Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

61. FEATURELESS FACES OF LAWYERS AND SCRIBES:

You can't retro-fit a legend to match the present day so if it's a connection you're making you first have to find the thread which brings together the items of which you speak : DeWitt Clinton High School and the arbitration of the unseemly field or the Fort Lee Union Marching Band and the incipient incendiaries of Monitor County and it seemed then as if every place I went had something to do with the past and its meaning as it took place for the present day : I couldn't find most real definitions worthy and often watched for newsmen lurking by the courthouse or anything else along Foley Square where the big guns came to when they went on trial or were about to get fried and it was always interesting - film trucks lunch wagons make-up guys and the rest it was a small veritable Hollywood entabulature all set up for temporary glory in the covering of a trial's duration or anything like that and security was never much although there always were police around and sometimes bodyguards too but who cared I didn't and no one else did either - magazine photographers and newsguys huddled and ready to pounce for photos stories comments wisecracks asides and grimaces or smirks the featureless faces of lawyers and scribes the regal cars of the mobsters and hoods the dames the big yellow hair on the tight-assed women in tow it all made for a wonderful circus in whichever season - of course the Summer ones were better because there was more to see and cleavage too but usually in the Summer like that not too much big stuff happened so most of it all was Fall or Winter trials and sentencings that became the most fun and sometimes I just walked around to see what was to happen - food vendors in their usual carts the newsboys and the magazine sellers standing around and a few Chinese oblivious to any of it - the janitors the drivers the cops those were the ones who counted and who really knew things and they'd talk to you if you were nice about it or gave them something like coffee or a donut or whatever and it was these same people who loved getting their mug on camera and prattling on about something they saw or had heard and then lo and behold! they'd get their face on a few seconds of TV coverage that night or the next and for a mini-instant to themselves they'd be famous and justified and right and important - until it all faded away again - but it was always fun and back in those days there were cop cars with just the little light on top and city paint jobs and they weren't much to look at and there were still a good bunch of horse cops around and maybe just a few motorcycle guys - no scooters or wagons - and everybody knew their business and knew their worth and just stayed straight ahead and doing their jobs and people back then too people had a lot more faith in everything and believed in and cared for things which went on unlike today's irony-ridden and jaundiced crowd who care for nothing and believe even less and anyway are now so distracted with phones and other stuff on those phones that they really know of very little anyway and care for less : it's a different by far world that still spins the same but everyone in it has a different make-up now and goes about everything differently too and sad to say most people are morons anyway and do moronic things and aren't serious or well-rooted about any issue or item and they really do seem to know less about everything than ever before and it doesn't even bother them that such is the case.
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So what is it that I do ? I mark each day as a day forward and move on accordingly - hopefully gaining hopefully proceeding and with hope going on - and that gives me great justice and a great confidence and rightness though it is not of my own but comes from somewhere else comes from a Father comes from a faith in so many greater things and I knew that then and I know that now even though between those times there has been a huge climate change and I've gone from ignorant to exalted in the same way - non-linear and obscure being both the same for me - except every move has been a move not for ME per se but so as to advance the chronicle advance the picture and spur the motivation yet now as I age and wither too I reach the point where accumulation must succeed in portraying this experience and THUS is here all of what you are reading...

