Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation
Saturday, January 13, 2018
MESSAGE ON THE JAILHOUSE LAWN / CHURCHHOUSE LAWN
THE MESSAGE ON
THE JAILHOUSE LAWN:
THE JAILHOUSE LAWN:
‘Unless your faith is firm YOU shall not be firm,’ it said on the church-sign which announced a sermon or somesuch - (of course it was the same church outside of which the illuminated sign read ‘Thank God for Summer!’ as most people grumbled and swore about the 100 degree sustained heat and humidity – but so much for that). I thought that was a particularly BOLD and erroneous sign for such a place to present to its public, since, in its reality it would essentially bankrupt and make foul the very church which proclaimed it, in that - going back to previous points on the personal psyche and systems of belief - once the ‘me’ personality crosses its crisis point successfully and with awareness, other things begin to happen, and a person certainly would no loner 'need' the church. 'God' can be quite transformative you know. If they in that church only knew, I really don't think that sign would be up. Once the 'self' gets wind of this, you see, here's what happens : the focus personality tries to continue its expansion, while still maintaining its 'previous orientation' with the world (the 'Bob' we know), and to correlate its unofficial information in terms of its religious and cultural beliefs. At this stage they are usually trying to – for example – prove that their new visions are true in the world’s terms. And as another example, if they begin with – say – automatic writing which gives ‘extraterrestrials’ as its source, they might then try to prove that those beings exist literally, and they will be convinced that the ‘space’ people, rather then they themselves, possess the abilities. Or, if their reason then convinces them that such ‘space people’ do not exist in those terms, they throw the whole thing over in disgust and do not use this opening wedge to understand that the psychic events were important even if their clothing was symbolic. The initial psychic event is often dramatic or outrageous, in normal terms, simply to draw their attention. And it may be some great psychological undertaking – all art and colors and vivid richness – yet they still insist (the old them) upon judging it according to the most rigid true-or-false standards, so that such experiences, visions, or interior revelations, become bigger than the ideas of what life and existence are and are then refused. At that pint, and because of it, many people then stay at the initial level, in a confusion and wonderment, and they try to interpret the events in a framework too small or still within their cozy religious or pseudo-scientific circles. Thus, talking statues, or weeping angels. Those circles, which, of course, will provide SOME freedom from the ‘official’ line of consciousness by allowing such psychic ventures. But only IF they follow certain set conventions characteristic of the group. BUT this approach then hampers the ‘personality’ from developing any further, and then - if the 'latest unofficial data' contradicts the ‘party line’ - that person is ‘out in the cold’ again; so that many people – after some first and initial steps – become frozen in development, and merely mouth the current psychic religious or pseudoscientific dogma. (Again I refer to ‘unless your faith be firm you shall not be firm’ a cheeky and deceitful canard). And the obvious and ready-made symbols of religion and pseudo-science - as a ‘fall-back’ position - are probably at least helpful to many people after this point, insofar as it may provide them then with a 'limited orientation' for inner activity and growth within ‘bounds.’ But, if the arrangement becomes permanent further, experiences are programmed too rigidly and such people never work through to the truly personal or original aspect selves hidden within. (And they become instead some semblance of the St. Theresa of Avila type – seeing EVERYTHING mystical through the church and Jesus lens). These stages, left alone, merely mirror the aspects of the psyche being activated – showing themselves only and always in the characteristics and comforts of the personality involved, (again St. Theresa), and any‘latent’ creative abilities might then be personified as a muse for example. The person's normal, 'focus personality' might be presented with new skills or interests, but this personalized and tailor-made assistance of the psyche to the focus personality may not emerge if the rigid concepts continue to cloak the experiences. These people more often than not are replete with the good and bad spirits of religion and myth and never take it past that point : the park-lawns and baskets of the homeless are filled with these types.
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Let’s not forget here any Dr. Chemist or the Scholar or a School-Marm trainee setting about to indoctrinate – after their own training is done – myriad others with the same stale information which has arrested their own developments. For the upper west side, NYC, right here is full of them and the monied and storied rich just above them often carry the same sorts of attitudes as those just below them and yet the selfsame sun which glows setting orange in the wide windows of the rich fronting the river is SOMEHOW the selfsame sun being shielded by the arm and the broken sunglass of the homeless and the unattached down there below.
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Let’s not forget here any Dr. Chemist or the Scholar or a School-Marm trainee setting about to indoctrinate – after their own training is done – myriad others with the same stale information which has arrested their own developments. For the upper west side, NYC, right here is full of them and the monied and storied rich just above them often carry the same sorts of attitudes as those just below them and yet the selfsame sun which glows setting orange in the wide windows of the rich fronting the river is SOMEHOW the selfsame sun being shielded by the arm and the broken sunglass of the homeless and the unattached down there below.
5. MESSAGE TO MR. CHURCH:
Dear Church : I noticed a sign on your lawn about being firm, and have written (just previous) a little bit about that - but what I wrote only takes it to the point of people who end up still believing in the basic structures and beliefs of the society around them anyway. YET now I’d like to entertain some further thoughts about those who – after illumination – take themselves well past your paltry signage. THE PEOPLE who can get PAST those initial stumbling blocks on their ways towards self-enlightenment end up literally worlds away from those who falter after that first step. In these people, the SELF, the ‘focus’ personality, becomes reassured enough to accept new data as a part of a greater reality in which the physical world is couched and it is ready for true self-fulfillment, which means identifying with portions of the psyche formerly considered 'Not-self' (the early needs for ‘death of the self’ only exist early on, when arbitrary standards between the Self and Not-self still predominate. BUT THIS SOON GOES AWAY ! and the newer stage is the one interpreted in religious terms as the death of the self and the new birth – the death of the will or in other concepts of a similar nature – which concepts are actually quite distorted ones, unfortunately, for actually the new person learns that nothing works for it but the new orientation fully accepted, and this means that it expands and accepts its own larger framework and sees that nothing is lost and IN FACT the world is gained in a new way and this new stage can be a quick realization or a gradual trial-and-error process in which the focus personality fluctuates between the previous stages until it FINALLY receives enough momentum to break through. AND THEN the personality enters truly a new country – one in which the ‘me’ of me realizes that the assumptions of the official consciousness only apply at that level. Those assumptions are then dropped as valid descriptions of reality, and they are treated instead as ‘respected local ordinances’ - and the seeming contradictions between intellect and intuition, good and evil, object and subject, vanish – these stages vary in time-length for everyone and they can be quick or they can be long – but overall these are the stages through which we each come to psychic maturity. That's where Art comes from, and Creativity, and the daring needed to create.
To one extent or another they take place in each person regardless of culture – as they represent intuitive revelation and assimilation (ancient civilizations once provided mobile groups of guidelines as symbols but our society tries to stifle things at this point by staying with the primitive and early first stage) and an entire world and culture is formed around a very specific and limiting and local area of consciousness and this level (dear Church) is particularly disadvantageous because its assumptions are made to seem to be the only criteria for reality since any ‘unofficial’ data that would show alternate patterns is discouraged and scoffed at - and of course the ‘local’ winners accept all that and prosper very well within the confines but OTHER stages of consciousness immeasurably fill out usual reality – adding depths and nuances not generally perceivable and they provide their own kind of evidence [these are natural stages experienced to some degree by everyone and beyond them are stages of ecstasy almost impossible to sustain in ordinary living and they are the mark of the mystic stage the dynamic dance of the dervish perhaps.
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I feel that is the TRUE meaning of ‘unless your faith is firm you shall not be firm’ and it has NOTHING to do with the church or its message – which is by comparison restrictive and limiting and encumbered by stipulation and demand. I guess what I'm saying is, there are no halfway measures, and - dear little church and church signboard in the woods - be careful what you proclaim, for you may very well come to regret it. True belief leaves organizations behind.
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I feel that is the TRUE meaning of ‘unless your faith is firm you shall not be firm’ and it has NOTHING to do with the church or its message – which is by comparison restrictive and limiting and encumbered by stipulation and demand. I guess what I'm saying is, there are no halfway measures, and - dear little church and church signboard in the woods - be careful what you proclaim, for you may very well come to regret it. True belief leaves organizations behind.
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Wednesday, October 19, 2011
ALL YOUR GLORIED SCIENTISTS
226. ALL YOUR GLORIED SCIENTISTS:
'I wouldn't want to break you, send a fist right to your face, a brutal boot
deep into your ass, but very often it occurs that these things become
necessary and the only way by which to impart not the values themselves
but the way in which they are being violated to the mind of another. It
a very direct way of experiencing the task at hand; something like 'do or
die' and, don't get me wrong, again those old, tradeworn cliches do manage
to give us a form of the manner in which old thinking once operated : the
force of the cannon-shed, the power of the assaultive indictment, the force
of absolute and final result, and I use them only as example, for these
are more exalted times and we live with different brains now and a
consciousness totally transformed. I cannot tell you how it breathes,
but perhaps your gloried 'scientists' can.'
'I wouldn't want to break you, send a fist right to your face, a brutal boot
deep into your ass, but very often it occurs that these things become
necessary and the only way by which to impart not the values themselves
but the way in which they are being violated to the mind of another. It
a very direct way of experiencing the task at hand; something like 'do or
die' and, don't get me wrong, again those old, tradeworn cliches do manage
to give us a form of the manner in which old thinking once operated : the
force of the cannon-shed, the power of the assaultive indictment, the force
of absolute and final result, and I use them only as example, for these
are more exalted times and we live with different brains now and a
consciousness totally transformed. I cannot tell you how it breathes,
but perhaps your gloried 'scientists' can.'
Sunday, May 08, 2011
'I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO SAY THIS'
225. 'DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO SAY THIS' (columbia crossroads, pennsylvania, 1974):
I loved your never-ending story of the time you went to the time before that which in turn led to - well you know how it runs and it's really so easy to just continue and all that brain-addled crazy stuff just seems running to and fro like the time the guy in the hay loft fell to the floor below having slept a long sleep in the surreptitious attic where he'd never should have gone and the only real problem was in how he fell right into the collected pile of that day's cow shit which was put there at the end of the day to be added to with the next morning's cow shit and taken out in the spreader (16 Holsteins and 3 Jerseys three times a day makes plenty of chowder) and how once he was found out said that it wasn't so much the falling into the cowshit that sucked big time but more it was how it all got into his mouth cause he was too busy being startled - all that brown runny juice and smelly pulverized straw and stuff all together dripping like some really wicked runny syrup - a bad molasses made from cows' asses - as he put it wisely enough and just like a sage but once he was found out the explaining had to be done and excused - after all anyone homeless on the walking lam and just wandering from place to place even in the deep country can be forgiven for seeking shelter and comfort and warmth - and after he was excused and then found out of course he had to be cleaned up and the farmer's wife (delectable creature that she was) thought very little of it and - in their ploy to further humiliate the man - and this is all a very funny farmer humor but believe you me it's all true and people are still laughing - had him strip naked for her right in front of her as she cleaned and replaced his clothes and then - believe you me again - took him to bed and requested nicely that they have sex - which was done - and then fed the man a meal and reclothed him in cleaned and fine clothes and the farmer came back in a bit later and - pretending not to know any of this - sat socially with the fellow until he was ready to leave and then smiled shook his hand and laughed him off as the awkward fellow bolted darted bamboozled himself away : and as odd as all this seems (how the wanderers are treated how the homeless walkabouts are used for local comic relief) everyone and I mean everyone had a major crazed good laugh over this for a very long time - wicked farm humor really knowing no bounds.
I loved your never-ending story of the time you went to the time before that which in turn led to - well you know how it runs and it's really so easy to just continue and all that brain-addled crazy stuff just seems running to and fro like the time the guy in the hay loft fell to the floor below having slept a long sleep in the surreptitious attic where he'd never should have gone and the only real problem was in how he fell right into the collected pile of that day's cow shit which was put there at the end of the day to be added to with the next morning's cow shit and taken out in the spreader (16 Holsteins and 3 Jerseys three times a day makes plenty of chowder) and how once he was found out said that it wasn't so much the falling into the cowshit that sucked big time but more it was how it all got into his mouth cause he was too busy being startled - all that brown runny juice and smelly pulverized straw and stuff all together dripping like some really wicked runny syrup - a bad molasses made from cows' asses - as he put it wisely enough and just like a sage but once he was found out the explaining had to be done and excused - after all anyone homeless on the walking lam and just wandering from place to place even in the deep country can be forgiven for seeking shelter and comfort and warmth - and after he was excused and then found out of course he had to be cleaned up and the farmer's wife (delectable creature that she was) thought very little of it and - in their ploy to further humiliate the man - and this is all a very funny farmer humor but believe you me it's all true and people are still laughing - had him strip naked for her right in front of her as she cleaned and replaced his clothes and then - believe you me again - took him to bed and requested nicely that they have sex - which was done - and then fed the man a meal and reclothed him in cleaned and fine clothes and the farmer came back in a bit later and - pretending not to know any of this - sat socially with the fellow until he was ready to leave and then smiled shook his hand and laughed him off as the awkward fellow bolted darted bamboozled himself away : and as odd as all this seems (how the wanderers are treated how the homeless walkabouts are used for local comic relief) everyone and I mean everyone had a major crazed good laugh over this for a very long time - wicked farm humor really knowing no bounds.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
ESTHER AMARKAT AND THE MARKET OF SLEAZE
225. ESTHER AMARKAT AND THE MARKET OF SLEAZE:
"There's no distinction between hot water and trouble and if you're in one you're in the other and I've been so long in both that it don't matter none to me" Esther said that to me one day at Kurt's Mellow-Mat as the house of pleasure was being called that month and I was in such a bad mood that I couldn't really care what she was saying nor even talking about all I wanted was the money in an envelope I was supposed to be picking up - which she did eventually give to me - and all she wanted was it seemed to delay that moment for as long as possible (and I was later told a lot of that was the same way about sex with her but I never really cared) and I turned once and said "I don't know what you're talking about but go on if you have to" and she smiled and lit a cigarette - which she smoked essentially in one drag from a long red cigarette holder which she held between jewel encrusted fingers with really bad nails - and said "my mother was a washwoman to the Reilly Appomattox family - if that means anything to you - and she learned a lot from them including how to steal and how to cover her tracks but nothing more ever came to me that was as important as learning that getting AWAY is more important than arriving - if you follow" and of course again I didn't but said nothing "and you take this envelope back to Max and tell him to shove the whole wad up his ever-loving white ass" and although I delivered the goods I never spoke those words to him and never saw her again either but no matter because within two years Maxie was dead and his whole syndicate it would appear was over and finished - so I figured somewhere along the line it was HE who had never learned from Esther how to 'get away' but then maybe she didn't either learn from herself or anyone else and by then just the same I too was gone and moved on to other things but these many little night-lessons learned while working here and there for twenty thirty fifty or a hundred bucks a week was a great experience for me and I never ever crossed anyone and so stayed out of trouble and learned of things I could talk about for ever and ever if I had too and such 'service' in the pursuit of crime was nothing more than schooling in the pursuit of the same crap anyone else in regular schooling would have been after and once a long while later I ran into one of the girls I'd seen at Esther's and she recognized me too and started talking to me and she said that Esther was a really kind woman but tough as grime and had been shut down so many times that she knew the entire racket by heart but no one was sure anymore where she was or what had happened to her but they'd heard that Atlanta was her next big market and maybe she was there or no one really knew but just said that and she said too that she herself worked most everywhere she could but that "nowadays it was a lot easier because everybody was on the make and looking for girls and even regular businessmen now had turned scales and gone crazy-hip and ready for action and nobody cared anymore about anything and money and men were both a lot easier to make these days and anyway see ya' around sometime maybe."
