Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

115. IT'S ONLY 930:

Somehow numbers got to be symbolic too : there was 509 east 11th 8 west 8th some bunch of guys at the local music hall on the nearby avenue had a song called 8:05 the rent was 60 I was 18 and none of this had any bearing really on anything at all except that once I went to a Bach lecture and started hearing all about numerical relationships and the scales and tonalities associated with harmonies and equilibriums and the fact that long before my time composers and thinkers had already been consorting with numbers and twists of logic and related spheres of harmonic convergences and sound and densities all having to do with numbers and their symbolism somehow into a world of meaning and illustration and that all got me to staying up all night listening to Bach - Bach stuff I didn't even know the names of and just listened to because of what it was - and in this dark-night listening I started to feel some real reasons for the existence I was living (somehow that seemed stupidly simply too and especially now as I look back on it - like trying to use regular language to explain a dream) but at the same time it gave me some comfort and then before I knew it it was deep December and everyone passing outside the doorway was bundled in some great heavy coat with the white-frost of breath coming out of their mouth and as they walked I noticed that everyone now seemed so totally self-consumed and really into their walking and sauntering as they went through their own personal thoughts in another world away I started thinking that maybe there was a magical underpinning to everything of life that we knew - some vaporous other-world which bubbled up and portrayed itself as real to us in dreams and connections and coincidences and overlaps and things of that nature and the only way we had of facing what that was was by retreating to someplace within ourselves - a place which instinctively understood all of that and by it gave us comfort and place : maybe Freud and his ilk had called it 'subconscious' and maybe not : but whatever feeble terminology was used to pin it down or try to there it was and remained - obvious and visible to me on these winter nights as people dragged along 8th street right outside the doorway where I watched and I remembered some quote from Webster about his dictionary work referring to him as 'caught in the web of words' and it seemed to aptly be able just as well to sum up for me the idea of being caught up in numbers and numerology of the sort that ruled the stars and births and deaths - even all that if you wanted it - and countless gypsies and fortune-tellers everywhere it seemed were always willing to squeeze out some further information as you wished : the fortune-tellers would move their little storefront reading parlors about as quickly as most people changed their socks but they seemed always settled in for an instant that was timeless and then they'd pull up stakes and be somewhere else so that even in the middle of NYC a Romany Gypsy fortune-telling tribe remained always on the move the mysterious move between things and places with a sacred eye into some other peering horizon at the same time : the secret and the salacious the dire and the dour each message from some other place : and I'd see them along the streets too and simply nod with an unspoken message passing between us and MYSTERY was always like that anyway all the world over.

114. AND NOBODY KNOWS FROM NOTHING:

There's nothing worse than a cowboy on a vendetta whose posse has left him abandoned halfway down the trail - that's the sort of stuff which fills Boot Hill with bodies and gets many a man in trouble in those old western stories but back in the time I'm talking about there was a certain form of anarchy about - which had people running off quite often in three directions at once and never really sure who was following them or behind them for support - and no one really listened to what was being said they just instead all wanted to add to the noise and I remember plenty of times seeing truly cacophonous mobs of silly people at be-ins or love-ins or mobilizations or whatever they wanted to call their activism in great wads of sweaty folk rambling through the park or blabbering about at Union Square or down in the Village or uptown too and they were all a really useless sort responding to messages from bullhorns and screaming loudmouths and politicians of one stripe or another going on about their Americanism and peacefulness and all that but all anyone really wanted - in whichever order you placed it - was as usual sex television fun and entertainment and maybe some food too - that's all it ever was : the same silly and trite generational voices as ever going on about the same things as ever before too - almost constantly anyway since like 1924 - socialists drinkers artist-types intellectuals students and rabble-rousers ending their nights at Chumley's or some downtown collectivist watering hole to discuss what it was they'd just all done and it's still like that today with just the glamor of it all being different and when I hear people say 'God Bless America' I wonder if they really meant to say 'Godless America' or when they say 'Pray for Peace' I wonder if they really mean 'Prey for Peace' which is all much more really like it is anyway but nobody comes near anymore speaking the truth or getting things straight so I'm never surprised and when I go back to some of the places I used to know it's all a really sad jumble for me to see now what it's all become - a cheap stupid carnival filled with pretension and fashionistas or gay/lesbian crossovers of whichever persuasion enough to make me glad at least to see some heterosexual commingling going on but try as I might I can never make any sense out of the present day - buildings all retouched or re-faced into horrific and sorrowful mimics of what they once may have been and nothing old or neglected around anymore left and everything's now got horrific value and horrible prices and costs attached and nobody knows from nothing what they're defending or what's there to be defended either and no matter no one cares.