60. THE CITY OF PELLAGRA - some history of a long-doomed subject:

During WWII, a Nazi program to euthanize children deemed unworthy of living was carried out in hospital buildings called 'hungerhauser', where a diet of potatoes, turnips and cabbage was designed to cause death in 3 months - learning exactly what happens when people starve was crucial in the progress of nutritional science because it focuses on sickness caused not by pathogens but by what was missing from the diet and - since Galen - disease had been blamed on something bad invading the body and putting it out of balance but the paradigm shift occurred after it became abundantly clear that the lack of essential nutrients could also be at fault - even well into the 19th century when it was already known that citrus fruits and vegetables prevented scurvy conventional wisdom asserted they were effective because they contained an antidote to bad air and unwholesome food not that they contained somehow an essential nutrient for health and nowhere was this stubborn reluctance to such an idea more apparent than in the insufferable slow recognition of what caused pellagra - known as a disease of squalor and poverty - it was widespread during and after the Civil War in the southern United States where the mortality rate among those suffering was 40 percent - some blamed insect bites others were convinced it was a contagious disease brought into the country by Italian immigrants and when an epidiologist named Joseph Goldberger went south in 1915 and noted that in asylums holding pellagra sufferers none of the staff members were affected he concluded that it could not be infectious - on the other hand the employees ate well while inmates were fed fatback and cornbread and to see if inadequate nutrition was the culprit Goldberger served balanced meals to children in two orphanages where after only a few weeks pellagra disappeared and the logical conclusion that pellagra resulted from a deficient diet (specifically lack of nicatinic acid) was obscured by the prevalence of eugenics whose proponents contended that the institutions where Goldberger conducted his studies held inferior people who were especially susceptible to disease - NOW if it's something of a Kafkaesque notion to live in a hunger house then that's the notion I'll share spiritually and internally for like some fevered Hunger Artist of that time and those stories I too have proclivities for starvation and withering and no disease 'cept living can be blamed for that and the sunshine blue skies forever-river of love won't stop at my door and ONE THINKS why stop at children let's seek adults too lets bring forth the whiter shade of pale-fire necessary for death itself to come calling we ALL have the EACH disease and we die before our time all other appointments notwithstanding and in this curious city I found myself I stood before either DOORS that would not open or DOORS which - already opened - led nowhere and that was a form of stasis a freeze and a paralysis I lived with and no matter what I ate nothing solved the problem - corn muffins potato bread knishes oatmeal eggs milk meat rice beans and cabbage too - and I saw investigators (the loopy kind the starchy kind the crazed) 'injecting themselves with blood from severely affected victims and rubbing secretions from the mucous sores into their nose and mouth and after three days swallowing pellets consisting of the urine feces and skin scabs from several diseased subjects and NONE contracted pellagra' and no matter because still nothing was 'done' to improve the diets of the poor until finally in the 1930's pellagra began to disappear (and here's where the Grapes of Wrath type SOCIALIST intent comes in - so first 'one' government tries to contract the disease and then 'another' government combats it) thanks in part to federal soup kitchens and the introduction of enriched flour : I can't allow myself to believe such drivel cannot abide the intent and if the unholy combination let's say of such as Golberger and the Government - if they MUST come together - then I'd rather have it over my own dead body! - for I need no investigators nor testers to tell me what I was living and their own blindness sloth envy and scientific nonsense would bring I knew nothing but dread and fear - which is ANOTHER kind of disease altogether is it not? - and barring that we bar nothing but bar the door and head for the exits and the midnight toasts of both Devil and Kin are nothing more than flames over dead bodies piled high and the soft squeal of delight is the true brigand of cruelty so HUNGER HOUSE today - if it might be anything at all - is a restaurant to be sure.

59. THE BASTARD KING OF 22ND STREET:

'Put markers on all the ovaries boys and sketch chalk lines on your soul for there's too many mornings left to decide which way to go' and it was never any different NO DIFFERENT no matter where I was - Coenties Slip or walking down Grand Street all the way to Corlears Hook (where they used to frame the ships) hundreds of small people sitting broken on benches and it seemed they all were still in shock bemoaning the olden depths of World War II or Auschwitz Treblinka or Bergen Belsen itself - whether seen as shadow cinema glimpse or ghost - the mass discrimination of mean magic and all its men : tired souls looking for gravesites numbered elbows too tired to grumble short fat men in umbrellas and raincoats with busted-up faces salivating at the water's edge and the small dairy restaurants with their all-night lights and the small civic halls of the one-door bookshops and musty old cafes where the revolutionaries sat reading and the philosophers dozed between bouts of paranoia and bagels both spread with a schmear of longing and angst and fear like something the junkman brought on sorry wagons with sagging horses each morning at the sound of the bell and the first light of dawn and you can call it run-on crap whenever you want but I loved it - the book was called 'Who Deciphered Gabriel Gaul?' and in it I read 'you're rotting away from the outside boy' (in translation of course - hopefully accurate) and that was the first time I'd seen what I'd before only heard but when I heard it it was always about someone who was sick or dying and that person was said to have been 'rotting away from the inside out' or something like that but this was different and somehow seemed fiercer and it came from someone who bore all the appearances of at least knowing what he was talking about from his end of the gun-sight : from a far and distant land but still about cities and urban culture and the personal anxiety and the dilemmas of people who have to come to terms with their own selves and destinies on the streets and in the shelter halls and then (as I read) one day he was just found dead - a crude hoodlum with problems of that day and just like Villon or anybody else I heard someone stammer "I'm the bastard king of 22nd Street you should know that already and if there's anybody ever in my way he's going down like the Titanic in a bowl of soup" and then Max Pariah himself - who had just showed up to read the storyline - turned and walked away and left it all behind.