"There's no distinction between hot water and trouble and if you're in one you're in the other and I've been so long in both that it don't matter none to me" Esther said that to me one day at Kurt's Mellow-Mat as the house of pleasure was being called that month and I was in such a bad mood that I couldn't really care what she was saying nor even talking about all I wanted was the money in an envelope I was supposed to be picking up - which she did eventually give to me - and all she wanted was it seemed to delay that moment for as long as possible (and I was later told a lot of that was the same way about sex with her but I never really cared) and I turned once and said "I don't know what you're talking about but go on if you have to" and she smiled and lit a cigarette - which she smoked essentially in one drag from a long red cigarette holder which she held between jewel encrusted fingers with really bad nails - and said "my mother was a washwoman to the Reilly Appomattox family - if that means anything to you - and she learned a lot from them including how to steal and how to cover her tracks but nothing more ever came to me that was as important as learning that getting AWAY is more important than arriving - if you follow" and of course again I didn't but said nothing "and you take this envelope back to Max and tell him to shove the whole wad up his ever-loving white ass" and although I delivered the goods I never spoke those words to him and never saw her again either but no matter because within two years Maxie was dead and his whole syndicate it would appear was over and finished - so I figured somewhere along the line it was HE who had never learned from Esther how to 'get away' but then maybe she didn't either learn from herself or anyone else and by then just the same I too was gone and moved on to other things but these many little night-lessons learned while working here and there for twenty thirty fifty or a hundred bucks a week was a great experience for me and I never ever crossed anyone and so stayed out of trouble and learned of things I could talk about for ever and ever if I had too and such 'service' in the pursuit of crime was nothing more than schooling in the pursuit of the same crap anyone else in regular schooling would have been after and once a long while later I ran into one of the girls I'd seen at Esther's and she recognized me too and started talking to me and she said that Esther was a really kind woman but tough as grime and had been shut down so many times that she knew the entire racket by heart but no one was sure anymore where she was or what had happened to her but they'd heard that Atlanta was her next big market and maybe she was there or no one really knew but just said that and she said too that she herself worked most everywhere she could but that "nowadays it was a lot easier because everybody was on the make and looking for girls and even regular businessmen now had turned scales and gone crazy-hip and ready for action and nobody cared anymore about anything and money and men were both a lot easier to make these days and anyway see ya' around sometime maybe."
Monday, January 10, 2011
THERE ARE THINGS TO SAVE/THINGS TO DESTROY
224. THERE ARE THINGS TO SAVE/THINGS TO DESTROY:
It's not a comfortable zone to be in let no man say it is - this of the time due to observation and all its potential - this is such abstract juice that worrying about it itself is painful and more trouble than it is worth SO here I am ! sitting beneath a tree atop the promontory and next to me on some broken down old table are three Russians stammering away in their language - and it feels good just to listen and [almost] know not where I am and they go on : the oldest obviously the mother and her daughter the younger girl married to the lout they've dragged along drinking beer from an unsettled can and he appears as bored as Zeus on a day off between dozes but the two women intensely chatter and seek his comment - which amounts to an occasional shrug or nod or some stammered gibberish in OH! that mother tongue - and if the Russian army ever needed a man I can sense that THIS would be the one but nonetheless the younger Russian girl has hair the yellow of gold and teeth I've never seen before but she carries her scrambled image well while the mother IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING defines for us all the image of the Russian Mother we've somehow come to know - close cropped and close to the ground she seems as sturdy as a shed and more stumpy than a tree but she talks a mild minute wildly with her hands as they both drink orange soda from sweaty bottles and sit there as a threesome fine and dandy and along for that matter and on the other side of me the Jewish Day Camp Survivors Club is sitting as a group on the dried and fraying grass - and all of them (perhaps twelve boys and three or four girls all about eleven years old) with their guides or parents or counselors are sitting in the shade and each child wears a wild pullover shirt striped black and tan in one outrageously rigid vertical pattern and the sidelocks the boys wear seem themselves defined by the same verticality yet curled with a shine and the girls have the same pattern of clothes as their shirts and plain khaki skirts and all of them together - as recognizable as a mob - couldn't be lost as a group or a single if they tried and I figure that's how the camp keeps its order on these camp-outing trips and the men in the group are each - in white shirt and cap and old graying hair - overweight and too slow as they walk with their wives or whomever in plain back/white garb as dour as the kids are outrageous and (here I notice) the Russians are watching the kids and that's what they’re talking about while the kids are oblivious of them and everyone else while a hundred feet away are the Palisades' cliffs and any human is stopped only by an old rock wall from throwing anyone else off and my mind gets glittery with slaughter at the thought as I realize these archetypes could rise up in some ancient blood-feud again and decimate each other deadly wild and strange war-whooping with murder as they throw each other forcefully off the nearby cliffs but I lean back instead and rest my head - to think I'd better save these horrid thoughts for some other day.
It's not a comfortable zone to be in let no man say it is - this of the time due to observation and all its potential - this is such abstract juice that worrying about it itself is painful and more trouble than it is worth SO here I am ! sitting beneath a tree atop the promontory and next to me on some broken down old table are three Russians stammering away in their language - and it feels good just to listen and [almost] know not where I am and they go on : the oldest obviously the mother and her daughter the younger girl married to the lout they've dragged along drinking beer from an unsettled can and he appears as bored as Zeus on a day off between dozes but the two women intensely chatter and seek his comment - which amounts to an occasional shrug or nod or some stammered gibberish in OH! that mother tongue - and if the Russian army ever needed a man I can sense that THIS would be the one but nonetheless the younger Russian girl has hair the yellow of gold and teeth I've never seen before but she carries her scrambled image well while the mother IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING defines for us all the image of the Russian Mother we've somehow come to know - close cropped and close to the ground she seems as sturdy as a shed and more stumpy than a tree but she talks a mild minute wildly with her hands as they both drink orange soda from sweaty bottles and sit there as a threesome fine and dandy and along for that matter and on the other side of me the Jewish Day Camp Survivors Club is sitting as a group on the dried and fraying grass - and all of them (perhaps twelve boys and three or four girls all about eleven years old) with their guides or parents or counselors are sitting in the shade and each child wears a wild pullover shirt striped black and tan in one outrageously rigid vertical pattern and the sidelocks the boys wear seem themselves defined by the same verticality yet curled with a shine and the girls have the same pattern of clothes as their shirts and plain khaki skirts and all of them together - as recognizable as a mob - couldn't be lost as a group or a single if they tried and I figure that's how the camp keeps its order on these camp-outing trips and the men in the group are each - in white shirt and cap and old graying hair - overweight and too slow as they walk with their wives or whomever in plain back/white garb as dour as the kids are outrageous and (here I notice) the Russians are watching the kids and that's what they’re talking about while the kids are oblivious of them and everyone else while a hundred feet away are the Palisades' cliffs and any human is stopped only by an old rock wall from throwing anyone else off and my mind gets glittery with slaughter at the thought as I realize these archetypes could rise up in some ancient blood-feud again and decimate each other deadly wild and strange war-whooping with murder as they throw each other forcefully off the nearby cliffs but I lean back instead and rest my head - to think I'd better save these horrid thoughts for some other day.
Monday, November 15, 2010
'JUST KILL HIM NOW HE'S NOT FIT TO LIVE'
224: 'JUST KILL HIM NOW HE'S NOT FIT TO LIVE' (nov. 14, 1967, nyc)
Friday, September 24, 2010
HUMAN REFLEXIVITIES
223. HUMAN REFLEXIVITIES (nyc, 1968):
They bring on the very idea of God - it just happens every tribe every bestial coven anywhere people have gathered the idea arises but we just don't anymore realize nor understand this idea this concept this 'what-can-be' and we no longer even understand how at one time the real battle wasn't over this 'God' thing it was over - really - how many and people went to battle over the idea of 'One' God one god alone as if any of that could really matter : it's just a human reflex : the battle to fight the words the ideas the concepts nothing held fast to understand or to be understood it's just like that : all that was only a part of what I'd been saying the night before to a few people around the table and now it was the next morning and there was only one left and her I did remember but all things were different now ALL : what she said was that she didn't like my randomness (and I could tell oh yeah that) my crazy randomness - to her who was a sister of system this represented nothing - so much as poor class no learning a haphazard talent and a total disregard of everything else and I figured enough to understand what she mean - I'd taken chances all my life and she was by far the prettiest one I'd risked - all for nothing now falling away and I asked "you want to say that once more you want to say what you mean?" asking that as I was leaning on the wall at the corner by the phone and the lamp and near me was the sculpture put in pace for some Cynthia Stone or someone who'd been killed about a year ago in a car-crash upstate and for whose memory now her family had donated a large sum of money and this memorial sculpture in her name and all that graced the lobby now of the Studio School which is where I was then living spending the overnights in a little room towards the ground-level and basement back which let out onto a garden area all very nice an I'd taken a few plywood pieces and fashioned a bed of sorts in the old fireplace and it all worked nicely with a few blankets and some little sense of where I was of course (sleeping somewhat weirdly in the well of an old large fireplace lends odd airs to odder dreams) and in fact it was the very place where just the night before I'd bedded this lass to whom I was now speaking these somewhat harsher and more disconcerting words - "so now you're saying you find that you don't actually like me and that for a few varied reasons having nothing to do with us really - I mean I'm 'random' - well what the fuck is that anyway? Should we then just cash out of this?" I knew she had nothing to say would fumble the reply would somehow just become more miffed and incapable of understanding - I really did like her and really wanted her to stay - "first you fucked me" she said " then you fucked my brain see?" (she talked like that - a rather startling thing to hear but she'd been brought up rash and crude and kept a very up-front fashion of coming at others right straight) "and now I realize I actually don't want any of it you or it - I mean it's all nice enough and you're an OK guy but I just want to let it go - you throw off my equilibrium you keep me off balance and I'm not used to that at all and I'm quite happy with my life just as it was and I don't need you anyway - all those stories and tales they just lead me down passages I don't want to go" and at that moment I thought of using my best Shakespearean voice or some stentorian of Falstaffian tone or whatever it is they call that and reply in some long ponderous fashion but instead all I said was "well, OK then I'll live with that - you know where I am and I'll be sorry for it but go ahead it's OK."
They bring on the very idea of God - it just happens every tribe every bestial coven anywhere people have gathered the idea arises but we just don't anymore realize nor understand this idea this concept this 'what-can-be' and we no longer even understand how at one time the real battle wasn't over this 'God' thing it was over - really - how many and people went to battle over the idea of 'One' God one god alone as if any of that could really matter : it's just a human reflex : the battle to fight the words the ideas the concepts nothing held fast to understand or to be understood it's just like that : all that was only a part of what I'd been saying the night before to a few people around the table and now it was the next morning and there was only one left and her I did remember but all things were different now ALL : what she said was that she didn't like my randomness (and I could tell oh yeah that) my crazy randomness - to her who was a sister of system this represented nothing - so much as poor class no learning a haphazard talent and a total disregard of everything else and I figured enough to understand what she mean - I'd taken chances all my life and she was by far the prettiest one I'd risked - all for nothing now falling away and I asked "you want to say that once more you want to say what you mean?" asking that as I was leaning on the wall at the corner by the phone and the lamp and near me was the sculpture put in pace for some Cynthia Stone or someone who'd been killed about a year ago in a car-crash upstate and for whose memory now her family had donated a large sum of money and this memorial sculpture in her name and all that graced the lobby now of the Studio School which is where I was then living spending the overnights in a little room towards the ground-level and basement back which let out onto a garden area all very nice an I'd taken a few plywood pieces and fashioned a bed of sorts in the old fireplace and it all worked nicely with a few blankets and some little sense of where I was of course (sleeping somewhat weirdly in the well of an old large fireplace lends odd airs to odder dreams) and in fact it was the very place where just the night before I'd bedded this lass to whom I was now speaking these somewhat harsher and more disconcerting words - "so now you're saying you find that you don't actually like me and that for a few varied reasons having nothing to do with us really - I mean I'm 'random' - well what the fuck is that anyway? Should we then just cash out of this?" I knew she had nothing to say would fumble the reply would somehow just become more miffed and incapable of understanding - I really did like her and really wanted her to stay - "first you fucked me" she said " then you fucked my brain see?" (she talked like that - a rather startling thing to hear but she'd been brought up rash and crude and kept a very up-front fashion of coming at others right straight) "and now I realize I actually don't want any of it you or it - I mean it's all nice enough and you're an OK guy but I just want to let it go - you throw off my equilibrium you keep me off balance and I'm not used to that at all and I'm quite happy with my life just as it was and I don't need you anyway - all those stories and tales they just lead me down passages I don't want to go" and at that moment I thought of using my best Shakespearean voice or some stentorian of Falstaffian tone or whatever it is they call that and reply in some long ponderous fashion but instead all I said was "well, OK then I'll live with that - you know where I am and I'll be sorry for it but go ahead it's OK."
