Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

169. THE REVOLUTION'S IN THE SQUARE (a life of contemplation):

I may have misunderstood everything I may have not heard a thing I may have not been present when I thought I was but nothing mattered nor made any sense anyway SO I stumbled forward talking to myself along the shrouded streets of whichever place it was my feet had taken me (I certainly wasn't touring in Turin whose SHROUD was enduring) - peripatetic shameless and grave with some hunger thrown in for spite and the girls that I saw were too rich for me and they looked askance at the chance (as I could tell) to see and the word on the street was 'John done said don't ask about the bell - it's ringing for me' but actually it was (incorrectly stated) wrong as I heard it because street people can get nothing right except death and hunger and it actually was John Donne who said 'ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee' and that was after something like 'NO MAN is an island' and I remember ON THE other hand that each man is a separate Monad 'particle-piece-of-something-greater-while-being-alone' at least and some or another dead President took that cudgel too and ran with it 'ask not what' instead of ask not for whom BUT WHAT'S the DIFFERENCE once you're out of the womb and I'm covered in some religious philosophy and a fight for the ages - untold endless myopic and outrageous - goes on around me while at the corner of Broadway some cat is singing the blues in a tin-penny hat with a wandering eye and three strings on a guitar made of water and he's scat-singing to beat the band 'cept there ain't none and the people passing throw back something whether dollars nickels pennies or looks I cannot tell and the old soldier fellow with his yellow-tweed-ostrich coat kneels to pray at the church by the corner and he never gets up again - seeing the ghost of Charles Chaplin and the blind girl too at that water-trough where the church makes the corner bend with a graceful adieu and I go on and look back - headed south somewhere for something but music's the curse of the streets and I hear everything I don't wish to hear and see only the best - Fallen Angels along the top of the mortar and five winnowing windows made of glass and college kids stumble drunk as all fish walking backwards to the front of the end of all time and I'm spinning with the world and all along in rhyme I keel over forward and get back up - rotating nothing in this hillock of my crime - 'The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres' I seem to remember something as I get back up was published in Nuremberg announcing that the Earth revolved around the Sun - a dense technical treatise it was - there is a certain strange unity unearthed (no pun) in this work - in that 'if we uncenter ourselves in obedience to the compelling circles and angles of 'Revolutions' we'll come to see that the eccentric radius of any planet equals its relative mean distance from the Sun while the epicycle radius corresponds to Earth's relative mean distance from the same point' : never mind the fact that (and never mind my crazy mind remembering this stuff in a situation like this) Ptolemy's eccentric radii for all four planets and the Sun equal 60 units while the epicyclic radii vary; this is simply an artifact of observations taken from a moving Earth rather than a relatively motionless Sun' but the important fact is the ratio itself : for Mars the ratio is 60 divided by 39 and a half or 1.518 which is a number which differs by less than 1 percent from the currently calculated mean Martian distance from the Sun of 1.524 astronomical units and Copernicus privately circulated a brief outline of his heliocentric idea in 1513 he silenced himself on the subject as he struggled to construct a full explanation - and I can go from that in 1513 to more than a hundred years later to 1676 or so when the back and forth of THAT day was between Spinoza and Leibniz - equally forceful and interesting and just as current to me - [I'm thinking current while leaning on a pole - I'm thinking Pole while throwing in Copernicus] the two of these men were so different - characterized as opposites as in the dealings of 'a crooked and ungainly philosopher the bewigged Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with a beauteous contemporary with dark languid eyes the Portuguese-Dutch-Jewish thinker Baruch de Spinoza' creating the foundations of modern philosophy and Spinoza postulated a universe ruled only by the cause and effect of natural laws without purpose or design the God of which universe was a non-interventionist whose essence and pervasiveness might be best described as Nature with a capital N in what Camille Paglia too would call the 'chthonic' sense and given God's non-interventionist policy Spinoza believed the modern state had the responsibility of looking after the common man and the common man had the responsibility of looking after himself and in all of this Spinoza saw 'FREEDOM' and anticipated later philosophical and scientific developments (when Einstein was asked if he believed in God he replies 'I believe in Spinoza's God') - and in Spinoza'a time the question actually was if you believed in Spinoza's God then were you not in actuality