Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

146. MARMADUKE AND BAAL:

There's often a material reality to the most superficial emotion : like parents crying over the death of someone they revered the real reason for the crying can be traced back to something other : a memory of childhood want or need or a recollection of a moment of loss or a loved-one gone or some old aunt or uncle from another land - stories they'd heard of but which were only brought forth as real in the family situation which formed them : none of this can be articulated properly but for those involved it all becomes the sentimental underlayment girding everything else and coloring and influencing the very way the world is experienced and seen forevermore - in fact it all is one of the most rational reasons for much of the maudlin behavior one sees in politicians and honorees and heroes as they stupidly try to verbalize what they're experiencing but wind up instead yapping some sentimental drivel proving nothing at all and I've always found that this sort of thing stays alive and is present everywhere and most especially in the 'lessons' we draw or try to draw from history : stories and adventures turned into lesson-leading or religiously-indoctrinated pabulum and tales gone awry with overt detailings of Faith and Honor or Fidelity and all of that - Christopher Columbus in a valiant effort for God or (no wait) the Queen or (no wait) the greater power of the search for Right and Propriety for the gloried kingdoms and powers that were : the frugal episode of Martin Luther and his Theses pinned to a door or the hemlock-induced death of Socrates and all the belated stories which go with it : every sort of cant and trite morality brought to bear so as to 'advance' one or another worldly cause so something or some other could gain and I've always been able to find that beneath everything there's always an undercurrent of a 'greater' reality and knowledge almost a 'secretized agenda' to what was or is being portrayed - from the 'comedy' of Marmaduke to the sentience of 'Baal' and everything else with it - NEARLY all of literature and art and entertainment couched in weird and somewhat twisted moralities - the world is constantly under pressure of the influence-peddling of people wishing to turn things their way - so WATCH OUT! it should be said and let no man fool you twice Haystack Calhoun or whomever it may be -- and like the small parts of everything which are embedded into everything else this crazy old world it seems just goes on and just as Religion is all about transcendence (really that and nothing more) in the same way no one really likes being here but one by one we go on anyway - hopeful perhaps for deliverance with the patience of a saint and wiser than a saint too but nevertheless resigned (as it were) to the ending : the girl I was walking with was off to my side and I noticed she had the palest reddest eyelids I'd ever seen and with red eyelashes too and she often closed her eyes as she talked and all I'd see were pale pink slits where eyes just before had been and it too all became to me like a high transference of things - here and there the little and the large - the tree with reluctant leaves the roadside light which must be triggered by the switch the way traffic and people flow together as opposites but as one and never are any words exchanged - I knew I was falling for something but I couldn't know what - the metal clang of the cars turning corners as people try to sneak between and the cluttered condition of traffic and its congestion - humans and things scurrying everywhere and about nothing no matter where to as the simple toss and throw of living itself is enough - nothing ever seen by Blake nor Whitman or Stevenson nor Caesar himself yet today it is all among us : a radical historian would say 'jam and tobacco - the very best things.'

145. SO MUCH DEPENDS ON YOUR PRE-SUPPOSITIONS (nyc, 1968):

So what did I know or (really) what did I care for it was all the same from my little book as I'd only recently arrived there heard all the stories grabbed up absolutely as much as I could experience and understand and went about my way watching and noting in awe and silence as I moved about switched places and allegiances and mosied up and down to whichever place I wanted to be whenever I wanted to be there and I'd heard stories and lines from the mouths of the famous and the lost the broken and the new the young and the rare and in that atmosphere I had to do double-time and quicker trying to make up and overtake everything that was around me Morton Feldman David Hare Philip Guston and Esteban Vicente too and all that I had to listen fast and learn hard or at least try to remember which of those I was doing or wanted to and if there was ever to be (for me) some grand sacredotal finish to things - as if in some weary gothic cathedral of the mind or some Fennario I sought to find - with all the glitter and light snuffed out I pretty much just wanted it to come without bidding and unknown to me - some sudden flash of death would be fine - and there were times too when I just wanted to flee and to have some other place to go to some Muncie Indiana of my own a place distant and elevated and singular where I could walk upon the high-ground and the dirt-grass hills amidst the scrawny northern trees but every time that sort of impulse arose I always managed to fixate on something else again - something historical or literary or artistic something by which the New York City presence of the dark and gloom and dirt and foreboding took on again its own vibrancy and allowed me free rein and even if all that took some weird religious turn it was all OK by me - I studied scripture and the history of the Bible and all the scribes and people who'd collected collated re-wrote and edited it over the long centuries of our time - those same people who'd molded something from it to suit each their own tastes and I rolled with it all and squandered no time in lost effort and as was said to me 'you've got to empty yourself of everything and become a vessel of the Lord' I took the advice as I could while at the same time living my own Curse of Tantalus which condemns its victims to an endless desire for and an impossible pursuit of the whole past the whole book the whole truth - an ancient hoary legendary curse which seemed rather more a blessing for me and an appropriate one too for I wished nothing more than to dwell deeply and as deeply as possible within all that I lived and experienced and as Moses - it was said - wrote the Torah in his own hands - so too I sought to transcribe my world and my reality in MY own hand and somehow project that and deliver that as a form of 'new scripture' to all my fellow mankind of souls in the dark or bodies in pre-death (however I wished to see them on any given day) and I learned - astonishingly as well - that ancient texts were written continuously without separation between words or punctuation and in the course of the first millennium of the Common Era (our time) scribes had to learn how to divide Hebrew and Greek and Latin words - as printers do now - but doing this required many hard choices - such as - how do you divide the following : GODISNOWHERE ? is it GOD IS NOW HERE or is it GOD IS NO WHERE ? and much depends upon your pre-suppositions.

