Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

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’.