Sunday, August 08, 2010
MUSIC TO MY EARS
222. MUSIC TO MY EARS:
Alben Berg or any other guy from the symphony would probably tell me something new something little but it wouldn’t matter because the trouble with the church is that it had trouble with everything else everything outside of it just ask Galileo – to use but one example – the guy with the star problem the sun problem the entire wide-cosmos problem of space and God in space and Earth in God’s orbit and even Holst wrote The Planets to try and tell us something anything musically about the very same thing but then who comes along but any old ragamuffin catholic dog-catcher priest-nun loser wanderer babbler going on about again and again The Eucharist and the presence of God-Made-Man within it but I’ve always thought maybe the real problem has been instead of God-Made-Man it should be Manmade God instead that’s the crux of the problem which I think too is Latin for cross ain’t that a Sun Son fucking God for coincidence and here it is as I’m just trying here to fall asleep that there are voices again trying to tell me something other than what I want to hear and ‘VOICES FROM THE EDGE LIKE THIS ARE ENOUGH TO CONFUSE ME TO THE DEATH’ and that’s a famous quote I know but one the origination of which I cannot give you asparagus fields onion patches Petaluma to Port Reading farmers of the world unite and all that but I wonder what do Marxists think of Heaven or did they ever talk about it ? speaking of workers’ paradises ‘to each according to his need to each according to his ability’ seems to just about rightly sum up the concept of Heaven but sweat equity needs an actor’s guild card I bet and some things are naturally funny AREN’T THEY and the guy in the airport lounge I just noticed was once a famous public figure now grown decrepit and I thought dead but maybe that was Lola Falana I was thinking of instead or Claude Osteen a ballplayer I remember from waybackwhen when the Way Back Machine would transport me anywhere it chose not me not them not Rocky or Bullwinkle or Rocket J. Moose or whatever but FRACTURED FAIRY TALES it always was for me 'tell me Gar do you remember anything special about being eleven years old ? if you do just mention various things to me as we talk' but 'nah I remember nothing except that I got my stamp collection going on my eleventh birthday and that’s just about the time it stopped too so any valuable commodities I may have are all by accident and if those old German stamps are valuable then you can’t have them how’s that' so the more I think about it even Lucas Foss Leonard Bernstein Marlon Brando his very self would have to agree ‘there are things we’ll never understand oh sly one more things in Heaven and Earth which surpasseth all understanding even until the END of time” in the name of the Partner his Sun and the Holy Roast Amen Sahib Amen…”
Alben Berg or any other guy from the symphony would probably tell me something new something little but it wouldn’t matter because the trouble with the church is that it had trouble with everything else everything outside of it just ask Galileo – to use but one example – the guy with the star problem the sun problem the entire wide-cosmos problem of space and God in space and Earth in God’s orbit and even Holst wrote The Planets to try and tell us something anything musically about the very same thing but then who comes along but any old ragamuffin catholic dog-catcher priest-nun loser wanderer babbler going on about again and again The Eucharist and the presence of God-Made-Man within it but I’ve always thought maybe the real problem has been instead of God-Made-Man it should be Manmade God instead that’s the crux of the problem which I think too is Latin for cross ain’t that a Sun Son fucking God for coincidence and here it is as I’m just trying here to fall asleep that there are voices again trying to tell me something other than what I want to hear and ‘VOICES FROM THE EDGE LIKE THIS ARE ENOUGH TO CONFUSE ME TO THE DEATH’ and that’s a famous quote I know but one the origination of which I cannot give you asparagus fields onion patches Petaluma to Port Reading farmers of the world unite and all that but I wonder what do Marxists think of Heaven or did they ever talk about it ? speaking of workers’ paradises ‘to each according to his need to each according to his ability’ seems to just about rightly sum up the concept of Heaven but sweat equity needs an actor’s guild card I bet and some things are naturally funny AREN’T THEY and the guy in the airport lounge I just noticed was once a famous public figure now grown decrepit and I thought dead but maybe that was Lola Falana I was thinking of instead or Claude Osteen a ballplayer I remember from waybackwhen when the Way Back Machine would transport me anywhere it chose not me not them not Rocky or Bullwinkle or Rocket J. Moose or whatever but FRACTURED FAIRY TALES it always was for me 'tell me Gar do you remember anything special about being eleven years old ? if you do just mention various things to me as we talk' but 'nah I remember nothing except that I got my stamp collection going on my eleventh birthday and that’s just about the time it stopped too so any valuable commodities I may have are all by accident and if those old German stamps are valuable then you can’t have them how’s that' so the more I think about it even Lucas Foss Leonard Bernstein Marlon Brando his very self would have to agree ‘there are things we’ll never understand oh sly one more things in Heaven and Earth which surpasseth all understanding even until the END of time” in the name of the Partner his Sun and the Holy Roast Amen Sahib Amen…”
Saturday, July 17, 2010
ME-OH MY-OH (at Constantino's)
221. ME-OH MY-OH / (at Constantino's):
If I had ever a manner which would be called my own it was in the ‘manner’ of quiet study and the means through which I went about things – those would probably have been my trademarks (‘he was an oddly quiet kid always just outside of things and on about his own way – evidently absorbing all he could but saying very little about any of it and very often too just merging into things or taking so much a natural part in what was around him that you’d think he’d always have been there – odd and curious too’) - I’d often (truthfully) just hang around : like at The Tombs that gaunt odd junk-hulk of a prison down by Mulberry Bend or what had been and all the remnants of the old opium dens and sex joints which once so long ago dotted the area - the old Five Points and the Brewery and Collect Pond and all the rest now gone and tumbled over and paved and built with civic-crap architecture - all the courts of this and that and hearing rooms and halls of record and whatever else INCLUDING the Tombs itself - all of that once had been riotous in anarchy murder and mayhem (in whichever order you select) and most of those places were once probably five deep in dead bodies and sarcastic knife ministry and bloodletting anyway that very winsome ghost of Olde New York still probably sat around there just waiting for something new to happen THAT was The Tombs for me and all the other area there - the silly frolic of what had become ‘Chinatown’ and the park which replaced the old Bend and the modern apartments which went up looking like chockablock cinder-block jails themselves but praised by others for their ‘architectural merit’ - whatever that was supposed to be - I’d just go there sometimes and sit on late dark Fall afternoons and watch the stuff blow around and all the people scurrying about - attorneys for this and that department and lawyers of clients in hot water and the parade of cop cars and victims and culprits and suspects going to and fro or in and out and ambulances and meat wagons too - the city coroner’s office and family courts offices were there too - all sorts of bureaucratic oddments and leftover syndromes and the sorts of things which lawyers play upon and criminals use to seek sympathy and plead remorse about something they did without really caring a whit either way and every evening or day I watched The Tombs was seen as a credibly-running two-ring circus of crime and circumstance or pomp and punishment - intermingling freely - and each story amounted no really no more than some black-and-white re-run of ‘Naked City’ like it was portrayed on old television : mordant and morose quirky and curious filled with moody eccentrics or twisted remorse and each circumstance was found to have some little psychological underpinning by a pinhead little briefcase lawyer out for his share of money being doled : studies of the criminal mind and studies of recidivist intent or natural ability to lie or inflict harm or explanations of abandonment and bad environment - all that déclassé stuff that 1960’s lawyers were just then getting good at with an entire mental orbit of taste and behavior being used to meander around phrases and concepts which really meant little and which skewered any case but yet each day the criminals came and went - bundled out of the rears of cop cars - with handcuffs on their wrists and sometimes chains at their ankles the superior airs of guards and wardens and assisting officers made it clear which game was being played and the occasional screeching and screaming mother or sister or brother of the victim or the culprit – each the same in their way – would seek their own attention as they grimaced and yelled on the street or the curb and it seemed that – eventually – everyone connected with a crime either way would show up here for a show - it was a dark and dismal world of theater and grief.
-
And oh well anyway most of the time no one ever believed me what I'd tell them the real and the imagined and the sugar with the bitter-water all that together : stupid fat cops men in blue walking with their belts and holsters and hats and guns while holding a bag of something coffee or sandwich whatever swaggering out to their cars half parked on the street and half on the curb privileged cop-parking all over the place family court welfare the clinics the dispensaries the law courts paperwork broken families runaways wife-beaters killers and murderers too everyone together in sweltering civic heat with no windows and just crap to breath and swan-sized cars faggoty and fighting it out parking meters fetid pools of drain water tiny little Chinese people stepping between things and lawyers with briefcases and fangs detectives hookers whores and miscreants and it somedays seemed like they'll all amble over to me on the nearby bench just to sit and waste away their time talking idly talking gay : 'fuckin mother system got no room for the likes of me the bastards now want another 50 bucks to keep me out of slam another week otherwise I gott'a go back in - God I hate that fucking place rat-sewer basement hell-hole scum' and that was the way they talked most often even I did understand their marble-mouth missing-teeth fiasco of a face and I just sit there like some Dead End Kid and take it all in and play back 'yeah right the cocks gott'a know the trouble they cause y'know cause they can't be that dumb' meaning of course not a thing at all but it would satisfy these low-life dribblers coming my way and there right there on at the corner the little Greek guy's place for donuts and ham and snacks and coffee and drinks usually loaded up with someone - now most places get loaded up when there's like 15 people crowding in but this was a place with the most interesting trait of getting 'loaded up' with 1 or 2 people inside it was that weird - a small cramped juice of a place like squeezing things out of whomever was inside - just like squeezing an orange then and getting juice and charging 35 cents for it and that was how the entire place worked - the guys behind the counter they never cared for nothing they saw all this coming 24 hours a day - every layer of society the doers and the takers the getters and the got they all came in there soon enough for something and all those civic buildings made it that they always had a clientele always had people who bought from them - a certain odd misery-level of the most un-solid citizenry you could think of and the most solid too - cops and those who made and undertook the law right next to the same ones who broke and fled from it but it never mattered and I always half the time expected someone to get killed when the two met but nothing much ever happened 'cept maybe sometimes some words exchanged but what are words anyway ? cheap and cheesy and useless - kind of like one of Constantino's old sandwiches anyway I always thought.
If I had ever a manner which would be called my own it was in the ‘manner’ of quiet study and the means through which I went about things – those would probably have been my trademarks (‘he was an oddly quiet kid always just outside of things and on about his own way – evidently absorbing all he could but saying very little about any of it and very often too just merging into things or taking so much a natural part in what was around him that you’d think he’d always have been there – odd and curious too’) - I’d often (truthfully) just hang around : like at The Tombs that gaunt odd junk-hulk of a prison down by Mulberry Bend or what had been and all the remnants of the old opium dens and sex joints which once so long ago dotted the area - the old Five Points and the Brewery and Collect Pond and all the rest now gone and tumbled over and paved and built with civic-crap architecture - all the courts of this and that and hearing rooms and halls of record and whatever else INCLUDING the Tombs itself - all of that once had been riotous in anarchy murder and mayhem (in whichever order you select) and most of those places were once probably five deep in dead bodies and sarcastic knife ministry and bloodletting anyway that very winsome ghost of Olde New York still probably sat around there just waiting for something new to happen THAT was The Tombs for me and all the other area there - the silly frolic of what had become ‘Chinatown’ and the park which replaced the old Bend and the modern apartments which went up looking like chockablock cinder-block jails themselves but praised by others for their ‘architectural merit’ - whatever that was supposed to be - I’d just go there sometimes and sit on late dark Fall afternoons and watch the stuff blow around and all the people scurrying about - attorneys for this and that department and lawyers of clients in hot water and the parade of cop cars and victims and culprits and suspects going to and fro or in and out and ambulances and meat wagons too - the city coroner’s office and family courts offices were there too - all sorts of bureaucratic oddments and leftover syndromes and the sorts of things which lawyers play upon and criminals use to seek sympathy and plead remorse about something they did without really caring a whit either way and every evening or day I watched The Tombs was seen as a credibly-running two-ring circus of crime and circumstance or pomp and punishment - intermingling freely - and each story amounted no really no more than some black-and-white re-run of ‘Naked City’ like it was portrayed on old television : mordant and morose quirky and curious filled with moody eccentrics or twisted remorse and each circumstance was found to have some little psychological underpinning by a pinhead little briefcase lawyer out for his share of money being doled : studies of the criminal mind and studies of recidivist intent or natural ability to lie or inflict harm or explanations of abandonment and bad environment - all that déclassé stuff that 1960’s lawyers were just then getting good at with an entire mental orbit of taste and behavior being used to meander around phrases and concepts which really meant little and which skewered any case but yet each day the criminals came and went - bundled out of the rears of cop cars - with handcuffs on their wrists and sometimes chains at their ankles the superior airs of guards and wardens and assisting officers made it clear which game was being played and the occasional screeching and screaming mother or sister or brother of the victim or the culprit – each the same in their way – would seek their own attention as they grimaced and yelled on the street or the curb and it seemed that – eventually – everyone connected with a crime either way would show up here for a show - it was a dark and dismal world of theater and grief.
