Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

50.NOTHING LIVES WHERE NOTHING IS:

‘Cultural disenfranchisement’ that’s what I call it when the people around you mean nothing and you very seldom know what anyone is talking about and most importantly no one seems to be reacting to anything you’ve just said so in that vein I find myself alone at most every midnight slaving away writing words in closets like a closeted queen afraid of the dark but generating darkness nonetheless but ‘darkness visible’ as has been said Milton or Golding or somebody said that and instead I’m relaxing on air thinking of William Saroyan and trying to understand the snippets of integrity his cultural bias means but what do you use to look up key phrases that would identify things WHATEVER am I talking about I’ll not know but brave the coming fierce storm I will and ready for anything I am -circumvent the obvious obsolete the nefarious don’t mess with Mr. In B. Tween in the wine-hot summer at the white hot summer in the wine-dark sea ‘once you’ve been beaten what will remain ? hunger and sleet and driving rain’ and you know (it’s already been said) how trees drop their leafs in the dryness and effect by that a recoup of their losses through the lack of moisture - it’s a kind of retrenchment that turns out in the end to be successful because in the long run the rains return and no matter what else the tree blossoms again and makes up for lost time - and so I think of that as I walk the edges of this colorful old town the stink of the fish market the cry of the bodegas the insufferable lines of people at every attraction and the foreign tourists hanging on the rope line wherever they go - SO EARNEST - their faces so intent on experiencing themselves all that is and I think ‘what the hell will I recoup?’ for what can I ever get back with so much being gone and if I live in the past in the days of yore then what good am I anyway missing as I am everything new (the nurses the lawyers the students) everything passing thru and out of Pace University and the noisy but sadly derelict harbor streets below and alongside the Brooklyn Bridge once the center of oh so much activity and beauty and anger and movement and yet now a pale sadly undone ghost of itself and ‘I WALK below arches I look beneath shells’ and there’s nothing there valued ‘but a collection of Hells’ and that’s where everyman’s memory comes in and I watch them again over and over the family of dentists just in from Queens to eat at the Harbor Café and the daughters they’ve married and the sons they’ve brought in and gray fathers and mothers dressed for business in the tropical heat and the children ready to boast and ready to burst prideful with energy and excitement but do they see the sad and lonely men walking past hunched and broken solid and lost beaten and finished at the very ends of a long New York life and I bet if they do it’s only in passing for ‘Nothing Lives Where Nothing Is' and there’s no refutation of that on these streets.

49. VISITING WITH THE VISIGOTHS - OR SO IT SEEMED THEN:

It never seemed miraculous to me that I could be in all these places and experience (sometimes without knowing) so much of what was going down then of which people now call ‘glorious and legendary times’ - which of course is all bullshit - but having the personal knowledge that all of this has gone through me lends credence to something within me something like that perhaps I really WAS just a half-step out-of-step all of my life and that I did miss all of this by just a fraction - so that whatever it would have taken for me to go from a bystander to a true participant was but a tiny thing and I missed it or flubbed it or ignored it or couldn’t read the signs of it - but then that starts one to thinking WHY and by whose plan or for what reason would a particular someone be brought right to the proscenium of something like this just to have it all pulled away by fortuitous momentum gone bad by bad planning by bad luck or whatever and one CANNOT just dwell on this stuff for the remainder of life because it truly could KILL or cause one at least to KILL oneself (I suppose) so what you really have to do is pull it all back re-group catalogue and sort and pull out from that mass of experience everything that coalesces and stands out and allows you to draw lessons from it take direction or find better understanding - and most importantly find HAPPINESS.

48. CHURCHES WERE LOCKED:

It’s like that sometimes I suppose - you can think and/or talk all about something all you want but the only way anything really happens is if you ‘ACT’ and if you make tangible some urge from whatever source it may be which is of course much of the tragedy of mass-killings slayings murders shootouts suicides and all the rest because MOST all of us never do ACT on an urge we rather just let it set in fester fume or we just keep thinking about things in different ways and become angry morose or nasty in ways others can see OR of course we simply withdraw but whichever we never act upon the urge - killings with a high-powered rifle from some tower somewhere or random wild shootings into cars along highways bombs dropped in supermarkets fires set in churches and all that : NO we’re much slower and deliberate when it comes to things and the long long end result of that oftentimes too is (plain and simple) ‘FAILURE’ the failure of the kind that these guys suffered from loss inaction no more intentions or strivings no more illusions even of getting somewhere else along the way and it’s at that point that even an apple becomes a treasure and that’s where I was at with these gentlemen (I call them so) and it became the time over a period of days that I often visited and went forth towards them to see what exactly they did during the colder days arriving - lounging with carts and staying warm beneath blankets at the old Collect Pond site now a meager park and windblown and lonesome too or they’d walk endlessly open-ended to see what it would bring - bakery cast-offs leftover food from this or that restaurant along the circuit purloined cigarettes and gloves or mittens cast-off by vendors or stolen from the same and the simplest hats of a hundred people found everywhere - blown off or left behind or discarded and considered lost and they ALL fit each and every and every day whether long or short was pretty much the same until weathers came - rainsnowsleethailice - and that certainly made the difference and back in these days before CHURCHES WERE LOCKED they always were there as refuge and soup kitchens and nunneries or any of the places known to feed the helpless and take in the indigent and then there was always Rikers Island the prison cell fit for a King if he didn’t mind bedding with bastards and buggers and creeps.

