Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

65. MANHATTAN IN MY HANDS, (e. 11th St., 1968)
I was slowing down greatly and concentrating (so it seemed) on some form of newer gravity which elongated everything and lessened my time-passage and even my concept of what was happening : one day I'd see some precarious old building now wasted partially boarded-up and seemingly ready to fall in on itself and the very next day I'd go there again and it would be teeming with 17th and 18th century workers in strange old original dress and language - horses carts people throwing barrels steel pails nails water lines fires and steam - and a busyness like I'd never seen before and I'd KNOW SIMPLY KNOW by recognition that I was amidst an entire other time and place and my spirit-soul was partaking of a slower denser and more rich experience of a somehow-existence in which time per se did not exist or could be bent and made to exist within another maybe concurrent realm - and this was all flexible and gradual and vivid and certainly as real as the more vague illusion of a present-day I was living with not much more of an understanding of anything and perhaps to others I would seem as lost and wandering or drunk and stupid but to myself I was an intrepid professorial explorer dipping into other realms to experience what I wanted - St. John's Wood the old canal at Canal Street the water spouts everywhere the horse-pools and fountains the swampy collect marshy lowlands running off to each river and the highlands - before they were cut and leveled - at what is now Broadway and Houston Street : stuff no one knows nor would know unless they either were a. THERE or b. had studied it so as to know - and I would visit the great coal-fire mills and the power-plants fired by coal or lumber and the great billowing forms of steam and seepage generated by all the flaming and smoking of huge cauldrons and I'd see the lines of wooden ships all tied up this way and that along Fulton Street and all the wharves - bawdy and filled with blowsy sailors and their extemporaneous shouts and the leering whores along the way the rat-infested dog pens the brewery houses the ale-houses and taverns grogs and bars the illicit whorehouses and hotels the unencumbered stairways the sex-cots and ad hoc hospitals with people dying in pools of blood and the nasty hacking coughs of the tuberculosis wards and the diseased and amputees and broken sailors and wounded servants wild animals stray pigs and boars dogs and curs old listless horses ready for death chicken pens quail houses slaughter house factories pools of animal blood amidst the bleats and squeals and screeches of death and the bludgeon and the knife - the butchers cutting up the newly slaughtered - animal parts hacked and put up for sale immediately and the hags and wenches lined up to buy what they could as soon as they were able.
It all would seem as something I needed to break through to get past the modern-day edge of it all and I could transport myself into another place : something somehow richer where the tumbling of words meant something different. I found that I could steal  -  the mark of a man back then  - anything from anywhere for all was left about and people's understandings yet did not include the sort of social-blemish trespass we  know now for this 'NOW' is a time of envy and back then when life was work and a person had to actually DO things to have anything  :  heat fire water and food  ;  there wasn't the concept yet of 'wanting' what others had or at least 'wanting' it in the envious way of today when 'possessions' have taken representation  and now over-ride their meaning and it's all just part of the froth of vacuity within which we live today : bigmouths and braggarts wanting what they want so as just to say they have it. Envy. Jealously. Covetousness. Greed.

64. A BANG LIKE A LORD:

He was smashing her hard enough to break glass and she was screaming back because of it and he was big and heavy and rugged and strong while she was as lithe as a beautiful bird seemingly strumming on wistful chords from Heaven but that's the way it went - they both were enjoying something that was evidently all it was cracked up to be and if there was any writing on the wall they were reading it now while I by contrast - always wanting to play the prophet - was instead quite supple in the other room watching a few fish move around in an aquarium while shadows of something outside were somehow projected on the wall nearby (nothing I could ever figure out) and again it was 22nd Street on an early Spring schedule and the people I'd gotten used to seeing were once again all about - slowly arriving by ones or twos and then staying put either outside or up along the stairwell waiting to see what happened but the rock-solid bevy of people were not all aware of the massive fornication just then finishing up above their heads - and I'd not tell because it was someone else's girlfriend I'd espied on her naked back on that bed - and the less anyone knew the better for all and anyway the most elementary of particles in things like this always meant some incremental move was easy to overlook (nothing big ever really happened) so I just let it all go and took down a book of historic posters from London's East End and Dublin's Irish Theater - anyway things I didn't really care about - J.M. Synge Oscar Wilde W.B. Yeats Sean O'Casey and all the rest - but the old photos were very good and the lack of dental hygeine too was amazing but I figured that was back in the day before telegenics and photogenics was important so no one really cared if you were a famed somehow playwrite missing five teeth or had three loose one and a blackened front tooth left and all anyone really cared about then (it seemed) were words and the handwriting which they kept showing as somehow proof of an authentic theater movement and an exciting night at the theater was incomplete without someone signing a handbill or poster or playbill or something and everyone seemed to like cigarette holders too - or pipes for the men - very strange indeed : and this was how I passed the time until those two were done fucking with an awful howl and an outward blanche as they both (fully sated and drained) collapsed back onto the bed together for a few moments before getting up and as she arose soaked with sweat and dripping wet I noticed she cupped her hand under her privates as she ran towards the bathroom so I figured she'd caught a good load of leakage right there and he got up with still half a hard-on to light a cigarette and noticing me he said "had enough I take it?" and I said 'Shit no it wasn't me I didn't have any or didn't you notice" and he laughed and said "who's downstairs ? the whole passel of assholes again?" and I said "I guess so but they've been there a while" and he croaked and said something about them waiting like that for a fire or a funeral that I really didn't catch and then there she was again beautiful and fixed as ever and I nearly died when I saw she was still naked and not embarassed one bit and she smiled at me and said "oh HI! I didn't know you were here!" and then she put on a robe and went off to get dressed - just like that - and it was the most warming thing I'd seen and it all made me feel actually as if it had just been ME doing all that work but then he said "let me get dressed and you can start letting the jerks up" so I did - going towards the elevator doorway and turning the key to 'On' and lighting the corridor and soon enough the noise started rising upstairs and people were everywhere while the wine started flowing the phonograph played some old jazz tunes and someone turned on the overhead lights which threw a projected wall-image of something like wax or honey blobs slowly moving about in colors too vivid to describe and in a few moments again everyone was about and both he and she - she in a vivid red shift or something which showed her off perfectly and starting the entire cycle of arousal again (or could have) mingled and mixed and not a word was said.

