Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

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.