-
And oh well anyway most of the time no one ever believed me what I'd tell them the real and the imagined and the sugar with the bitter-water all that together : stupid fat cops men in blue walking with their belts and holsters and hats and guns while holding a bag of something coffee or sandwich whatever swaggering out to their cars half parked on the street and half on the curb privileged cop-parking all over the place family court welfare the clinics the dispensaries the law courts paperwork broken families runaways wife-beaters killers and murderers too everyone together in sweltering civic heat with no windows and just crap to breath and swan-sized cars faggoty and fighting it out parking meters fetid pools of drain water tiny little Chinese people stepping between things and lawyers with briefcases and fangs detectives hookers whores and miscreants and it somedays seemed like they'll all amble over to me on the nearby bench just to sit and waste away their time talking idly talking gay : 'fuckin mother system got no room for the likes of me the bastards now want another 50 bucks to keep me out of slam another week otherwise I gott'a go back in - God I hate that fucking place rat-sewer basement hell-hole scum' and that was the way they talked most often even I did understand their marble-mouth missing-teeth fiasco of a face and I just sit there like some Dead End Kid and take it all in and play back 'yeah right the cocks gott'a know the trouble they cause y'know cause they can't be that dumb' meaning of course not a thing at all but it would satisfy these low-life dribblers coming my way and there right there on at the corner the little Greek guy's place for donuts and ham and snacks and coffee and drinks usually loaded up with someone - now most places get loaded up when there's like 15 people crowding in but this was a place with the most interesting trait of getting 'loaded up' with 1 or 2 people inside it was that weird - a small cramped juice of a place like squeezing things out of whomever was inside - just like squeezing an orange then and getting juice and charging 35 cents for it and that was how the entire place worked - the guys behind the counter they never cared for nothing they saw all this coming 24 hours a day - every layer of society the doers and the takers the getters and the got they all came in there soon enough for something and all those civic buildings made it that they always had a clientele always had people who bought from them - a certain odd misery-level of the most un-solid citizenry you could think of and the most solid too - cops and those who made and undertook the law right next to the same ones who broke and fled from it but it never mattered and I always half the time expected someone to get killed when the two met but nothing much ever happened 'cept maybe sometimes some words exchanged but what are words anyway ? cheap and cheesy and useless - kind of like one of Constantino's old sandwiches anyway I always thought.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
OH ZIPPORAH
220. OH ZIPPORAH:
I met a girl named Toni Schlesinger and together we went to Williamsburg one day in Brooklyn getting over there by train and then walking to this place two girls were living in two girls she had to talk with she said for something she was writing so we got there and the interesting thing was it was a railroad apartment in a former funeral home a place that had been transformed and reworked since that time but somehow even I could tell that something was weird because even though a lot of work had been done you could still tell that these had been maybe rooms where dead people had been laid-out in caskets and viewings took place and all that but a lot of that I’m sure was imaginings and power of suggestion and all whatever and the two girls living in there with whom we wound up talking and having tea and sitting around awhile with were named Zipporah Lax and Sara McGrath and they were both art teachers just starting out in the NY school systems Zipporah at P.S. 161 in Harlem and Sara at ‘Beginning With Children’ a school right there in Williamsburg a pre-school I guess but never thought to ask and I for sure first thing thought ‘Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you’ that thought kept running through my head and Toni asked them about it being a former funeral home and what it meant to them and all about whatever spirits and stuff they’d felt if any and how they liked it there and it turned out the apartment used to be the viewing room and any embalming was done in the basement and like many of the funeral homes in the early 20th century it was designed with torchere lamps and we got to speaking about how maybe right in these rooms the bereaved would come to see their dearly departed but how maybe one of the bereaved was a murderer or like in some crummy TV show Toni said it would be a widow a rich bratty widow sobbing anyway in spite of all that no candles or nothing creepy instead the two girls were happy and cheerful and homey with even a stupid pan of brownies on the stove and on the wall by the refrigerator something was hanging and Toni asked what it was and Sara said 'it’s a traditional Mayan men’s shawl that I got in this town in Chiapas where every man was wearing one I’ve traveled a lot you see' and then Zipporah said 'Sarah and I met in college when we were both at Pratt for art and I thought she was really cool and a fellow traveler' and then Sarah said 'we used to have a map above the kitchen table but we had to take it down because we just kept talking about where we wanted to go all the time' and then Zipporah said 'the map sucked us in too much' and Sarah said 'I want to go back to Mexico for a year to become bilingual' and as I was trying to keep notes and I saw it was getting more difficult to distinguish who was saying what I started just using names in brackets to show who was speaking and this is how what follows got started and then I asked about whether to them it was important to know a place deeply for if not wasn’t one just skimming surfaces and winding up merely having long discussions as a girl with bellhops and busboys and they agreed in their way but said as females they were always attuned to that kind of stuff anyway and people like service boys and guys were always hitting on them or as girls trying to begin discussions anyway so none of that mattered for as you travel they said you’re going to be able to keep away from the avoidance of others at least 80 per cent of the time if you’re sharp and probably 20 percent you’ll end up the next morning strangely in some guy’s bed or with some guy and only a pale remembrance of what you were doing but as lesbians they could figure to avoid all that whether they had to tell guys or whether guys simply surmised what was up but even then sometimes they went with it for the experience anyway so nothing mattered it was just travel and then [Sarah] 'I’m from California San Luis Obispo and my parents met coming back from India where my dad had gone on a spiritual journey but the guru had turned him away and he and my mom were on a ferry from Belgium to England and my dad didn’t have the money for the fare so he was trying to sell some beads and he thought my mother was a snotty American and then I was born in Scotland when my mom at that time was 19 and when I was 19 I was taking that same ferry and I looked around while on it and said ‘where’s my future husband?’ but it never happened' and Toni pointed out to Sarah all the beads she had on and asked then wasn’t she preparing for a man thereby or why the decoration and Sarah said 'no not at all in fact Zipporah calls these my art-teacher jewels' and then [Zipporah] 'my parents met traveling too on a kibbutz in Israel but then they came back to Miami where I grew up and Sarah’s and my stories are very similar and Sarah is like my fifth roommate in this apartment and I moved here about 4 years ago when I found out my grandparents used to live in Williamsburg in fact my grandmother was Mr. Farber’s secretary at the Farberware factory' [Sarah] 'my dad grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor which is England’s largest hospital for the criminally insane' [Zipporah] 'your dad’s so sunny and airy' [Sarah] 'he’s been in California a while' and then Toni commented on how there was a lot of knotty pine in the apartment a sort of ‘potbelly aesthetic’ she called it [Zipporah] 'so Alpine ski lodge that’s my landlord he did a lot of home improvement after it was a funeral home and when I moved in I found little antlers on the fireplace and my landlord said ‘you can tell we like the country’ which actually made me laugh when I thought about it because it’s funny how people who like the country seem to always wind up having a particular fascination with killing things shooting the native habitat whether by guns plowing cutting or whatever so these little antlers proved he loved the country so much he had to kill defenseless animals to prove it and then cut off their body parts and leave them around to show what he’d done - so weird' [Sarah] 'Zipporah did a lot of work in here' [Zipporah] 'Sarah likes to decorate and that’s why she’s so much fun to live with' [Sarah] 'I lived in 15 homes before I was 18 so you’d think I’d have a few possessions with all the traveling' [Zipporah] 'Sarah’s a collector she came here with three suitcases and one was all full of pictures nothing more' [Sarah] 'I moved in last fall for good before that I’d been gone from New York for a while traveling and Zipporah offered me the room in August and even though I wanted to look around first I said yes and I know it sounds weird but I did want to look around because my last two situations in New York were both offered to me by good friends in fact one said ‘I’ll look around for the apartment on the Lower East Side – you bring the Earl Grey’ so it’s always been like that a lot with me and this time I first had an inclination to say no but I said yes anyway because I so much like Zepporah and wanted her to know that' and Toni said 'everyone wants you to live with them it seems ! I wonder who will be next' [Sarah] 'I do have someone waiting for me in Mexico' and the two girls begin to break up in uncontrolled laughter 'forever - he said' [Zipporah] 'he sent her a birthday card that sings' and from that point all they did was laugh…
I met a girl named Toni Schlesinger and together we went to Williamsburg one day in Brooklyn getting over there by train and then walking to this place two girls were living in two girls she had to talk with she said for something she was writing so we got there and the interesting thing was it was a railroad apartment in a former funeral home a place that had been transformed and reworked since that time but somehow even I could tell that something was weird because even though a lot of work had been done you could still tell that these had been maybe rooms where dead people had been laid-out in caskets and viewings took place and all that but a lot of that I’m sure was imaginings and power of suggestion and all whatever and the two girls living in there with whom we wound up talking and having tea and sitting around awhile with were named Zipporah Lax and Sara McGrath and they were both art teachers just starting out in the NY school systems Zipporah at P.S. 161 in Harlem and Sara at ‘Beginning With Children’ a school right there in Williamsburg a pre-school I guess but never thought to ask and I for sure first thing thought ‘Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you’ that thought kept running through my head and Toni asked them about it being a former funeral home and what it meant to them and all about whatever spirits and stuff they’d felt if any and how they liked it there and it turned out the apartment used to be the viewing room and any embalming was done in the basement and like many of the funeral homes in the early 20th century it was designed with torchere lamps and we got to speaking about how maybe right in these rooms the bereaved would come to see their dearly departed but how maybe one of the bereaved was a murderer or like in some crummy TV show Toni said it would be a widow a rich bratty widow sobbing anyway in spite of all that no candles or nothing creepy instead the two girls were happy and cheerful and homey with even a stupid pan of brownies on the stove and on the wall by the refrigerator something was hanging and Toni asked what it was and Sara said 'it’s a traditional Mayan men’s shawl that I got in this town in Chiapas where every man was wearing one I’ve traveled a lot you see' and then Zipporah said 'Sarah and I met in college when we were both at Pratt for art and I thought she was really cool and a fellow traveler' and then Sarah said 'we used to have a map above the kitchen table but we had to take it down because we just kept talking about where we wanted to go all the time' and then Zipporah said 'the map sucked us in too much' and Sarah said 'I want to go back to Mexico for a year to become bilingual' and as I was trying to keep notes and I saw it was getting more difficult to distinguish who was saying what I started just using names in brackets to show who was speaking and this is how what follows got started and then I asked about whether to them it was important to know a place deeply for if not wasn’t one just skimming surfaces and winding up merely having long discussions as a girl with bellhops and busboys and they agreed in their way but said as females they were always attuned to that kind of stuff anyway and people like service boys and guys were always hitting on them or as girls trying to begin discussions anyway so none of that mattered for as you travel they said you’re going to be able to keep away from the avoidance of others at least 80 per cent of the time if you’re sharp and probably 20 percent you’ll end up the next morning strangely in some guy’s bed or with some guy and only a pale remembrance of what you were doing but as lesbians they could figure to avoid all that whether they had to tell guys or whether guys simply surmised what was up but even then sometimes they went with it for the experience anyway so nothing mattered it was just travel and then [Sarah] 'I’m from California San Luis Obispo and my parents met coming back from India where my dad had gone on a spiritual journey but the guru had turned him away and he and my mom were on a ferry from Belgium to England and my dad didn’t have the money for the fare so he was trying to sell some beads and he thought my mother was a snotty American and then I was born in Scotland when my mom at that time was 19 and when I was 19 I was taking that same ferry and I looked around while on it and said ‘where’s my future husband?’ but it never happened' and Toni pointed out to Sarah all the beads she had on and asked then wasn’t she preparing for a man thereby or why the decoration and Sarah said 'no not at all in fact Zipporah calls these my art-teacher jewels' and then [Zipporah] 'my parents met traveling too on a kibbutz in Israel but then they came back to Miami where I grew up and Sarah’s and my stories are very similar and Sarah is like my fifth roommate in this apartment and I moved here about 4 years ago when I found out my grandparents used to live in Williamsburg in fact my grandmother was Mr. Farber’s secretary at the Farberware factory' [Sarah] 'my dad grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor which is England’s largest hospital for the criminally insane' [Zipporah] 'your dad’s so sunny and airy' [Sarah] 'he’s been in California a while' and then Toni commented on how there was a lot of knotty pine in the apartment a sort of ‘potbelly aesthetic’ she called it [Zipporah] 'so Alpine ski lodge that’s my landlord he did a lot of home improvement after it was a funeral home and when I moved in I found little antlers on the fireplace and my landlord said ‘you can tell we like the country’ which actually made me laugh when I thought about it because it’s funny how people who like the country seem to always wind up having a particular fascination with killing things shooting the native habitat whether by guns plowing cutting or whatever so these little antlers proved he loved the country so much he had to kill defenseless animals to prove it and then cut off their body parts and leave them around to show what he’d done - so weird' [Sarah] 'Zipporah did a lot of work in here' [Zipporah] 'Sarah likes to decorate and that’s why she’s so much fun to live with' [Sarah] 'I lived in 15 homes before I was 18 so you’d think I’d have a few possessions with all the traveling' [Zipporah] 'Sarah’s a collector she came here with three suitcases and one was all full of pictures nothing more' [Sarah] 'I moved in last fall for good before that I’d been gone from New York for a while traveling and Zipporah offered me the room in August and even though I wanted to look around first I said yes and I know it sounds weird but I did want to look around because my last two situations in New York were both offered to me by good friends in fact one said ‘I’ll look around for the apartment on the Lower East Side – you bring the Earl Grey’ so it’s always been like that a lot with me and this time I first had an inclination to say no but I said yes anyway because I so much like Zepporah and wanted her to know that' and Toni said 'everyone wants you to live with them it seems ! I wonder who will be next' [Sarah] 'I do have someone waiting for me in Mexico' and the two girls begin to break up in uncontrolled laughter 'forever - he said' [Zipporah] 'he sent her a birthday card that sings' and from that point all they did was laugh…
Sunday, June 13, 2010
MONSIEUR GAUBERT
219. MONSIEUR GAUBERT (Heart From the Sea):
Heart from the sea or the eternal parity of Monsieur Gaubert - any of those things could have been working for me at that moment for as I walked away I thought of sound dead silence and the rising attestation of the world about me and as I looked up at the darkening and swelling sky high up I saw the thinnest sliver of the new moon slowly easing downward its slow way to the horizon of evening and as the dark progressed the rounded curve of white grew and I knew that BY THIS MEASURE too could time be seen as one day past the next the same moon would be there changing in its ways above and amongst us - both to deny space and the darkness of stars and light and presence and to bring forth (‘in all the yellowing lights of mankind are seen the thinnest of doorways and low-slung windows the winding cloaks of dawn and doom and death itself wears yellow gloves’) and as we passed so too would the variegated waxings of the lunar passage mark us all for whatever we are or would be and the long thin story of mankind on Earth was to be yet seen (‘for ah the future unfolds yet my fine young men and we are quite worthy walking this way towards joy and happiness and our greased pavilion of paradise daily’) and EVEN THEN EVEN I saw them straining eyes upward the hundreds massed at the Chinese wall searching high the skies and I AGHAST I brought forth intention to watch but heard instead the shooting stars above screech past and the mad midnight Chinatown crowd yelling forth with fireworks loud BUT NOTHING COULD STILL THE MADNESS and the only man who came forward was the man with many arms and like some oriental God of far-off he too swept arms skyward and postured as the moon once thin and new was aged and older now and we all saw the rounding the fullness the orb of Heaven above and what men couldn’t sing they sold - streetshop after streetshop filled with glittered light and colored papers shining jewels and spoons of health and goodness with its own democracy heads northward and then someone else speaks up : “I have been here many years and was always afraid of just this thing – a faceless crowd a broad crazed throng and the metal guns gleaming the leaden bells done ringing the crying and sobbing of hundreds and even more than before the piles of the many dead” but I figured it behooved him to speak that way before all these his people and sailing on alone MYSELF as a fair soldier without connections I still stood straight to listen up and live the memory foretold - ‘one man from the eastern sea will come someday to bring calamity and minions strong without deceit will die by his works yet live by his feats’ - YES TOO I almost wanted to laugh at that but figured not to for if ‘space is its own extension than aren’t we just hanging out?’ but no matter what I said not much else made sense and a lonely cockatoo crowed from someone’s backyard shed and the yellow light shone there too broken like a pattern on the siding and illumined by other lights and all the angles merged into one some strangely cut crystal of light that I saw upon people’s faces and old men’s coats and the trailing shadows and lively cloaks of women and girls as they passed and I wondered of the sunlight and where it had gone and how far is far and how far away and then awkwardly random and abstractedly said I heard : “plus superficiellement encore ce retour aux raciness asiatiques est visible dans les nouvelles modes vestimentaires…” and the French girl’s voice trailed on and I followed nothing no more but watched instead the young kids as they pranced and clenched tightly shut their heavily made-up eyes [‘and the Devil came and took us away and the metal phone booth attached to the wall had fallen and we watched as the rats came out and crawled over what had just before been a happy courtyard of people and only now we realized was a tragic garbage dump filled with leaky bags and a long night’s dripping of trash’] KING KONG QUI RUGIT AVEC UN FOND SONORE.
