Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

162. ACCUSATION DESTITUTION FALSE WITNESS STEALTH AND MORE:

There are some men for whom no lines are straight all things lead to crooked places by circuitous routes and the simplest statement is not simple at all - convoluted with passions redundant and stuck the same things recur : accusation destitution false witness stealth and more : all for the purpose of witnessing against a fellow man as in a sideshow stuck with arrow and spear or some cloven-heel barnyard whelp born to wallow in the self-same mud as others have slogged through seeking clues - where are we ? what is this ? and how far will it come to be ? AND for these men (hear me) there are no words worth saying no sentences to lead to salvation or settlement for they arise like fire wicked and blazing atop the mess of their own production and I say to them a 'woe unto you when the tribulation comes' but neither do they see nor hear for they are but like babies waiting to be carried out amidst dark waters of their own dark making.

161. LIVING AT MACDOUGAL ALLEY (nyc, 1967):

'More notes about solitude and longing' - it seems sometimes that could be a pretty fair title of some of the stuff I'm seeing for everywhere I go it seems there is hurt and a wounded structure for it appears that even the very physical State of Our Union is being ruined in the same way that the spirits of people have already been destroyed and it's something that I wanted to delve into but often was unable - back at the library in the old art school where I often slept on the floor overnight after reading for hours this or that tome on theory or practice or history of ART - and by the reading of that in such a place as I was reading it (a great enormous tiring spectacle of a centuries old series of buildings put together as a mansion with its stables and gardens) it seemed to grow even larger in life than in concept - the tall 19th century windows looking out over some stupid 1968 street with its beast-like cars trolling by in the cold - causing little curlicues of vapor to trail them - the people in scarves and great-coats silently passing along their ways to whatever it was that was drawing them in - into a climate of change as awesome and yet as cold as the weather around them : WE all knew it was coming we all knew it was changing but we could not bring ourselves to explain what we saw so we traveled in silence and the only references right then that I had were references to the past - the past without endings and without doubt - some jagged part of the path I wanted to be on but which was turning out to be only some odd offshoot without much meaning some dead-end where I'd flounder some island of limited potential from which I'd simply just never make connection NONETHELESS three floors below me on the street they walked oblivious past what I was inhabiting and all the histories which went here with it and all they had to offer to that date were feeble photo-shops 'instant passports enlarged blow-ups of your favorite photo poster-sized wall shots of your favorite stars' and all the other tendentious crap that went with it - eighth street shoe stores five step walk-ups with little lobbies of mailboxes in rows and buzzers at every address and the worn-down brownstones the sagging steps the forlorn claptrap of every shoe-shop and cheap delicatessen each had its own answer and tried to proffer it - the sailor-sized tattoo shop the smoke shop the ties and clothing stores the record shops and the bookstore and attached at the corner The Christian Science Reading Room lest I forget (that one-night stand of the hopeless and the beleaguered the helpless and lame) - and it was right across from there that the old bar/restaurant was with the Cezanne in the lobby and I often stood there just to see it (albeit through the glass for I never went in) and although it was never understood by me what that particular Cezanne was doing there or why or how - it was as if an extra point had somehow been added onto the personal compass I navigated by - for that reference was referenced as often as anything else : polestar northstar setting sun or riding-high moon : and whether by darkness or bright light each time I passed through MacDougal Alley to or from whatever I took it in and the old stables and the black metal fence and the tiny flicker of the gaslamps and the alleyway with all its entrances and my own back door (some leftover segment of a varied Victorian day when even old New York was answering to a different theme) they each meant something dear and right to me and I knew by the knowing that SOMEHOW right then I was in the correct place for that moment of my life even as much as most of it came to naught but NO MATTER that for I went on nonetheless waning and prospering and waning again as any light from another place was wont to do in the weird atmospherics of this heavy Earth we walk.
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And then some guy walked up to me as I was looking in and said "you know what that is do you ? that's a Cezanne a card players Cezanne and we've only got it for a year or two before it has to go back from where it came - I can tell you're interested in it" and I looked over and said "interested ? yeah that's right I guess I can't get enough of looking at it" and actually I wasn't sure who this guy was or what he was up to or even if he knew or was telling the truth but I didn't let it bother me right then "yes" he said "yes and I can tell - well you KNOW what I can tell about you?" and of course I didn't so I said (stupidly in hindsight) "no what can you tell?" and he uttered these still indescribable words to me "that you're a lost little boy walking these streets with a LOT of pent-up anger and the very idea of peeking into a place like this to look at what you think is some form of high art gets you excited" and then I realized he was just another