Dear Earth,
Having just returned to New York City after travelling by raft down your Colorado River through your Grand Canyon, a shock the city, this first day, after sixteen days on your river, deep in your Grand Canyon, 2 billion years before today … another great non-conformity.
I stand back while I stand forward. I eddy while I rush down river observing my need to take part, to be heard, to express my views, to obtain, to be needed, why, what need?
I stand also between forward and back, balanced on a paved walk, that is itself balanced on granite, deep dark quartz-ingrained granite, that is itself moving between then and now and all of us, every cell, bound to and born from this waltzing inner and outer core of molten compressed star dust.
I stand and collapse the high skyscrapers. I haystack, boil and whale rock them down into the avenues and side streets. The dam is dismantled, and I let my imagination empty out.
Fifty thousand cubic feet per second, more, roars down the avenues and swells into the numbered brutal grid. Debris begins to slide in from the cross streets and the yellow taxis climb and fall on rapid waves of my imagination over narrow gaps in the huge piles. Long rolling tongues swell uptown of these rapids and downtown flipped taxis cars and buses form submerged or visible jagged obstacles.
Times Square is a maelstrom and all the traffic heads one way, down town to the ocean.
I see the city collapse completely and the sea rise and flush it all out, concrete foundations, steel ambition, glassy vanity, brownstone, penthouse, office floor, all reduced to a layer of sediment, no, only a slightly different shade in a much larger layer of sediment. A matter of subtle geological pigmentation in a dried beach. A few inches in a 500-foot-thick blanket of sandstone rolled across the older manahata granite and Hudson River basin buried most likely for ever unless revealed in time to come by some post-historic river, earthquake or shifting tectonic plate … to what to whom what for why?
My beloved has her hand on my naked shoulder. ‘You’re all right. It’s all right,’ she whispers in the darkness as my eyes open momentarily amid the embracing waves of sockdolager, granite, crystal, the dreaded Lava Falls, rapids, like our present age, where each night in sleep Psyche rows me again down Pan’s Grand Canyon.
I stand also now awake beneath forward and back, within the universal darkness. I see the city obscure the stars – my travelling companions down the Colorado. Cygnus, the Milky Way, Orion, the distant Andromeda – all obscured above the city’s man-made canyons and up-lit cliffs of show-times-square. But I know their infinite space is there. I know they are there always. Older than our earth, our sun, but of the same nature, the same dust that pools in the hotel bath when I wash my clothes and fills the tiny wrinkled tributaries and lifeline canyons of my sunburned hand holding down this page while I scratch about and scribble in another great non-conformity.
Wish you were here.
Many blessings,
A Sometime Broadway Actor.
Mark Rylance