63. THE MOVIE FICTION:

'Imperial spaces for democratic man' - I'd heard it said about the grand old movie palaces but I always thought it to be silly - the whole idea having no sense for as I walked the arcades and 'movie palaces' along old 42nd street and its environs they always seemed to be - no matter what else - dwarfed in their presences by the live theater buildings in their same area and all those great names of things and places named after people and stars and old famed ideas had their walks of honor and red carpets and Schubert Alleys and gilded doorways and all of that but it was all enriched by the very idea of LIVE theater and the players themselves walking through and around in all their grand and antiquated presences whereas the MOVIE palaces - whatever they were - were of a far less rigorous glory being useful for perhaps entertainment of the masses or the rubes from Trenton or Tallahasee but always filled and enlivened in their limited way by the awful dreck that passed for movies - monstrous stupid films made by studio characters on the lam from deviltry or death - either one for them being the same - and all those horrid old names of Hollywood people and their hideous pretensions were here to be seen only by their rank product : shilling shit movies produced by fools and made for idiots and the people in droves eating them up and whether in scumbagged old movie houses or the 'grand gilded palaces' we are talking of it was all the same momentary distraction and florid junk projected at screen after screen and the undying applause was stupifying while to just look at the people enjoying this and supposedly aware and enamored of their surroundings made me barf - for I knew there was no truth to the idea of enlightened entertainment and these people were just out for junk and they wanted memories and food and 42nd street - pig stalwart rapscallion that it was - gave them all of that and a bus ride too and the only thing 'imperial' about any of this was the fake gold of the cheap gilding and the false czarism of the autocrat laughing at the minions arrayed below him or the ertswhile movie mogul high up above the audience in a little square room with a concealed viewing window sneaking glimpses at the poor bastards he's just taken the three dollars from (old prices) to watch some sorry spectacle unfold in an ornate drawing room of psychotic hell and if there was ever a dictatorship in America this was it and it was alive and well and only the ad-men who made this crap up had the erstwhile means to stop it but they never did and therefore the fiction went on and on and entertainment like this KILLED absolutely killed America a long long time ago Thomas Edison be damned and Henry Ford be damned and Art Linkletter be damned and George Lincoln Rockwell be damned and Norman Rockwell too for none of that lived anywhere near me and it was all a lie and a fiction and a distortion but one for which people had died and were still dying and 'good for them' I thought since they've already fallen for it they might as well fall for it all!

62. A SORT OF HEMINGWAY IN DIRGE:

Looking with today's eyes I can see that the cumulative effects of low quality are deadening and that the mass of men are now engrossed in layers upon layers of low-quality - habits of listening style food thought and reference - things which have been destroyed and diluted down to a mere modicum of supposed self and presence and which in spite of all else have been accepted as a new 'norm' - something like the old nugget of 'defining down' something and all of this and its effects already present will just build and become the newer fabric of society and the make-up of the times being set for the next downward shift again - sort of ad infinitum - until something occurs : revolution malcontent discontent furious violence ribald distractedness and a rabid lashing out unto self-destructiveness and wanton decay and there's nothing to be done about it and nothing ever will be done.