fag trying to pick up another young street-walking young man like me (for this wasn't the first nor the last time that this sort of thing occurred to me and I never knew why) and I turned and said "fuck you you slattern what do you know about anything anyway and besides you're nothing but a predator now leave me alone" and his eyes narrowed and he stared back "careful now fellow I wasn't meaning no harm rather just seeing if you'd be interested in anything" and in the usual course of these cruising and annoying Greenwich Village nights I knew he'd offer to buy me food take me home want to talk and then sit around and then try something stupid and try to bed me for it had all happened before and there's always been something about these middle-aged Village lonely gay men that somehow leads them to find wandering lost boys but what really annoyed me was his weaving of the Cezanne bullshit into this whole thing - and what did he mean with the 'we've only got it for a year or so more' I wanted to know and I kept trying to think of something next to say while at the same time not wanting to take this any farther so I turned on him again and said "look pal if you don't get out of my face right now I'm going to kick you in the nuts so hard you'll be wearing them as earrings" and with that he turned away and quickly left.
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I don't know why I mentioned that as I did but the trembling path of Eighth Street makes me remember things and I can't always contain what's remembered as I think he retreated back into Washington Square Park not far off and if I close my eyes right now believe you me I'm there again - as I can recall every sound sensation smell and item about that place the old Mews the old MacDougal Alley the old start of MacDougal Street itself and the little gallery on the corner across from the park and the park too and every person who by or along it and all my days there were filled with observation and (even then) the thoughts of memory and the past together - the bleak gray rooftops the cityscape seen from above the old housetops and roof portals of old Greenwich Village the coffee shops and the wasted corners and old havens of geeks freaks artists queers lovers and whores the Italian thugs from south of Bleecker coming north to beat the senseless shit of any fag or beatnik they could find the turning points of old old religion and old foreign custom and the bakers commingled together with vegetable men and lumber men the hawkers and their wares the spaghetti palaces and the twisty streets leading downward and east to the Chinese haunts the smoke-dens opium hovels pharmacy and herb shops ginseng weed tubers of this and that and every potential herb and blossom known to man for everywhere to everywhere was Health to Healing known together.
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HOWEVER that is NOT 'end of story' - and I still remember a hundred other things : how that guy started telling me about some cabinet or something that was underneath the painting some piece of furniture I'd never heard of some French name as he put it "you know what that is ? it's a 'bon heur du jour' - a delicate fall-front desk of the late 18th century and it literally means 'happiness of the day' and favor is found in its time" for I guess he knew furniture or something or maybe he sold antiques or ran one of those musty antique shops downtown - I never knew - but he did seem to know his 'happiness of the day' as he put it while by contrast I was still concentrating on the Cezanne which concentration had started this whole scene and whatever this place was - restaurant or nightclub or bar/lounge or something I never did get inside there and never did really know or need to know for all I was doing was learning it by its art and that was certainly not for me the art of steak-fries or food service so it really never mattered and I've written of all this stuff a few times already but not like this - for this once I'd been transported to another time and place a scene entirely different and there were horses for certain and carriages and candles on mantlepieces and doorways lit by gaslight and darkness in the sky amassed with stars of a totally pre-electric era and I'd already left two centuries and entered a third and another besides and the language as I traveled was getting harder to understand thicker and sterner and more formal and the people I'd see were people from somewhere else and things were different and the streets were almost bare and in places non-existent and just pathways and tall trees and lanes and shrubs with horse-paths and copses and small bodies of water and streams and rivers and hilltops and the land shambled both up and down and made no sense or logic of itself and much of nothing was everywhere as the air was crisp and certain and I knew - certainly knew for sure - that I had moved along to someplace else.
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And then I was pausing I just found myself pausing - short of breath and unable to even gasp as the thoughts were racing through me like racehorses images piercing sounds and the visages of people and things they'd done and said and it was all I could do on the evening's day to sit across from some Henry Jamesian doorway facing Washington Square Park and find a way to just let it all flow : '1958 Summerspace Merce Cunningham costumes by Robt. Rauschenberg music by Morton Feldman a pale-toned speckled design covering backdrop and dancers' leotards equally created an allover Monet effect as the performers camouflaged to sink into the background emerged as markings and exclamations as staccato events that were continually reabsorbed into the enveloping mood into the vast lyric canvas - a new kind of American pastoral sophistication (Carolyn Brown and Viola Farber as dancers) The Stable Gallery - Eleanor Ward's establishment in a converted stable