Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

99. I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SAYING BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN (nyc, 1968):

It was somehow always a situation of 'I know what you're saying but I don't know what you mean' - with weird twisted humors and stories concocted seemingly of the moment and one guy I heard made mention of his just-completed Vietnam experience saying like 'never again' for him he won't ever again go near the place and didn't even want to talk abut it and then he began talking comically like he was mad or something - about how they used to say at base-camp that the 'only way to remedy napalm from off the skin was to burn it off' and that was some huge joke and then he talked about bombing runs and how they'd go out in groups of low-flying craft and just drop the stuff onto anyone and anyplace they saw and it wouldn't ever matter because the 'gooks never knew what hit them and no matter they needed a good cleaning anyway' and they'd watch everything - the screaming people running off the ones aflame and the ones wailing until they crumpled and died and the huts torching up one after the other and the funny ways people would scurry out of burning huts set aflame from the just-previous hit and how it was all like a comical funny movie cartoon you'd see in the theater before the real show started and how on land-patrol missions the locals would be rounded up and tied with wires and then stretched between poles until they said what they were supposed to say and how they'd cut off tongues or testicles and the women and girls who were stripped bare and then bent over and checked for 'worms' which could only be done by 'injection' and that again meant more work HARD work because endless fucking was difficult but someone had to do it and if they wanted to call it 'pacification' it was OK by him because by the time they were all done he was always 'pacified' for sure - until the next time - and how he was glad to be back here in the 'land of the brave and the home of the free - where the less you know the better off you'll be' and he even got that backwards and that was that - or as he put it 'here I am brother a trained killer sent home to forget all I learned - now what d'ya think of that? and ain't America great?' and the more I heard stuff like this the more I realized how much I actually hated people who could think in those categories and how I hated the sort of guys who would even deign considering this to be some form of right outlook or proper behavior and I really was disgusted over and over a million times by the sorts of people I saw who took willing part in this - the draft boards of course were humming and the entire place was afire with people being sent off to war - but in spite of the draft there were actually people enlisting (for whatever 'benefits' that brought) and I could never figure them out but soon realized I shouldn't anyway because it's simply a certain mindset or a certain sort of person who holds out a possibility for military life or enlistment or order and there's simply no other means of behavior open to them - they surely were NOT cut out to be artists and such - so I simply let it go : regimentation always attracts more regimentation and the people who think along with that : so no matter what it all had to take its course and whether they came back in body bags or came back with hundreds of their murderous tales to tell - either way - here they were and a good number of them in those days tried to get back into civilian life by melding into this new and burgeoning concept of hippie life - free loose easy sexy and expanding - and with it came their drinking or smoking pot and much of their foul outlook and abusive behavior and in point of fact their psychotic and repressed and intense and explosive mental set often brought out rages and violence of a sort not before seen in this supposedly 'serene' atmosphere of enlightenment - thus there occurred murders and beatings on a surprising scale and along with that most especially and repulsively came the sex crimes and brutalities that went with it but everyone washed their hands of what was occurring and simply did not address it - which then became even more a part of the sickening behavioral environment that war caused and by 1969 and after it had become an egregious offense against humanity itself - here AND there USA and Vietnam - because these sickening people knew no limits and were simply being dropped back on our shores after their enlistments and service times ran out - pure psychosis let loose upon the streets (the resultant debacle of 1970's NYC quality-of-life was too easy to see building).

98. SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE AND COTTON FULL OF LIES:

I’ve tried five hundred things - painting on air singing aloud drinking gallons of water staging dances in my head backlighting the sunset overlapping the dew calling out names genuflecting at trees walking on water leaving my droppings fist-fulling aspirins dousing the flames - and nothing (I swear) has worked YET THIS LIFE HAS GONE ON - and now - ONLY NOW YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOU MORE! we’ll then here goes I’ll find a reason to talk of my semester in the wind my picture at the hanging my dangling edge of dangling edges but the first thing you must know is the time when it was (July August ’67) these specifics accumulate and the names overlap and if you ask why (I’ll smack with the strap) - his name his name it was nothing his age it meant less and all that shit - a purloined breviary from the Northern Dispensary where Poe once schat and the small bricked steps were where I sat and slept through the days and smuggled some pipes and ran with some dope and drank black-red wine after breaking the glasses at the Sheridan Square tables Lion’s Head Bar ’55 and every other incessant nuisance wherein the homosexuals hung and music on Thursdays WELL MAYBE there was jazz and be-bop folk and folk-rock clap and claptrap and pure shit too as the postulated potentates of every stripe and fixture came down from their own encumbrances and wallowed in the mixture and that’s when I first heard of Poughkeepsie and Memphis and the Starlight Lounge Romany Marie's and The Kettle O'Fish all real places which were real people who stood cheek to jowl mostly dying ONE AFTER THE OTHER they submerged their own peculiar art in foul-smelling postules which broke and spread and the Limelight Primelight Finelight girlies who learned to dance naked under protest but were convinced of the buck and convicted to fuck they all sidled up to the barter and traded places with elves and the candle-sniffing dogs if ever there were they ran from place to place seeking out new quad-dual-headlamp hemi hot rods lower than low and more pathetic than dirt (and these were only place names among the stars) for as they died they died - as simple as that as simple as the Hudson Hornet Studebaker retired any scat-singing Ed Sullivan mind-plant that ever could be Tom Sawyer came a’callin’ and a’lookin’ for me (should I answer or just nod ? was my question to Todd) and Lady Beaver-Pelt herself came from the scrambled egg department of mindless entertainment singing like Peggy Lee and Charles Darwin mixed whilst all the while over the gold-gloved pyramid the other lanes rang with music and song and the belled cat bellowed and kept it all going but ME I sat back relaxing figuring to simply watch and see what occurred but instead of all that I had some brown rice and tried our for plays and readings and the morality tales of the theater lane brewery pig-faced audacity swapfests - which only oh then were so rampant and BY JESUS it was hot everything was- the weather the heat the white sky the fire the dirt and the long sleep of midnight with some stillness to try (and I did it all once and again).

