Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

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).