Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

90. PERSPECTIVE OF THE MOMENT:

One of the things that usually happens over time is that perspectives change little more than do attitudes - and therefore most people go to the grave with pretty much the same ideas with which they lived most of their life - which is why for instance one can still see older people relishing a World War II movie or a Vietnam Vet reliving his Vietnam story - and it just goes on like this - for the defining ethos of one's life is made up of the accumulated moments of its most vivid and most shattering moments and these together occlude to make the thematic scope of that life manageable - it's a kind of rationalizing away of our days and without it many of us would be otherwise insane over moments and ideas and it reminds me of a kid named Nathan who once said to me off-handedly that 'you can always tell when people stopped changing their lives - like my grandmother - because they go on still wearing the type of clothing that was current when they stopped' and it was a funny little comment not meaning much and we sort of laughed it off as he said it (we were in some Houston Street garden looking at fish and turtles in the heat) but the more I think of it the more I sometimes realize the import of what he meant and how it's in many ways profoundly true - I just don't know how much value to give it as an observation - and funnier still is the fact that right there at the corner of Houston and the Bowery most of the people who hung there then were bums and cast-offs without much real choice in their clothing or appearance and lucky to be still wearing any thread at all and having a few teeth BUT nonethless it was a small comment between us and what he meant by 'changing their lives' was that period of a person's life when all is still vivid and when the dynamics of a life would still allow for CHANGE and for most anything to happen - and a lot of that disappears as we coalesce and harden into older age and settle in to the means and ways of things as we would like them to stay SO it all did make sense in a way and 'so much for grandma' too.
-
There's always the other factor too of some sort of circular wheel-of-life thing going on in that at any one time all over the globe older people are faced against the rush of younger people coming across and learning (as if for the first time)conclusions of their own about life and its matters which they somehow feel are oddly unique to them but are not - in fact it's the same old stuff being re-learned over and over anew and it's as if an 'old' person is at some (arbitrary) number of (say) 58 in his or her conclusions and the young person is on his or her own number 5 or 7 - and these numbers never catch up to one another for the older person dies off and the young coming up after that old person singularly work through and re-learn at their own pace the lessons the old person left behind - everyone starts at zero - and it's part of the age-old differentiation and difficulty between youth and age : 'nothing new under the sun I've heard it all before tell me something I don't know...' etc. and I know for myself that very often I can't abide more than five minutes worth of young company because of the paucity of references and understandings and the lack of any symmetry between my 70 and their 7.

89. THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM WAS MY BROTHER:

I can't ever say why but something was calming me down in the middle of all the world's grief - oil-soaked penguins dead birds along the reef wildcats prowling in pits of poison gas-attacks in the open-air markets of Kabul - endless horrible things bespeaking mankind's dead brutishness one towards the other and all I could do was look away or shudder to a halt and I went speechless in the middle of LIFE - life itself being a quandary of which I found nothing or very little to salvage : some guy named George walking along the canal in Frenchtown with some wicked crazy babe in tow and talking a mile a minute until the moment he saw me and we met and started the usual stuff about both where we'd been and how in the intervening two years and another guy walking his dog across a soon-to-be-graded field where a new plan for houses was already waiting and set and in place - sadness in every window and eave - and I could say nothing at all and the waterway was silent in the crisp Fall air - each boat having stayed in place and the slow rocking of the river-water around the bend led my eyes to Pennsylvania and something else far away (tho' I get home how late - how late / so I get home - 'twill compensate / better will be the ecstacy / that they have done expecting me) and that fair triumphal regal music that I hear starts itself annoying me (the bandstand is a copy of something in Rome or so it was said when I later got home) and all I see HERE are scant'-clad girls in bodices and sheer tops with tight clothing clutching their rears and I wonder in such a place as this how anything became so risque and burlesque (or is it the tone of the times and the temper when no one now cares or notices the flesh?) and I know so many who've made love to a log or reciprocated feelings with stone and I know they're still pining for something other than all that emptiness - that which comes with empathy and all their stupid caring - and even that DOG was now sniffing the air or searching for clues or finding a care and AS IT IS it's always NOTHING or all of nothing or EVERYTHING and nothing at all - and in some tawdry finish it all evens out in the end and they build twenty buildings where before there was one and someone pipes up and says 'how beautiful everything is' and just like that ALL'S forgotten (and we've already moved on YES we've already moved on) yet if the LORD is my Shepherd and I shall want for nothing then by the same token if all the wealth and riches of the world amount to NOTHING in the eyes of this God - is that what I'm really wanting this NOTHING that always shall come to be nothing ? and really 'restoring' the soul just sounds like SO MUCH WORK.