97. ONE QUICK AND PLAYFUL THRUST:

The grand piano is rolled in with its curving wing unfolded like a great black butterfly that slowly sails toward charades by candlelight across the polished chasm of parquet the floor the floor unremarked while walked upon hundreds of feet at a time the ballroom dancers useless in their frieze of little time places lived and sought and seen and found like a small eraser rubbing a list of names to bits until the little crumbly pieces of eraser like people are strewn and sloppy over all the paper’s surface JUST LIKE THIS FLOOR so soon they too will be gone and somewhere the Big Guy naps dreaming of westerns and flowers in his hair grapes on some veranda and that fat girl in the toga transformed into a naked beautiful creature enfolding him and feeding him and every one of his desires while inside along the kitchen wall the servant staff is holding knives purloined from the meat drawers and pantries of the deepest kitchen recess OVER BY THE MEAT LOCKER where the cuts are kept and they are staring into ballroom space lasciviously watching the young girls dancing and they dream of killing the mates of everyone they see just to have the girls for their own ONE QUICK AND PLAYFUL THRUST into the ballroom light ‘so have I heard and do in part believe it’ so Shakespeare had a character say and better even than that were the words of POE (whose destroyed and vanished New York City house I once more pass this time while the firehouse across the street from it is bedecked with flowers and notes vigil candles for the recent dead) the Poe house is gone now a vacant gaping hole near where the street once was BUT NO ONE CARES they’ve fought that fight already and it’s been lost Poe said: ‘assigned to live next door because he’s silent though under lock and key because he’s mad’ – To immerse himself in tales where he could be the man - In once upon a time there was a man and marveling -
I watched the face you wore hardened into remote indifference beside my own.

96. THE DEEP - WHERE PHILOSOPHY DWELLS:
Socrates disagreed with Parmenides and Plato wrote about that disagreement ('The Sophist') - which is Plato's defense of nothing in which he not only argues that nothingness is an existing force in the world but that there is as well an element of nothing in everything we say and know and he personifies this in the 'sophist' who was a sort of traveling wise man in ancient Greece who went from town to town teaching the art of argumentation and who would for a small fee provide convincing arguments for clients on any subject (and from any viewpoint) the client wished - thus they were especially often useful in courts of law where persuading the jury was often far more important to a defendant's case then uncovering the truth and their reliance on persuasion naturally set them at odds with the new philosophers of Athens who believed in the pursuit of Truth above all else - Sophists oftentimes resorted to reasoning that was based not on what actually existed but on what did not exist - (in other words they tried to make something out of nothing) - [this again is where I feel narration played the great and running role] for a Sophist was a fast-talker a shyster and a quack with a 'reputed and apparent knowledge on all subjects but not the reality' and the Sophist made many untrue claims and therefore resided actually in a world which did not exist and Parmenides recall had argued that it is impossible to say anything intelligible about something that does not exist and so it seems as if the Sophist surrounded himself with nothing - the ideal human hiding place - a haunt nobody can reach in a realm of which no human can conceive : the Sophist was shrouded in things which did not exist yet needed to articulate something substantial about nothing - the very pursuit that Parmenides claimed to be futile BUT per Plato consider this : even nothing is something : even something said to be 'not-beautiful' is as subject still 'something' (it is 'something not beautiful') it is something other than beautiful and everything that exists seems to have this quality of 'otherness' in the same way - so a Sophist could conclude that nothingness does indeed then contain an element of something - it contains something of otherness and by this reasoning (circular and obtuse and PERHAPS meaningless and foul too) 'something' also contains then an element of nothing - there is something in nothing and nothing in something (Parmenides called this blurry mixing a sure sign of 'backward thinking') and if Plato was right to resurrect this backward thinking then even the Sophist's statements are something since they are something other than the truth and the light of reason can reveal the Sophist's shadowy hideout and philosophical hunters can circle their prey and learn something about nothing along the way and Plato - lastly - considered that NOTHINGNESS is power and he concluded 'I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power - either to affect anything else or to be affected in however small a degree by the most insignificant agent though it be only once : I am proposing a mark to distinguish real things that THEY ARE NOTHING BUT POWER' (Sophist : 247e) meaning that nothingness is a power in the world that pervades all existing and non-existing things.