58. I WANTED TO MAKE A NEW MANNER:

I'd always wanted to break out - to make a new manner of seeing for myself a new manner of writing and talking and observing and just BEING and the evidences were all around me that it COULD be done if I began to do it right and that involved or would involve many things and among them would be (as a 'reaction' to what I'd been seeing) an end to the supposed equanimity of all things and the idea that all values are equal or equally valid or permissible had to be done away with and buried - and that was one of the first things I did and with great aplomb to myself : I began to 'discriminate' just as the rest of the LBJ Great Society bullshit country was determining its fate in putting an end to de facto segregation and discrimination of all kinds in the racial realm - the very opposite - and I took all of that into the realm of values and knowledge and learning and started pointing to certain and varied things and saying 'THAT' is not right 'THIS' is wrong and it's all still a very strange conundrum to me as to how this occurred - this flip-flop of interpretation amidst the vagaries of turmoil and rancor in society for as it turns out a 'Liberalism' of the intellect is not always a good thing but that's another detail for another day : I stayed in place or went to the 42nd street library or any of the galleries and reading rooms and art-places around and did as much personal work there as I could absorbing learning finding and understanding all forms of knowledge and ideas art and other : I studied supercilious religions and the causes they caused 'In Palmyra New York a small town on the Erie Canal 20 miles east of Rochester - a normal small sleepy upstate town of western New York State - in 1823 an angel named Moroni supposedly visited a 17-year old farmer named Joseph Smith and directed him to a hill just south of Palmyra where he later dug up the golden plates containing the text of the Book of Mormon and he founded a religion and a church of that religion called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) which attempted by its words and portrayals to represent the encapsulated ideas of the original Mesoamerican peoples who got their start on these matters with the emigration of Lehi - the Mormon's Israelite ancestor - to these lands' I delved into the origins of the Americas and the resounding strangenesses of the originations and genesis of the peoples therein and I learned magical things strange things concurrent with different things and theoretical things and I took ALL of this to the streets with me and began to see the incredible true and real differences in time that overlap on the streets of Manhattan and I walked and talked among the ancients as they walked with me and to me I walked among the peopled ancestors of all that went before and all they places they'd originated and I was shown origins and definitions of things like time and space and reality and self and being and pleasure and anger and shame hurt envy fallacious greed and all the rest and I became a holy man then too and walked that way amidst my peers and all the places of New York City I to you now impart - wonderful informations and astounding things AS I HAVE SAID : a new manner of everything for me was born fresh.

57. EPISTLE TO DIPPY:

[Dear Tony: Went to the Princeton Museum yesterday and library and bookstore and a few other spots it was nice and they had carolers from Princton HS Glee Club all over the place and horse-drawn buggy rides and all that crap - plus there was a concert of medieval music going on with a Petrarch-lecture of some sort for free all in the main room of the Princeton Art Museum though I didn't stay for long there and then I went to that little old house with the Museum show there currently entitled 'Princeton during the Civil War' it was pretty cool and some old guy about 75 or 80 started talking to me a blue streak about the 'southern' history of Princeton as a south-outpost in the north during those days - he'd lived in New Orleans and Baton Rouge since his graduation from Princeton in like 1950 or 51 or something - he started telling me all kids of cool stuff relating to the pictures and photos on the walls and the only hang-up he had was in not being able to remember the name of 'that fellow who had trouble integrating Ole' Miss' - James Meredith I supplied - and he was pleased and other than that he was sharp as a tack and I was reluctant to leave him there but I did just saying 'thanks- it has been a pleasure to talk to you' blah blah and cool I'll send two very simple pictures I took of pictures which is a new and interesting concept I suppose - pictures of pictures of pictures of pictures and it just goes on like that forever and INFINITY is a mirror you know!]