144. WEST-WORLD - the NYC WESTSIDE ART-SCENE, 1970: 'Almost a Nightmare, Sir':

Nathanael West once said 'your order is meaningless - my chaos is significant' (born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein) he was born in New York City and as I read him and learned a little about him I became curious too about more - it was nothing really not a deep sidetrack into something dense and dark just more a curious fillip of mind into following a local thread so as to see where it went - (New York was in fact filled historically with many of these little stories of people who'd become something else and reputations built upon or salvaged from nothing but pluck and (perhaps) certain levels of ordinate and engrained talent - which the more I delved the more I saw was often nothing more than a talent for performance) : but that's just the way that stuff went and some people it seemed were just born to it - performance display loudness ostentatious fluff and all the rest and parts of the Village and its environs were loaded I knew already with the theater crowd and the art crowd who just crow'd homosexual and lesbian at every turn and even though you get used to it all quickly it's still a bit weird the aspect of the design and the display that takes primary place among them even the smallest little restaurant or cafe scene anywhere I went was fraught with gay tension - colored paintings on the walls fabrics and decorative jewelry the loud guffaw the rising lilt of a voice telling a tale or recounting something and always always somewhere the fey feminine and most flamboyant boy-man being the most effete fem-man you could imagine : it went everywhere from the cross-dressers to the lousy cranks and the enervating old men - gay all and gay everywhere in a small kingdom of their own - the point of 'Performance' as they saw it I supposed was always theater and much like the theatrics of Nathanael West and the pufferies of Baldwin and Capote too I saw so so many people in so so many ways taking their natural role and playing it to the hilt and never were questions or doubts raised because here where I was living - of anywhere else - was this strange and back-then-still-secret counterculture really alive and well.
-
I awoke to the savage mimicry of two broken arms and a welded candelabra afire : I had been up for days at the 'CutRate Hotel' truly a place of thieves and an army of ants with a cutthroat landlord named Zuckendorf a bevy of boys admitting to strangeness and a cabin-room filled with cloak - places where zippers hung out and people hung their coats and it was all life-sized and large enough so that one could walk right into it and close the double doors behind yourself and if you brought a friend a good time could be had : doubled-over older men with boys the size of feral cats and meowling just as loud and it was out on old Weehawken Street way down by the old Hudson piers that I first met the eyes of Razwell Dukan Kent some shuddering bastard-drunk of the night-eaves between porters of puke in the alley of doubt and the grenadine was laid out on the table where fist-fires surged and the ashtrays had messages writ like fortune cookies in a madhouse of rum and fury : I never stepped back and once twice three-times a lady was more than I could bear and the peculiar French girl I'd been watching or thought I was turned out to be Latvian instead named Guna Martindrack or something like that - and her sister the Transylvanian mad-hen who was had with the milkman was better then ever and naked to boot (a wise man never held that hand and there was nothing between those loving thighs but vinegar and sugar and a story to be told) Gandy Brody and Esteban Vicente Charles Cajori Nicholas Carone Milton Reznick Morton Feldman Mercedes Matter Philip Guston David Hare and a few more too were the only names I had in this network of friends - 8 W8th Street to you and yours - I'd become my own mailman and I'd managed my own space and eight o'clock in and eight o'clock out seemed much too regimented for me.

