Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

136. SERVING THE CANNON I REFUSED TO SERVE (nyc, 1968):

There was a terrible form of militarism in the air which everywhere had entered people's minds : the stand-America firsters had popped up everywhere with stickers on windows flags flying high construction sites and gravel trucks roared with lunchtime workers wearing decals on their hats - the fact is no one really knew a whit about Vietnam nor the war nor the French nor Ho Chi Minh nor the Viet Cong and Viet Minh Laos and the rest - but no one cared either - they just had staked out media positions and ranted and raved from those points and everywhere you looked there was someone scraping over something and using the words 'honor' and 'privilege' 'patriotism' and 'duty' and all that bullshit like it just dripped from a fountain somewhere in its richness : face it America had always been a garish country where people wore their styles and their bad taste somehow as badges of honor and now there were hundreds of thousands of old-timers and WWII veterans somehow colluding with each other and with the nation's politics and power-brokers that there was an equivalence between the Second World War and military effort and light and power with the Vietnam War or whatever they called it (it varied from 'crisis' to 'incursion' to 'assistance') and all those mid-life veterans and their wives now and the old veteran's groups had taken the side of power and might and right to facilitate a pretty severe divide in the country between the 'youth' who objected to the war (they were essentially the ones at risk the cannon fodder being scapped up and having their lives interrupted by being drafted in audacious numbers and thrown into that poorly defined cauldron) and if you went anywhere (for instance - McCormack's) you'd find these old guys sitting around with their beers defaming the war-resistors and their 'anti-American lack of patriotism if they don't like it here they should get the fuck put the over-privileged bastards when MY country called I went when I had to fight I fought all those lazy mother-fuckers want to do is dance make love and smoke dope') - all of which was untrue but whatever it meant no one cared - and if you weren't able to voice back some support for the bullshit just spoken you were pretty much out of luck or in trouble because the divide was that severe and it was really a break-off between not just generations and points-of-view but entire ways of life and ways-of-the-future too and soon enough everything became a parody of itself : garish TV shows taking off on the theme of that 'divide' and missing the point and politicians trying to specifically take one side or the other and use it for their own purposes and the efforts of so many went really for naught or for the negative so that before long the Great Divide had actually happened and materialized within the fabric of the very society we lived - at least in Manhattan proper as I knew it where in the main both sides were well-represented if not well-meaning BUT there were parts of the country too where one or the other sides pretty much went unrepresented and it was a lost cause one way or the other : not a pretty scene in 1968 and the years which followed and the result of course again was violence bullets death and other such tactics which eventually resulted in as much state-side rubble as you'd see later (yet to come) after debacles of villages like My Lai and things like that : both sides had intensified themselves so much that by term's end neither of them had any valid point nor leg to stand on and all that was left was a morass of noise and a horrid background hum to the nastiness of the everyday situation.

135. EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL TREATS:

"These are people who understand nothing and as I watch them I tremble myself at the thought of the future of time or the concept of making a future of time and place with these people for as they walk so they do and believe me they are stupid so stupid in fact that as I make my way through this new wilderness (which has unfolded and then flapped back over itself these many years now) I am aghast at the thought of being given over to their future - these people who are dependent on everything for everything who run the cities like crapshoots while things decay and fall who saunter with largess through countryside vistas now of longing only for all that once was but is now lost who build twisted palaces in places they never should be who light candles to Virgin of Guadalupe and sing chancel songs to myth and who recognize nothing and demand the same and run with families of children all askew through open places now degraded and degraded places now open and it’s a long and sorrowful sight this trepidation of longing death destruction peace calm and quiet with every sidetrack towards something else taking us back to the formative nothing of our own young years and the land we walk on here YEAH though it is hard to believe every street and lane and alley and park space was once a wilderness for someone a place bereft of definition yet without time and direction and space and place AND ALL OF THIS was enforced upon it by mankind and mankind's gigantic unholy writ and microcosm of nothingness written in a singsong hand of stars and starlets and personages and forces unrecognizable and now like a swarm we have let the dead in we have allowed the sick and strange to walk all over we have given up our guard to the long-lost longing of the extra-terrestrial realities of all and every which was AND misunderstanding as such every thing and every concept they diverge badly from the life they should be leading but because of that too are all erroneous and false concepts perpetuated and formed into actualizations of images and thereby the physical limitations and structures we see around us constructed and maintained of course by Earth-bound sibling idiots over-weened with bad pride and convoluted treacheries which are then used one hundred and fifty percent for the effect of perpetuating all which is wrong and of course one of those things being the attributes of claim and possession and the warfare and debilitations that go with it for only in the closed and shuttered minds of someone already dead can death and destruction mean anything or divide any distinction between absolutes of false rightness and false wrongness BUT SO BE IT and if there was anything more to say I’d say it precisely (or even loosely) but language pales fails and falters here it’s dead as a doormouse or doorknob or whatever and rather than any of this I’d really rather flee and just re-enter the vast and benevolent Blakean macrocosm of the self-created world with all its own Gods and Goddesses and declamations and demons and rankings and apparitions for at least there I am in all rightness and am in control of my creative senses wild and beautiful as they may be for only with the use of that lens is the real focus brought to be and as Blake once said too ‘the road to excess leads to glory’ or maybe that was Robert E. Lee who knows I certainly don’t ! and by that encounter I want to close this book now tell me something about yourself" and with that I was startled again and stepped back to reassess or take a second look at something but then decided to myself that this was probably a woman who had money and I had none and she probably had the kind of tastes that run to reading architecture magazines and worrying over what fixtures are put in a bathroom and I cared nothing and again I had nothing but perhaps the once-contempt I could muster for someone such as her but no matter because listening as I was to her overview of things I decided I’d better throw her a crumb no matter what it was : "well you know between us to be honest I’ve reached the point where I feel really that I can without too much difficulty argue successfully both or either sides of any argument" and she said "called ‘cowardice’ yes go on" and I continued "so for me to continue listening to you gets tiresome because even though I do understand what you’re saying I do feel that I should have or have probably said it all first and then at the same time I figure that I could successfully refute anything you’re saying without too much of a material problem and even though maybe I like you you are too in many respects an enemy to me and if I haven’t got that much difficulty seeing you in that light then it’s pretty easy on a larger scale to see why people would have decided to go to war or fight and here we are walking through these grounds and I want to say I’m also probably pretty happy that endless waves of young guys got themselves battered and killed three hundred plus years ago for all this shit it’s a pretty nice deal and fairly cost-free too for me as I see it and yeah I understand what you’re saying – we have given over our land and space to a greatly-lessened stage of intellect but so what it gives US somehow a higher and more rarefied position from which to scoff at the bastards beneath us it FACILITATES DETACHMENT for the likes of us and I see that as a good thing – we need to do nothing except to stay outside the mess and we can go on with our personal callings and because of that I want to say maybe I don’t really care one whit about how many dead bones I’m walking over to get anywhere for as I see it that was their problem and they solved it all in the way they say fit - as pygmy minds are wont to do - so I allow myself a pretty rich life because of them" and