Heart from the sea or the eternal parity of Monsieur Gaubert - any of those things could have been working for me at that moment for as I walked away I thought of sound dead silence and the rising attestation of the world about me and as I looked up at the darkening and swelling sky high up I saw the thinnest sliver of the new moon slowly easing downward its slow way to the horizon of evening and as the dark progressed the rounded curve of white grew and I knew that BY THIS MEASURE too could time be seen as one day past the next the same moon would be there changing in its ways above and amongst us - both to deny space and the darkness of stars and light and presence and to bring forth (‘in all the yellowing lights of mankind are seen the thinnest of doorways and low-slung windows the winding cloaks of dawn and doom and death itself wears yellow gloves’) and as we passed so too would the variegated waxings of the lunar passage mark us all for whatever we are or would be and the long thin story of mankind on Earth was to be yet seen (‘for ah the future unfolds yet my fine young men and we are quite worthy walking this way towards joy and happiness and our greased pavilion of paradise daily’) and EVEN THEN EVEN I saw them straining eyes upward the hundreds massed at the Chinese wall searching high the skies and I AGHAST I brought forth intention to watch but heard instead the shooting stars above screech past and the mad midnight Chinatown crowd yelling forth with fireworks loud BUT NOTHING COULD STILL THE MADNESS and the only man who came forward was the man with many arms and like some oriental God of far-off he too swept arms skyward and postured as the moon once thin and new was aged and older now and we all saw the rounding the fullness the orb of Heaven above and what men couldn’t sing they sold - streetshop after streetshop filled with glittered light and colored papers shining jewels and spoons of health and goodness with its own democracy heads northward and then someone else speaks up : “I have been here many years and was always afraid of just this thing – a faceless crowd a broad crazed throng and the metal guns gleaming the leaden bells done ringing the crying and sobbing of hundreds and even more than before the piles of the many dead” but I figured it behooved him to speak that way before all these his people and sailing on alone MYSELF as a fair soldier without connections I still stood straight to listen up and live the memory foretold - ‘one man from the eastern sea will come someday to bring calamity and minions strong without deceit will die by his works yet live by his feats’ - YES TOO I almost wanted to laugh at that but figured not to for if ‘space is its own extension than aren’t we just hanging out?’ but no matter what I said not much else made sense and a lonely cockatoo crowed from someone’s backyard shed and the yellow light shone there too broken like a pattern on the siding and illumined by other lights and all the angles merged into one some strangely cut crystal of light that I saw upon people’s faces and old men’s coats and the trailing shadows and lively cloaks of women and girls as they passed and I wondered of the sunlight and where it had gone and how far is far and how far away and then awkwardly random and abstractedly said I heard : “plus superficiellement encore ce retour aux raciness asiatiques est visible dans les nouvelles modes vestimentaires…” and the French girl’s voice trailed on and I followed nothing no more but watched instead the young kids as they pranced and clenched tightly shut their heavily made-up eyes [‘and the Devil came and took us away and the metal phone booth attached to the wall had fallen and we watched as the rats came out and crawled over what had just before been a happy courtyard of people and only now we realized was a tragic garbage dump filled with leaky bags and a long night’s dripping of trash’] KING KONG QUI RUGIT AVEC UN FOND SONORE.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
I SIMPLY DON'T CARE
218. I SIMPLY DON'T CARE ANY LONGER FOR ANYTHING AT ALL:
Like what city would talk and what's talk anyway but evasion and who listens - these were the notions I thought of as I watched the cars go by seemingly as twisted and fractured as any piece of stupid truth they'd ever heard attempted to be spouted by some nincompoop strolling by (hey! I thought - if cities could talk why not cars listen) and all the years of understanding are gone by the boards anyway and why is it that for so many years the old lumps which were cars were once designed with carved clay full-size models and all we got were huge flabby rectangles besotted with silly fins or indentations and ostentatious lights and now that we've got computer-aided designs networks all of a sudden of some mass-produced great light have come on and we get produced the swoops and swirls of some design-cheese factory bringing forth the embodiment of modern-day sleek - kind of just like what ONCE was the super-headquarters of the You Benighted Nay Shuns before me but go figure that one out for yourselves because every time I talk back there's another ass-sniffing hound who won't talk to me or shuts me off or turns me out like some bad beef at a barbecue from Hell and the fact of the matter is 'I simply don't care' any longer FOR ANYTHING and the mouths of babes can utter what they wish but it's still shit from the mouths of babes - see - that never changes and the far-seeing God who's exited the scene a long long time ago may just now again be rehearsing in the wings and if that's so I'm with HIM for sure but the world's a bum place and Manhattan wears the mantle of something other than that though I'll never know surely what it is - bread shops on the Grand Concourse simple bookstores along the way and Grand Central Station filled with misers and miserable thieves everyday but (SHOULD I AWAKE one day and find myself blind) I'll still saunter along to wherever I find the nice things to model and the kind of entwined mass-malaria that settles the score FOR Hell's a base Heaven and they've OPENED the door !! woolly mammoths seeking to be heard line-force doctorates leaning towards third magnificent fulcrums drubby and hollow master mechanics learning to swallow EVERYTHING once known is striving for presence and countless man-hours lost still manage to stage the production of something with every new name BUT the more things change the more they STAY the same !! and then the interviewer came up to me and said "what do you think?" and I managed to utter some words of doubt to lessen the stink but he took out a wedge-shaped malodorous word and shoved my head down struggling to be heard - I finally shouted - "Thomas Edison's dead and his West Orange plant has been shuttered and closed for rebuilding but that's OK by me since I've already seen it but to make matters worse since I once knew his nurse they threw us all out of LLewelyn Park too when all that we wanted was to admire the view!" and the guy said back to me "is that one L or two?" and I sniggered a bit and went right to my work and said back to him (for all it was worth) "merry tidbits to all and to all a good fight ! and the cow ran away with the goon" and then I began thinking what I really wanted and I realized it was but to be alone and to sit by the river's edge with my hair shorn short and no wind in my face and to lessen the evil and save the disgrace I'd stay there for days on end taking space but all for the reasons of all LOVE and GLORY for I've been places NO ONE else has seen and how can you (really) go on with the simple life when you've been to the moon and the planets (I mean) what else really is there to see?
Like what city would talk and what's talk anyway but evasion and who listens - these were the notions I thought of as I watched the cars go by seemingly as twisted and fractured as any piece of stupid truth they'd ever heard attempted to be spouted by some nincompoop strolling by (hey! I thought - if cities could talk why not cars listen) and all the years of understanding are gone by the boards anyway and why is it that for so many years the old lumps which were cars were once designed with carved clay full-size models and all we got were huge flabby rectangles besotted with silly fins or indentations and ostentatious lights and now that we've got computer-aided designs networks all of a sudden of some mass-produced great light have come on and we get produced the swoops and swirls of some design-cheese factory bringing forth the embodiment of modern-day sleek - kind of just like what ONCE was the super-headquarters of the You Benighted Nay Shuns before me but go figure that one out for yourselves because every time I talk back there's another ass-sniffing hound who won't talk to me or shuts me off or turns me out like some bad beef at a barbecue from Hell and the fact of the matter is 'I simply don't care' any longer FOR ANYTHING and the mouths of babes can utter what they wish but it's still shit from the mouths of babes - see - that never changes and the far-seeing God who's exited the scene a long long time ago may just now again be rehearsing in the wings and if that's so I'm with HIM for sure but the world's a bum place and Manhattan wears the mantle of something other than that though I'll never know surely what it is - bread shops on the Grand Concourse simple bookstores along the way and Grand Central Station filled with misers and miserable thieves everyday but (SHOULD I AWAKE one day and find myself blind) I'll still saunter along to wherever I find the nice things to model and the kind of entwined mass-malaria that settles the score FOR Hell's a base Heaven and they've OPENED the door !! woolly mammoths seeking to be heard line-force doctorates leaning towards third magnificent fulcrums drubby and hollow master mechanics learning to swallow EVERYTHING once known is striving for presence and countless man-hours lost still manage to stage the production of something with every new name BUT the more things change the more they STAY the same !! and then the interviewer came up to me and said "what do you think?" and I managed to utter some words of doubt to lessen the stink but he took out a wedge-shaped malodorous word and shoved my head down struggling to be heard - I finally shouted - "Thomas Edison's dead and his West Orange plant has been shuttered and closed for rebuilding but that's OK by me since I've already seen it but to make matters worse since I once knew his nurse they threw us all out of LLewelyn Park too when all that we wanted was to admire the view!" and the guy said back to me "is that one L or two?" and I sniggered a bit and went right to my work and said back to him (for all it was worth) "merry tidbits to all and to all a good fight ! and the cow ran away with the goon" and then I began thinking what I really wanted and I realized it was but to be alone and to sit by the river's edge with my hair shorn short and no wind in my face and to lessen the evil and save the disgrace I'd stay there for days on end taking space but all for the reasons of all LOVE and GLORY for I've been places NO ONE else has seen and how can you (really) go on with the simple life when you've been to the moon and the planets (I mean) what else really is there to see?