143. INEPTITUDE COULD BE NO WORSE:

As if I was hidden across a grimy Texas I became a nervous wreck inside my own skin I could never get comfortable I felt always as if the police or something like them were closing in on me getting closer and closer much to my own discomfort and it was never anything I'd 'done' just instead a feeling of something like I'd somehow be implicated in - some long jagged Kafka-like meandering puzzle of no solution which would enwrap and coalesce around me ruining both my life and the rest of my days and the days of any of those around me and as such with the urban mutant (which I sometimes felt I was becoming) it was always something vaguely sinister - two sides of the same coin but different sides on every coin too - so you could see where I was headed like the torn twins or some mythology of the good pious catholic school girl on one hand and the neighborhood hooker on the other (I was 'etherized' upon a table) and spread widely between : no understanding and no explanation possible either and that was the most painful part of it all the knowing that IF I was ever taken in or apprehended by whatever was chimerically chasing me down I'd be at a loss for words to explain it all to any others who might ask - whose lives I may have ruined and whose situations and resources I'd have squandered : no words to matter with no stories to tell why or how - it had all started so slowly and then grown and gotten bigger YET remained slow and really NEVER took up any speed or tempo and that was what made it all the more rigorously painful and INEPTITUDE COULD BE NO WORSE -- long lines of silver Buicks in the sun with the piano-player's appointments all ruined because he'd lost the use of his hands and the washerwoman with ten bucks to spare cleaned out the parson's house while he was away - taking all the silverware and breaking into the strongbox and taking the money too ! what a warp and what a story but too disinclined to tell it all no one would speak up - Alan Shepherd John Glenn and Virgil Gus Grissom like 3 sixth-grade saints in my memory stayed current (we listened raptly in that fateful year on a black 8-transistor hand-held portable radio made by Emerson to every snippet of the news it told - bilious savagery Leopoldville and Mumbasa with Dag Hammerskjold's plane going down Cassius Clay and Malcolm X U Thant and Tryge Lie - so many weird names to boot)- I swallowed it all like freebasing acid on the LSD bib of a stage filled with Hamlets : there was no town to name and no name for the town : one piece after the other on a great bridge to nowhere : penicillin nodules in lumps of clay and stool pigeons in old Jersey City dungeons with Murph the Surf and the Star of India writ large.

142. ACT AND ACTED UPON:

You need few things really to be able to keep going or to get by : you need to search and know how the human ‘animal’ works – watching its movements reactions grimaces and feints seeing how thoughts of the animal are made manifest by moves of the animal – all these are things which add to the growing idea of ‘feel’ of felicitude for life iself ease of motion and movement and all this to see- for Mankind is a busy animal and one always scurrying about changing building cutting moving and bringing things to and fro and just by watching everything occur there is a richness that accumulates and it is cost-free and constantly changing as it ennervates the mind and spirit to move itself forward – we bring back from that swarm each part and parcel of ourselves and things we remember the people and faces who come and go for just as in passing through time and events together we gain people and lose people we still ‘keep’ portions of them all within us and our traveling tableau provides us all the fodder and material we need to proceed and continue making a life - the rolling land sliding by the sunrise and its fall the spiriting of clouds and wind the rain ads and snows which come all of then precipitate themselves and more as they both ACT and are ACTED UPON and so it is with events and people around us : we are the chemical agent of change and process we are the reagent into which all this mix is thrown while WE are consumed and that exact-enough life-chemistry is what makes us have value and goal and just as NATURE wastes nothing but re-forms all things so too do we in our way possess and transform together eveything around us ‘all the world’s a stage’ and all the rest and if we are actors in it playing our parts we are as well actors out of it developing roles changing the script and entering a constant re-write : these were the little things I learned the notes-of-notice of a man on the street and I amassed a fortune in my way - talking to people sourcing from anyone proposing links and adding to the catch-all fervor of the crowds barely held at bay and still now I can recall the bleat and the utterance of each person along – just months before I had been settled and screwy in a madhouse a house in a nowhere of sameness in families filled with dread and confusion up and down the streets all the same and now I had transformed what once was cheap carpet into a lush grass and I recalled the years spent in a certain lassitude of local movement – school home yard and field and not much more – visiting with relatives in the same boats with the same attitudes and ideas altogether and with their deafening silence towards anything which then may have been happening outside of themsevles it was startling they heard at all : my father’s plight was one of three usually – fearing getting ‘laid-off laid-on or laid-out’ as I’d put it and the solace he brought to himself was in feeding and tending a family just the rest : but that held no cold comfort for me and I wanted out and got it : words on a jacket lines on a lawn sports in the attic and nothing to do and it’s a shame how many things were wasted.-
Not that there ever was a severence of doubt about any of that.