56. BALLS IN THE HAND:

Balls in the hand heads on the roof gnats in the dormers money on tap jiggers in a row menfolk feasting strongly nine boots in the alley beggars without handcuffs nightcaps in the morning schoolgirls with no shame mothers on the counters old men leaping candles and horsemen on the water - and with everything trailing a long train of flame.
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It's an insidious anarchic mess this newer form of writing and my late hands are tired from pouring on the oil but I stay with measures given and mark by chain places I've gone and how deep I've descended but such record-keeping grows tiring in the end yet I soldier on trying to parlay my mention to a goal above intention : 'don't put no money in the meter - I'm going home and they're done for the day you'll be OK' I heard the meter lady telling that to someone who was digging for change and I felt that was pretty nice of her telling him that she alone was finished for the day and therefore there'd be no more ticketing done - expired meter times or not - but somehow I'd still be worried I figured because there's at least five thousand other cops in this stupid city and I bet not a one of them would care about whether or not SHE was done for the day and they'd be MORE than happy to write the offender a ticket - but as in the rest of life I guessed it was all about WHO you put your faith in and how the moments ran.
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I could have sworn there was nothing more to any of this but happenstance but then I was proved wrong by everything around me : sources I never even gave a thought to and things which began running through my head and one of the most important actually seemed to be a fearsome figment for I'd come to sense or 'imagine' all around me the about-to-happen spectacle of huge animal-creatures materializing before me and stalking off in each direction at most any instant and it was all-consuming to me as I'd visualize them anytime and anywhere and it all became confusing to me whether or not they were real - I just could NOT distinguish the reality from the figment of this - large long-limbed animals prehistoric in their size and visage and speed stalking fearsomely over the modern landscape and intermingling with buildings streets avenues and lanes and traffic and people swishing through the scenery soundlessly and then just that quickly gone and I couldn't make hide nor hair (whatever that meager expression is) of any of it but just had to walk around with it all inside myself as a secret vision or a very weird fear or the twisted imaginings of some urban madman and none of this could I tell nor tell apart from regular reality and I became frightened the more it happened and scared too of what to see and of what was to come from it but I remained silent and vigilant to see these huge animals again.
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And I looked up into the three a.m. sky and remembered reading about one Grote Reber - the 'great sounding' name of the man who built the first radio telescope in his backyard in 1938 in Wheaton Illinois when there really WAS a nightime sky for a dedicated astronomer to study and I wondered if - as he looked up - he'd ever glimpsed an inkling in THAT sky that it would someday have become THIS sky and then in some further accidental reading I found this little poem by some little kid written in some Harlem schoolroom competition (11 year old Marvin Mercer - PS 153 in Harlem) and thought it pretty apt : 'My heart trembles like a poor leaf / the planets whirl in my dreams / the stars press against my window / I rotate in my sleep / my bed is a warm planet.'
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(The stars are done and - for the moment - we too are finished.)

55. IN THE CITY OF THE KHAZARS:

I learned many things and I made images of everything all around me so as to make sense of this life : it became my very own Tabard Inn - something out of Chaucer where I watched the comings and goings and listened to all that was said - and as Plato had said 'the soul takes nothing with her into the other world but her education and culture' and with that in mind I walked with the utmost care through the Gate of the Sun - and it was one John Millington Synge who had said 'a CROWD is as exciting as champagne to those lonely people who live in long glens in the mountains' and it had been a while since Tony Main's place was a regular domicile for me too and I often recalled (with some verve) the girls and women I'd seen there and the adventures I'd heard and witnessed but it had seemed since then that for some reason my life had taken a different turn FROM that and more towards a philosophy somehow of 'scorn' for the flesh instead of chasing it and all I'd seen of it and the wonderful attributes of the flush female form - naked and clothed - had pushed me onward AWAY from it for even as it was in all its beauty stunning and fair it still too was something I found easy to push away and so in some 'monastic' way I peddled myself as 'goods solitary and alone' while seeking some 'other' world higher and broader than all that : and the two differing vantage points were easily summed up for me both by the ancients 1.'who sculpted Love and set him by the pool / thinking with water such fire to cool?' and 2. 'beauty tainted by human flesh and coloring and all that mortal rubbish' and I studied and read all that I could - anywhere it could be found and by whatever means - I studied Alexandria and Alexander the Great Ptolomy Soter Ptolomy Philadelphius Euclid Galen Philo Origen Plotinus Arius and more.