Friday, March 05, 2010
I USED TO LOVE IT
217. I USED TO LOVE IT:
I used to love it when I'd be driving at night in the middle of nowhere - some mountain peaked ambling road in north central Pennsylvania or somesuch place and I'd be up pretty high along some ridge or height and down below would be the lights of some upcoming place - small town village farm crossing larger city whatever - and the lights would get closer and I'd be nearing them more and more as they grew larger and brighter and then no longer 'down below' at all they'd be out before me and then I'd arrive first at the first crossroads and then another corner and a few more streets and the houses would begin getting closer together more like a village or a town from time ago and what was from a distance seemingly nothing and far away would suddenly be there right amongst everything and it would engulf me and then I'd realize I was there right there and the place would cover me over and take me in and the off to the side there'd be a railroad depot or maybe a freight yard or a simple place where the tracks crossed and the coal-supply yard and its trucks would be there and then some warehouses and a district of storage and junk and more houses - battered small twisted old large all kinds of yards and fronts old porches sagging with junk - the sorts of places you'd see out in the country along the old roadways places where people didn't care much and they'd have couches and refrigerators and weird things like that out on the front porch and old crumbled bicycles and piles of metal and chairs in the yard and off to the side there'd be like five generations of rusted old cars - the big old fat kind from great-granddaddy's day and then grandpa's and then dad's and then all the kids and everyone just drove something it seemed until they gave up on it and just parked it with the others and left it and some would still have their colors fading old place or maybe even still bright and others would be sagged and brown rust and nothing much at all with the glass frosted over or broken and even with stuff inside them now too - storage things like chairs and shovels and rakes and clothes and lumber and these country houses they'd just not care but here in the towns that didn't happen as much except on these outskirts I'm mentioning- the places where you'd enter from and then there'd be a store or two and general convenience stuff gas stations shoe discounters a lumber yard and maybe a farm or tractor place an old Sears or Penny's or whatever they still had and then nearing more the center of whatever these light were there'd always be a Ben Franklin Five & Ten store on some corner fronted on the other by a big tall old hotel now running itself down to a nothing at all and a bar within and a red neon or something telling of it and then there'd be a row or two of downtown type stores bakery camera tools hardware implements insurance notary appliance foodstuffs second-hand and then electrical supply and sports and fishing and liquor and bicycle and toys and a bargain shop and a households store and kitchen dresses and curtains and things and it just went on with here and there a small sparsely done-up eatery diner kitchenette hamburger joint and then running out again car lots repair shops truck yards oil tanks motorcycles snowmobiles nursery trees and shrubs garden supply - all that it just went on and at the daybreak after all those lights seen from a distance were gone and turned off and I'd be right in the middle of it I'd know it had all been a place and something-real an actual location - first glimpsed from afar on some twisty highway up above or from some two-lane country-bumpkin side road highway land and whether it was filled with craters and bumps or smooth as all get out it always took one right past the lights and the police station and the municipal buildings and service yard but right there too ALWAYS right into one real solid honest-to-goodness run-down weird old American town - the kind you just don't see anymore.
I used to love it when I'd be driving at night in the middle of nowhere - some mountain peaked ambling road in north central Pennsylvania or somesuch place and I'd be up pretty high along some ridge or height and down below would be the lights of some upcoming place - small town village farm crossing larger city whatever - and the lights would get closer and I'd be nearing them more and more as they grew larger and brighter and then no longer 'down below' at all they'd be out before me and then I'd arrive first at the first crossroads and then another corner and a few more streets and the houses would begin getting closer together more like a village or a town from time ago and what was from a distance seemingly nothing and far away would suddenly be there right amongst everything and it would engulf me and then I'd realize I was there right there and the place would cover me over and take me in and the off to the side there'd be a railroad depot or maybe a freight yard or a simple place where the tracks crossed and the coal-supply yard and its trucks would be there and then some warehouses and a district of storage and junk and more houses - battered small twisted old large all kinds of yards and fronts old porches sagging with junk - the sorts of places you'd see out in the country along the old roadways places where people didn't care much and they'd have couches and refrigerators and weird things like that out on the front porch and old crumbled bicycles and piles of metal and chairs in the yard and off to the side there'd be like five generations of rusted old cars - the big old fat kind from great-granddaddy's day and then grandpa's and then dad's and then all the kids and everyone just drove something it seemed until they gave up on it and just parked it with the others and left it and some would still have their colors fading old place or maybe even still bright and others would be sagged and brown rust and nothing much at all with the glass frosted over or broken and even with stuff inside them now too - storage things like chairs and shovels and rakes and clothes and lumber and these country houses they'd just not care but here in the towns that didn't happen as much except on these outskirts I'm mentioning- the places where you'd enter from and then there'd be a store or two and general convenience stuff gas stations shoe discounters a lumber yard and maybe a farm or tractor place an old Sears or Penny's or whatever they still had and then nearing more the center of whatever these light were there'd always be a Ben Franklin Five & Ten store on some corner fronted on the other by a big tall old hotel now running itself down to a nothing at all and a bar within and a red neon or something telling of it and then there'd be a row or two of downtown type stores bakery camera tools hardware implements insurance notary appliance foodstuffs second-hand and then electrical supply and sports and fishing and liquor and bicycle and toys and a bargain shop and a households store and kitchen dresses and curtains and things and it just went on with here and there a small sparsely done-up eatery diner kitchenette hamburger joint and then running out again car lots repair shops truck yards oil tanks motorcycles snowmobiles nursery trees and shrubs garden supply - all that it just went on and at the daybreak after all those lights seen from a distance were gone and turned off and I'd be right in the middle of it I'd know it had all been a place and something-real an actual location - first glimpsed from afar on some twisty highway up above or from some two-lane country-bumpkin side road highway land and whether it was filled with craters and bumps or smooth as all get out it always took one right past the lights and the police station and the municipal buildings and service yard but right there too ALWAYS right into one real solid honest-to-goodness run-down weird old American town - the kind you just don't see anymore.
Friday, February 26, 2010
I WAS NOT EVER ALONE
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.
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.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
NOTHING BUT DEATH TO ME
215. NOTHING BUT DEATH TO ME:
You are nothing to me but death you mispronounce most everything you have acted as teacher but have taught me wrongly you have mis-spoken words and concepts which you did not grasp but brought out anyway even as it seemed to me that a person would first shy from that which they did not know well before trying to propagate it wrongly you have misled a generation you are nothing but death to me you have tried your stories and they have failed you have regaled youngsters with lies and have tried to make everything simple even where it was most complex or at least much more difficult than you led them to believe you propagandized without telling what you were doing you lied theatrically and you pushed religion without saying what it was you absolutized a conception of life and matter in erroneous ways that turned out to be wrong so wrong so deadly wrong - YOU are nothing but DEATH to me.
You are nothing to me but death you mispronounce most everything you have acted as teacher but have taught me wrongly you have mis-spoken words and concepts which you did not grasp but brought out anyway even as it seemed to me that a person would first shy from that which they did not know well before trying to propagate it wrongly you have misled a generation you are nothing but death to me you have tried your stories and they have failed you have regaled youngsters with lies and have tried to make everything simple even where it was most complex or at least much more difficult than you led them to believe you propagandized without telling what you were doing you lied theatrically and you pushed religion without saying what it was you absolutized a conception of life and matter in erroneous ways that turned out to be wrong so wrong so deadly wrong - YOU are nothing but DEATH to me.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
THE HUMAN INVENTION OF DEATH
214. THE HUMAN INVENTON OF DEATH:
‘Since you are mortal don’t prophesy the quality of tomorrow’s dawn / and when you meet the man of the year / don’t try to read his life line / for swifter than a dragonfly / pfft / a change’ – that was written by Simonides about 2500 years ago as a Greek victory ode and in it he basically restates what Solon (the Athenian legislator) once said : ‘call no man happy before his death’ I was thinking about that as we started talking then too of ‘people’ we’ve known and Reggie Crispin says that he ‘once knew a scholar in Royal Hiltingshire 1st School who was perfectly versed in as ‘aspects’ of death (how we’d gotten to that point of conversation I cannot rightly recall) and he related : “until about 1950 – when someone died in the Newfoundland fishing village of Witless Bay the community took steps to avoid angering his irascible spirit and to do so they stopped the clock at the moment of death so the dead person would believe he was still alive and they covered the mirrors because it was dangerous for the spirit to see its reflection and since the deceased was assumed to be ‘furious’ about his death the best defensive strategy was to be seen acting as if he was still the life of the party - which meant raucous wakes where the corpse could be danced with given glasses of rum and made (via strings) to sit up in his coffin and Witless Bay had another custom also designed to confuse any returning spirit and that was that the chairs in the room where the deadman’s wake had been were overturned and the door locked for a day after the funeral – but when one Father Glough arrived in Witless Bay he forbade these practices (in the light of this Christian teachings) so that from the 1930’s to the late 40’s the practice had just about dwindled and regular Christian attitudes of death had taken over” and of course that became but the beginning of a long wharfside discussion of the entire concept (‘Death and everything else’ I called it) and we mentioned other practices like cannibalism and the sacrifice of mates and servants concubines and horses all which had been put to use to accelerate or ease the soul into that ‘afterlife’ adventure (one Timothy Taylor had called the soul – he said – “something that was ‘us’ and something which ‘continued’ after death”) and we’d decided that there had probably always been a widespread fear lodged within humankind – a fear of the ‘disembodied’ soul - and then Reggie said that he’d learned that “actually cannibalism was one of man’s first methods of disposing of the dead – at once an expression of thrift and a form of conspicuous consumption as well as a ‘way’ to incorporate the dead into the living” and the he said it had been found as a practice as far back as ‘Homo Habilis’ – an early mankind of long long ago and “likewise against the prevailing opinion that the earliest burials about 12,000 years ago demonstrate reverence and affection they were actually a way of ostracizing scapegoats as in ‘no one wanted to ingest you’ and only with the first farmers in the Neolithic era did burial become standard practice” and having myself just come down from the heights above us with the old St. Peter’s graves of all the Mundys and Parkers I could stand I was ready just then for some further ‘edification’ so I turned it back on him and said “well may that be but do you not think that is was the ‘practice’ first instituted by humans of grieving and the anguish of loss which eventually coalesced into the proto-religious cults of death and dying whereby great tomes and magnificent kingdoms were then imagined and erected as for the places where these ‘dead’ go and had not any of this been done - had not Mankind taken Death from out of the realm of simple animal passage and decay - it would never have arisen as such a major ‘obstacle’ to every individual human who now must LIVE with the thought and affect of DYING?” and he said “what are you saying?” to which I replied “simply that – if we look at it clearly – Humans INVENTED death – first as a concept and then as a practice for it marks by one singular different step the variety between us now and the animal kingdom now - of which we are both a part and vastly separate from - for we have been somehow allowed to dwell upon and erect a structural concept of DEATH and DYING as a place/kingdom/passage/act/practice and it is thereby something now which rules and infractures our very fabric but had we not invented it – by whatever means – our ‘passage’ would have been seen – without religion and without a God – as a simple move into the next evolved form of living a simple ‘passage’ from one room to the other with no need of all that which DEATH conceptually brings with it and that PRIDE and that hubris is what both elevates and limits us amidst all the rest of the world’s living beings” as we spoke - of course - before us the little meanderings of the boat traffic and odd tanker and tug freight was rolling by with the resultant wake and ripple of noise and the slap of the water on the old pilings and although it did nothing to compete with our own personal back-and-forth voices it did lend a nice background sound to what we were saying (as if irreverent sea-creatures had suddenly a’lit to land in order to speak) and then he said “have you given thought to how less comfortable life would have been without a ‘storyline’ for it to end by?” and I said “whatever that means I’ll not know for the only ‘storyline’ as you put it is the obvious one to me of intuitive and inspirational feel - the sort of thing which simply guides a life through all its undertakings and if that’s the ‘comfort’ for the story as it is needed then that’s OK too but too much has always been invested in the hierarchy and ritual aspects that go with organized approved and dictated learning and supposed truth - and just look how many people in all reality have been slaughtered and decimated by people over the millennia fighting for their own stupid version of a very liquid truth” and by that of course I’d meant to say that any unfettered acceptance of church kingship political power and ritualized allegiance to anything would never be a part of my own make-up but I’d missed evidently the opportunity to get that across to him “you can’t really say that” he replied “for so many layers of social cooperation and living and all the advancement that went with it were motivated and advanced by those very same ‘powers’ who put some structure and allegiance into ‘society’ – blindly forming without even fully being cognizant of it – the world we live amongst right now” and I said “no no I’d much rather say the RUINS of the world we live amongst right now - and I mean that sincerely the RUINS of every form of rational logic aggressive demand and mercantile impetus towards making nothing but a prison for fellow mankind wherever” and he simply looked at me and said “way over the top old chap ! way over the top!”
-
It was never really easy for me to forget that conversation – and I replayed any number of times in my mind – as eventually the two of us just sauntered over to the nearby Armory outdoor bar and drank a Porter together – ale being some sort of effusive weakness of the British Isles too I suppose and as for me not caring less it was the first beer I’d had in quite some time and I realized I didn’t miss it one bit but anyway we parted on good company - both ALIVE and well thank you - and there’s a bloke I’ll surely never see again yet his words and mind forever shall grapple in space.
-
I am sometimes convinced that NOTHING exists and I can confirm that to myself – which in turn only reasserts my premise and I see instead the huge parade of mental constructs and stopping off points along the way and underway by everyone in a curious one-and-the-same-time confluence of assumption and interaction and everyone who finds dynamics is in the midst of change and alteration while so many others just rule along safely and soundly and right here as I watch I can feel and realize the waterfront which has – in essence- grown THROUGH me and which answers to many of the assumed parameters of my own thinking but yet which can be read completely and entirely differently by anyone so inclined – even sitting next to me – amidst their own working set of assumptions and occurrences – and read wrongly or rightly it does not matter for those concepts (only with great difficulty if so) cannot be transferred or read one to the other and it’s a might-solace of letters like some Tower of Babel symbolically placed in lines of reality so fevered and dense that they cause tendencies and deaths and births and arisings and all life is underway at all times with growth and action as much as decay and falsification and destruction is a solid wall of change and not much else as we allow spiritual change to undertake removal in our name and LOGOS word made flesh ruler of all things is the creative concept of force driving forward and past and into everything else which may be.
