Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

175. HARP-EYED THE FERRY MATTER - and 'the end' (nyc, 1969):

Then there were TWO soldiers and in hats were they and wearing stockings green and blue and they stood straight and they wandered not and kept a face forward fort-wise weary but born to no manor they kept no allegiance and before too long the swords were drawn the tuner was payed twice and over again once to tune and once to just listen HARP-EYED THE FERRY MATTER flowed gently sweet and scattered and rabbits wizened and squirrels forlorn and geese and swans and bears and hens in fact EVERYTHING of the King’s estate came forth to greet the newer date for we’d forgotten already to go and had stayed too long by the old window looking out at the piercing eights and other cars streaming by the gates and doors and no steamer trunk for anywhere else had been unpacked except the twelve APOSTLES they were who couldn’t stay YET I heard them say : "what is up with us ? what self-image is this ? and what do men see when they look at us thus" and the stranger responded by saying : "if it ain’t the Real McCoy it ain’t nothing plus if you’re not gonna’ stay no one’s coming your way and not a soul of you twelve would we miss" and then Red the big one known as Judas to some turned and spoke to the crowd and said : "some there are who claim to know and others there are who seem and still others who know enough to claim to seem but my own idea is it’s all this dream where I twist and turn and some silver I earn by turning in good friend Jeez the one who eats cheese to the nails on the tree and he withers and fades and declaims at the last ‘this ain’t a good game I feel forsaken and shamed but suffer the somethings to come to me’ and by that balderdash it seems a great church was gleaned AND WE’VE STILL GOT THE MONEY we’ve keened" and then I saw he bowed down to the road and the next thing I knew he was hanging there DEAD and ‘sorrowful justification’ the newspapers read but it was all enough to do in the sheriff with the price on his head.
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Now whatever all that was I had to keep myself as steady as I could just to concentrate on what was there : I looked up in the little room and Hans Hoffman's scrawl itself was sequestered on the wall - all brightly painted with reds and blues and all - and the really nice girl the lady at the reception desk said 'come right in we've expected you all morning' and this was (finally) to be the place the gallery the up-and-coming location of painterly hangings and I was to be included - me Mindy Walter Eddie R. and Balton too - and we were the five who'd been selected for the hangings of some thirty pieces yet to be selected and I'd been told a hundred times that 'this could be it' I could be famous this could be the big break but I laughed back at all this (in fact we all did) because we each knew we were too young and had garnered nothing - no 'hard knocks' no experience to live by no reason to make our paintings any more stand-outish than any rat-ass high-school kid's art-class trash - all in all between us we had maybe three year's experience amidst NYC art and even if this did sometimes feel like twenty so any big-break this turned out to be would probably be the big-break that 'broke' us and as it turned out to be that was pretty much it - we hung there for about 6 weeks with some twenty paintings and some little labels about us and the work in each case and there was even a little reception thing with the usual - 'meet-the-artists' crap all around it but nothing much happened a few little things sold and it all came down and we walked away wiser and wizened by the experience but I knew all the time it wasn't for me - all this wrangling and spitting back within the 'art-world' fabrications of fit and style and publicists and agents and all that and every art gallery curator worth his salt wanted nothing much to do wit 'studential' work as one stupid French guy had put it and I pretty much agreed with that anyway saying back 'yeah well at this point of my work I really don't want much to do with curatorial or gallerelial work either' and everybody laughed like it was some big joke even though we were all hurting and there we stood in our bibs and paint-clothing while around us all these jerky hacks came in in studio-black and fancy clothes and the girls all dazzled up with stockings and short skirts and come-hither looks and fetching protuberances and all the rest but it all went for nothing and I was glad anyway to get out of there with my life and went right back down to my basement hole and put on some loud music and crawled up to sleep in the back until the very next day somebody came by and woke me up and handed me a hundred and fifty five dollars for work sold which was like a fortune back then and to me in those days and I took the money but said I wanted all the rest of my stuff back and they said come get it and this payment had gotten someone 3 little pieces I'd done but I wasn't even really sure of that and even now don't know where they went and one had really been my favorite and was an astounding and coincidental piece of work that had dazzled even me - I'd done a blue and white sky all along the top half of the picture and made it slapdash and crazy and wild - all dark blues and light blues and whites and colors befitting the scene and then after I was done I stepped back from it and somehow SOMEHOW from about three or four feet back the combination of light/dark contrast between what were 'clouds' and deep blue sky had somehow spelled out in that sky the very clear but very simple words which read 'the end' and I was amazed and flabbergasted by the accident of what I'd done - and now it was gone and among the three which had sold and I never did see it again but the picture memory of that has stayed with me forever.

