Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

111. ELM TREES ACROSS FROM CITY HALL:

So why orchestrate the matter ? why try to make sense ? for "Theodore is not a hobo a vagabond or a dirty hitchhiker he is instead a jobless graphic designer who has no work nor prospects because computer skills (which he also doesn't have) have pretty much replaced his version of T-square and art-pen graphic design HE having become OUTMODED and every morning before going job hunting he still bends down over his sleeping wife's head and twirls a piece of her hair around his index finger as he whispers into her ear 'Nan I'm leaving' and she in turn rustles a bit and mutters something and then finds herself wondering if he means for the day or forever and she never knows when she'll come home to nothing to the empty apartment to his absence and the lack of his warmth in the hallway or the muffled sound of TV in the other room or that smell in the place like a person has been there before her" and someone was apparently attempting to describe some domestic scene or something - recounting some story he'd heard or been privy to and as I sat there I found myself too listening to the words flow forth and I realized I too was part of the scene - able to be described as much as anyone else in the telling or the saying for each and every human episode is at base the same - something of emotion and heart or solace or envy any of the hundred things which go into the make of EITHER harmony or conflict and that's the human condition no matter what else anyone tries to tell you and it's all like some old black and white engraving of say Fiorello LaGuardia pugilistically intoning about something in front of some pinball machines painted evil or whatever and he attacks them with a hatchet - making emotion out of some passive rite some mental state of material - all really a NOTHING - but like anyone else he imbues it with something and thereby it lives forever and we still see him whacking the machines over and over a million newsreel minutes of ephemeral time over all these elapsed years the very selfsame things - elm trees across from City Hall a few old boats sagging in the East River harbor and the tired old sullen bell at the Seaman's Church clanging away for something for nothing for some other death PERHAPS at sea - and no one ever knows the difference nor cares yet life goes on in its stagy way and we the AUDIENCE are still trained to clap and applaud at the varied and prescribed times - as we dutifully do en masse for whatever reason it all may be.

110. WITH CANDY STILL ON THEIR HANDS:

'To the sound of your wrecking voice / I am drinking milk on a patio / outdoors somewhere overlooking a great blue harbor / and one without doubt or passage.'
-
There was lots of lost time for me everywhere : walking down along the Henry Street Settlement looking for anything that could give me incentive to go on I looked at the endless array of synagogues and old churches amidst the 'ancient-for-New York' buildings and the now crumbling walkups and storefronts decorated with Hebrew lettering and I saw all the places selling scrolls and dreidels and anything else which the great Jewish masses needed and they stood around too - many of them lame and elderly and sorrowful and mute - short and stocky bent with cane and overcoat and hat and they all seemed meant for something else and someplace else but saddled somehow too with responsibility here for one thing or another and there was a certain gloom and sadness which permeated the area and the tasks each person undertook were heavy and dreary - a thousand seamstresses and ironers and cutters and counters five hundred bakers and cooks and hundreds of others there for prayer and humming and worship and prayer again - prayer for sunrise and prayer for sunset prayer for birth and prayer for death for hunger and for food for good fortune and for massacres crime and well-being EVERYTHING seemed mixed together and I sat down on a stoop across from the settlement building just to watch things come down as workers were tearing apart tenements and ripping up streets to build whatever - one form or another of government building all with government architecture made and selected by stern government agents with very loose government money (once again NOTHING of this was good or right or honest or even needed) and no one looked up no one moved no one even seemed to care as I watched transfixed : old red brick doorways and buildings and fronts with Hebrew inscriptions and synagogue names and symbols the long blue sky behind the star-symbol atop steeples unique to the Jewish way - none of that tall thin boastful Christian style here but rather a stolid mean and chunky brickwork topped by the Jewish star with a circle and it stood stark and lonely against the broad and deepening sky colored as it seemed by every pogram slaughter and death these Jews had ever undergone - but still there was the massive silence and that is what I noticed the most and actually it is that which talked most loudly to me and I remembered someone had said 'if life is so short why then is memory so long?' and judging by what I'd just been seeing I knew I couldn't answer this OR that and it all started to seem like tuberculin fields of dread with people stalking streets like fire or wise men with swords seeking children to kill - with candy still in their hands.

