Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

126. 'UNTIL WE STUMBLED ON ISTANBUL' (nyc, 1974):

It was like an endless Christmas Eve of expectation or something - I broke two into two and over again until I was transformed by Nature into effectively illusionary being haunting wild streets or slinking between avenues filled with dead cars : dowagers low on their springs like some tired old Packard sliding into death with no brakes left and fire on each wheel - at 25 Fifth Avenue was a woman I grew to know only by her words with a wonderfully spacious and grand name 'Elizabeth Villiers-Liberty' but pronounced so oddly right with an accent composed of all Europe itself so that it seemed that just be the hearing of it I was transported to the old walls of ancient kingdoms a'borning and the way she talked to me was straight and stern - tea and crumpets with ideas of travel and old conservative ideas about everything and all I really knew was that she 'didn't like men with beards' said once in passing and I thought that in itself to be a precise statement of stricture which seemed odd to me - who anyway cared? - and beards that were everywhere went where they wanted : Romany Marie's to the Jumble Shop to anywhere at all ('I spied a man coming down the street covered in swag and willing to greet - to most everyone he swung his wave and took on the world with a fearsome gaze...') we'd listened to parkland doggerel for too many days but this guy known to everyone 'took the cake' as they say - he was a Roman he was a priest he was from Scotland he pandered for money he traveled the Alps he squandered his art and he searched Ararat too for old Noah's Ark and those were the sort of people I'd meet - well enough until we stumbled on Istanbul.
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So between Ms. Liberty and this Italian guy I just mentioned (Alberto Ragi) I was pretty much set with people of differing persuasions all about me - he did go to Turkey 'south by the sea' but ended up instead stuck along the Bosporus at Constantinople called Istanbul now ('just like that crazy old song' he said) and I kept getting oddball postcards to my 8th Street address for a while - old steamboats plodding up the Bosporus or pictures of the smokey harbor right there with lines of very old crumbling homes in the background - these buildings were perched right up at the river's edge with the water sometimes even running below them and he said they were 'all the old mansions of the past' now burning and crumbling one-by-one daily and the jagged streets were filled with ancient sights and cars and trucks equally old belching smoke and grime into the filthy air as donkeys and animals too walked the dirt streets where poor people lived : 'but I'm intent on living this artist's life right here even if it kills me and I swear I'm happy trying too - you really should come' - and that was the last I ever heard from Ragi for the very next Spring on an awkward May morning he blew his brains out in some fetid backyard filled as it was too (I later learned) with packs of wild dogs - for which the modern-day Istanbul (back then) was famous and every new new politician came into office each time swearing he'd clean up the dog-crisis problem like it was some foreign-policy situation needing immediate attention : but no one ever did anything really about it and that's where Ragi died.
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There were times when all of this felt like nothing more than just taking messages : notes about time and place filtered through some gauze of experience and a watery film of wonder at the same time : 11th Street was a nightmare by then - sixteen people at a time crashing on the floor and each of them AWOL runaways on their way to Canada fleeing their time-to-be in Vietnam just around the corner for them - they'd just drop everything hitch up with one of the cars we were running up and down from Virginia and DC get to NYC and pile out right in front of 509 e. 11th spend a night or two or a weekend then leave more than half their stuff behind (usually) - shoes and shirts and stuff but always being sure it seemed to take guitars and jackets - and get high-tailed some more to Buffalo and Canada to hide out as deserters and that apartment by that time was filled with everything - contraband stolen USNavy and Army stuff ID badges and dogtags even cars and armaments - the cars were taken by the body shop across the street re-painted changed a little and sold for 2 or 3 hundred dollars real fast - of which we'd get maybe 80 bucks - little white Plymouths and Valiants and such all army issue bullshit staff cars - and even though Ms. Liberty 'didn't like men with beards' there were suddenly plenty of them around and girls too - the horniest little fuckers I'd ever seen - all young and not really jaded just burned already by a too-quick and too-idealistic experience of whatever sort : base nurses and army post dieticians and teachers and clerks and secretaries and stuff - I never really knew what any of that was about except maybe it was just a girl's sense of 'adventure' at play but they'd run away and escape too and they sometimes were wilder than the crazy guys I'd see - hanging around naked and free - sometimes they'd just ditch the whole idea and escape instead into the very bowels of NYC - all their special accents and regional dialects and all that - and on that count too (I told Elizabeth - trying for a crummy sex joke) there were 'plenty of beards around and I didn't mind a'one of them' - I think she really tried to laugh but I could tell it hurt too much.