‘Since you are mortal don’t prophesy the quality of tomorrow’s dawn / and when you meet the man of the year / don’t try to read his life line / for swifter than a dragonfly / pfft / a change’ – that was written by Simonides about 2500 years ago as a Greek victory ode and in it he basically restates what Solon (the Athenian legislator) once said : ‘call no man happy before his death’ I was thinking about that as we started talking then too of ‘people’ we’ve known and Reggie Crispin says that he ‘once knew a scholar in Royal Hiltingshire 1st School who was perfectly versed in as ‘aspects’ of death (how we’d gotten to that point of conversation I cannot rightly recall) and he related : “until about 1950 – when someone died in the Newfoundland fishing village of Witless Bay the community took steps to avoid angering his irascible spirit and to do so they stopped the clock at the moment of death so the dead person would believe he was still alive and they covered the mirrors because it was dangerous for the spirit to see its reflection and since the deceased was assumed to be ‘furious’ about his death the best defensive strategy was to be seen acting as if he was still the life of the party - which meant raucous wakes where the corpse could be danced with given glasses of rum and made (via strings) to sit up in his coffin and Witless Bay had another custom also designed to confuse any returning spirit and that was that the chairs in the room where the deadman’s wake had been were overturned and the door locked for a day after the funeral – but when one Father Glough arrived in Witless Bay he forbade these practices (in the light of this Christian teachings) so that from the 1930’s to the late 40’s the practice had just about dwindled and regular Christian attitudes of death had taken over” and of course that became but the beginning of a long wharfside discussion of the entire concept (‘Death and everything else’ I called it) and we mentioned other practices like cannibalism and the sacrifice of mates and servants concubines and horses all which had been put to use to accelerate or ease the soul into that ‘afterlife’ adventure (one Timothy Taylor had called the soul – he said – “something that was ‘us’ and something which ‘continued’ after death”) and we’d decided that there had probably always been a widespread fear lodged within humankind – a fear of the ‘disembodied’ soul - and then Reggie said that he’d learned that “actually cannibalism was one of man’s first methods of disposing of the dead – at once an expression of thrift and a form of conspicuous consumption as well as a ‘way’ to incorporate the dead into the living” and the he said it had been found as a practice as far back as ‘Homo Habilis’ – an early mankind of long long ago and “likewise against the prevailing opinion that the earliest burials about 12,000 years ago demonstrate reverence and affection they were actually a way of ostracizing scapegoats as in ‘no one wanted to ingest you’ and only with the first farmers in the Neolithic era did burial become standard practice” and having myself just come down from the heights above us with the old St. Peter’s graves of all the Mundys and Parkers I could stand I was ready just then for some further ‘edification’ so I turned it back on him and said “well may that be but do you not think that is was the ‘practice’ first instituted by humans of grieving and the anguish of loss which eventually coalesced into the proto-religious cults of death and dying whereby great tomes and magnificent kingdoms were then imagined and erected as for the places where these ‘dead’ go and had not any of this been done - had not Mankind taken Death from out of the realm of simple animal passage and decay - it would never have arisen as such a major ‘obstacle’ to every individual human who now must LIVE with the thought and affect of DYING?” and he said “what are you saying?” to which I replied “simply that – if we look at it clearly – Humans INVENTED death – first as a concept and then as a practice for it marks by one singular different step the variety between us now and the animal kingdom now - of which we are both a part and vastly separate from - for we have been somehow allowed to dwell upon and erect a structural concept of DEATH and DYING as a place/kingdom/passage/act/practice and it is thereby something now which rules and infractures our very fabric but had we not invented it – by whatever means – our ‘passage’ would have been seen – without religion and without a God – as a simple move into the next evolved form of living a simple ‘passage’ from one room to the other with no need of all that which DEATH conceptually brings with it and that PRIDE and that hubris is what both elevates and limits us amidst all the rest of the world’s living beings” as we spoke - of course - before us the little meanderings of the boat traffic and odd tanker and tug freight was rolling by with the resultant wake and ripple of noise and the slap of the water on the old pilings and although it did nothing to compete with our own personal back-and-forth voices it did lend a nice background sound to what we were saying (as if irreverent sea-creatures had suddenly a’lit to land in order to speak) and then he said “have you given thought to how less comfortable life would have been without a ‘storyline’ for it to end by?” and I said “whatever that means I’ll not know for the only ‘storyline’ as you put it is the obvious one to me of intuitive and inspirational feel - the sort of thing which simply guides a life through all its undertakings and if that’s the ‘comfort’ for the story as it is needed then that’s OK too but too much has always been invested in the hierarchy and ritual aspects that go with organized approved and dictated learning and supposed truth - and just look how many people in all reality have been slaughtered and decimated by people over the millennia fighting for their own stupid version of a very liquid truth” and by that of course I’d meant to say that any unfettered acceptance of church kingship political power and ritualized allegiance to anything would never be a part of my own make-up but I’d missed evidently the opportunity to get that across to him “you can’t really say that” he replied “for so many layers of social cooperation and living and all the advancement that went with it were motivated and advanced by those very same ‘powers’ who put some structure and allegiance into ‘society’ – blindly forming without even fully being cognizant of it – the world we live amongst right now” and I said “no no I’d much rather say the RUINS of the world we live amongst right now - and I mean that sincerely the RUINS of every form of rational logic aggressive demand and mercantile impetus towards making nothing but a prison for fellow mankind wherever” and he simply looked at me and said “way over the top old chap ! way over the top!”
-
It was never really easy for me to forget that conversation – and I replayed any number of times in my mind – as eventually the two of us just sauntered over to the nearby Armory outdoor bar and drank a Porter together – ale being some sort of effusive weakness of the British Isles too I suppose and as for me not caring less it was the first beer I’d had in quite some time and I realized I didn’t miss it one bit but anyway we parted on good company - both ALIVE and well thank you - and there’s a bloke I’ll surely never see again yet his words and mind forever shall grapple in space.
-
I am sometimes convinced that NOTHING exists and I can confirm that to myself – which in turn only reasserts my premise and I see instead the huge parade of mental constructs and stopping off points along the way and underway by everyone in a curious one-and-the-same-time confluence of assumption and interaction and everyone who finds dynamics is in the midst of change and alteration while so many others just rule along safely and soundly and right here as I watch I can feel and realize the waterfront which has – in essence- grown THROUGH me and which answers to many of the assumed parameters of my own thinking but yet which can be read completely and entirely differently by anyone so inclined – even sitting next to me – amidst their own working set of assumptions and occurrences – and read wrongly or rightly it does not matter for those concepts (only with great difficulty if so) cannot be transferred or read one to the other and it’s a might-solace of letters like some Tower of Babel symbolically placed in lines of reality so fevered and dense that they cause tendencies and deaths and births and arisings and all life is underway at all times with growth and action as much as decay and falsification and destruction is a solid wall of change and not much else as we allow spiritual change to undertake removal in our name and LOGOS word made flesh ruler of all things is the creative concept of force driving forward and past and into everything else which may be.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
PILE-DRIVER HAZE WITH THE MOTHER OF INVENTION...
213. THE PILE-DRIVER HAZE THE MOTHER OF INVENTION THE CHILEWONT WITH THE BROKEN EDGING:
Up top the rocks were massive and etched with what appeared to be lines made eons ago in some weird extra-terrestrial way and they were piled as they grew from the earth just where they stayed and paths and trails went right over them whenever they were in the way - I imagined the Native Americans of old walking these very rocks as they passed along the high palisades and checked out the river beneath them and the far-distant other shore - lush and dense and rich and green - teeming with silence in the riches of things unseen and overgrown NOT a word to be heard not a noise out of place just the usual warble of birds in the Spring and ice floes in the dead of Winter the hush of snow the hiss of hot air and I could see the huge markings on the faces of the rocks and wondered about them in silence (for apparently Americans took no heed of this at all and they cared less about any of it either) for nowadays nothing comes from the sky - no riches no money no special things from on high - so that there's really little to be gained (it is thought) by the caring either for or of it and if you understand the thinking which produces something like that you'd probably understand a million other things which I myself noticed by being here : on the northern bottom of Newark along what is now Route 21 and by something called Mt. Pleasant Avenue is a massive cemetery dating from the old original founding days of earliest Newark and in this location are to be found to be precise most of the people whose last names have now become or were already the names of streets in old Newark (there's a distinction to be made here because there have been essentially two Newarks with one on either side of the societal divide which strangely divides America in these parts - that is the original OLD inhabitants and their being replaced (once they essentially gave up on the cities in question) by the newer and much-lesser mentally fit secondary groups which came after and still are coming and breeding and adding great numbers and hordes to these already miraculously decayed and forgotten places which have in essence become mighty new engines of social engineering AND socialism of a sort which never was supposed to happen in the USA at least by history's standards and which today's Americans conveniently forget all about) - but so be it - and a friend of mine just yesterday commented upon seeing this cemetery - 'so this is where all the WASP's ended up' - and he wasn't that far from the truth and all one sees here are the collected remains and remnants and memorials for all of that which has passed - an entirely 'other' way of American life and one composed of names reeking of old England and old Europe and the many places from which these early settlers of Newark and environs came and the whole place (once proudly athwart the bountiful river) is now busted and truncated and made noisy by the howling thread of highway traffic which rudely trounces at its end at the exact spot where the most forgotten and most luxuriant remnants of the old are - concreted mausoleums closed forever now by poured sealings to thwart vagrants and the old and crumbling red brick tombs with monumental tops and grandiose architectural renderings now crumbling in a powdery mass of old red brick and broken stone covers and ancient iron rusted away to a mottled mesh with broken windows which here and there may still reflect the fleeing sun and inside of each of these tombs - redolent of the past and the past again - are perhaps still the bones and shards of the original tenants the ever-owners the long-lost-last resident of each : formally named crypts broken now by time and exquisitely carved memorials forgotten now by every weather and air and awareness of any nearby human anywhere and I visit these places myself as a spectral figure and I find myself there seeking my own bones and my own reasons but the place is awesomely inspiring and the entire idea of the present and the modern makes my heart ache and hurt and seek ceasing to pound as a solace for I know that this has fallen and fallen again BETWEEN places between times and presences and no one is aware of the loss and no one cares but HERE are the original causes and names and people and dates the truly ORIGINAL marks of everything AMERICAN which here once was and here now is despoiled lost gone and forgotten amidst the noise and wail of stupidity amidst the noise and wail of crazed local populations of indigents voting and screaming while they vote and falling and swooning to their God meager great God Mammon and succor though it may be and alongside that everything else pales and should for truly THIS this is the city of the dead the sepulchral presence of death and ALL its varied minions with the noise and smell of the modern about them (whilst I walk alone and silently among them - in some evasive semi-dark of time and theme and air) - and I like to think I am better for that.
-
To the pestilence of testing men I add the prevalence of death and its elusive meanings as a way of furthering the test : we build the monuments to the ideas which undergird all of what we do as a vest of immortality or something we wish to wear over our clothing as some major outer garment of rank and status TO WIT 'look at me for I shall live forever' yet alas it is not to be ('I am Ozymandias...look upon my works oh Mankind and despair...') and it is to that very boneyard we are then retired (quite passively that is and NOT at all actively) and that very boneyard it is now which I walk in and view the remnants of faded powerless dear and dire glory all gone to seed and rot all broken and tarnished forgotten and dis-respected (ringed with rude roadway 'round loud scavenging noise and fury) and I conclude ALIKE that it is likely that there is NOTHING more to go around - we all are silent at once and despair together and lonesome at once and elated with fear the fear of time closing in on us and then over us and LOOK LOOK just look yourselves and tell me what you see for even the brick and the granite here disprove the complacency of time and show its active element instead - rot and withering and decay and fault.
-
So 'what's to navigate' one says ? navigating without water remains impossible and most of my story is all lies (or all of my story is mostly lies) and none of it can be sourced : my father being from Albania ? sure as Tirana and my mother being Trinidadian ? sure or from some other Pavian part of Italy - let's say - sure and they both ended up in some prefecture provincial of Merry Olde England with Robert Ford his'self as guide (take from the poor and give to the rich - it's called today and when Robert Ford became Robin Hood I can't recall - 'I may LOOk like Robert Ford but I feel just like Jesse James!') and I met with Little John just this morning at that same old bridge and I HAVE visited Czechoslovakia and I have passed through Peking but for whichever reason BETTER OR WORSE it hardly mattered and this scribe's from Bolgna anyway so each and every story you hear is a PASTICHE of desuetude (and how do you like that title!!) made-up whole cloth patched together ring of stories and tales no greater than the least of them and no less than the best - "fill my marrow with new monkey bones and let me drink of the chemist of ale" the guy saying that was sure to be lonely and he was in actuality ABSENT from his lodgings yet I stayed there alone for a few days and then went down to Pete's Tavern and tippled a few more lagers AND NO WATER could be seen there either (just MaryBeth and Doug and us walking along looking at the bloodied posters of the missing in action and the people who never turned up turned up dead for sure for so many it was thought had died in the inferno as the crumbling towers wilted pancake flat and crushed and killed them all and some of these I'm told even had to jump to race their way to sudden death - the PAYOFF of every mind and every man (sinister constabulary tophat barnacle covered soldier-sotted windfarer sailor-boy humdinger) but by then it had to be AT LEAST October first of two-thousand and one.
