Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

105. IF THEY WOULD HAVE LOOKED - BUT THEY DIDN'T:

Somewhere in the back of my mind at these times was the idea and the realization that when people spoke of 'New York City' and all its magic and excitement what they were really talking about was a place and a time that was gone and for all practical purposes but a fading memory - for the city itself was at this time already foundering and breaking apart and what was left was a saddened reality which had somehow lost most of its more true vitality and instead become enmeshed in another world entirely of modernism and lightness and because of that so many of the places and scenes of the old days started just disappearing and the city was getting made over again into something new and different - glass and steel replacing mortar and brick and concrete - and people changed too and because of that everything began to be different and seem almost foreign or unreal and circus-like and I wondered (or began wondering) 'where are the serious conversations?' and 'where are the things of import which matter?' and I knew they were mostly gone or dwindling and it was apparent everywhere : a funny memory I always had was of a time when you'd see cars - station wagons mostly - with rear widows covered over sometimes with twenty or thirty of these odd travel-decals people used to put in their windows - things they'd picked up from their various destinations ('Weeki-Watchee Florida Yuma Arizona Knott's Berry Farm Georgia New York City Cape Canaveral Pike's Peak Niagara Falls) and they covered the entire country because apparently most every destination had them - these colorful water-transfer decals - and slowly they all began diminishing and I'd see less and less of them as apparently fewer people still 'understood' the naivete necessary for these things to be in place and as that went so too did much else and a more strange sort of abrupt self-awareness began taking its place and with it the self-consciousness necessary for irony and humor and parody and all of that to take place and set in and essentially what resulted from that was the cultural cross-referencing which made many other things suddenly intolerable (like the things which took innocence or naivete to be tolerated) and once they were gone there was no bringing them back and that then was the end of the old scene even to the extent that I noticed the old dour darkness and solid serious of old New York had simply vanished and much of it by the late 1960's was being replaced with plastic and light colors and better lighting and modern fixtures and more colorful decor and wild designs and fabrics and shapes and while that might not seem like much it really IS much and makes a great difference to oh-so-many things and New York City was in the forefront of all that as it grew into its own self-awareness and 'Fun-City' crap and all that (from Robert Wagner to John Lindsay to Michael Quill to Abe Beame in one fell swoop) and while 'DISASTER' is its own best friend it does - at the same time - arrive with plenty of announcement and fanfare and all of that was very apparent and obvious for all to see IF THEY WOULD HAVE BUT LOOKED : but they didn't.

104. 'NOT MY ESSENTIAL BEING':