109. DEATH NEARING:

Dazzling in a winning way they swarmed the cafeteria counter and asked a million questions and posed for photos and sat down together and hands met hands and all things jammed and merged and maneuvered in a single way and the only thing left at the wavering pines was the whispering patron of some ancient lines written long ago in a reverie fine - with pebbles in mouth and beach-fronted twine Demosthenes-style enjoined and consigned to the junk-heap of olden times’ history and olden times’ stories and other days' glories but for whatsoever matter it may have occurred no one ended caring and the story seem to veer until VOILA! we found ourselves walking on ice at some Lake Surprise in the midst of great woods where cars parked in three’s and horses walked by and the grand deserted village turned over itself ‘reading history like this never before’ yet even then I’d wished I was gone and much more instead at the water-wheel I sat and watched things pass along and listened to the trees and their unerring song which whispering again to me sure seemed to say : "we’ve got so far to go and we’ve just left today and the narrow wagons of time in whatever disguise shall stay near us and dog us and twist these fair days yet STAY WITH US SIR oh fine gentleman man we are lonely and sad and throughout this fair land we find there’s a need for good company’s parted and we’re again left alone and seem broken-hearted" so if the water I thought and trees like that talked than who am I to ignore what I’d sensed or I’d thought and I rose up then slowly and bowed to the sky and touched with both hands the tree to my eye and for certain that I was alone and unseen I lifted the cap of the evergreen scene and realized my motives had nothing to do with foraging for love or viewing the zoo of all human-kind as they stumbled and yelped and I took to my glory instead the great belt above me of starlight and moon and walked through the sky as steady as soon and months may have passed while I lived in those woods though there’s nothing I know or recall if I could and hunger had taken its great raging toll like some Van Winkle boy back to this present I stole and said to anyone’s ears who may have been hearing "THIS is my life and this is my bearing" and I took me a room in the Excel Hotel and settled down in comfort and slept ‘till DEATH NEARING.

108. THE THIRTEENTH OPTION - Living Through the Depression:

And thus the gentlemen of the jury took their seats and the others arrived – those who would watch and comment and criticize – and then the judge himself came in and sat down on the big royal elevation but just as he did so the chair itself creaked and broke and the lower leg had twisted out and deposited the judge upon the floor by which time a messenger had arrived bearing papers from a notary which attested to the fact that the manufacture of that chair was suspect but by then the judge had reasserted himself forward and slain the two guards who’d left this to happen and as beleaguered as everyone was - for fear is a great leveler and evidently no one really wishes to die - the room was abuzz with crickets and wallflowers and the old woman who had walked up from the basement was relating the story of the estate sale from Saturday at which an ancient man had come in asking far too many questions of the house and time and home and possessions and he walked away purchasing nothing and that had made everyone suspect of his motives and "WHEW! was he strange" she’d said and "all we were trying to do was help out the Marsden family which was in some hard times after Helen died and by selling the old house and all she’d once had they were getting some financial savvy into their lives and even the grown kids were happy – even though Helen was dead – because they’d been able each to take their own favorite things and photos and mementos for themselves so that anyone else traipsing through the house wouldn’t matter to them" and just then the judge arose and said "I still profess that you all were trespassing and had no real business in that place for in reality it was not yours and never had been but for this moment we’ll let that pass" and he sat back down with a big pass of air and it was actually that pass of air which had gotten my interest but again he started professing something sonorously like a judge in the true modern sense of the word "I am not an impartial observer here you see and never have been for there was a time when I was deeply in love with Helen and she with me so I must take objection to this course of events and they say that Justice is blind but let me tell you it’s a false blindness which is caused by nothing more than – if you’ve never noticed – the blindfold upon her eyes which is processed and put in place by enemies of the court and they seem to feel that if you convince enough people of your impartiality and blamelessness then that will simply make it so but it never does and the entire thing is a pack of lies and actually I’VE HAD IT I’m done I quit I’m leaving this bench!" and with that he left the room and was never heard from again not even in the annals of legendary justice or any of Albee’s plays or anything of that nature and after that – and probably because of it – it became really boring to just hang around and so everyone left one at a time singly or in clumps I REALLY HADN’T NOTICED.

107. NOTHING STOOD STILL IN THIS KINGDOM:

It's always been too much for me to catch up with everything and because of that there are a lot of things which just accumulated and stayed there - half the time I wasn't sure so much as what I 'had' as what it was I remembered 'doing' - meaning the act and not the result intended or not was what stayed memorable - and that was pretty much the way it went and by which I learned things : the Collier Brothers in their way had nothing on me (they were two brothers who died in their apartment in Brooklyn or somewhere amidst an accumulated assault of bundled and piled newspapers magazines clippings books and everything else too - so I knew what that was about for sure) and I accumulated just as much although it was not often tangible 'stuff' as to be identifiable by description but that of course made it more mine and more singular by far and as it was I kept myself bounded by both the streets and their luck each in their own way : talking with Chinese people down along Baxter and Mott and Oliver and Cherry I was able to learn to fend in a unique way - eat on the cheap as needed get tea and oranges and learn where to find them and just as much visit the old dairy bars around Rutgers Square and Grand Street where an all-night vigil was never interfered with : endless and fascinating the leftover Jew scholars and philosophers and all-night eccentrics or the maniac madmen huddled over a cup of tea or coffee next to the Jewish Daily Forward building or Yarmolinsky's Bank where people would read Hegel Kant or Nietzsche all night and try to make some liquid sense of enlightenment's own tenets and existentialism's rebels - both fools sometimes akin to nothing but endlessly fascinating the hunt - and of course the Seward Branch library (a once-magnificent building that was and curiously American-styled too) or I would pace down to the river and its odd corners and currents as they wended along the old eastern streets - tug and barge traffic small boats and police craft wagons and fish and schooners and the slow and steady lap-lapping of the saddening river's flow as it crossed over and under a mostly-everything - silence bounded both by mystery and all that was possible too and I KNEW THAT but my task was to learn the difference and I knew nerves wouldn't do it nor taunting or bombast nor the bravery of the stupid or the silence of the wise - yet somewhere between those two poles I sensed would be me and kept there finely-hewn by all I knew and whatever I'd decided : the memory of time was racing ahead of time itself and I gripped mightily that downing tree and greening park or ANYWHERE my feet could take me until I realized one day sensibly that I covered the actual length and breadth of that city numerous times knowing every nook and cranny as I paced and before me then it all changed again (for nothing stood still in this kingdom) and I'd have to learn new parts again or just let it go and I'd swear too that on some streets to be sure the elevated railroad - though by then some years gone - still cast its shadows upon the street and still buzzed around within people's heads and I'd think 'why did castles have moats?' and I'd answer that back to myself in the same way as if to say 'they did so to keep pillage away and conquest and mayhem and they ringed themselves with water for security on at least 3 sides with hopefully a rock wall of an elevated height behind to build into' and I matched that with the little island kingdom itself I inhabited and question again 'was it what was kept out or what was kept in that was more important?'