165. A MAXIMAL DEMONSTRATION (nyc, 1970):

'If ever there was a shadow of meaning over the entire dark of the sky it was the moment when the light of time flashed into Man and roused from slumber the envisioning category of human life' : that was being piped in from the nearby auditorium in Calder Hall while about a hundred people milled whether or not they understood a word : mothers in wrapped sleeves and old guys with tube socks and cigars together rose up as one to sing hymns and this went on for a while - I turned to the nearby guard who was feigning being awake and asked what 'all this was' and he shot back "I'm not sure - they've been here since Thursday night and for two nights now have held these prayer meetings for two or three hours and then left" and then he sat back down and asked if I was going in "not on your life" I said "I was here because I thought there was a lecture" and he laughed and said "oh that - yeah there was but they moved it over to Arnoldston Lounge because it was a lecture about the Devil" and then he started laughing - I guess at the haphazard overlap of two divergent subjects and then he said "you know I don't live down here I live up in Harlem on 124th Street and this kind of stuff is everyday matter for my people - but to see all these white folks milling about holy-rollerin' like this well it just gets me funny and besides you can't un'erstand a thing they're saying - they get it all mixed up God don't want no white dudes dancing his black steps!" but it never-minded for me anyway since I just plain wasn't interested but yet this guy kept going on about Woolworth's being the only Temple on his block - just like the 'Woolworth's Building' (as he put it) was the Temple of Commerce for the white man and all his people and it too was built by Masons and had been painted 1000's of years ago way back in Egypt and somewhere deep inside one of the pyramids men had found a wall painting of the 'Woolworth's Building' right there but instead of being in downtown NYC there in that painting it was more poised like a rocket ship or something in flight or about to be and it was a messenger ship of the Gods who'd come back and forth upon it and that's where the Masons and Mr. Woolworth himself had gotten the idea for it - not an idea actually because really they'd been dictated and sleep-walked to it and fed the exact measurements and designs for the building from these extra-terrestrial Gods and 'now these stupid white folk again screwin' things up are making a mess - first they turned the entire divine idea of the Woolworth's into a just-simple fetching of money and then they screwed up the whole meaning and message of God - all they'd ever made of it was one Big Plantation Slave-Ownin' Super-Power" and then he said "that ain't God ! God's funny as Hell really - God's a wise-crackin' son-of-a bitch with a monumental sense of humor" and I said I'd "try to understand all of that" and then I simply turned and left - leaving the big old lever of a door-handle there to smack closed with a bang all on its own.
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It wasn't as if I wasn't interested in this Spike Jones of a philosopher character but it seemed more vital to me to be able to bounce off something like that and reflect instead on the entire larger picture of what had just been presented to me : after all I presumed both sides here to be fairly cogent about what they were doing and the fact of the local Harlemite holding fantastic beliefs so different from the whatever-believers in the other room there meant to me that somewhere there existed a large cultural divide which would need to be dealt with at some point : it almost seemed impossible for the two to simply co-exist for there was very little overlap and I wondered when and if a conflict between the two would materialize and take its place among the larger issues of the day - what I noticed the most after the differences was the way that neither of them held any cultural unity and how that in neither set of beliefs was there an over-arching larger sense of harmony or oneness that could be construed as a true belief-system : the black guy seemed simply contrarian and angered a bit by usurpation and the room filled with wailers inside seemed by contrast a room filled with staggered and happy idiots buying dogma blindly and singing it back to the rafters while in their odd clothing and out-of-date presences (some cowboy-booted haven of old country-western clothing and cheap suits tied together with string while the ladies of the group had pearl earrings of the clip-on variety tied together with twine necklaces and powdery bouffants as if awaiting a baking-class or some heavenly cook-off either with angels or at least of angel-food cake) and I couldn't mesh the two together in any way - if Martin Luther King were dead (for instance) than weren't the these the very people who may have killed him ? or if the white evangelicals in that countryfied bacon-field atmosphere of the other room feared the 'Nigra' and lynched and enslaved him then weren't they the very people responsible for the class-consciousness and discrimination and violence the country was going through ? (notwithstanding the fact that the very killing fields of Vietnam at that time were littered with Negro corpses as much as white corpses and that the Harlemite's son or sons could easily have been among them) and I knew that it was difficult for me to consider all this clearly and that each time I approached these matters - either from some skewed James Baldwin 'Fire Next Time' perspective or the street-hawker violence of 'Muhammed Speaks' being given out on the street along Times Square by the Black Muslim acolytes there - that it was all the same in its own way and merely the perspective changed - evangelicals and insipid crazies of both stripes trying out in their way the same thing : ('oh Black Swan important things embrace me - I am lost in the midst of a thousand fields' - that was a line I was working on back then but I could never decide whether it should be 'mist' or 'midst' to make it right - but it seemed to fit either way) and there was an old Arabic poem I remembered (by 'Attar') which stated 'the effects of Paradise turn into sweetness every ugly sound' which seemed right too : but it wasn't that I didn't know where I was headed - for I did - I just was intent on keeping right the filter I put into use to sort out the things I was exposed too and this particular instance seemed a perfect example of not wishing to mess with 'certainties' and matters of ridiculous faith or even faith in errors - which both sides here were undertaking.
