broadcast FEB 27th 2006--NYC

she shows a rose to a young girl and asks: "is it beautiful?"
"Yes."
she places the rose behind her back and asks: "is it still beautiful?"
"yes, it is."
"beauty is in the mind, not in the rose. and that's what i paint."

in this city you tend to bounce as you walk, and you tend to walk through walls - one minute you're sitting in a supersize starbucks in downtown manhattan (to my left, a young black guy is watching a kung fu movie on his mini-laptop, making beautiful 'still' gestures with his hands - like blessings - and i can tell he's smiling; to my right three girls wearing different shades of pink hats... i keep getting caught by the rhythm of the editing of the kung fu movie, reading it as patterns of information with open references - the pattern emergence that combines the rhythm of brushstokes, attention spans, and market share in the career path of an emerging artist... a history of manhattan land price shifts over the last thirty years... or models of lost words incurred when translating from japanese into english. i'm trying to read nagarjuna - and succeeding - but suddenly listening to marvin gaye's "what's going on?" for the first time in years) and then you're on the midnight train to brooklyn and walking through windswept streets of rubbish, past the huge tower blocks of the bushwick projects before slipping into the artists' lofts building where i'm staying. on the subway a gentle oldish black guy sings great soft-edge soul songs accompanying himself on a keyboard, in the train a seriously hyped up guy talks to himself before answering his phone and mouthing off at the caller, back in the loft a neighbour explains how his state of the art figure-modeling program works. crazy guys in cafes rant to themselves about how 'you shouldna shot him man, you shouldna shot him...' and in galleries artists talk about the beauty of the mind. i'm everywhere.

on a train an old black woman puts away her bible into a carrier bag carrying the words "forever 21." she is vajrayogini. and just as she passes through my world, so i pass through others' worlds. i walk through other people's worlds, partially dissolving with each stroll along the sidewalk. i dont have to speak to speak anymore - i just walk: one more hallucinatory sight-line, one more absolutely perfect three-second edit manifesting in other people's lives, in this city made up entirely of such things.

on the seat behind me a young girl sings a beautiful funny excited song over and over - "new york, new york, new york CITY!" her mom gets a little embarassed and asks her to stop but a guy sitting nearby starts to talk about the song with her. she made it up herself, dreamt it in fact, and so she has to sing it. high up on a building a poster shows a suitcase covered in flowers and beneath it a tagline which cant be read properly cos its first portion is cut off by the edge of the roof. they are advertising forgetfulness, the impossibility of getting complete messages in this city. this is an important message to receive and not everyone receives it. and then later that night, returning from geshe michael and christie-la's teachings the daughter of another student tells me sleepily i read a book about you... there's no need to try and 'understand reality', you just have to enjoy being real, the whole crazy dreaminess of the thing.

i'm writing this message on a computer in apple's superstore in manhattan. there are no internet cafes here - everyone has their own computer and the cafes provide ports to plug into the internet - so i have to imagine buying a computer in order to write to you. to write, you have to pretend to be imagining buying something. and i like it like that - for now, in this precise moment of this journey's trajectory, its a way to be a soft logic monk. a way to be.

Shenyen