on Seventh Ave at Fifty-eighth Street 'greatness in art isn't heavy it's light it strains to leave the earth but it's light' Kenneth Koch said that and Gustave Flaubert said 'be regular in your life so that you may be VIOLENT and ORIGINAL in your work' and Freidrich Schiller who died just recently in 1805 spoke of two kinds of pastoral poets the naive and the sentimental he called them and he said 'Nature has granted this favor to the naive poet to act always as an indivisible unity to be at all times self-sufficient and complete and to represent in the real world humanity at its highest value and IN OPPOSITION it has given a powerful faculty to the sentimental poet or rather it has imprinted an ardent feeling on him - that is - to restore from out of himself this first unity that abstraction has destroyed in him to complete humanity in his person and to pass from a limited state to an infinite state - and these two types BOTH propose to represent human nature fully or they would not be poets and writers but the naive poet always has the advantage of sensuous reality over the sentimental poet by setting forth as a real fact what the other aspires only to reach and SENTIMENTALITY here in writing is the offspring of retirement and science' and I thought to myself WHEW! I didn't want any of that - sentimental foppery being just what I hated the most - the faction of the wet-eye the moper the crier for God and his works the helpless the broken and those who can do NOTHING to advance themselves and their thought so to the rest of the world I said 'be damned' and meant each word of it too and it was Andrew Marvell who'd written in 'The Garden' - 'annihilating all that's made / to a green thought in a green shade' and then I looked up and saw two black men silently it seemed sawing a tree and for whatever reason I couldn't understand what they were doing until I realized the time and the place and saw they were servants or slaves at one of the advancing mansions along the way and they'd been out collecting wood for fires and stoves and their two carts seemed quite full but apparently they'd had one last opportunity at an attractive tree or a situation of a tree needing trim and so they were doing it as they closed the task and I went to them and said "Sirs sirs excuse me but what is this night and what day has it been?" and apparently my calling them Sirs had caused confusion for they seemed flustered and stepped back hurriedly and replied "we's only doin' what's the rightful task and so when y'ask us such a question we'not be unda'standin' what ya aksed us" and I said back "no - simple though it is I really want to know where am I" and they laughed and said "why's you'se here to be sure o'that and this is Master Henry Morton's wagon crew settlin' fo' this night - jes' we two nig'r's gittin wood" and I said "OK OK thanks for that" and knew I'd lost the game but still was hopefully sure of illusion only and not much else - for how was it I could be unattached to the fabric of both time and place and still inhabit both a lawn and a street together having moved backwards three centuries - these were things I did not know but wished for knowing.
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And then again I saw only the trees and the pathway which wagons and horses used - the itinerant walker such as myself between places going whether north or south or east or west had his vantage points aligned for in each direction there ran paths and waterways and the not exactly level land rose and fell with the same pace and movement as the waters which passed and here or there a broad vista stood out from some slight height while in other places the descent brought the path down to a hollow or a low spot collected with water and fens and bogs where people dwelt - tents and shacks and piles of things about and the closer to either shore one got the sloppier everything seemed to be as debris and belongings seemed scattered about for no one early on really had specific places to live or stay and the earliest of the property claimants always did have a rough time claiming their stakes and keeping what they claimed - outside of the small circle of land they actually DID inhabit - and everything else outside of that was constantly under discussion and up for grabs for there was as yet no rules or established formats for claimant and holder for those who simply passed through or along and those who settled in and the only things which made ownership were the buildings and homes one inhabited and the farm-fields which were cultivated but the waterways and low-spots and ponds and lakes where cattle roamed and wild things stayed all these were part of a strangely evolving common-weal for the benefit and use it seemed - early on at least - of anyone and all as traces still lingered of the indians and tribes which had just as recently been scoured and driven away themselves - yet it was their paths and their places far outside the walls and ports of the edged settlements which were still in flux - sunrise sunset winter and each other season bore with it the wild cock-crow of nature the uncorraled and loosened animal and everything else out on its own - including people - for no definitions were yet set as rule and law and statute and whatever came to be had best come to be only by establishing for itself itself alone and it was quite some time before real governance came to be or was recognized to be and that time - when it came - put a stop to much of this and activity was then structured and formed and limited and ruled - (and by this time) I stood OUT of time myself - as previous once before I'd written of John Street and all of that strange atmosphere and activity - and I shook myself back and said 'I really must retrieve and find anew all these things EVERY ONE and bring them forth to mankind NOW - before this present day we view wanes and fades away to nothing more than dream itself'.