174. THE ONLY MAN I EVER KILLED WAS MYSELF (nyc, 1968):

I had an unwitting energy and a manic propulsion to walk seaward - edge to edge the crazy island swarmed with people and water and as the two went together it was everywhere merged - men in dark coats trudging dutifully in early morning lights towards their rendezvous with 17th floor windows lit early with light from within - a yellowing light seen from below - and the lobbies of the many downtown buildings which took them in had as much eager activity inside as out - the newly married apprentice businessmen types learning their means and methods as they sorted through life (that new apartment on 21st and that new little lady left in the apartment) and career : everyone so serene and vacuous in the same way that they were striving and greedy to make it big : that slalom to the top regardless of who got hurt along the way and like a piston pushing from below the entire apparatus was one of profit/loss and accounting and making every and each tiny little dollar count for something - lawyers trained in laws used to sue and doctors seeking medicine which would make them rich and all about them too people were lined up to take part : soldiers and sailors and psychiatrists and counselors everywhere and wherever I turned there was something or someone needy showing up and people seeking advice from others while giving none themselves - taxi drivers impatient at red-lights staring ahead as they brazenly ran through them BUT YET for myself it was all different - I kept losing things and I could find nothing and so I had nothing just the endless declensions of Latin words the endless lists of encyclopedia entries and the scribblings in journals one after the other and picture postcards of things I savored : Empire State Building Chrysler Woolworth United Nations and the Savoy the Plaza the Algonquin the Pierre and the Waldorf or any of those grand hotels perched on nothing but air and filled with stories and everywhere I went there was something to take or get or see and bring back with me : yet again I was alone and singular and I literally had nothing NOTHING except these collections of junk mementos or the broken things I'd pick up on the street (by those counts I was wealthy indeed) and in such a fashion it went on - the endless turmoil of the Vietnam years and the people parading stamping screaming and steaming all along the streets and squares with protests demonstrations hunger strikes burnings and the rest - the mass of impractical rules and laws controlling draft and service and the wiry induction center on lower Broadway - the quaint and odd old building spired up like some new branch of an evil hell filled in its corridors with the dour and stupid bureaucrats of fake power and elan pulling kids in to churn them out as draftees inductees fodder to be killed and maimed for the Johnson/Nixon bullshit machine and I watched and stayed with it all - Nixon's proud yet stupid post-election and pre-inaugural President-elect set-up in the Hotel Pierre where he immediately began living like luxury like some fearsome King of old all puffed up with power and intent - no one stopped him and no one cared and six years after Kennedy another bullet in the head to him wouldn't have much mattered for EVERYTHING was spiraling down and I lived on 8th Street and I lived on 11th and I stayed at places all in between - 1st Street 14th Street and all the lofts and studios through the west 20's and places too on the eastside with its towers and doormen and money and presence : everything swarmed and in it all I swam : the police who swaggered through the park with billy clubs at the ready and the mobs of disenfranchised and angry nobodies who shouted back at them and the crazies who doused themselves with holy water and then screamed or the lines of girls at the Judson Memorial Church holding candles for the dead soldiers whose names were posted out front on a daily basis and there were no comrades-in-arms NOT because there were no arms but because there were NO COMRADES as everyone went diving for themselves and little else - quick-study romances wherein boy-rebel gets girl-rebel or hippie meets hippie and they happily fornicate forever - all it ever was was a nightmare kingdom of liquor and law and drugs and sloth and let no one ever tell you different - for yes I was there and yes I swam in the same oily muck as the rest and maybe (just maybe) the only man I ever killed was myself.

173. AN AGE OF SCIENCE AND DOUBT (lecture 21, present day time):

'Two guys sunning on the moon with laser guns ricocheting off Mars - anyone's quick synopsis of the last 50 years could include those two items and nothing more and get the point across - of course it leaves out by decibels of sound all the gruesome ways of death and slaughter all the broken limbs and false enticements of Kingship and Power and victory and force : there once really were rivers that ran with blood and they probably still drain into the hidden sluice pipes of despond and all that runs through it : broken bindings on the Bibles of Hell where the preachers who use them have opened each volume and split their backs - folding them over before huge crowds swaying - angels of Death on markers of shame cruising down from the skies as the stewards and hostesses of sex crime and theft and every leaf in those books has been sealed and lacquered over with the gloss of snide and the snicker of deceit BUT NO ONE (everlasting glorious redundant heaps of two-legged people) thinks twice nor looks back and over the rubble settles new dirt and dead trees and the drained and oiled industrial soil of contorted crops the harvest of which is nothing but more of the same : 140mph cars headed nowhere in a flash and driven by broodheads and idiots who then join the armies of the world to fight and grab back what they claimed was theirs anyway : first the lesson is polished and then consumed like an apple fallen from a Satanic tree - the same old story the elders spat out and if all time is nothing but endless repetition and if the eyelashes of God and all the female saints of old bear ANY RECOGNITION to holiness at all then I'm in this for the long-haul but only if I can clean the corridors of power and slaughter the guilty - leaving (perhaps) the innocents at bay to fend for themselves.'

172. FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (or Something Like That) - Part One:

One time I woke up dead in Meshoppen Pennsylvania on my way towards Towanda - an oddly undifferentiated place in the plain wilds of northeastern PA the place where they call their little foothills the 'Endless Mountains' if you want to know that and where there are rabbits and rodents amidst rafters and rapids and the little old river I'd found out that way - name I forget - had fossil rocks a'plenty amidst the running waters of some little stream - which water-bed you could walk and see all these rocks and as you walked there'd be deep in the woods suddenly houses and cabins with little fences and driveways and places where there were people - pretty much silent and mysterious people - living about and going on with their own tiny lives amidst all the conflagration of the rest of the world and I always liked that infernal distance and silence - except for the gurgling of the fossil waters - and I wanted just to stay there forever but couldn't and it wasn't really Meshoppen anyway go to find out it was more like Waverly NY right at the border but whatever I never cared much for that stuff : the heavily laden waters made me think of Heaven and the musics which came from the clouds had me thinking of some great wild voice about to come down from the skies like a hand delivering tablets or any of that stuff that used to happen (star-twinkle brightness angel Moroni speaking in tongues and the desert man crying all to himself in the middle of the deep deep woods) and I was so sad I too wanted to die but nothing ever came my way and the pictures I'd see carved into trees were all the pictures I'd ever need.