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.