Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

72. MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY DREAD ALONE ('My own madness'). Caravan Dawns, pt.2:

Ishmael Nothing you can call me : the ART of serenity befits me - ('amidst an outsize ego in a town of superegos' but I think they meant super egos (two words) as a (one word) superego means conscience which is somehow from the Latin combination of con (meaning 'with') and science (meaning 'knowledge') and if that goes together than most anything else does too) - furthermore they say 'sex between old people / ick' and if that's the case I hope they either never get old or never again have sex when they do...but that'll all be their problem thanks...I've got my hands full : - in 1939 Pepsi's 12-ounce bottle was twice the size of Coca-Cola's and was being marketed exclusively to Negroes mostly the poor who clambered for the opportunity to get twice as much product for the same nickel and 'Pepsi survived the Depression by appealing to Negro consumers' and maybe that's true but it no longer matters and there are fifteen other sorts of people these days and we no longer have 'Negroes' and NO ONE resembles a poet as much as another poet which means (I think) that the competition among poets is fierce and fast and furious too and even Robert Frost had written about 'the exception I like to think I am to everything' : 'SEEK first in poetry concrete images of sound/ REALITY is the cold feeling on the end of the trout's nose from the stream that just runs away' and 'an artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it' (monarch of a desert land I could devote and dedicate forever to the truths we keep coming back and back to) - 'don't you know he's just bustin' your balls talking big and stupid like this as if he really KNEW all this shit and what it meant but actually he's a crafty little urchin trying out tricks and I know for a fact that he once went up to a woman on the street and started spouting Verlaine 'here are some fruits some flowers some leaves and some branches and here is my heart which beats only for you' at which point he unzipped his pants and presented her with an organ quite different than his heart...and she screamed and ran off and he was quickly arrested for indecent exposure - to which he said 'well I don't know - I always thought it was pretty decent' which didn't add to his reputation either' - but in Paris the truth is that Notre Dame stands on a place of Druidic sacrifices and pagan worship and long into the 16th century was the site of an orgiastic four-day saturnalia often ending in murder and group sex so so much for history and what we THINK we've seen - and as in Bellow Herzog says 'if I am out of my mind it's all right with me' and then goes on a five day flight from his disintegrating life and on a spree writing letters to everyone - newspapers friends relatives people in public life and at last to the dead to his own obscure dead and finally the famous dead : Randall Jarrell on Walt Whitman (which I oh so much want you to hear) - 'an author who is a world and a waste with here and there systems blazing at random out of the darkness as beautifully and astonishingly organized as the rings and satellites of Saturn and we cannot help seeing that there is something absurd about any judgment we make of its whole - for there is no 'point of view' at which we can stand to make the judgment and the moral categories that mean the most to us seem no more to apply to its whole than our spatial or temporal or causal categories seem to apply to its beginning or its end' and 'what the hell you talking about you gimcrackery piece of garbage?' (some guy said that to me at the train station while I watched the prisoners get walked by in chains - three prisoners all connected to each at the wrists and ankles by some weirdly expensive seeming length of chain and in addition some over-sized white wire-ties at their wrists and the whole thing made me think of an automobile - with chains on the tires and wire ties holding clumps of wire like on some tired old rust-bucket just trying to run at a trickle down the street) and I turned back and said 'ain't saying nothing just thinking of things' and hoped that was that with nothing more to be said : but I sensed that the conditionality of the human situation would bring me nothing but shame pain and grief no matter what for in any direction as I looked there was nothing but annoyance - three paltry nuns the Sisters of This or That in procession and childlike passing and one with a small suitcase intending to board a train to somewhere trying to look angelic but their concerns could never be mine nor the innocent emphasis they made on goodness and prayer and all good intentions but I knew their worldview was as twisted and wicked and evil as any other and if they could not time-travel and only needed a train then I washed my hands of them too and the short round fat Pakistani woman whose skin was so dark as to the color of brown leather but in no way black she looked surly and soiled trying to sell candy newspapers cigarettes and trinkets and her insane newsstand was fitted out like some housetrailer of the mad leaning sideways with an elevated platform from which she dispensed her change and kept a wayward Paki eye on the shit-head Americans passing her by BUT IT WAS like that everywhere amidst the stench of commerce and pain as each day darkened and broke to night and re-opened again in caravan dawns where no birds would alight - travel and structure and food pain and hurt - collapsible men pissing before urinals like altars with mop-wielding acolytes passing around and the genuflecting ladies keeping their own doubled time before their holy mirrors too but no one could speak a sensible tongue for all language had been debased and nothing worthwhile was found to say and the whole dark human race was dwindled to its desperation seeking rain or wind or snow SOMETHING to enliven their days (and all I heard were odd cliches) : 'I am escaped with the skin of my teeth' /'in skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed' and most amazingly 'my decision to go by train today is confirmed by the crash they had last week which will make them more careful in the immediate future'...and then of course my own reply to all of that (somehow from Robert Frost again) : "I HAVE BEEN ONE ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT.
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'The winter evening settles down / with smell of steaks in passageways / six o'clock / the burnt-out ends of smoky days.'