160. WAITING FOR THE REST (Philadelphia):

And then one day just like that what they say the ‘paradigm’ changed and I found myself again in Philadelphia and later Elmira and then Binghamton and Scranton too - each and every an outlandish way station on the way to some fiery finish a locomotive of intent a rocket-powered incentive of power and destruction a real-estate monkey a bludgeon a tool and with no one to answer to no one to listen for I simply kept everything going as I proudly walked down the Avenue of the Arts or whatever crap the people of Philadelphia say for the strip of downtown thy own that’s infested with 'a-r-t' as it’s called : myopic landlords and girls in small skirts paint-splattered bicycle people tall Russians from Minsk and the old buildings just before they’re traded in for civic destruction for a while they become havens for art activist galleries of change urban spectacle the takeover of the people lofts of demonstrative painters and then the next thing you know : POOF! : murals everywhere squeaking some ethnic urban-pride out of blighted ghetto lanes with sports images and tribal things pestering the eye and tax-payers’ dollars being used for outside junk the mulberry trees lay over the fountain the sculpture garden and the walkway - everything splayed with color and goodness the kind you can’t find in a small magazine - and the contrast with what I’d been used to was startling as I walked the small-scale streets looking about all the time trying to figure the differences of where I was from where I’d been : a certain Philadelphia small-scale Americana was everywhere in a way not found in NYC even though often the historicity of the timescale was much the same as were often the people too but much less broken and blighted by time these little stories and places kept their time and sense about them : old buildings often leaky and shuttered but still there nonetheless and walkways and pathways and old street lanes kept to the selfsame purpose as ever – which purpose was nothing really – just a sort of ‘group-day’ feeling that some idea of ‘nationalism’ tries to coalesce around while being pushed by odd groups of veterans military-types Daughters of the American Revolution maidens politicians with all their acres of bullshit to peddle and the occasional naïve but high-minded historical scholar or period specialist : all in all nothing worthwhile but great for fundraising and picnics of nothing else : of course from my vantage point I wouldn’t see any of this layered far deeper as I was in the dark-wood veneers of evening and Fall – the grays and browns of evening which both I walked through and which followed me everywhere I went - they were a fine cloak put over the grand veneer of time/space and that which it presented to me – old doorways and windows old buildings along the lanes and alleys the old Bourse the old Merchant’s Exchange and the Customs House the old City Tavern building and its corner turn in the grand cobbled road – I walked and I remained silent dark and as brooding as I could be and I came up to the Second Bank of the United States and its fantastic seriousness and granite blocks and stairs and rounded stones for what once had been the horse-wagon lanes VISTAS UNHEARD OF to me before I was IN a different place I was truly somewhere else and yet this was me living and breathing a life given to me given over to unblemished seriousness and things I couldn’t avoid : I was lost in the density of a fabric that carried for me a great onus and responsibility to get through and out across : words lines drawings ideas and everything in between Isaiah and Ezekiel combined (God’s own combine a great machine BROODING in the sky) – I couldn’t touch it and I couldn’t leave it alone and it ALL burned my lips like Ezekiel’s coal had burned his back when and I was certain and I was sure and I was dizzy.