113. THE SCHMUCK BROTHERS LANTERN FACTORY (nyc,1967):
They'd just finished tearing down the Singer Building right by Park Row along the area of City Hall and that was near the same spot where the old Post Office also had been - another massive red-bricked facade on a huge building built in that now obscure style of some 1880's flamboyance which took up space and seemed all to weigh about a billion pounds - they don't make buildings like that anymore and the only things you can find like that are occasional leftover crumbling midtown police stations or old church schools and stuff - and there was rubble everywhere real rubble not just glass and steel and in that rubble were thousands of items to salvage and pick and the trick was to somehow get the deal or buy the rights to as much of that stuff as you could get your hands on - in those days all the regulations and limits and stipulations about things were not in place as they are now so it was relatively easy to get to these things and just tramp around at will which people did - contracted people and regular people too walking over mounds of junk - and from places like that these guys like the Schmuck Brothers and many others would find their raw material and there'd be trucks and vans parked all askew with guys loading them up with anything and all that took a month or two or more to clear and the wreckers by then would have moved on to the next building - most often nearby too or right across the lot or wherever - for the developers at that time were trying to connect parcels and build 'larger' sites where before there'd have been two three or four buildings it wasn't large enough unless they were now all conjoined and contracted as one for the sorts of large steel/glass buildings they were putting up with plazas and dead street areas and setbacks and entryways and all that so this meant there was plenty of rubble and wreckage going on and the way of dismantling buildings back then was huge iron and concrete wrecking balls which often would just continually smash into the walls and things one hit after the other until various portions just fell - not too much controlled demolition and explosive devices as are used now - it was a much different operation with cranes and shovels and steam pickers and trucks and things all over the site while huge cranes would stay in position as they each held an operator who would just keep swinging the demo-ball over and over into whatever and people scurried around below and beneath and stuff just flew and fell everywhere - it was a true mess at times - and then just as suddenly it would simply stop cease come to an end and all would be quiet except for the occasional groan and crash of something which tardily would decide to give it all up and come crumbling down : and that then was the situation all along the area of downtown as in addition to everything else they began the final process of deconstructing and dismantling and destroying the entire lower westside for what was to become the late lamented Twin Towers of the World Trade Center mysterious state-sponsored lucre Mammon boondoggle without any sense of being that it was and all for nothing really as hundreds of businesses and literally thousands of people within their neighborhoods were displaced moved and made essentially homeless too and the whimper that went up meant nothing to anyone as the continental rigors of state-powered force reconstructed whatever it wished and wherever it selected and at the same time too as up in the village the enraged and sensible voices of Jane Jacobs on Hudson Street and all of those people sought to stop the same stupefying destruction and dismantling of Greenwich Village with through-streets and highway/byways which would have churned up and recultivated the whole area this time for automobile access and the full and unhindered traffic and passage of cars trucks people cargo freight and junk from one faint shore of the island to another and that too was then later in the 1970's superseded again by the huge fight over Westway - which too would have decimated the westside as the elevated highway came down - and the whole circus play of fight argument demonstration and rage had to take place over again and though I was present for most of this stuff I stayed apart from the fray in a manner more reminiscent of one who observes and studies than one who does not care - it was in a way all too real or all too cumbersome for me to take up as a cause in the sense that 'reality' has always obscured me and I never got along well with it and anyway my one silly voice in this fray would not mean a thing because eventually it all happens anyway one way or the other the way it was meant to be and even the plans and such if they're not taken up immediately then a sort of 'defeat' is accepted and in about 7 or 10 years they end up getting what they wanted anyway and if you don't believe me just take a look around - it's all programmed and finalized way beforehand and there's never room for error and mistakes aren't built into the planning or the budgeting and again if you don't believe me just try walking down Houston or Canal Street any day or time of the week and see if there's room for even your body to pass without getting run down by something.

112. HIM:

So let's say that even within this Kingdom of Evil there was no 'External Deity' out there alien to Mankind but just the One whose presence was constant and within everything and accessible and current - I watched the postmen walking their rounds and was somehow able to recognize the HIM of it I watched the clerks giving change and newspapers and saw too and I watched the girls and women walking past and saw it and the parade of motorcars and taxis honking and impatient yet orderly in their queues and way and saw the working Moment within turned out and recognized IT all and silently worshipped - I saw the cop with the stick beat the man with the knife and the old fellow asleep to his death on the sidewalk of an old building and with his bag of cloth and ragged possessions and the spittle of his jaw running with the piss of his pants and I saw God there too - and somehow it all could work and as steadily as the sun lit the sky and the moon walked its paces : everything it its own presence and mooring and every moment running on : I saw it all and if any one else knew of this to say that then I knew not of them.