106. YOUR DISTANT CRUD WOULD STUPIFY ME STILL (nyc, 1967):

The guy had only one hand - I may have mentioned that once before - but the hand that he had was more adept at doing things than the two hands of most other people and he could purse-snatch or pickpocket quicker than flame and with that strange handicap he moved swiftly and the swiftness was aided by the distraction he caused by just HAVING the one hand because people naturally gravitated towards staring or concentrating on what that other arm was doing or lacking or whatever and that certainly drew attention from his actual activity - his name was Len Levy and he'd come through the very bowels of New York City having first grown up in the old Hell's Kitchen when it really meant something and then - after eventually losing the hand in a brutal knife fight - spending lots of time in both jail and recuperative hospitals all provided to him free of charge by the wonderful City of New York but he never spent a day with his eyes closed and could recite back most every detail of things he'd seen and stuff he'd learned in all this travail for he had a mind like a trap - the proverbial cop mind noticing everything forgetting nothing - and like a detective he could tell you instantly when something was amiss : a bad license plate on a car or a fake sticker or a bogus story or a fake excuse and there wasn't ever an agenda that got by him if it wasn't absolutely one hundred percent exact and on the up and up and because of all these reasons he moved forward with an absolute 'no-stick' quality to him and he seemed to just land in money all the time - I'd met him the very first time outside an old lousy bar on the west end of 37th Street where the horses were kept for some of the horse-drawn carts and things that paraded through midtown and it was on a really old-looking sawdust covered wooden ramp where I met up with him after that to ask some things of him - like what he wanted with me and how he had gotten mixed in with the service-industry crowd around there (he said that for a guy with his one hand it was the second most pleasant thing he could do with the other hand) and he took to that little ramp and horse-garage area pretty well taking care of the feedings and keeping things in order - as he put it - a little bit at a time 'never too much work to get me worn but never to little to bore me' and since he wasn't in it for the money he'd figured he might as well do something he enjoyed and I'd occasionally go there to visit with him (he'd sometmes sit and be playing cards with one or another Hispanic guy there) just to pass time and watch what went on - carriage guys coming and going bushels of feed and oats and stuff being carried in or out and of course the offal-wagons which would always need tending and the whole place was - though pretty compact - ample enough too to take care of everything needed and there was a blacksmith area with a great-looking workbench and tools and strips of leather and harnesses and things - all the sort of items which fascinated me both in their real presence and also in the strange fact of their just BEING there like that in the middle of some God-awful strange city situation - once again I was taken in by the total incongruity of so much of what I saw - a tack shop and saddlery right there in the grimy middle of westside Manhattan running and functioning just as quietly and steadily as any other outrageous surprise in the middle of a city like this and I found out he had a two-room apartment on 41st Street and often also just stayed right there and slept in the back of the horse-room redolent as it was with the warmth and odor of straw hay horse and manure - actually a quite wonderful and very inviting aroma all told - and he kept some belongings in two trunks there (into which he pointed out to me once also went any of the items he got from his small steady stream of theft : jewelry money glasses wallets gloves keys cards - anything he could get away with) and he had people who'd buy from him whatever he wished to sell later on so that ALL TOGETHER whatever rank and foul deeds he did - obscure as they were - they managed to come back to his own benefit over time and the amazing thing I learned and a fact that's always stayed with me was that on the 'surface' of Manhattan what is presented to the 'public' and the outsiders who visit and travel through and turn all the cash registers of the city is ONE thing but the gritty reality of it all BENEATH that is quite another thing - layers upon layers of corrupt dealing theft and danger over which is slid some sort of criminal grease by which it all slides together and over - one piece after the next - and even with all the hands out for parts and percentages it provides enough lucrative heaps of endeavor so as to satisfy an entire underculture of graft corruption and thievery - the very sort of stuff which is NEVER really mentioned or if mentionied is never delved into by anyone INCLUDING authority and law most of which is just as much involved in all of it as anyone else - and the shiney veneer of what is New York City as we know it is only one very small part of the much greater reality - which probably feeds thousands and prospers as many too.