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My God was really a Sun God as I figured out : as ancient as they come in that regard and well before organized religion took root to claim 'ownership' and it all had very little to do really with the wishes or conditions of what we'd just been talking about but I was determined to steer clear of such conflicts and abide by my own precepts and in my own way I did find it funny and the scene precarious especially as the Harlem guy had just declaimed his God to have a 'sense of humor' (which maybe would go a long way towards explaining a lot of things about humanity and this entire creation) but somehow it just didn't stick as it always seemed to me that just by being or claiming to be 'God' you by necessity had to be dour and stern - so I missed that point and started thinking instead of the legacy of slavery as it must have been seen through that guy's eyes the guard from Harlem - what conspiratorial ploys must he find everywhere he looked and the miserable history of Reconstruction and the supposed emancipation of the black man - even though it wasn't really that at all and I think Lincoln like really only 'freed' the slaves in rebel territory if they would then abandon their farms and homes and take up arms with the Union so that it was more like a commanded 'half-emancipation' with a seriously military overtone - anyway I wasn't sure but didn't much care to correct it since it all worked in my head - must have ridden hard on him and his forbears and had gotten his transplanted up here in that crazy northern onrush of Negroes that took place at the end-years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th - NYC and Chicago to name but two were quickly faced with enormous influxes by then of black families which had transplanted up from southern climes mostly because of the demise of the old cotton-fleece and farming kingdoms and the advantages presented by the newly-resurgent north and northeast with all those industrial jobs and the rest : great communities of blacks sprang up - with their dance halls and clubs and music revival houses and chattering religions and preachers and tongues and the white man followed with his aping Minstrel Shows and carnivals and circuses wherein the black man was either ridiculed or held to a concentrated magnification which highlights and parodied all the cultural traits of that small culture - implanted with African voodoo and the down-home black-magic of swamp and field and all that old ante-bellum and Civil War era lore and magic : and yes the Harlemite WAS right - that white man didn't really 'know nothin' about the black folks and their ways and did manage to get just about everything wrong' - that was the cultural infraction and the class-gap which now presented itself and the enclaves of blackness in Harlem and the old lower east-side pools of servant quarters and porters and lifters and haulers - all those early black-people jobs - were now everywhere and disgruntled and angered blacks by the thousands were swarming the streets for their rights and in an activism as bold and as loud and cantankerous as ever : the great cultural breakdown was underway - black-power salutes and fists and guns and newspapers and speeches and marches and rallies and riots too had already once disheveled the land and burned through already the cores of more than one city and it was some magical moment of calm perhaps before it all only began again - that was the time I was walking through and wondering about : infested with crime and violence and even (a 'la Baldwin again) the infested sexuality of black swagger and black pussy and dick strutting everywhere and once again ONLY the white man it was who picked up on this wrongly and got it ALL wrong : there really was a grace-in-weakness and a power-in-strength both which fought against each other as they intertwined (again, like sexuality) within the culture all around it : entire armies of inter-married and liberated individuals mixing it up mysteriously with pure-breds and African royalty now splashed all over the American countryside and cityscape and there was NO escaping race any longer and NO avoidance nor reason to avoid of the black/white separation AND attraction everywhere going on at one and the same time - the undercurrent again was always sex and yet at the same time could at any moment turn to violence - it was a unique time and one (I learned later) soon to pass as the grim myopia of America replaced it all with its later bouts of self-indulgence and wastefulness and the prideful squandering of all good things let alone bullets and guns and murder and mayhem anew AND IF my God was a Sun God it meant so many other things - it meant I was unconnected to this sort of talk between groups different though essentially like-minded individuals it meant that I held separate opinions and outlooks from all of that it meant that I in no