‘God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people but there really is no HISTORY in Paradise – ask Adam and then ask Eve’ and some magical man with a centrifuge tractor was trying to tell me something but all I could hear was the kids yelling in the park by the horizon where the water-wheel endlessly turned and the scaffolding had broken the cranes had all fallen the window washers were dead in the street and some Bill Hogan lookalike was spouting bliss from the rooftop raining it all down on the people below : all the little Bob Dylans twisted in their sacks and looking back up at the sky ‘fffrom there I swear – I think from whence it came - and ‘der weren’t a nuttin’ dere just before’ as I watched the little muffin girl break a sweat while reaching a climax as she simply talked about ‘all the wonderful places I’ve been’ – the mermaids in Murmansk the swindlers in Sebastapol and the swineherders in Switzerland too ‘and leiderhosen to you too!’ the swell crowd swelled Lydia Penic Marfenstien Beaman the young lass from Bonn who’d said once to me ‘what do people speak in Bonn you ask ? well CERTAINLY it’s not German for sure ! they speak BONN!’ and I tried to laugh that one off but she was a beauty and she caught me in love and I jumped to her bones and said ‘tell me now are YOU Mae West?’ but she nodding her head a vociferous ‘yes’ and said ‘and besides that I’m the best – so come and get it Mein Pardner! (that’s German for Dutch the way they speak it in Bonn)’ : five black guys playing tiles or dice or something on a table by the railway station and they were as loud as Hell and busy to boot as all that hoopin’ and hollerin’ sure made them thirsty so they just drank some more and that kept making it worse in some great jetty spiral they never even realized but they were short and fat and of no consequence whatsoever – the mailman came over and the policeman too and they both shouldered a holster worth every dime and bet the whole house on their sisters but just then the local came through and sliced down the middle the whole entire redundant bunch (alert ! body parts strewn about legs and arms everywhere) - I’d made the mistake of reading a book about the First World War all that blood and the gore and I knew I was soon to be there for sure – and like the town Moron (one Teddy Lee Rabes) I went down the foxhole looking for babes – but I had another thing coming.
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And I had to tell her too that I was in love at least fifteen times a day.
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159. WHAT AM I TO LOSE?:

And anyway what am I to lose ? the whole world is running down pop culture has reduced everyone to the status of pygmies morons and zombies too and noise is ever-present and no one has any sense so it's all like popcorn in a blender as I see it - useless noise a battered pulp of nothingness and some more unessential fine-tuning of pablum and shit all mixed together as I roll down my window and spit at the passing parade : dirigibles in the sky fat and bulbous floating around hanging over sports shows and cheerleader squads and bi-planes along the coast trailing fatuous signs for people who don't read and along the sandy walkways edging the beach gigantic black people horn and holler in on everything while low-life vandals from the renters' districts spray-paint their mad messages on every doorway and signpost they can find : what bows down to that ? the police and the goon-squad the priests and the geeks : worship where you will because even Paradise leaks and Father Mulcahy (yes that's who it was) raises his hat and blesses the sea.

158. MY OWN 'MONDO CANE' (the Air of a Sanctified Place):

Mondo Cane : I have done nothing : that’s Italian for ‘a dog’s life’ and has nothing to do with the English word ‘cane’ : I have nothing : and have gotten over that : there are too many words in the English language things that mean nothing – like solace or malfeasance or attainment or signature : caterwaul overplay vault dramatic urge enumerate dismember antagonize orate nod surmise denote percolate tureen unknown benefit nimble harsh – just things to say or words to mention when between all other words ideas themselves fail : adumbrate the exceptional moment - it was on a Tuesday I realized I had outlived my usefulness had nothing to say and should probably move on but Death held no dominion and my hands were BOTH too shaky – I couldn’t aim I couldn’t slice and besides either way I neither wanted to do so nor cared enough about doing so to try : what a waste and I have a life to sell BUT life is nothing more than a sad and singular moment worth little or a sound and a fury signifying nothing or this castle has a pleasant seat or whatever the quote in MacBeth might be about the ‘air’ of a sanctified place – in this particular MacBeth moment meaning only of course that THAT castle is pleasant and has fresh air and is ventilated and does not smell of shit or offal or human and animal waste and stale dead airs of dank confining places AS CASTLES WERE WONT TO DO and if only a GREAT King could have an airy castle and ONE WITH A PLEASANT AIR then GREAT it all must have been Irene Castle Jimmy Castle Roddy Dunsmore and Burnham Woods too – that was really a guy’s name I once knew and his buddies called him ‘Bernie’ though ‘Woody’ too was often heard and there’s no leaning on air or on figments of bad imagination Cain and Abel and the Canaanites too the MYSTIQUE is all there though it’s broken in millions of pieces and I am your father’s idol but it was YOUR mother I worshipped at the altar of dread : six in the morning coffees in bed after long nights of roustabout lovemaking but there was nothing to report to anyone – no movement on any front Ron Napoli to Charlie Swoboda cretins and mutants and soldiering slobs : Aleck oh Aleck to him I would heed NOTHING sensible ever came forth – bad news bad taste bad ideas and no noise ‘cept for the empty clacking of some loosening wheels : in the jar of an addict can be found many foods and the singular mention of a milk-toast fiasco can bring life from a dead man to be sure – rolling away the stone was ONE thing but putting it all back together again was quite another like in the Valley of the Bones episode in the Bible – not too much was really left to chance I guess ‘lest there’d be an arm hanging from an ear or a leg where a mouth should be : all this stuff did have to be done quite carefully you see and like the sad policeman who lost his gun in the rain there was nothing to do but start crying in shame.