she said "typical bastard point of view – not worrying an iota over whose dead corpse you’re crawling on order to get your way it’s called EXPLOITATION" and I turned and said "bullshit it is I haven’t exploited anything and I can barely stay here and listen to you mouth such cant for the matter at hand is having nothing to do with the base politics of what you’re saying (and then saying you don’t say) except for the endless quandary of your crap dialectic and my concerns are and always have been spiritual and literary and groundbreaking and otherworldly while it seems your skinny rich ass is somehow sunk in the morass of your own guilt and doubt but what is it you’re trying to prove anyway ? you apparently spend your days pouting while you spout an endless disarray of something to funked-out college kids who soon develop attitudes but what are you anyway?" and right then a really nice looking girl had stopped with a dog – some big hairy specimen – which she was allowing to frolic in wade and drink from the small part of the running brook nearby and as I watched I really was taken aback momentarily by her beauty as that she possessed right then (‘in golden sunlight yellow hair and the fairest of figures which ever stood there’) and being distracted I actually did not hear the start of the Pinkerton lady’s reply but caught on as I could "vouchsafe to listen but you won’t I am about the complete opposite of what you just said for I am trying to develop a race of super-beings in their thought and attainment and to do that I teach them that there are no limitations to what they wish to do or think of doing and it all comes together in some form of graded progress slowly along on the way to a newer form of paradise for them and for us" and so yeah yeah I figured all that and more was coming for it always seemed these ‘academic’ types or whatever they are always like to get all hazy and doctrinal with theory and stuff you’re supposed to not know anything about so that they can baffle you with it all and thereby win the day but however you see it I saw it as yet another bad habit and it reminded me of the guy I’d recently talked to when I noticed as he sat next to me that the watch on his wrist was about two and a half hours different from the time as I showed it and it was well enough within a margin of error that I thought perhaps my clock had died or whatever and so I asked him if his watch was showing the right time JUST LIKE THAT and he laughed back and said "no it’s broken the hands are wrong they don’t work but the digital is still good so I keep using it and just refer to that" and then I realized he had an embedded digital readout in the face too which kept correct time and the watch itself since it was a metal and fancy one and probably worth a few bucks to him and was seen as too valuable to give up on so he kept it and as I said that reminded me very much of her points of view or attitude in that unless you first understood her valuations and reasonings you’d not have a clue as to why or what she was saying about something which seemed so different from what you had expected to hear (much like an apparent difference in time) but regardless right then she jumped right back in "that reminds me too of what I was saying just before about how it was the British who always revered their lands and made these great strides towards preserving the magic realism of their lands and properties and in an old piece from the 1660’s there’s mention made of the necessary removal from England of the smoky workshops which so dotted and darkened London and that the environs of that city should be planted with ‘such shrubs as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous flowers to sweeten the stench’ and it was called I believe ‘Sylva’ by a John Evelyn I believe too and it then lovingly describes how to plant tend and harvest all sorts of tree – from the solid English oak to the Frenchified acacia with roots which ‘insinuate and run under the ground’ and he admired the fact that trees could ‘generate their like without violation of virginity’ and his ultimate purpose behind this amazingly enough was that these giant plantations of trees once propagated and matured were to be felled to provide the raw material for ships or a cleaner fuel for manufacturing than the sulphurous Newcastle coal which befouled the London air throughout the 17th century and as I look back on that as but one peculiar instance I am again struck at the amazing gentility of the English touch upon the lands wherein they live and I find all that like nothing here – where without a thought things are cut or dredged or leveled and who cares for it seems the one thing lacking in America for sure is the grace of place and presence which would give a form of holiness to the spaces where we live - this fine park notwithstanding - but back to what started all this WHO would defend this place really ? who would defend and fight to preserve right here this park or even this city – do you REALLY THINK that people would come forth and fight battlement to battlement and doorstep to doorstep in a combat to the finish to defend and save this city I DON’T THINK it would happen in that manner for one thing there’s far far too many different and low-grade mixes of people to even really care – and they don’t – about preserving or saving the place they live in as long as they remain sated and satisfied by whatever they’re GIVEN and that’s the problem too with all this gross anti-intellectualism which is so rampant for it teaches people merely to be stupid and moreso to develop their stupidity and be happy about it so you see there are simply NO treasures here which most people would feel inclined towards saving or fighting for or dying for and so that’s what I testify here to you if you understand that or see what I say."

