Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

216. I WAS NOT EVER ALONE (nyc, 1967):

I never walked alone that I didn't have someone with me and if that sounds stupid that's the way it was - there wasn't a step I could take where someone else wasn't tagging along : dark streets the old wharves the entryways to towers and tombs everywhere I went but after a while one gets so used to that companionship that it all becomes acceptable no matter and it's the same idea behind ideology and solidarity and religion and all that 'I go but not alone' stuff wherein people seek a certain companionship within themselves - it's like the last tile on the museum wall or something that completes the set - God Mammon Subconscious Conscience Id Ego it all just goes on and on and I realized that anyone can convince themselves of anything if that ANYTHING makes their getting along easier - so that was okay by me - all those crazy nuns along St. Charles Borromeo parish school standing like horrid negative apparitions leftover 1960's radical Nazis pushing tots around in a crazed mime of perversion - a 'subconscious' manifestation of a form of patriarchal control and twisted obeisance to an amorphous ideal they'd somehow convinced themselves of being right and strong and powerful enough to take over and own their very earthly existence and which now trickled back out in an angry stream of holy invective answering only to the repressed desires of breaking away and setting themselves free but that entombment held them and their angers only could find release through imparting to others that very same uncomfortableness and so it went - day after day I'd see them along the industrial fencing of the schoolyard as they bullied their wards as if in a cattle yard - with no thought to anything but procedure and process and no one said ever a word to them to correct perhaps this misaligned pedagogy and allegiance to the wrong manifestation of what they thought they saw - poor infected girls turned lonely into even poorer barren infected old women taking solace only in their bizarre biblical tales of all women wenches and witches in devotion to their God and all through time we've seen this as again and over again no one interdicts to elemental grooming of that diminishment but call it growth and grace instead - and I'd come across segments of this same thinking in places other than this churchyard at the corner too - the massed bungle of workmen throwing their freight onto loading docks while at the same time hurling back and forth line after line of unending worktalkchatter about anything and everything of no consequence at all but the sorts of things that make life go on the wrangled talk the story with no end the tale of home or Her the story of this or that and - just in order to get by just that simply - they'd go on shadow-dancing and pushing each other around with tales and stories of their own personal hammeryards and their own personal goals and aspirations and quests and conquests by which each they weaved their own worlds and everywhere I went I walked in the great fog the huge swirl of many worlds turning and intersecting and weaving and forming and no no I was not ever alone.