Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

191. LEAST OF ALL MY CLARITY:

There was so much more I wished to say : 'you love your enemies and hate your friends' would have been one phrase - as Joab said to King David when David was seen weeping for the son who had betrayed him (the son Absalom had just been killed while leading a failed rebellion against his father the King) and Joab's claim was that the King was disgracing all those who had just risked their lives defending him - but I somehow shied away from that because of the confusion of the argument for after all HOW before them would I be able to let them see that I was in essence weeping for them who had betrayed both me and their own intelligences by marching in lockstep to the invidious Evil of media and all that - yet they'd not see and I'd really rather not press the point (an idiot is after all an idiot) and the fact that they loved their enemies - which were the Evils embodied by the Spirits which drove them - and hated their friends (in this case me pointing all this out to them in their own self-interest) would matter little to them - pleasure-principle solace-seekers of self-hood lost raiders of the ark of goodness now forgotten and rotten by neglect - NOTHING would matter (LEAST OF ALL - thought I - my clarity) : so I took my onion and peeled it back - leaning sideways on that pile of grime known as home (apartment hovel fishbowl garret one-room intensified emergency-care studio of the open-air) and she she who walked (acting lessons on the side sweet smile face made wild MINE!!) having just told me something I'd already forgotten made me nervous within my delight and had decided again to walk away - two cats nearby meowed by the milk-bowl at the loading ramp - and the only sound I heard was the distant rumble of some music from far off across the way - far far off across the way - and she was gone.

190. 'WHY ARE YOU STILL LIVING IN THE PROVINCES?'

'All to result in the usual static I'm still thinking of you and wish you were here' that was the cryptic note left on my shelf by someone who never identified herself until much later - when I found out it was left by an occasional and passing girlfriend/acquaintance the realization of which left me almost quivering with anxiety - we'd not seen each other in some time and she'd been to Paris and Berlin since then while I'd remained mired in my little stewpot of work and place and by contrast my lack of glamor to her world-weary adventuring seemed ridiculous and made it seem ever-foolish for her to even want to say hello - which she did eventually - along with all the concomitant small-talk and note-comparing which always goes on in such situations : she'd brought back a new boyfriend - someone named David - and they were soon to be married which also was OK with me and then they planned some move to someplace in New England together so she could work and study some more at Skowhegan - which was some form of artists' colony in Maine and I wished her well and was glad to be seeing that she'd be on her way and onto something better and bigger : everything between us was over and had been and even my newer understandings of what she was about didn't make much sense anymore and besides that I really no longer cared - just that plain and simple - and once you can realize that I guess you can get along far better and we kissed chastely and said good-bye and she was on her way - never heard from since.

189. THE VISIT

Without wishing to know anything more I walked to the sea and when I arrived there the sky was low and the ocean was heaving itself up to the shore in massive crumblings of water beneath a full-moon sky filled with shapes - clouds scurried by beneath the moonlight - and I understood again that so many things go by without being understood and that's probably the way it should be anyway for 'understanding' just forces mistakes and wrong names to the fore : 'stillness is the order of the day and man's greatest strength is shown in standing still for if we would mirror God our souls must be more still' and that was the message of the water and the night sky together as I seemed to hear some music of the stars above the sea echoed again in the pounding roar of a midnight's surf and yet AGAIN I sought no understanding but just passably let it be and without discerning matter OR its cause I was able to enjoy each everything I saw : and I thought of death and all of those I knew who had died and I balanced it with life and all of those I knew who were living - as TOGETHER they meshed quite well - a passing tanker creased the half-lit ocean and I wondered of those aboard the craft - where to were they headed and how - on the whim of a hope and a prayer for weeks upon some open ocean of the blackness and dark without a full knowledge of what was with them - air and wind the leaden cold rain of the great ocean's squalls the calming effect of sunrise along the far horizon and a voice within me said 'seek to know no more yet merely let it show'...and so I did while standing upon some abject notion of land and place of sand and situation and I knew the world could be good if only I were to let it be.