134. 'I DO SWEAR I WAS ONCE ON THE MOON':

So Neil Armstrong touched the moon - human presence of dimensional reality crossing with the solid eminence of white/tan sandy abandonment and the rigid prophylactic mind-set of reason and logic colliding with abstraction in a fashion of geometric conflict still avoided to this day - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin being the first two of [ODD CONCURRENCE] TWELVE MEN who touched the surface twelve disciples of want from some other place of concrete stallions and rigid morbidities as in "I will make ye fishers of stars" perhaps and in his biography it is mentioned that 'Armstrong moved 16 times in his first 14 years' but always within Ohio when his father finally settled the family in Wapakoneta - not far from the Wright Brothers' Dayton (he later took with him to the moon - as perhaps some poetic gesture of travel-brotherhood - two small pieces of the Wrights' 1903 flyer) - has anyone ever thought of when consciousnesses collide what reality is in turn created and what mass-induced assumptions then take place : millions watching on small metal-framed televisions on some hot July night as two men dusted the surface of some small desolate and lifeless emanation of solidity afloat in dead air - a completely paradoxical vision of reality as we all knew it up to that point - something of no noise no presence no stirring no movement - so much so that even the spike-planted surface-flag had to have its simulated waving-in-the-wind posture made artificially and right there it still stands - as if blowing in the wind in a place where there is no wind - and all of this paradoxical peace and good-will opposed back on Earth by the darlings of youth decimating each other - Vietnam bloodbaths amidst massed puddles of anguish and death UPON WHICH each night nightly that same moon shone SILENTLY and without disturbance over the noise toil death and destruction in the paddies and hills below and for all of that it was THIS world which slumbered 'neath the moonlight from above - and did you know of the rivalry and the tiff between Armstrong and Aldrin and that although they did manage to 'pat' each other on the shoulder once they touched down it was Aldrin's snit over Armstrong's selection as first-man that caused him to NOT take any pictures of Armstrong as mission leader and once they were actually ON the moon the only decent still photograph of Armstrong on that moon was taken by Armstrong himself when he appears as a reflection in a photo of Aldrin's visor (Aldrin had expected to be the first to step-off but sometime during procedurals he was shunted aside for Armstrong) and the reason actually given was (for the 'American' character) 'Neil was Neil - calm quiet and absolute confidence and we all knew that he was the Lindbergh type - he had no ego.'

133. 'MEAT IS MURDER' SAID MAXIE YIELDSTONE:

"Bankrupt the money-heart gather all the oysters in the furious ocean some skimmer like a sieve washing sins from errant sinners singing sounds from the lower jaw I'm Mandible Maxie the one with the mouth and whatever shot off was shot off from somewhere and although I remembered your name I didn't recognize your face - ass backwards really and pretty hard to do - but the Linden tree was a rare oasis and the old woman came down the steps to talk to me about the appointment she'd made at the nail palace nearby and 'who was running the hot dog stand now?' and 'was it any good?' she asked both those questions with a smirk as she lit a cigarette in the fragrant late Fall air but I couldn't smell the difference between HER and anything else there (but I just left it at that and walked away) and I've heard it said that 'meat is murder' but if that is true than 'what of the herder?' and a real answer to that would be that THAT kind of mass-produced cattle-meat never herds is never free never roams and is instead penned up in squalid fetid stalls with nary a foot to move and it's all mass-produced for slaughter and that is that and really the best thing you could do is eat shut up and be glad you're not a cow - sort of like that the long-running debate in my head wished to turn it back on the hot-dog questioner lady who seemed so interested just a minute ago about quality and then some girl walked up to me and asked if I had the time and I said 'yeah - for you I've got all the time in the world' but that wasn't what she meant instead she wanted to hear 'eleven twenty five' and leave it at that but she started telling me about her dog - which was actually a nice dog - but I said 'it's nice about your dog but I'd really like to meet your pussy' but of course I didn't say that either because that wasn't what she wanted to hear and you do really have to be so careful in every social situation."