Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

178. FRIENDS MOSTLY UNSEEN... (1968, nyc):

Sometimes among the people I knew I would sense various attitudes and world-views which I couldn't understand or fathom and mostly they stemmed from upbringing and/or money and the sorts of families and lifestyles they'd enjoyed (which by contrast I could say I never had and most certainly had never 'enjoyed') and privilege being a pre-requisite of taste I was often left holding the bag as it were - seen as the low level representative of some alien life form of the sort which did sometimes come into and inhabit the city - a case of 'new-money vs. old-money' as it were (except that in my case the old money was no-money) - and in most every aspect of taste there were huge differences which in my case of twenty-five cent soup and muffin meals meant that any outward expense of more than that was trouble - while they went about in their own allegorical fashion eating filet mignon every twenty minutes and with perfect silverware and service at that - it was just really too much of a divide to cross and so it stayed that way YET I managed and they welcomed me in as much as they could and whenever they had to - which was nice always when it happened - but I held no grudges and went about my business learning everything and watching as closely as I could too all that went on so as to absorb from it as much as I could -- there was no telling when at any time something might come up into which I was drawn and where my very own personal points of views could be different enough to perhaps show them something new or different by simply expressing a viewpoint or approach which BECAUSE of their upbringings or attitudes they simply not think of - which as sometimes just as much a revelation for them as most often their stuff was for me : an odd converse of events which sometimes amused : and I liked it all well enough and I kept carefully within my own precepts and parameters which mostly meant things like not volunteering any information or at least not letting anything slip until the very last moment or when I actually had to - that was one means of holding it all close to the vest as it were and thereby harboring as many aspirations of seeing what was first expected and what was considered a'propos and normalized from their points of view as it related to whatever situation was at hand - I spent time reading and reading carefully those things I liked and it didn't much matter there they stood on any scale of propriety or taste : I loved what I loved and delved at will through anything I could find which fixed my interest and which related in any way to the art-philosophical-psychological points onto which I was trying to focus and set my course and I spent plenty of time as I said (as much as possible) with the likes of Morton Feldman Philip Guston and all the rest of those around me as I possibly could and those who were not near me - in turn - became as real to me through their words as I could make them and the constant referencing of unseen peoples and forces around me led to some startling and scary events for me too - almost hallucinatory in nature sometimes these things were - but just as much edifying and instructive and (for all those reasons) my Friends were legion and mostly unseen.