New York, 1984.

Long ago as I looked out from the top of the Empire State Building after sunset I became aware I was looking at time; at the energies and product of those long dead mean eating their lunch on a girder hundreds of feet up in the space above 1920’s Manhattan. Chrysler, Flat-iron, the doomed Twin Towers and a hundred others that dwarf the Trinity Church on Wall Street took the best part of a hundred years to build. This wasn’t a 1980’s eyeball snapshot; it was the massive sprawl of a century’s effort. It was as if I were the merest drop of seawater in the travelling froth atop a magnificent ocean wave; the little dealings of my day, molecular in the scheme of New York’s rolling history. To take that in was not the work of my retina. But I wasn’t indulging in some historical romance; I was attempting to hold this immense wave in my imagination whole, intricate and inseparable. Not one part could be without the other, no second misplaced in the tick of time. In my little immediacy I find it hard to know I am held in the midst of this glorious onward roll of family, buildings and builders. As the Indian’s say as they kiss the ground and enter a sweat lodge, “For all my relations.”