157. LOOK CAREFULLY AT ALL THINGS:

Once we make dis-information our first claim it’s easy to influence everything else – the word goes out that an idea is being spread and lemming-like everyone accepts it (I always hesitated to assume that people get the references on two particular things : ‘lemmings’ and the entire idea of ‘lemming-like’ and also ‘Masada’ and the entire idea of 'Masada-Complex' or ‘Masada-like’ but I’ll leave that be for now) : the whole idea of myself in these days I'm covering was that I remain wrapped in mystery : my paintings were all about mystery and the words I spoke or wrote pretty much were too – and I’m not talking Agatha Christie versions of mystery I’m referring more to ‘enigma’ or the enigmatic fashion of leaving someone wondering just exactly it was they’d just experienced and I found that doable by developing an idea of ‘one-remove’ from things : the simplicity of it was that in the way I was living (day-to-day amidst nothing and changing places all the time) all it was really was a reflection of my own reality which had led me to a certain ‘mark’ past which the entire contents of all the rest of my life had altered and been changed to another level : I sought nothing certainly not relief and I was always able to just keep moving along : facing difficulties but understanding them and eluding danger : and it was always funny to me to see how so many people are stalled at a single-level consciousness (in their ‘public’ sphere anyway) wherein the getting and keeping or the distributions of their tangible lot on Earth are all that matter – traipsing through time as if their will and word was everything both singular and right and most powerful and they sought to change things by fiat by all the while ignoring (remaining in ignorance avoiding disdaining) any and all aspects of their on-hand working and durable creative consciousness their psychological underpinning their truer and more-real and concurrently eternal subconscious workings and I’d see the guys with the umbrella carts just shuffling along with their two-dollar umbrellas in the rain (once it really rained of course they’d find a concealed and rain-free covered spot from which to sell) and I’d know they were involved somehow in something else but that they too were looked upon by others as the caste-underdog of reality’s foul system and that just like the weather until it rained no one cared about them – and that was symbolic too of the means by which they lived the rest of their lives these passers-by scurrying by and feverishly scouring NY’s street on their way to and from their mischievous little fancy jobs – they ignored the rain until it rained and they abhorred their consciousness until it too overwhelmed them and then they found themselves seeking to purchase their solace or sense from some strange shadowy underclass of idea and thought tucked away deep in the sheltered recesses of that which passed for their present mind : all the while unfeeling and stupid and dense like a dank gray cloudy overcast day before the rain : and I also realized somehow that it’s that sort of thing which builds the great buildings and motivates the daring enterprises and brings forth the crazed outlandish characters of dictators and autocrats and power-players of all sort THAT which motivates the empires and business titans of all time : the compensation for the missing subconscious the over-weaning substitution of it by something else – it’s that which allows Kings and Generals to hear the voices of their ‘God’ on the battlefield telling them to ‘sojourn on’ or fight for this ‘honor’ or that to conquer in ‘My Name’ and the rest of that – it's the base-cause behind terror and flame and murder and mayhem and it’s ALL misunderstanding and error and nothing more – the working attributes of any God which does not truly exist except ‘within’ that spot those working attributes are eternal and constantly expanding and turning and removing things while replacing things and that enormous pulsing lava of vast consciousness floods into each of us in dark ways and secreted recesses from which we somehow eventually DO find we all can communicate and understand the world but at the same time from which we all find separation and the distance necessary from each other to make this world ours and structure it around ourselves for the ‘Bell’ must ring true if we are first to hear it : it all demands a fealty and an allegiance to the message and the power and the source but (filled as it is with memories and regrets) we misconstrue it and make stories about it which substitute for it other submersible ideas which are never quite up to snuff nor equal to the true mystery of the subconscious craziness we are all related to : read any religion read the trial-and-error factor of Mankind over the ages and see the sequential power-and-effect reality from which this faulty world was built – the resultant fantasy (sometimes dark sometimes happy) ends up as sentimentality and froth – the sort of things told by a ‘Mammy’ to a chil’rins sitting at her feet : all those myths and stories the vague B’rer Rabbits of the eternal mind – we ever source from that same deep well – the darkness the blackness the eternal awe and wonder the cosmos of time and happenstance embroiled and turning together the stories of the universe the sense and ideas of all space and time and the trials and errors of all Mankind (no I’m not saying the Joel Chandler Harris wrote the story of God either - I’m just saying look look carefully at all things).