He was the kind of a person (to take this instance) of whom I'd expect a pile of teeth to be amassed - in that he'd be the one to take to the extreme the idea of 'eye for an eye tooth for a tooth' and have surely many of them and that would probably be the way he runs his whole life - 'exactitude' - like following rules and maintaining situations and demanding a certain routine in everything and believe me I have nothing against anyone subscribing to any other ways of doing things but it's just like 'once upon a time I thought everything was seamless - now it all just seems less' would suffice just as well : it was a wide-open time and place for me and in order to take the fullest advantage of it I went around doing whatever I had to do in order to maintain at the least a form of subsistence sufficient to keep mind and body intact and alert - most of that was strenuous observation but not always that alone and it managed to keep me stabilized and in gear and there were plenty of times I really didn't know what I was doing or understood that I was inadequate for whatever yet I kept on - there were always plenty of others on their way to and from one educational foray or another and lots of those wore it all on their sleeves and I wanted at times myself so badly to be intellectual and knowledgeable and caught up in the knowledge-search but I sensed really that that was NOT my essential being and there would always be something else for me to go after in that regard - which was much of the reason for the outsider status I kept - but it all came with some fortuitous moments too and I took advantage of everything I could whenever the moments arose while at other times I found myself fighting scrupulously to maintain an attention so as not to be run into the ground by my own fearsome depression and bad-feelings which always wanted to take advantage of whatever place I was in - jump in front of a train or off a bridge or in some way or other put a finish to this paltry experiment which was failing - BUT I fought all that as best I could as I knew and realized I was living in an 'AFTERMATH' and I grasped that and as the time went on I understood that all of the older New York world of art and creativity had just recently exited that deep dark scene from the 1940's and 50's when everything was dark and philosophical and fraught with the images and merits of psychology and psychoanalysis and all new forms of awareness and such and the 1960's instead had dawned into a different form of light and being - filled with attitude and irony and play-acting and all of that which made everything so very different almost overnight - many of the dark objects of doubt and concentration were just-like-that GONE in an instant and many of the old characters had started dying off and the places they inhabited were changing - Tenth Street and its odd galleries was gone the art world had been made 'esteemed' now and valuable and the much more voracious money-appetites of the vendors and dealers and all of those minions who made their usual Jew-money off of it were running rampant and much of the scene had shifted uptown or to other places entirely and the old loft scene was dwindling and when money started coming in by the boatloads people began acting differently and differently to each other too and factions and camps took over and people began writing about art even more that DOING art - always a bad sign - and because of that people took sides and factions became camps and styles and the slick cheap media came in - tabloids and the shit-press making game with the art world so as to sell product (simply that and nothing more) and it all began falling apart and the irony and comedy portions of it started shaping up into things self-created by others Pop Art Op Art Geometric Color Field and the rest : basically just categories made up for the sense of saying something to others who knew nothing about the subject or the history and it was all being said - just the same - by people who knew little of what they were saying anyway : if that was camp then so it was if that was style or outlook then so it was too and then media and junk took over and everything needed superstar status and the same level of junk-world pop-culture crap stepped in - just as it had in music and clothing and taste and film - bastards one and all and all orphaned stepchildren of talent and culture in the old sense : it all dissolved away like the old scene itself dissolved away - and I knew that it was always possible or at least becoming so that you could make something up in the morning and if was parlayed right by late afternoon you could have a movement and an entire following based on the prettiness or hipness or glibness of that which you were doing and EVERYWHERE there were new-media stars and the media had begun talking everything over : they needed constant product and constant newness and that all had to be self-described and delineated by action and fashion and the excitement of being right where it was happening and ever-and-oh-so-hip at all times and I saw it all happening and knew who was behind it all and to keep it going the same powers needed criminal rackets and drugs and forces to keep it going and lives were ruined and everything started going amiss and off-center and it all turned to junk and that junk - by 1968 - was all over the streets and dripping from the walls and there wasn't ANYTHING any longer profound or real anywhere and I knew it and walked amidst it all and stayed quiet about it but kept my growing disgust to myself (they were ragpickers picking through rags).

103. FIGHTING TIME (a quick look back):

I never really fought time but TIME was always fighting me - because youth was fading and it diminished in its own manner everything around me and I only sort-of knew it was happening while it happened but mostly did not because the tendency is for something like that to go by unannounced too - without fanfare and with little notice to the person it happens to until much later when one looks back and realizes all of what had passed already is gone and it 'ain't coming back' no way and the mark of a real person and a mature man (I suppose) is how he deals with that realization.

