Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

38. THE DIANE ARBUS WEATHER BALLOON FLOTATION COLLAR


1. A GUY WALKS INTO HIS PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE DRESSED IN NOTHING BUT CLEAR PLASTIC – PSYCHIATRIST SAYS “I CAN CLEARLY SEE YOU’RE NUTS!”

After all whatever else it’s taken me so long to get here that I will proclaim the following “all things on Earth are true” and you can figure it out from there Talos because REALLY I want nothing else to do with it – in any case haven’t the time – so sit back instead and follow the dots where they lead (or lead the dots where you may) or read the dots and then follow (fellow) : ‘OMINOUS HALLUCINATIONS’ things that have come down to us from Heaven and stayed for millennia – MOST of them have been misconstrued or tinkered with and twisted out of shape and because of that ALL RELIGION IS A LIE and there’s more than you realize to the sky (manic little boy riding his tricycle through the hotel lobby and the entire hotel is deserted and scheduled for demolition and the only people who are left there are homeless crazy waifs who have nowhere else to go NOTHING at all and they are consigned to die where they fall and the meager little boy CRAZED WITH HIS OWN UNKNOWN DESIRE rides his fierce tricycle straight at them settled together on a flaming couch and just before he gets there the tricycle of his dreams lifts off and he is suddenly airborn and carried BY HIMSELF straight to his own violent future ! and two Chinese gentlemen also sitting there begin to write both notes and fortunes with a calligraphic brush on the now outsize and well-illuminated walls SOMA ! JOLT ! oh extra satisfaction too ! “I was loyal to my father behind his back” the one man says and the other agrees but replies “really so ? I hated my own mother fiercely until that day she changed her feeble ways” and the first man (throwing calcified yellow domino bones says back) “I was a scourge to his face but I wouldn’t hear NOT a word said against him by anyone else” and they both thereby agreed that SOMETHING was up (“I won’t know ‘til I’m finished” was the last thing I heard) and regardless of deception or any other calling it doesn’t always matter where you come from what most often matters is where you’re finally headed : ‘in the snow there was nothing visible WHAT BABIES THESE WRITERS CAN BE there’s nothing worse than ‘sentiment’ it’s a truly killing emotion and whenever I see it rear its lazy head I cringe in silence and return to what I was doing quickly aware of the uselessness of any endeavor because ‘tears can ruin everything’ and ‘nothing so silly sports life as emotion’ ! (heard that at a card-game once uttered by the principal and his wife) and the real true key to life ANYWAY is to ‘see without looking’ – AND once you can achieve that you’ve accomplished – more than anything else – that which really just has to be done and (I think to myself) ‘I’ve seen Diane Arbus’ Roselle NJ twins and I know exactly where they live and what they do and I watch them daily together with their Siberian husky eyes and their infracted colonoscopy dawdling eager hands and the two of them together sitting back to laugh both turn instead to crybabies whisking away and even as I watch them I shudder thinking they shoulder both their burden together ! cameo roles in a horror film ? I think not - rather they’re actually quite sweet and loveable tender and dear together POSTER CHILDREN FOR DNA WITNESSES TO HEREDITY’S POWER to send us into the world fully formed and DOUBLED if that’s our luck and if you look closely at these twins (1967) they’re dressed and coiffed as symmetrically as two halves of a Rorschach blot with even their bobby pins in the same places and the little details of dress hairstyle and makeup become clear and important when they are viewed as details with import for EVERYTHING – even gesture – communicates articulately the very ‘what’ of what we are in life and the differences however slight or significant (and they are actually quite significantly different) in their facial expressions hold keys to the deepest mysteries of their individual personalities and whatever secrets each they harbor and if WE ONLY COULD decipher but once we’d then be able to decipher every one and the whole entire world BUT have these twins instead become ICONIC ? which means have we stopped ‘looking’ at them ? not the most fortunate fate to befall a work of art for when we call something ‘iconic’ partly what we mean is that it has become possible to see it without looking (PARADOX : ‘to see without looking’ is at the same time a great Zen-like goal) and once we can summon an image from memory and reconstruct it in our minds and interpret it in ways that become convenient substitutions for the image itself we may lose our motivation to revisit the actual object as often and to study it as closely as we should (‘we stop returning to it for the periodic soundings that it can provide on the subject of how we and the world around us have changed with age and maturity and in the course of time’) AND WE INSTEAD must strive to brush off the obscuring patina of iconography and see ART in fresh ways while we amend and deepen our own partial memories and surface impressions AND THE CASE OF DIANE ARBUS of course like that of Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf is both confused and deepened by the fact of their suicides (in Arbus’ case 1971) and the fate of such female-artist-suicides is that self-murder lends a sort of romantic and even ghoulish luster to their reputations and causes their art to be seen selectively and often inaccurately through the narrow prism of the manner in which they died but (in any case) what is this romantic fog which we spread like buttery-moss over the lives and myths of these dead people WHAT is it and WHY is it attractive to so many ? I often wonder ? and the answer which comes is (in one word) ‘WEAKNESS’ the weakness of weak people being attracted to other weak people and some weird and supposed nobility of their work and station - all in reality garbage and trash - for the well-mined state of exaltation collapses when embodied by the weak and they emote over everything and they too-earnestly send spittle and tears together flying (‘and the world has little use for the weak and they are soon subsumed and covered by events and replaced in their own decrepit weakness by things and by those over them with far stronger constitutions and actions’) and ANYWAY these are the same people – the weak ones who won’t do anything – who in their turn want everything done for everyone - want famines solved and wars ended and problems researched and vast sums of money spent in helping the un-help-able or the otherwise helpless and maybe why don’t they all just gas themselves anyway then they won’t have anyone else anymore to blame YET ‘photo records remain of many great calamities of which large numbers of fatalities and otherwise mortal injuries occurred and for those things recorded we have the early photo-journalists to thank and it behooves one to think of all we’d not see had it not been for those brave souls first walking into scenes of carnage and destruction’ and momentary stoppage and rehabilitation and the re-education of millions and FOR THAT MATTER Mao Tse Tung a’swim in the Yellow River…and so thankful we all very are.