way concurred with much of the outlook or approach they were taking at that moment towards things : in all it delineated a tribal-difference of manner and reach that I partook of and they did not - to wit the most ancient of servings and allegiances to a vast and broad and utterly speechless God or Presence - a something which just was - so that I bothered no reach-out and wished to say nothing back : the sharpshooters in their western vests and the black guy in his renegade yet happy outlook could go their own ways as I owed nothing to them nor they to me : and their old history and their old story of evangelism and the rest held much in common - black and white - with plain old American history (that American tension again was intertwined and fraught with deliberate struggle and energy - a roiling tumbling intercourse of legs and arms around each other amidst argument struggle and self-flagellation all mixed together) but that was the inter-racial world I was seeing and anything of Harlem that I'd ever seen had always led me to the conclusion that - as a destination - it was a nice crackpot solution to some odd form of internal emigration in which Southerners and West Indians and Caribes of all sorts ended up flocking together in a big huge muddle for second tier industrial jobs and/or plain labor which in their won taciturn ways they ended up enjoying - hardships and all - simply because it somehow propelled them (with a few bucks) backward into a better-reminiscence of their older days and past time as downtrodden and subjugated - which in its way back then was as a 'comfort food' is called today - simple and warm and pleasing and it was never anything like real religion anyway - this big history of the evangelical movement and all those black and white churches going on about things but whatever I felt about it all was immaterial anyway - alongside the point of what I was building or erecting for myself none of it mattered : all of black Harlem was in my hand and the old 116th Street Italian Harlem even then little known to me did hold all my paternal family memories of kingship lordship mob hoodlum gang-leader murder and mayhem and prison and death too -- it was all a simple legacy based as I saw it now on nothing more than stupidity plain and simple buttressed in its cantilevered way by a Romanism and Catholicism of Vatican proportions - based on lies and twisted greed and corruption - which ran everywhere once and still did : immigrant populations of pathetic piety coming over in hordes to drool and peal and pray and prey on the inhabitants of whatever place they went - all that incessant caterwauling amidst novenas and vigils and masses and ceremonies of vestment gilt and richness as an entire 'other' culture once again attempting setting itself up somewhere new in the middle of the usual mercantile atmosphere of cut-throat Manhattan and all its Goliaths running about reaming dollars and deals down each other's throats - it was a supposed history written on tissue-paper and even trees and hillocks had no chance of survival let alone immigrant and religious groups trying to become established and the God-fearing witness movements of Deliverance and Redemption - all those stuffed-shirt liberal preachers and Henry Ward Beecher's of the square and quadrangle witnessed to their own prostitution and not much else - old slavery was over and a new slavery was taking its place - mobsters generations of double-dealers and contraband-brokers had taken over the streets and every interest group wanted (of course) to be represented in the new fiasco with or without God along for the ride (no matter what the activity they somehow managed to make God fit in) processions of statues covered with dollar-bills and the weird purchases of indulgences and salvations all over again - wailing for the redemption of the dead preachments to deliver one from Evil (ever-present and omni-voracious) so that NOW all this evangelical clashing of races and creeds once again - even in these present times I witnessed - bore to me all the earmarks of the same stupidity and oddity of some Martin Luther tacked-on-the-doorway theses - all blather and no bother but somehow from somehow at least a CALL for authenticity and I realized too that salvation (as they called it) was nothing more than pride and a prideful boast for dignity and selfhood - as rational and secular as anything else could ever be and maybe that was what the Harlemite guy was seeing when he saw error or wrongness - he perhaps saw an inauthentic and over-weaning pride on the part of inauthentic and over-weaning whites attempting to usurp his racial and familial identity with exuberance and pleading and humor and taste : some fiery old-testament reaction to God's ignoring the please of the hordes : same old story everywhere - promised land deliverance parting of the Red Sea talking in tongues and all the rest of the hoary old stuff.