102. THE EVER-PRESENT URGE TO END:

There were a lot of things I had to get over and some of them became quite difficult but it never mattered because in whichever means I advanced my situation so too in the same way I ensured a certain form of privacy and solitary vision - it became difficult for me to share anything with others or sometimes to even understand their language or points of view - and inasmuch as this became prevalent it meant that I would be completely alone : when I spoke others simply thought it funny and at other times whatever I did people thought completely strange or unique or at the least odd – but of course that is one of the best benefits of city living or at least of living in a city such as this one was (self-defining that) because no matter what undertaking I started I could advance my way through it as there are very very few situations which others would object to – short of crime or murder and even then I’m sure exceptions could be had – for this was after all the pre-eminent American city for intrigue and history and a sense of the ‘past’ still being there somewhere and commingling with the present : Horace Greeley boyish of face and with that odd hair was still as present to me and strong as was Abraham Lincoln himself aboard the Brooklyn Ferry or speaking at Cooper Union OR even more amazing sitting at Matthew Brady’s photography studio for that famed portrait and ALL of that was as current to me as electricity through my veins Walt Whitman himself too visited – I walked the same boards I walked the same docks and wharves I smoked the same smokes and salmons and oysters and clams and I drank too IMBUED with the overly-crenulated aroma of past present and NOW rolled together and ‘Phrenology Factor Found True!’ was yet a contemporary headline to me and the ‘lacy gals’ of old Theatre Row haunted my dreams and gave me pleasure between City Hall and the old Post Office and Newspaper Row - everything was joyous and dirty filthy and rich and I – saucy boy – swaggered like a bootblack with a corduroy satchel between night-streets of venom and vile and torture and rape ALL was in the making and everything was ripe - one time four ancient-seeming American indian natives accosted me along Pine Street when it was yet a simple lane of wooden dwellings and I was walking along and they’d found someone to speak to me and ask where Beekman could be and I said ‘north north of here along the river – but why want that ? it’s just tanneries and leather and foul-smokes and putrids and many boats docked too and shipbuilders and roustabouts in filth’ and they replied that there were men they had to kill and harbor shanties they had to burn for those who took their sisters and squaws and did what they did needed to die and not a minute more wait’ and I shuddered just to think but figured to know what they meant and offered for no price to take them where they wished and we walked steadfastly through brush marsh and weed - all along swamp and festered mudlands - until I got them to where they wanted and let them go off figuring to not know what I didn’t have to about whatever and then so quick as a flame they too were gone and I was thrown again to pavement hard and coarse along John Street and near an old negro church and my head – bleeding a bit from the hit – was sore to hurt but I staggered up and KNOWING FULL WELL what ha transpired welcomed my own way back to the present day and re-entered some land of the living or the dead I knew not which – 1966 1967 1970 I wasn’t sure BUT I knew enough to know that whatever I’d just done I could read about it again in some dusty history at the library - and I did and filled my mind anew with incredibly what I MYSELF had just been through and it’s difficult (to this day) living a life like that with sidefields of adventure unspoken and unable to be shared but instead I had to and do listen to the drivel which passes for talk these days and wish myself back or under the wheels of some runaway cart.
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If asked why I make words up I reply ‘I do not!’ and if asked if I make stories up as well I reply ‘Never have!’ and I must leave it at that - my gift has become my burden and my travails are my travel - time is no space between things and dimension to me and I still can meet and know people of 300 years ago – figure that – but everything too is a JOKE and a catcall because that’s the only means I have to suffer these days of the NOW – I AM TRAPPED and must by means of my own make light of the serious dilemma I’m in.

101. WHAT IS IT YOU WANTED I SHOULD SAY TO YOU?

'Fuck I hate this world and I can't seem to get anywhere and that's the craziest deadening feeling of all - that no matter what happens I'm always just out of sequence or off-time by a step and no matter how I continue to do my own work it inevitably misses the mark of anything bigger' : what was that ! I thought to myself as I approached the staggering voice because I was actually afraid the guy was about to begin crying or something and I'd seen this stuff before and read numerous accounts of desperate people breaking down or going off on themselves with some stupid spree or eventually mutilating or killing themselves over what they took as profound disappointment but which was really nothing at all and much like Religion itself they too seemed always to start off with the premise that 'something is wrong' and thus were always predisposed already from the start to find fault with reason or a reason for fault - whichever way it was phrased it meant something negative for them and to them and by which they'd trounce complacency and be done with pleasure and constancy and instead end up crazed and demented on some legendary quest for a 'rightness' and 'justice' only they could see - look about us everywhere and see the results of that - but there wasn't anything sensible I could say nor really wanted to as I simply watched as he talked - and it was really too bad too because I KNEW there was a satisfaction present - in everything - if only he'd try to achieve it and like Buddha had observed 'it is what cannot be spoken in words but that whereby words are spoken...what cannot be thought with the mind but that whereby the mind can think' and this goodness of a Godness could not be fathomed out by reason but only 'revealed' to us by an experience which cannot be expressed in words or concepts - it is impossible to make something like this a mere object of thought and for that reason I felt sorry for him while yet silently wishing him well on his journey or quest or for that matter his own personal disaster - all his deal NOT mine.

100. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN FARM:

And just as I looked up I saw there were fourteen new members of the USNavy (straight as an arrow) exiting a government car at some childish fast-food restaurant Parkway foodstop and they all looked allright enough mesmerized and vacant as they strode in in a sullen and almost-so-mechanical fashion right through the belabored and most necessary doors wherein people were listed and lined like flies buying and packaging foods without description and the wild kids were crying and flailing and the two old biker types were sitting erect watching the lassies from the opposite side of the room and it all seemed (really did really) like some far-distant play of action without words and a scene from a distant land where everything jumbled together to make something else and where there was never no reason no semblance no sense and the words of the ‘dead’ were all that could be heard and I asked myself specifically if ‘I’d ever known anything like this before?’ and found I couldn’t answer and I asked Leo Benjamin Kirk Hallet Jimmy Cruise and (again) this Mike Bartholomew fellow ‘where was I?’ and without even turning they said as one - “you are nowhere really but just witnessing the play and this scene takes place at the Union Rest Stop of the Garden State Parkway PREPOSTEROUS you see but so real nonetheless and we’re all still putting these finishing touches on what the people should say NOW THAT WE’VE GATHERED THEM HERE and of course if you’ve any suggestions just put them right in” and that’s how – apparently – I became Dialogue Director for a play I never wrote but had merely imagined and the curtains (OH I NOTICED) were made of hair and everyone wore gauze and the murmurs I heard were the sounds of the crowd while the Navy van noisily and seemingly without an exhaust system bellowed through the parking lot picking up all criminal minds and the soldiers ran sunning from the floor to the furnace but JUST AS QUICKLY the sun had come out and transformed was everything to some far-other time of academic groves and needles of pine and fine sunny plains of grass and sunlight and nary a building in sight and I noticed I was transported by all of that back-way-back into time a time before existence arose of anything we knew and the fair academic groves almost had no language themselves for people ‘early’ people were sunning themselves eating whatever grew from the bushes and trees and it all seemed like some long magical lunchtime of wisdom and thought and all before us stretched every endless possibility of chance and fortune and opportunity and might for the NEXUS PLEXUS very real world was as yet unformed and open to all things and no mental frame had yet evolved so that ANYTHING in actuality could become ANYTHING for ‘concepts’ had not yet arisen (we were still working on language and some forms of communicating pleasure) and the whole wide world AS YET was unformed nor fixed (‘your analgesic gel is telling little fellow for everything depends upon the frame into which you place it and by your choice of ‘frames’ so often are your ‘pictures’ made or broken and success itself could hinge on so many things just like this…’) but I wondered at that moment if a police car went by WHAT would it say (and I realized of course ‘NOTHING’) and I read the Runic Stone as its message said ‘DIRECTIONS TO FLIGHT’ but it had been left unread oh so many years and much of what was there had gone interred and neglected through every empire and each wild civilization - starbound earthbound and distant or near - over all the eons and all the every years and in saying what I dreamed I portrayed the necessary images so others could see (for that was all the theater ever wanted from anyone – its own ILLUSION!) and with that I closed my eyes and swam away…‘WE see now that the axioms of Geometry are simply definitions and that the theorems of any geometry are simply the logical consequences of these definitions and a GEOMETRY is not in itself about physical space : in itself it cannot be said to be ‘about’ anything.’