an atheist ? an offense then punishable by exile imprisonment or death ? Leibniz thought so and others agreed - such as the bishop who denounced Spinoza as 'that insane and evil man who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod' and the Jewish community in Amsterdam - which excommunicated him but the mystery is whether or not Leibniz himself believed in Spinoza's God - cribbed his teachings (while professing unfamiliarity with them) and cynically invented his own philosophy in reaction to Spinoza's so as to mask his secret atheism (why ? from an impulse for self-protectionism and the patronizing view that the 'masses' needed to be protected from the rudderless world he detected all around them) - Leibniz was prolific and did make advances in mathematics and had a great role in developing calculus - all of which overlapped with his British contemporary Isaac Newton but apparently much of Leibniz's thought is in debt to Spinoza's : Spinoza believed man's soul and body were inextricably tied and progressed in tandem through the world subject to natural laws BUT Leibniz was disturbed by the conclusion that followed from that belief - that the soul died with the body and he wished to show that the soul and the body were separate in order to make it easier to prove that the soul was immortal and in the service of this obsession Leibniz came up with the notion that everything and everyone in the world was a distinct 'monad' (from the Greek word for unity) programmed by God to act in a certain way and each body monad was accompanied by a soul monad that coincidentally shared the same experiences and GOD was a monad too Leibniz argued and for those who wanted to see God pre-eminent Leibniz explained that God was the 'Monad of monads' and I tried considering this as something to hold close and understand but at the same time I wondered what cage this was coming from - the God cage the Monad cage the cage of opportune wordplay or whatever and if today's modern people knew anything about this I was willing to bet they didn't understand nor consider it one whit anyway and I thought of myself 'Mr. Monad' I wanted to say - myself leaning on a lamppost under the Eighth Street lights by the old Hoffman Studios where the record store was blasting British music by Blind Faith (talk of a coincidence) and the old industrial workers Local 65 or whatever it was had the trucks rolling in and the corner pastry shop made me hungry about nothing and the new people in the new apartment building made me wonder what the HELL they'd torn down to put that there - and all of that had me considering what the heck was I anyway and all this modern people crap - 'anxious over the apparent purposelessness of the world revealed by modern science' - is supposed to be replaced by some great new transcendent age of people struggling to protect their 'belief in a transcendent power and force more lasting than their material world' and yeah right sure I muttered while spitting and under the lamppost I wanted to stay because I knew no modern God was gonna' enter there - material bullshit possessions and means be damned they all misunderstand the sunlight to begin with and it all gets worse from there each minute of the live-long day and Spinoza's God might have been enough for Einstein but that's about it for today nobody cares a whit and anyway it doesn't matter when the hordes are at the doors with ready cash in hand and Spinoza's God still spinning makes 'no exception to its natural laws on your account oh people and it will work no miracles for you oh people of the plains and it will tender no affection oh those people who strive and utter and cry and beg and it will show NO CONCERN for your well-being oh campers and disciplinarians and those who bow and those who hold candles and move about hushed in dark places awaiting light beneath rose windows shattered by rocks and pebbles and bombs and steel NOTHING is for you and NOTHING is real and THIS GOD I say to you will give you NOTHING that you do not already have for God helps those who help themselves!' and with that I bent over and laughed upon the ground and found my Self once again deprived of all company except the ghost of what I was once and could have been once more and should have been and was not and all possibilities like some endless paper hallway with a watermark of time and energy too seemed stopped and stuck by the TIME it got to me and whosoever believes in God needs a capital G and not much else or so it seemed at that moment FIXATED by gain and loss the awkwardness of the tall buildings squeezing out the old horse stables the paths where the wagons went and the gaslight-fronted drinking halls where ancient artists came back to life and talked back to the world and I assumed their pose and I assumed their life and all of their beliefs and it all went out from me AT ONCE commingled with dread and fear and lightning and more - and OH! by the way Copernicus it was who wrote 'Mathematics is written for mathematicians' and I figured fair enough and left it all for them - yet this philosophy I've written for regular people and I swear I heard that echo in the rafters : sky above and heaven above that and somewhere above even that the Heaven we claim as home (but why I'll never know).