Ode to a fire escape

I think there's a balancing point, in the life of a writer, where edge meets tightrope skills, where passion for place co-exists with thriving groove within its particular landscape, and where the flame of the word is burning in the heart, without resistance.

And I think that balancing point is where a writer must be, in order to be able to produce great work. It cannot be prescribed, but it can be recognized. I see it every time I read Martin Amis, for instance, even though he's probably an uptight rat-arse. I think the less petty life becomes, also, the more space becomes available for something beautiful to happen.

I am living in an overlooked apartment this week, and again a few weeks ago, for just about the first time in my life (!) and that includes elsewhere in new york city, new orleans, denmark and ireland. It's a great apartment, roomy and centrally located in Park Slope, utterly quiet and peaceful with a row of brownstone backyards opposite.

I love the space and the well equipped kitchen, and the rhythm of life here: writing, walking the whippets, writing, loading and unloading the dishwasher, thinking about dinner, making coffee, walking the whippets, writing... but the fact that I am visible when I walk around naked is a new one on me. However, I enjoy the kind of somewhat-intimacy that is part of this kind of landscape of facing windows. I think it's a duty of living in this kind of arrangement to be visible at least a part of the day. I try to keep this visibility clothed, at least, but it feels right to me that people can see me going about my day, and I glance in at their lives. The only one with full visibility though, at least with the lights on, is the fiddle player who lives opposite and down a floor, who has only one flimsy green see-through piece of cloth on one half of one of the windows, probably for decoration rather than privacy.

There is a neighbourhood budding horn player, who has been verbally instructed, via my next door neighbour's fire escape window, to discontinue any hopes of a career, and who seems, sadly, to have taken the advice, or perhaps found a practise room. There's a guitar player elsewhere whose sound is mute and pleasant enough to be able to survive such approbrium. I say it again, I have no such difficulty because I have no guitar here, though I sing sometimes, and I miss the bollocks out of the guitar I left behind in Copenhagen.

The fire escape here is gorgeous, and I have slept on it. But it has been thrilling to live in the flat I've subletted all summer long up in Prospect Heights.

The thrill is in its fire escape, with its view of Manhattan ( I saw the Chrysler building's wicked white witch hat of light get turned on one night last week, while eating my dinner out there!) and its tall trees and its huge huge sky and no one overlooking and the basketball court in the middle-near distance where men met to play late in the hot summer nights, and the children's playground with its distant daily bustle and the huge vista of flat, low rooftops all the way to manhattan. And the butterflies dancing and lovemaking together in twos all the livelong day, and the crickets and cicada have played a summer-long jam right outside my window. I have heard and seen birds outside my window this summer I do not recognise, whose sounds call to be heard. And the sufi man has sung every break of day into existence on the balcony of the penthouse on the corner.

I relish every moment there. Actually, I relish every moment. Here.