37. AND I REALIZED I COULD SEE THE FUTURE:

It was just like that - ‘I gotta’ go and I went’ was the feeling - and even though I was as ALIENATED as ever ever again it was all I could do from telling everyone I saw what was going to happen – for good or bad and they all deserved whatever it was – and I could see it all : the vast mistakes the deaths the jumps the betrayals the lusts the scandals and the trusts I REALLY COULD see the future and I knew where every bell that ever was had once rung and would never ring again and what would be gone and what would stay and who would pass on and who would remain and why and (most importantly) HOW and none of this mind you is something that really makes for friendships and alliances - because for sure people regret even seeing you coming - but nonetheless there was nothing I could do and so I just did it – I went into the old Hungarian clothier’s store and I said ‘my sir you’ll be dead within the year and your stupid shop will be shuttered – so give me something cheaply’ and he stared and became angry and threw me right out and I never did buy anything from that Magyar’s store but he was gone within the year and I stepped into the little Polish-Jew camp-survivor man’s diner on the corner of 11th St. and First Ave – he was the one with the numbers on his arm tattoo’d and the eyes which always teared and I said ‘let me have soup sir – and you needn’t memorize those numbers no more because you won’t need them where you’ll be going soon’ but he didn’t understand and he presented me with the soup AND a piece of bread for which I had to pay a 1966 quarter and I ate and left – he was gone not long after that – and I walked right up to the 20-year old girl walking towards me by Rappaport’s Childrens Furniture Store and I said to her ‘hey you – you’ll have two kids within the year but you’ll need no furniture here because they’ll both be twin Devils and Evil as Hell and you’ll suffocate them yourself with a pillow by six months old and the State will get you for double murder and you’ll die in Dannemora’ and I walked along as I heard her scream and wail (to no avail) because I turned the corner and ran…so you see what kind of atmosphere I’d had created around me and it came from strength and fortitude – living each night on the streets of the lower eastside and drinking coffee with Russian émigrés in Pushkin Square or some equivalent of that along Grand Street and even though they seldom talked we understood the issues and the subject and once or twice they’d even lend me their daughter here and there for a squeeze and a fuck - ex-patriot communism was like that you know - and I never regretted a day of my time and took it all in as I could and better than most but best for myself everything counted for everything whenever it could : I’d put ALL my past behind me : the miserable seminary years the horrid days in the suburban ghetto of people and pests the loincloths of guilt and doubt the lines for the ballfield and the swagger of high-school bullshit the crappers the jerks the car-guys the mothers the priests and the janitors too all either alcoholic or horny or gay and I was sick to Hell of it all anyway the teacher with the one black tooth in the front endlessly prattling about the Korean war and all he’d done for nothing there and his African Drums which we’d have to listen too and his two adopted sons who we’d have to meet and the pink Lincoln by Roloff and the fag dentist Chrobot and the underpass and the prison-farm and Murray and Martha to boot - endlessly endlessly yelling and arguing back and forth over their candy-store cherry-Coke newsstand counter and SICK TO HELL was I.

36. HOW'D I GET HERE?

What did I mistake you for when I saw you coming ? some ring-finned swoopy 50's car low on the shocks and dropped in the back ? some T-style jalopy chopped and channeled and ready to race ? or an ancient pick-up truck listing and sad but ready to go ? WELL for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it was nor the sequence of events which led into it but it wouldn't matter anyway since here I am and there you are together again with nettles and restless and lazy and low - the four new horsemen of this metropolis - and there just aren't any new names I want to hear about nor old ones either - top-down Israeli autos blowing bombs to Heaven's gate with smoldering ruins of all God's manners and all its real estate : and I saw two chickens in the yard a pheasant and a hen ten crescent-minded maidens and a fountain in the glen but only voices echoed back (wherever I could hear) 'what is it that you wanted and what are you doing here?' and nothing made me remember and nothing made me sad for Dismal was the cantankerous foe and everything was bad.

35. I PROBABLY CAN’T

I probably can't turn this back on you but I will try - you being Everyman the Reader : Whomever - but I will begin to make the attempt to the utmost while walking some morning street and thinking about everything I pass - the walloping fling of the fat man rushing by the tall cool mist of the girl across the street still airy and wet the rattling crib of the deliveryman entering the bread store the cafe owner setting out tables the guy with the bicycle with his child on the back bike-seat each one of them part and parcel of the scene before me - something with integrity perhaps but for certain something genuine and real or as real as anything else can be : meanwhile the train rattles by keeping to some form of schedule I don't know of the pigeons seem to flutter and swoop flutter and swoop and flutter and swoop again - each sound or movement moves them - and their singular take on life seems boring as I watch and the graveyard near the tracks - inglorious and almost obscenely violated by rails and stairways and people - which sends forth its own air of death and the past with monuments and marble and stones two hundred years old if a day YET silent and mute as ever too AND no one notices nor seems to care - so frothingly on their way as everyone is to SOMETHING else and other than this but NO MATTER for now it is ALL my little picture here my very own vignette my manner my speaking my mosaic my quilt - whichever you call it - and moving lines strike moving circles strike vivid forms of tableaux as everything moves about and withers and passes and dies and all along the way not a sound nor a song is heard - just the slow passion of everyday life the slow ending of living and strife the capped moment the crowned glory the highest pinnacle ever of something that ever once was OH! something that ever once was.