as there are others who do not have websites and blogs and the like, by whom I am also equally inspired and moved, by their art or their e mails or their conversation or just by their presence.
So I am raising my palm, turning it upwards, and from it, blowing a kiss, through the airwaves, to thank you, my dear friends, allies, maybe some of whom I haven't even yet met, all of you who endeavour, however it may be, to pull some punches and push the river, to whittle away at your art and bring life force back into fashion, to sail the seas of tomorrow's dreams, to live out your love.

New York Dreaming

Today I have been reading John Keats, and I am choked up with feeling.
I haven't read his poetry for years, but now a soft backed book of his words lies by the side of my couch, or sometimes up on the bed, or crammed inside an ancient plastic bag ready for work; a thing of awe in itself, even to look at, even just to know the worlds that reside within its tender pages. I am lost to his beauty, and crumpled by its glorious weight.

At the same time, I feel air borne. The night welcomes me in and takes my shoes off. I'm wrapped in a blanket, little and small, my feet, two brown birds perched at the edge of my computer desk. It's cold in here, I forgot to turn the storage heating on again, and so my hands search out warmth within each other, holding to one another briefly between each sentence I type.

I keep forgetting it is now spring, and I'm strangely mourning the loss of winter, which is often my happiest time, because then that I can feel free from the anticipation of having anything particular to look forward to, and can just enjoy the solitude, the quiet intense opening that slips by without almost anyone noticing.

Winter is for pleasure behind closed doors, soft insides, long woollen scarves and hugging your knees. It is for introverts such as myself, it is the excuse we long for to just shut the door and send the troops of life away.

But the daffodils are making me smile. From the bus yesterday I watched an entire family stealing huge clumpfuls of them from the gardens just up Lewes Road. They then proceeded to hand them out randomly to passers by, and to a perplexed looking woman standing at the bus stop, before marching up the road, a trail of yellow heads behind them.

Daffodils are cheap to buy and light up a room like the first of May. Unfortunately, tonight mine hang wilted in the vase on my living room table, their sad heads crowded together in some secret act of mourning. I should throw them out, welcome in freshness with a new ripe bunch bursting with life. But I feel attached to my dead ones, to my old ones, they are poignant and somehow regal, sad and they look like they are whispering about things I can never know about, in the hush of this room, when I have gone to bed.

It's eight days until I leave for New York. I'm feeling unprepared, and I like it. I like the fact as well that I simply can't imagine how it will be. It doesn't feel real somehow, like I am about to somehow slip behind the screen at the cinema, and find myself in some Woody Allen film, being neurotic and gesturing wildly, or else becoming a line from a Velvet Underground song, trying to score smack with Lou Reed up Lexington 125.

I've so many images in my head. I've been reared on New York mythology, and so my quest is to ride the Staten Island ferry, find myself in a bookshop entirely devoted to murder mysteries, and to stay at the Chelsea Hotel. I throw that last mission in casually, as if it were some passing desire. But the truth is, the Chelsea Hotel has resided in my mind for too many decades to not feel an incalculable pull of excitement when I think of it. Probably every artist I admire had stayed there at some point; it's been alluded to in so many songs.

And so for me "staying up for days in The Chelsea Hotel writing "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" for you.." has become legend in my mind. Jack Kerouac wrote "On The Road" onto a twenty foot roll of paper whilst staying there, "Naked Lunch" was completed there, Andy Warhol and all his motley crew used it as a base and made a film of it, Dylan Thomas staggered about there, and Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in one of its bedrooms.

If I can't afford to stay there, I shall pace the streets outside, pressing my nose to the glass beseechingly: me a writer, a songwriter, a lover of music and words - a girl from England staring into the place that has housed all her greatest aspirations, all her wickedest and most sublime passions.

And this feels like the greatest thing to do - to travel across the world to not only meet the place I have dreamed of visiting for so long, but to meet a fellow writer, whom I have never met before; except in the dream time of words, through consonants and syllables, vowels and question marks, and the occasional voice on the end of a very far away phone.

I feel grandiose, silly perhaps, but I don't care. I'm doing this for me, and I'm doing this out of kinship with another writer, and to become a better one. I'm doing it for the love of the narrative that goes like this: two people travel thousands of miles between them, to meet in a far away city, to see the lights, to drink coffee, and because somewhere there is some understanding between them, the exact nature of which as of yet is still unseen; and to live, for even only a few moments, without big reasons, but just take up a pen and let a story unfold.

Little reasons, they cut through living with a more touching beauty, they leave a fragile trail of consequence, like tiny spots from a poet's cut, like stolen daffodils from a roadside park.



" I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were talking so brave and so sweet.
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street.
And those were the reasons, and that was New York,
We were running for the money and the flesh,
And that was called love for the workers in song,
Probably still is for those of them left.
But you got away, didn't you babe,
You just turned your back on the crowd.
You got away, I never once heard you say
"I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you"
And all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again, you preferred handsome men,
But for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said "well never mind,
We are ugly, but we have the music".
And then you got away, didn't you babe,
You just turned your back on the crowd.
You got away, I never once heard you say
"I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you",
And all of that jiving around

Now I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
That's all, I don't think of you that often."


Leonard Cohen 1971 for Janis Joplin.