88. SOMETHING LIKE THIS SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED:

"And Jacob once the tomb was empty what else was there to do except believe in something miraculous and the bones anyway the bones never showed up and that was the simplest thing - all the authorities had to do if they wanted to stop this crazed band of nascent Christians was to produce some bones - in fact ANY BONES would have done - and disprove in their way the occurrence of which everyone spoke but nothing like that ever happened nothing of the sort occurred and they let it all keep running on and eventually PERFECTLY it fell into place into something and neither lions nor martyrdom nor slayings and killings and ostracism and outlawing could put a stop to it as it grew fingers and added doctrines and made its rules and credos and new beliefs over old beliefs and before it was too far on the everything about it had become everything else and political power and secular rule became its order of the day but JACOB again NONE of that would have happened if they didn't will it to and that's the run of the world today - that's what we're left with the remnants of all which occurred and every offshoot from that which still exists today is what we're still fighting over and there will be no loving end to anything of this sort but any fool who fights for God is fighting for a DEFINITION alone - that and nothing more can you understand that Jacob?" and Jacob said "why do you believe everything you read and what if it never happened like that ? what if this was all made up in say 719 and they added AD to it for credibility and the entire backstory of all mankind can be adduced to be fictitious and without any basis in reality - have you ever considered that - and perhaps you're nothing more than - as all of us - a captive complete and total to whatever they've told you occurred" now I won't go on to say this conversation was something I wanted to listen to ad infinitum BUT it was interesting enough and these people were characters in the way that fiction makes characters who embody concepts which the story needed and that's probably just as artificial as anything else since - using myself as an example - whatever I was told when I was young I've since later found out was wrong incorrect lies and crap the stuff like 'statesmen never lie cops are your friends the priest will help you do this for your own good' and a million more things I've wrestled with mentally but never talked over and (as I recall) the last friendly conversation I had with my father was as I drove him home from a problem and all the way home he talked about the moon and everything about the moon and who'd been there already and who really made it there first and what the Russians (he called them Russians not Soviets) were planning to do and it all made little sense to me because I didn't view the moon in his terms - as if it was some form of political real estate that someone had to inhabit just to show who was boss - and the entire framework of that thinking and that thought was bogged down in nothingness and we never got anywhere with that one : but anyway I'd have rather talked with him IF I HAD TO about the beauty of its light and the odd regularity of its passage and waxings and wanings and what it all meant for those before us and the eons of time it was seen from the sea by sailors with nothing else to do or see.

87. ONLY THAT AND NOTHING MORE - (This Girl Was Tough):

"Well" she replied "if war is a Greek thing and generals will be generals then everything between the end and the beginning is just the same old replay of some horrific and brutal Peloponnesian bullshit with no reckoning no anything except a bunch of large-balled and horny and addle-brained sick men chasing each other through the streets and skies and seas with guns and bombs and bullets and there’s no principle or high reasonings involved EVER it’s all just the same putrid baby-killing bullshit that makes mothers scream and wail and fathers die sorrowful and silent and ten rooms filled with intellectuals spouting babble about science and war science studies and trends and observations and Sun Tzu Art of War crap amount to nothing more than a wicked nun’s brassiere and probably just as futile in use and any one of us singly or in groups become nothing more than ancient squatting savages when engaged in warfare and strategy because it’s all LIES DECEIT and the nasty compunction to fuck your neighbor’s wife kin and daughter in that sequence if need be NOTHING MORE nothing less and it’s like an old guy blind as a fuck sitting at a chess board thinking strategy for the game before him except he can’t see shit just sense what he maybe thinks is there ONLY THAT AND NOTHING MORE."