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And anyway I never liked that slapdash punch-anywhere version of old-time 'American' religion seen to be composed as it was mostly of fakery and elixirs and wash-baths of false redemption of do-good profit and all that - it was first and foremost a business ploy to make a buck and get ahead anyway and if end-time or salvation or the second or third or tenth coming could be made to pay then THAT too would be put to use and it had somehow seemed to have lost all that regal poise and perfect comportment of the churches of old (in a manner of speaking anyway) as it traded in its form of love for lucre and lust instead : all those early-formed American country towns between hills and mountains and rivers and valleys where you'd come upon them just arond the bend and suddenly see the white steeples of each of the different denominations in the village or town - those little country and village churches at town-center squares surrounded by the parson's house of the local cemetary or one of them and the peace and calm it all exuded gave you some form of the semblance of the very peace and order of that little place in that spot in time - all those hard-working close to the soil American types turning over the dirt and watching things grow and the little merchant class in town trading in goods and foodstuffs and crop and product - until one day over time it was all ripped away and warehouse and industry and machine shop and highway and shopping-center nightmare roadway tore it all to pieces and different faces and tongues came into town to sequester themselves in cramped complexes of cheap apartment living alongside their grubby pizza shops and fast-food gimlet joints and car-repair shacks and broken-down old mental-gymnastics sweatshops and clothing emporiums and all the little junk these places became made of over time : just like that old religion it was ALL down the drain - all that Roman and Byzantine and British and quaint Slavic or European habituation of ceremony to belief to ritual to power and preachment all went by the waysides : categories of communion and baptism and confirmation and high mass and burial and candle and incense all forgotten about - replaced by small heads poking arms from behind grand podiums from which empty men prodded and pandered their cause of the moment wrapped into falsely-sanctified sentimental rubbish in search of dollar-salvation self-interest and false-learning and all this magic of the bad armies went forth as writ gospel exploding new truth and everyone who wasn't dead wasn't alive anymore either - just absorbing shit like a bad soggy sponge absorbs dirty water and everything seemed over and washed away - and in each of those little crooked cemetaries all time had passed and the at the little gated small-family plots the gates had each fallen from the hinges and the fences too had fallen in and the old iron grillwork had rusted and borken away over the years - trees and shrubbery overgrown in the creices of gravestone and lot-yard and even the sahed of the old churches and trees was gone - illegible marking on crumbled stones lights on in attics of no reckonings and no inhabitants and every plot left as one great mystery behind : hilltops and hillocks rambles and vales : everything over and done while the old-time pale of American religion still jabbered on and the enthusiasm and sing-song cadences of new preachers and new people - dark swarthy black loud rambunctious - brought their vivid African and southern based rhythms into pulpit and pew and an entire otherly and new franches had set in : louf showy and broad these Negro preaching shows usurped all silence and all breath and the great swaggering heaps of emotion and tongue took over reason and logic and made 'worship' what it really should ever had been - a total ambandonement a craziness and a falling down for God ! Himself - while the old village rivers ran and the old ponds and pools stayed in place and the yellow sun shome on the shady town the country church the barrel-house of preaching and singing - wild with abandon the frenzy ever unabated just went on and on and shone high to Heaven itself.

164. THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (nyc/philadelphia, 1967/8):

‘With the requisite recommendations you can really go far’ (it wasn’t like I had tipped my hat to the sun or anything) and that was really all I heard – some guy was talking to me from the side of his mouth but I wasn’t listening and I said to him instead – ‘no that’s OK because that way it just sounds like all I need to do is make the right connections to succeed but that wouldn’t prove anything to me and it wouldn’t satisfy me either’ – he’d been referring to (as usual) learning the ways of the artworld and all that gallery-society crap in ways I just couldn’t abide : I heard it all a hundred times and realized too that there really were people who tried to specialize in nothing more than that – not talent or work or culture – just the ‘getting ahead’ by playing the necessary game perfectly – it also usually took family money of some sort and they all had big-time fathers and family money and stock fortunes and properties and stuff - oft’ and again trips to Europe and England the Louvre and even The Hermitage in Moscow or somewhere I wasn't sure (I thought it was Andrew Jackson's mansion at first) but all that cultural attachment meant nothing to me at that level because it really was but consumption and nothing more (some old guy used to say to me on the docks ‘I remember when consumption was a disease’ and I always thought it funny – contrasting today’s got-to-have-it culture of acquisition with some old-time use of the same word with different meaning) - but that all meant nothing now because these people were truly S-E-R-I-O-U-S about their stuff : no messing around and no fooling either - these were half of them red-diaper babies with a foot in the bank - mommy and daddy were often Jew-leftist leanies by night espousing equality and certain forms of revolution while by day walking discreetly to the bank once more : it all came down to nothing really and in its essence was laughable - for who could help that they sometimes had beautiful daughters or desirable sons with esoteric and wilded-out tastes about art and music and careers and life itself : generally everyone was free and easy and wanted to stage that very same revolution mostly under the covers but often wherever they could : so I decided I didn't need no smarmy mettle-mouthed constabulary of taste and edification deciding for me when and how I'd be 'right' with the prevailing tastes of things and thus be deemed 'successful' and with the 'requisite recommendations' - I'd heard it all before and wasn't ready for the trouble nor to pay my obsequious ass-kissing dues either so THUS then and there down the drain went 'career' - get that 'cuz I'm only to say it once - and like W.C. Fields himself on the whole I would have rather (sometimes) been in Philadelphia.
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Which I soon was : I arrived there on some fortuitous circumstance of getting a few bucks to drive some legal briefs to the offices of an attorney filing an appeal who had an office in the Philadelphia City Hall - and after the first time I received the same job over and over again and along with it the use of the car owned by the person who sent me - a public legal-printer - it was a 1967 Ford Galaxy - very black and very sleek and still very new : I enjoyed driving it quite fast both up and down the New Jersey Turnpike and my 'excuse' to myself was 'deadline' as the briefs had to filed by 3pm on any given day I was making the delivery so that in reality my 'deadline' premise was real enough - I'd go 75-80 miles per hour steadily down the Turnpike (fast for those days) and I really don't remember much but I recall enjoying Philadelphia immensely as a predetermined and very different city for me : another place entirely and one with not near as much familiarity to me and I remember back in those days being stunned by the perfectly planned layout of Broad and Walnut and the convergences of all those streets as they wrapped around the square the center of which was City Hall and the great tower and statue of William Penn high above - the street there was lined with oddities and curiosities outdoor book stalls mounted police magicians street-players crooners and bums - among all of which I'd browse for hours after making the delivery and getting whatever documentary legal signatures were needed and I'd park for free somewhere I cannot recall - leaving the car for hours unencumbered : it was a wonderful little occasional job and a great task and I was getting paid to boot with a free car to use and free gasoline too - I grew found of Philadelphia and its art-schools and studio ateliers and galleries along Broad Street or whatever street it was - the entire area was laid out nearly formally and many of the grand old buildings held their grace and charm so that it all felt as a small Paris of some sort - rivers and waterfronts old history nice buildings stoneworks pediments and edifices with grander allusions to art and culture then I'd seen in a long time - if NYC had been 'masculine' in my mind Philadelphia then by contrast was quite 'feminine' and I was quickly falling in love : with something with what I wasn't sure and didn't care - whenever I was there I found again that I 'saw' differently and things just 'appeared' differently - music halls historic lanes and alleys old cobble streets gas lanterns federal-style brickworks and all that Liberty Bell and Betsey Ross stuff too - quite wonderful.

163. OF AN INSATIABLE FRAGMENTATION:

I used to love the black and white - everything grey hued in between and no color at all - I'd go out of my way to seek out the lack of color the black and whites of evening and dark - streetcars trains taxis buses shop-windows everything held in suspension between color : the impressive middle-ground of a nowhere between place and time yet something I could walk through : the old railroad siding with the boxcars abandoned and tumble-down left open to the elements and scavengers rats dogs and bums - coils of rope and sloppy pits of oil and tar leftover tires and wheels the broken-down hulks of trucks and everything facing the river at evening wore that grey face languid and sorrowful or still and wordless - a Jersey sun fell down through the sky and the now-colorless river rolled by : clutches of men with cigarettes and bottles of rum it seemed just appeared from the darkening bays and stood their almost-lifeless ground as if daring whatever to happen if it dared (but it never did) and some putrid old car would rumble past a pier - decrepit and sagging both - and without another sound or movement or act the darkness of the slowing sky would fall.