47. THE NEW VAGARIES OF THE OLD INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT ('so that one's eyes were cleansed'):

One way to look at the seeing of everything is as one vast opportunity to let the other world shine through – or at the least to let you think about it – old yellow sunlight dripping off the White Street building fronts odd as ever from whichever direction it comes and the light diffuses itself as I watch and breaks apart like syrup to droop over other things – the shoemaker’s oldest doorway the leather shop with the piles of cuttings in the second-floor windows the paint-strewn drippings of oil color on thirty-year old boards and planks EVERYTHING everywhere a herald of something else a call from a distant place and a cutting from some far-off film of unedited docu-logue not yet nor ever finished : ash smokes the foremost foyer the ancient bedroom is covered in silk and damask red velvet shades the wall-sized window the drainage pipes which run along the wall are painted black a hundred times in a hundred years – it seems – as inch-thick paint falls off in slugs and chunks to litter the old floor beneath the sagging stairway heading up to the lofts on high and after business and manufacture stop only THEN do people live and artists paint and singers sing and sculptors sculpt and the shadows which follow the stories too are seen to limp yet NO ONE goes astray – Caroline Foerth still smokes a Gitane beneath the forested lamplight by the faded portrait of ‘Old Wild Bill’ and one John Ellington naps in a chair after just finishing a canvas he’s named ‘Duluth’ – wild with stir and splattered with paint from three cans purloined from Canal Street’s off-ramp (no artist’s tube colors these – for he ‘uses the real thing’ as he’s wont to say) and whatever solid is left to decay decays while water runs from the stairway faintly staining the landing below but no one notices nor ever cares for the water hereabouts is free and MOST definitely needed so let to be…Kensington Fields Galleries shall be sending a rep. up tomorrow to check out the scene ( for they want to stay hip and understand the current field of color-field and whatever else these messes make) – "when I was with Art as a concept I lived slept and drank it all in and even now today as I look about I can notice (because of my work steady in art and paint) I can notice the way colors peel back or bump into each other and the outlined shapes BETWEEN things show the negative spaces never meant to be noticed the ‘purview of the previous’ I call it and it all reeks of perfection the lapse of time and space the outlining of another world brought forth maddeningly into and through this one and I inspect the world with these singular eyes and watch each thing and look deep at every person face and moment through the stippled eyes of an artist on the hunt and on the prowl for ‘moment’ and passage and I do suppose to be frank that it’s the same for words and for you too - all the same in fact for the essence is shared : we come from and inhabit some other place entirely don’t you think ? and be damned what they say" and I nodded back so as to be sure he saw and said "it’s one place all heavy with moment – it’s frost glazed on ice itself – in fact it’s ME and it’s YOU carrying water for God in a way" and he smiled back and said "Mandalay and Brodabing to you too!" (he often talked like that) and I decided then and there that if this was living I wanted the opposite of fate and I told him so I said "if this is living I want the opposite of fate" and we laughed until he said back "like Talleyrand and Cardinal Richelieu in the Style Hall of Fame – I’d say".
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(‘Really Cheap Real Estate’)
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Here is it all [AT ONCE and together] ‘that bridge at Trenton is out the one at Lambertville too the river has exceeded its banks no other passage will do’ and the mud I am told is five feet high but I tend not to believe what they say – it’s probably just a mud-stained water-line which they mean : people exaggerate and tend to get things out of order to disabuse the notion of right and correct they conflate the situate they misrepresent what they see but nonetheless I’d have loved to have seen that - and the little riverside bar at Rubeville or somewhere like that along the Pennsylvania side of the river although there were three motorcycles there and a few people sitting about outside wining and dining their beers you could tell it was still reeling from LAST YEAR’S water as were the other ten homes along that silly little off-the-main-road street where some of the places were still torn up and under re-construction from the PREVIOUS water inundation and now they have to do it all again IT'S ENOUGH to make you run for cover take another route get outta’ town forget about this place forever wash the mud from off your boots and skedaddle to some other place YET PEOPLE STAY IT SEEMS and I’ll bet there’s some really cheap real estate right about now around there but outside of the mostly great views and pleasant green vales what the hell else you get for your money is lowland mud swamp-fest rains and misted buggy foggy views and besides that too everyone else around the place is dumber than shit on a white-laced tabletop ‘WOULDN’T ‘CHA SAY?’ and I'd rather be in Doylestown for the benefit of Mike than to be stuck in three feet of mud for a week and more (‘that’s RIGHT!’) and it’s all like ART on paper anyway – NO GOOD UNTIL IT DRIES! – and like some Japanese Satori a sudden illumination a Buddhist term for ‘awakening with a sudden kick in the eyes’:
SO THAT ONE’S EYES WERE CLEANSED :
‘outgoing consciousness is where there is no receiving’.