86. WHEREVER EVENTS TAKE ME...

As a young man I spent a few years in the Kyoto Society of Imperial Buddhism where I was sequestered in a strict monastery atmosphere among a mix of advanced and beginner level Shinto thinkers - all this in an exercise of trying to instill awareness and positive universalism into the otherwise privileged and encapsulated minds of wealthy young men and as part of this training we were made to give away the (equivalent) sums of one thousand dollars a month to anyone randomly found or selected on the street (after imparting to them a slight 'sermon' of enlightened talk) and we did this for one year twelve times - and the one thing it did for me immediately was to make apparent the actual randomness of what random actually is - for 'random' is what you make it as my selection of 'random' turned out never to be random at all and that's the one quality of the exercise I could never get over - the immediate and at-the-core misrepresentation of the exercise itself and I found (as MY lesson taken from this) how most everything in this life is actually incorrect and thus illusionary and thus based on nothing but false belief or misunderstanding of complete obeisance to fabricated elements AND I found it to be that people are actually quite comfortable with this and that becomes the quality of the value by which they live their lives and this element then builds on the next element and the next and so on and before anyone knows it we have societies built on essential wrongs and misunderstandings (or as I'd once put it - to great acclaim - we find ourselves 'morbidly out-of-place').
-
(I've got things to tell you - too many to list - and I guess YES! the greatest of these is how much I love you and I really do even though I never SHOW such maladroit dramas past the scrim of the stage and I act as I act as if no love itself ever passed through my cage - BUT IT DOES! and you have all too - so marvel not naked at what I've just said or what I've been doing for this sort of love is for sure my UN-doing).
-
The shtetl is unsettled the provinces are in revolt and over the border now have broken the hordes.
-
I was reading Gary Snyder in the shade of some old oak while carriages and horses passed me by - alas each with tourists filled BUT here no matter that - and I thought I'd found a clue to something different : how we each ARE without really being - how we each ARE everywhere while being NOWHERE too - 'blue mountain white snow gleam through pine bulk and slender needle-sprays' - like that as it was said and so much more and I thought I understood the moment THIS ONE that very moment itself as it happened : and it too passed me by.
-
Bergdorf Goodman across the street - every taxing moment is catalogued - the saxophone player and the cormorant at the lake in Central Park the sunbathers and the people otherwise engaged while lounging on the ground the sorrowful sleeping bag-lady scrunched like paper by the statue near the library's old side steps and all the people standing in the sunlight.
-
These are grave thoughts Europa and I really should be reading Blake anew - every line and nook and cranny every word around a word to the absolute very last - but now all my things are gone too and I reflect only by memory for the present time is now a world I cannot understand nor walk through AND SO this hymn to you and I ask beseech and plead that you at the very least listen to me once and not abscond with my thoughts and memories of everything which once was ('for who is left to tell us who?') and there would be no one were it not me who witnesses and tells anew THIS WORLD is sunk and sunken too Europa and everything has died without hope of rebirth or resurrection as the dead so dead shall walk forever to Death and ne'er reach the ends of that great trek and GOOD for them they deserved it all (if it is a simple matter then it shall be easy but if it is dense the difficulties shall be absurd) and even Atlas were he now to reappear would be asked over and over 'has this been ever done before was it ever a film or something I could watch would I know the words if I had to sing them?' for no matter what else IT IS NOW LIKE THAT in this foul harbor where no boats berth.

85. LOOK LOOK:

To the pestilence of testing men I add the prevalence of death and its elusive meanings as a way of furthering the test : we build the monuments to the ideas which undergird all of what we do as a vest of immortality or something we wish to wear over our clothing as some major outer garment of rank and status TO WIT 'look at me for I shall live forever' yet alas it is not to be ('I am Ozymandias...look upon my works oh Mankind and despair...') and it is to that very boneyard we are then retired (quite passively that is and NOT at all actively) and that very boneyard it is now which I walk in and view the remnants of faded powerless dear and dire glory all gone to seed and rot all broken and tarnished forgotten and dis-respected (ringed with rude roadway 'round loud scavenging noise and fury) and I conclude ALIKE that it is likely that there is NOTHING more to go around - we all are silent at once and despair together and lonesome at once and elated with fear the fear of time closing in on us and then over us and LOOK LOOK just look yourselves and tell me what you see for even the brick and the granite here disprove the complacency of time and show its active element instead - rot and withering and decay and fault.

84. TRAVEL TIME:

She wanted to know if I wanted to go to Tempe Arizona with her and then to Taos New Mexico and I said "good God let's not forget the Alamo too" but she laughed and then I declined and she said she was going and she did and came back a few weeks later and said it had been all to the good and she'd also visited Taliesen and Georgia O'Keefe's place too and she was all fired up for a time over that - her name was Judy Tenenbaum and usually all she ever did was go to Skowhegan Maine where there was an artist colony of some sort allied with the Studio School we were both enrolled in and though I'd never gone there either she was always pushing it as an opportunity or a choice - and especially in the Summer months when she'd spend weeks there at an outdoor camp that was held for isolated art study and production time with guest artists on site and it was always 'Showhegan this' or 'Skowhegan that' with her but that was OK it never bothered me really even though I often wondered about it as a distant and intriquing destination for 'art' - plus the idea of going to an 'art-camp' secluded deeply in nature like that seemed weirdly out of kilter to me deep as I was in the mixings of everything urban and everything of urban heritage as it all related to the artworld and all its history (only later did I find out I was really quite wrong on that count too since most of the 'artists' of the periods I was interested in - basically all NYC since the 1920's - had each had hideaways or seclusions and places of their own to which to retreat and go or paint).