156. SPARE ME YOUR DOOR-TO-DOOR GOD:

The van went by with its lettering on the side ‘St. Paul’s Evangelical Church’ and it was stopping here and there to pick up worshippers and later to drop them off and I thought to myself how difficult it must be to explain away this form of door-to-door church service in the face of the religion being preached : who first dreamed this up ? the picking up of and the delivering back of worshippers ? after all there were certainly no great distances involved and the ultimate responsibility I’d always thought for sound living is in the self-motivated enabling of the human spirit – kindled and energized by its own spirit of God within – to go to and get to places and activities of its own ordination : this bespoke everything in just the opposite way and I realized ‘SOMETHING’S wrong.’

155. THE INTERVIEW AT BROADHURST - ('but anyway doctor'):

"Somehow I knew it had to come to this I tried I really tried ('look doctor I'm really depressed - I'm shot but I'm just gonn'a go on and talk') and I hoped too it would have worked out differently but it didn't and I never knew what liars were until that moment : the guy sends me publicity photos of some fucking oceanfront hotel and claims they're his and the view is his and then he sends some stupid-ass picture of a barber with some lame-shit TV star in the chair and claims this is 'his' barber too haircutter to the stars and all that - this for some bald-headed old weasel who perhaps might occasionally need a trim around the edges that a moron could do and then he sends some publicity photo of some plain-jane woman in 8x10 business glossy dress and he expects me to buy the story too that this famed jewess is his 'partner' - another bad use of a bad word - and that she's mad at me no less for a pronounced anti-Semitism from her days back in Kansas City when she witnessed anti-Jew codes and the discrimination that went with it : (I want to think God's calling out for something to fulfill Itself - yet it is not this) : and I feel like I'm baring my soul to a killer a madman someone at the least ready to act upon me with a meat-cleaver if he could : it's always everything adversarial like a mean game of chess being played and the check-mate stakes are death or ruination or oblivion but I don't know what I ever did to this guy but ANYWAY DOCTOR it's always been like this - I remember this character back in 1968 leaving forged letters in my possession - he'd written a note attesting to his fine credentials and academic achievements so as to gain some admittance to Boston University and he'd typed this on a letterhead he'd purloined from (of all places) a small local law firm named 'Rabb and Zeitler' the 'Rabb' of which was soon later disbarred by the late 70's - two shyster lawyers on the fuss and on the make - and what always baffled me was why this idiot would figure to use a 'lawyer' as his character witness or even his 'reference' for academic purposes : and the funny thing was to boot that this creep never saw the inside of a University for real in any capacity except stealth and duplicity anyway and another time he mis-represented himself as an attorney for the wives of Rahway Prison inmates who were having a prison revolt or riot or hostage situation of some sort and he was eventually arrested and taken away for that one - no lawyer no real role no representation just some Channel 7 9 or 11 creep who stuck a microphone in his face and got a few minutes of footage on THIS lie today's lie the LIE OF THE WEEK ('such fame is short such fame is fleeting - so goes the heart the world is beating') and another time he's arrested and convicted too of breaking into Newark City Hall by some illicit means of mis-representation and stealing some evidence to 'blow the whistle' on some guy but the guy later turns out to have been the brother-in-law of the Mayor or something and he gets protected and this guy gets arrested and convicted and does some small prison time but he comes back from the incarceration later telling of the condition in jail ('the soup was bad man the conditions were terrible - when they call it pea soup in prison that's just what they mean - you get water and A PEA - oh and yeah there's a LOT of contact with the Deity in prison' - he told me that sitting in a car overlooking foul Sewaren Bay) and then his mother says it wasn't so much jail as psychiatric lock-up and then she says 'he can't tell the difference between fantasy and what's real anymore - he's going to need a lot of help' - [now tell me doctor tell me AM I WRONG to want to wipe