188. A PLEASANT WINTER IN PARIS:

So the answer really is ‘sit back and enjoy’ and think about what you’re doing and watch the man nearby with the saxophone in the case as he walks along the street avoiding lights and cars (he’s the one running from one session to another) in a hurry to be somewhere and take a moment and observe the people streaming in and out of the railroad station and see the men with the uniforms and the guards and maintenance workers and the busmen and drivers and sports fans and delivery people EVERYONE milling about going to and fro and it’s all work the wildest work in the world the ‘everyday’ work of session men and builders and laborers and losers and all we ever can do about it is try to escape it but in every other place we go there’s more work to be done – anyway it went something like that - those final words from Pinkerton who was getting ready to leave for Cos Cob (which is a town in Connecticut somewhere she’d mentioned as home) but I never found out which home the one where she ‘grew’ up or the one where she still really lived for she certainly SEEMED like a city type to me especially an uptown one who walked a lot while thinking nothing of it and that’s only something that locals do for people from other places are always complaining about walking - their legs are tired their feet hurt their back is killing them their shoes aren’t fitting right their stuff is too heavy to keep carrying - anyway outsiders never walk (I’d found that out) but that’s a confusing meaninglessness in this case of Pinkerton who bore the earmarks of everything at once and nothing at all and PERHAPS just perhaps I’d designed a mystery (I thought that to myself) and as we finished our time together I found myself maybe wishing for more time with her but at the same time a gladness for her leaving did come over me and it’s that bedraggled mix-up you get at a bus or train station when you ‘know’ you really want to go yet you linger and hope to stay too just a little bit longer so you hang around and operate slowly and stop for this or that just to all-at-once take it in which I was already doing and the voice on the loudspeaker kept announcing a page – evidently for someone who didn’t show – and that became annoying quickly enough but then so did other people for the crowd-crush was really a lot and she was gone and I was on my own but the last thing I said to her was "well hey I hope to see you somewhere again maybe at Columbia or maybe around there or even here and it’s been a really pleasant afternoon walking and talking" and she gave me a phone number and I gave her mine (a made-up one as I really had none) and I realized the burden thereby was all upon me to make the next move whether in a week or a month or a day for only I could call her she’d not be able to call my made-up number for any real satisfaction unless by chance I had for her rippled some great unknown waters of coincidence and surprise and – who knew – she’d maybe wind up with some great person for her on the other end of that phone call and you know ‘stranger things have happened’ (as they once said at Barnum’s but haven’t said lately) and it all reminded me of another time when I finally did reach someone on the phone in this manner (one Cartier Liza Von Liberte) and she wound up talking to me about very many things but what was amazing was that there I was on one end of the phone a pauper who’d written her a letter in response to something she’d written that I’d seen and her – in response – a wealthy New Yorker on the other end - living at 25 Fifth Avenue who spent most of that conversation telling me about her trips to Europe and how she’d just returned from a pleasant Winter in Paris and had I ever been there and after being told I had not she exclaimed as to how it was I could even live without having ever traveled or seen Europe or the world or done anything ‘extraordinary’ to expand myself and my horizons and all that and it was that huge divide as it opened up which pretty much sealed our fate and never heard from again were either one of us quick end to a short story but another example of how chance - which DOES sometimes really work - in this case worked for nothing and amounted to less (or as my mother used to say - all pouted up and haughty in her play-acting 'Well! I like me who do you like?').

187. AN ART SCHOOL EDUCATION - 'Sex is Like...' (Jan 1968):

Sex is like a cardboard box – as much as you can stuff into it it will take - up to a certain point : what made me think of that was the two naked girls curled up on the old tan couch in the old studio room where some 10 or 12 people were busy sketching and painting them while an art instructor went from easel to easel and spot to spot critiquing each work in its progress – I’d never done this myself ‘painting from life’ never really having interested me since I painted an entire and different format for myself and any drawing I may have done was usually done on the fly with nothing really studiously approached or worked over – so I couldn’t tell what the point of any of this was and a few of the resultant drawings and paintings did seem the same to me anyway as they were made of of the usual jagged charcoal markings denoting the breaking down of object into form and then form into line and all that eventually ended up as much looking like a jumble of smudges and blurs as anything else (studio drawing like this was part of a grand old ‘traditional’ artist’s education in the old ‘Continental’ vein and was the one attention this school really gave to the old hoary tradition of art education – the rest being free and fluid loose and easy) and by contrast at the same time a few were painting and drawing in very true-to-life manner yet each thigh and breast and neckline was pretty much the same : how much could you do to raw unbridled nudity without advancing the pornographic angle anyway : but it was nonetheless always worth it to see the girls splayed out against one another all breasts and asses and sex and faces haphazardly displayed by ones and twos and even the guy models whether in faux-heroic stances or semi-self-conscious languid poses of informality always had a dick hanging somewhere and an expression of some lackadaisical awareness of what they were doing – egad no boners please! - so anything an instructor had to say – I thought – would be comical indeed ‘well you’ve got that pussy just right but there’s a little too much line on that guy’s cock’ or that’s how I laughed it off anyway – knowing it wasn’t really about that stuff anyway : and then that got me thinking about God again and all the cool stuff He’d supposedly made - all these bodies and swells and juices and orifices – and I wondered if that guy who’d just been talking at me had ever taken any awareness of all that as he considered the plights of both Mankind and its Gods – those Greeks on Mount Olympus seemed to fuck enough for a real tribe anyway – and human or not I wondered what he’d thought of any of this and the beautiful girls and even the not-so always attracted my attention and I loved to watch them upon completion as they slowly broke down a pose gracefully moved themselves around and then somehow always demurely put on a purple or nicely colored robe or wrap to walk out in and in which to walk off – they’d re-appear a little later nicely dressed and ready to walk outdoors and no one would ever say really a word to them about the whole scene they’d just gone through - entertainment or not as it was - the art world was weird like that – especially for 18 year old boys don’t you think?