him off the map to be done with this forever I should have NEVER reintroduced myself into his crap] -- and thus that young man riding in the train wearing a cross leaves a great wedge and a blemish like his mind - I wish to say to him 'I want to know if there's enough room in the universe for your anus (Uranus) you asshole' and he'd look back at me and talk shit like 'I'd be pushing out mud for days' if I ate that stuff and I say to the nasty waiter with a bad mood 'I see you've got the rudiments of table service down pat - with the emphasis on 'rude'' : and I order lobster risque - presented to me by girls in very revealing outfits so that I have to JUST HAVE TO say 'thanks' and the doctor turned and said 'what is it you are studying?' and I say 'I want to be an Updike scholar I'm starting with 'Of the Farm' and 'the Poorhouse Fair' and I'm gunning right through it all : and also I'm studying the ways of American culture using first Schlosser and Fast Food Nation as an example and instead of intellectual discourse all I see are my own ancient Hebraic self-destructive tendencies from within - insidious contrarians and a race from inside which first uses then sets-up and then destroys each function of a working society and NO WONDER they end up outcast and hated and aimless and wandering - especially as they make the characteristics unspoken and unmentionable ('reverential holocausts') - and just as extremities on old statues are always broken off so are all their myths and selective small tribal creeds - chosen people nomadic nitwits and all the rest but the fact is THEY DON'T EXIST and they're all small Eastern Europeans now claiming their ways and just like those statues NOTHING'S whole everything's sundered and broken off and they demand fealty alone to their own myths and stories - you CANNOT criticize them don't you see ! and this is the SAME guy who stole a high-school bullshit patriotism speech and won a prize who plagiarized an old Chinese poem line for line and had it printed as by him in a literary yearbook who tried to steal another guy's poem about 'My Friend Frank the Telephone Pole' but got caught instead and never settled up who was expelled from the Capuchin Seminary along the Hudson River up above Bear River Bridge for cheating on the Regent's Exam - so you see I really never knew what to do about any of this - and it does go on from here - crazy stories about money-management huge sums great earnings in movie investments and films and hobnobbing with the stars and some guy Devaney and all the rest and eventually QUICKLY! it rather all ran me down and everything I did showed how he'd done really nothing I was speechless and he was not : a complete fop and a scoundrel too I couldn't disentangle myself from the mess he'd erected around me so I just stopped - it was either that DOCTOR or murder you see - some people just don't deserve to live - like THIS guy who once called himself 'Freighter Aleck' - pronouncing the monkish Frater title as 'freighter' (instead of 'Frahter' the Latin Frater for 'Brother') and it wasn't even his title to give himself he just tried stealing that too - the Capuchin Monkey that he was and if this was ever America to him ('Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Crappiness') I'd bet he wouldn't have known it because for that to be there at least has to be some substance but there's not NOTHING and it's all fantastic gibberish a gutter in the brain a chalice for a mouth but out of which comes words not blood and words alone are what hoist him up to the rafters from which he hangs : confusion ? I think not : and then I simply started babbling - 'where does a sports memorabilia collector put his Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse (both dressed as Yankees and Mets respectively) character dolls out for display at home ? why where else but on the Mickey Mantle and every time I hear the name Frank Zappa I think of a guy with a hot dog and a microwave and every time I hear the name Peter Sellers I think of dildo salesmen and a skeleton walks into a bar and says 'give me a beer...and a mop' and in the middle of all this - as it was - I lived in a single crowded room amongst the great treasures of my own personal 'career' - art which went nowhere but defined me by its being..I stayed close to 1st street by a place called 'Naked Lunch' later called the 'Sidewalk Cafe' and I never thought I'd be there but I was - and all this while the crummy doctor just smiled and kept scribbling away" and that's pretty much the exact transcript as I recall it being written.