Up top the rocks were massive and etched with what appeared to be lines made eons ago in some weird extra-terrestrial way and they were piled as they grew from the earth just where they stayed and paths and trails went right over them whenever they were in the way - I imagined the Native Americans of old walking these very rocks as they passed along the high palisades and checked out the river beneath them and the far-distant other shore - lush and dense and rich and green - teeming with silence in the riches of things unseen and overgrown NOT a word to be heard not a noise out of place just the usual warble of birds in the Spring and ice floes in the dead of Winter the hush of snow the hiss of hot air and I could see the huge markings on the faces of the rocks and wondered about them in silence (for apparently Americans took no heed of this at all and they cared less about any of it either) for nowadays nothing comes from the sky - no riches no money no special things from on high - so that there's really little to be gained (it is thought) by the caring either for or of it and if you understand the thinking which produces something like that you'd probably understand a million other things which I myself noticed by being here : on the northern bottom of Newark along what is now Route 21 and by something called Mt. Pleasant Avenue is a massive cemetery dating from the old original founding days of earliest Newark and in this location are to be found to be precise most of the people whose last names have now become or were already the names of streets in old Newark (there's a distinction to be made here because there have been essentially two Newarks with one on either side of the societal divide which strangely divides America in these parts - that is the original OLD inhabitants and their being replaced (once they essentially gave up on the cities in question) by the newer and much-lesser mentally fit secondary groups which came after and still are coming and breeding and adding great numbers and hordes to these already miraculously decayed and forgotten places which have in essence become mighty new engines of social engineering AND socialism of a sort which never was supposed to happen in the USA at least by history's standards and which today's Americans conveniently forget all about) - but so be it - and a friend of mine just yesterday commented upon seeing this cemetery - 'so this is where all the WASP's ended up' - and he wasn't that far from the truth and all one sees here are the collected remains and remnants and memorials for all of that which has passed - an entirely 'other' way of American life and one composed of names reeking of old England and old Europe and the many places from which these early settlers of Newark and environs came and the whole place (once proudly athwart the bountiful river) is now busted and truncated and made noisy by the howling thread of highway traffic which rudely trounces at its end at the exact spot where the most forgotten and most luxuriant remnants of the old are - concreted mausoleums closed forever now by poured sealings to thwart vagrants and the old and crumbling red brick tombs with monumental tops and grandiose architectural renderings now crumbling in a powdery mass of old red brick and broken stone covers and ancient iron rusted away to a mottled mesh with broken windows which here and there may still reflect the fleeing sun and inside of each of these tombs - redolent of the past and the past again - are perhaps still the bones and shards of the original tenants the ever-owners the long-lost-last resident of each : formally named crypts broken now by time and exquisitely carved memorials forgotten now by every weather and air and awareness of any nearby human anywhere and I visit these places myself as a spectral figure and I find myself there seeking my own bones and my own reasons but the place is awesomely inspiring and the entire idea of the present and the modern makes my heart ache and hurt and seek ceasing to pound as a solace for I know that this has fallen and fallen again BETWEEN places between times and presences and no one is aware of the loss and no one cares but HERE are the original causes and names and people and dates the truly ORIGINAL marks of everything AMERICAN which here once was and here now is despoiled lost gone and forgotten amidst the noise and wail of stupidity amidst the noise and wail of crazed local populations of indigents voting and screaming while they vote and falling and swooning to their God meager great God Mammon and succor though it may be and alongside that everything else pales and should for truly THIS this is the city of the dead the sepulchral presence of death and ALL its varied minions with the noise and smell of the modern about them (whilst I walk alone and silently among them - in some evasive semi-dark of time and theme and air) - and I like to think I am better for that.
-
To the pestilence of testing men I add the prevalence of death and its elusive meanings as a way of furthering the test : we build the monuments to the ideas which undergird all of what we do as a vest of immortality or something we wish to wear over our clothing as some major outer garment of rank and status TO WIT 'look at me for I shall live forever' yet alas it is not to be ('I am Ozymandias...look upon my works oh Mankind and despair...') and it is to that very boneyard we are then retired (quite passively that is and NOT at all actively) and that very boneyard it is now which I walk in and view the remnants of faded powerless dear and dire glory all gone to seed and rot all broken and tarnished forgotten and dis-respected (ringed with rude roadway 'round loud scavenging noise and fury) and I conclude ALIKE that it is likely that there is NOTHING more to go around - we all are silent at once and despair together and lonesome at once and elated with fear the fear of time closing in on us and then over us and LOOK LOOK just look yourselves and tell me what you see for even the brick and the granite here disprove the complacency of time and show its active element instead - rot and withering and decay and fault.
-
So 'what's to navigate' one says ? navigating without water remains impossible and most of my story is all lies (or all of my story is mostly lies) and none of it can be sourced : my father being from Albania ? sure as Tirana and my mother being Trinidadian ? sure or from some other Pavian part of Italy - let's say - sure and they both ended up in some prefecture provincial of Merry Olde England with Robert Ford his'self as guide (take from the poor and give to the rich - it's called today and when Robert Ford became Robin Hood I can't recall - 'I may LOOk like Robert Ford but I feel just like Jesse James!') and I met with Little John just this morning at that same old bridge and I HAVE visited Czechoslovakia and I have passed through Peking but for whichever reason BETTER OR WORSE it hardly mattered and this scribe's from Bolgna anyway so each and every story you hear is a PASTICHE of desuetude (and how do you like that title!!) made-up whole cloth patched together ring of stories and tales no greater than the least of them and no less than the best - "fill my marrow with new monkey bones and let me drink of the chemist of ale" the guy saying that was sure to be lonely and he was in actuality ABSENT from his lodgings yet I stayed there alone for a few days and then went down to Pete's Tavern and tippled a few more lagers AND NO WATER could be seen there either (just MaryBeth and Doug and us walking along looking at the bloodied posters of the missing in action and the people who never turned up turned up dead for sure for so many it was thought had died in the inferno as the crumbling towers wilted pancake flat and crushed and killed them all and some of these I'm told even had to jump to race their way to sudden death - the PAYOFF of every mind and every man (sinister constabulary tophat barnacle covered soldier-sotted windfarer sailor-boy humdinger) but by then it had to be AT LEAST October first of two-thousand and one.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
A WAND OF GOD AND TIME TOGETHER MINGLED
212. A WAND OF GOD AND TIME TOGETHER MINGLED:
So we all came up then rather quickly walking in the grand glorious daylight as the buildings dropped their heavy raiment upon the street below and the spreading sky succored the air and the ever-widening lines of space and shift and the driving gentle lilt of voice and song all together brought out the best in every city street where vendors stood still in motion hawking their scarves and gloves and shirts and jackets and the wonderful jewelry of the earth and the gold chains and silver bells and ribboned hats and shoes and dresses and cloaks and the toys running freely on tabletops squawking with peals and buzzers and bells and rings alike to goods for sale but sounds and words in themselves and the darkened dour doorways wherein people lived were filled with the huddled and the Grecian urn coffee cardboard cups about and the vendors selling roasted peanuts and pretzels and hot dogs and soda and candy and all the foodstuffs of a single city street at one time working like a huge cauldron of fire and energy and work and toil and the men from all the other lands and the Nigerians and Pakistanis standing holding hands talking the squat briefcases of paper and deal and the card sharks awaiting prey and the three-card-monte fellows and the walking girls like harrazins of ancient isles the vagueish sounds of metropole all itself the wide growing and closing world upon itself reawakening from a long-lost snooze and Herald Square then beckoned and the chairs put out for people all around the monument the fair and the Greeley pedestal and the lightened air with words and joy and lights and markings of three hundred city years of work and toil again and again and the walk from there down and from there up and the great oasis of O'Reilly's pub wherein sit the working drinkers of the world united the Irish the German and the Austrian the traveling craftsman the skilled artisan here for a spell and the shoppers dance through to eat and ask and the workers trudge through to eat and pass the time they've yet allotted to such horrid joy and toil like this the ale and the beer and the counted bottles of rum and rye the fair and distant seas around us the storyman with his story the two boys from the continent alone working and talking the merge and move all things together in one fair blush of time and manner and we walk past and in and stay to sit and stare and watch and the manners of all the street-folk change as we arrive the distant tongue sparkling talking glib the words the one and one again and anew at far and near to the globe itself we are together one at Herald Square where the plainclothes cops a'watch the crowd and the uniformed ones stand straight at curbside watching traffics the running cars the rush of curb-hopping pedestrians those who would run and walk and flee 'tween lights and the greens and reds and the yellows and the gated Herald Square of time itself all contemporaneous with all things and none and we decide to watch alongside the dated building high with broken brick and ghosts of other buildings still written on its sides and the black flat parking lot the fence the cars the life within the tiny gatehouse with the black man singing and throwing spittle as he sings the matrons and those whose garb and package perfect as together we mix and walk and mingle within broad waiting rooms and thoroughfares of time and place and the mix of faces grates but makes peace quickly within us within itself all time and peace and light and angle as everything all wafts through with the scented wand of God and Time together brings us forward and backward within this very world united somehow commingled like us as one as one on the broad array the Broadway the walking plank of all mankind.
So we all came up then rather quickly walking in the grand glorious daylight as the buildings dropped their heavy raiment upon the street below and the spreading sky succored the air and the ever-widening lines of space and shift and the driving gentle lilt of voice and song all together brought out the best in every city street where vendors stood still in motion hawking their scarves and gloves and shirts and jackets and the wonderful jewelry of the earth and the gold chains and silver bells and ribboned hats and shoes and dresses and cloaks and the toys running freely on tabletops squawking with peals and buzzers and bells and rings alike to goods for sale but sounds and words in themselves and the darkened dour doorways wherein people lived were filled with the huddled and the Grecian urn coffee cardboard cups about and the vendors selling roasted peanuts and pretzels and hot dogs and soda and candy and all the foodstuffs of a single city street at one time working like a huge cauldron of fire and energy and work and toil and the men from all the other lands and the Nigerians and Pakistanis standing holding hands talking the squat briefcases of paper and deal and the card sharks awaiting prey and the three-card-monte fellows and the walking girls like harrazins of ancient isles the vagueish sounds of metropole all itself the wide growing and closing world upon itself reawakening from a long-lost snooze and Herald Square then beckoned and the chairs put out for people all around the monument the fair and the Greeley pedestal and the lightened air with words and joy and lights and markings of three hundred city years of work and toil again and again and the walk from there down and from there up and the great oasis of O'Reilly's pub wherein sit the working drinkers of the world united the Irish the German and the Austrian the traveling craftsman the skilled artisan here for a spell and the shoppers dance through to eat and ask and the workers trudge through to eat and pass the time they've yet allotted to such horrid joy and toil like this the ale and the beer and the counted bottles of rum and rye the fair and distant seas around us the storyman with his story the two boys from the continent alone working and talking the merge and move all things together in one fair blush of time and manner and we walk past and in and stay to sit and stare and watch and the manners of all the street-folk change as we arrive the distant tongue sparkling talking glib the words the one and one again and anew at far and near to the globe itself we are together one at Herald Square where the plainclothes cops a'watch the crowd and the uniformed ones stand straight at curbside watching traffics the running cars the rush of curb-hopping pedestrians those who would run and walk and flee 'tween lights and the greens and reds and the yellows and the gated Herald Square of time itself all contemporaneous with all things and none and we decide to watch alongside the dated building high with broken brick and ghosts of other buildings still written on its sides and the black flat parking lot the fence the cars the life within the tiny gatehouse with the black man singing and throwing spittle as he sings the matrons and those whose garb and package perfect as together we mix and walk and mingle within broad waiting rooms and thoroughfares of time and place and the mix of faces grates but makes peace quickly within us within itself all time and peace and light and angle as everything all wafts through with the scented wand of God and Time together brings us forward and backward within this very world united somehow commingled like us as one as one on the broad array the Broadway the walking plank of all mankind.
Monday, October 19, 2009
ONE MARVELOUS ENTABLATURE
211. ONE MARVELOUS ENTABLATURE (and a midnight dreary, nyc,1967):
I took off with the best of intentions walking sullenly through the darkness of 17th - bleak and forbidding was the night as above me the curious hum of lamp and streetlight thrummed in the air and I'd learned long before that there was really nothing to my mind more mysterious and exciting than the absolute dead depth of the bottom of midnight the lowest point of black nighttime along the streets of a New York City night with everything silent (I'd learned that all that 'city that never sleeps' crap had no real basis in fact other than the ten or twelve monstrous blocks of the seemingly never-ending junk of the entertainment districts where people played until they either dropped or died both being much the same to the vacant mind at play) and dark - loading docks closed up windows barred and even the nighttime attendants of these places visibly reluctant to even peer out until daybreak - those I did see walked gingerly with flashlight and keys or huddled in doorways looking out with coffee and a smoke - it was a confederation of negatives and big dark nothings a huge unfolding mystery awaiting light before it once again could start up re-wind and un-wind and churn itself anew through all the froth of another 'productive' day : of course in all of this I was nothing but a stevedore without value a cipher walking through the pith of the night and as I walked (unending too were the means by which I kept myself awake and hating sleep) I dreamed the curious and fabled dreams of those awake - weird kingdoms of glitter and gold made of froth and ideas which would pass and disappear just as swiftly as they passed - through my mind and right out again - leaving in their wake the jumbled confusion of deja vu and misplaced identities : I watched trucks haul by - those huge multi-wheelers which trailed the waterfront docks and loading areas and I witnessed the silent cloaked movements of the very occasional person walking by me or past me and around me or in the other direction across from me - single units monads within time male or female witnessing their own lives and walking in a fashion towards a destiny of their own - I pulled the mental shades down low on anything I'd not wish to see and eagerly peered hard at other things I'd wish to see - opposites like that somehow meld everything together : what I would have given for a companion or a friend the boon of a lover or the fidelity of someone to keep me well and warm but there was none and as I stewed along on my way I understood that and realized this was but the end-result of all that I'd lived until that moment : the stupidity of being a child way too long the rancid effects of sheltered living and parents and siblings and home and place - all those things which weigh around the neck like a deadly anchor and bespoil all independent days UNLESS one throws them off early and surely - which I swore I'd done : I'd sought to break free and break away and had - by my own final wits - done so and here then was the resultant life : ME once and forever alone walking scabrous city streets learning every dot and every essence of everything I'd see and every new way for me was a new way - I'd figure - for all of Mankind too and that was the manner and the means of what I'd be doing for the rest of my life : I'd turned off 17th and had headed up to 23rd and there was the place I was going - just past the post-midnight coil of ironwork and the steel of the old Chelsea Hotel - 3rd floor left into which location I'd enter and sit at the window waiting for the arrival of my good friend Marcus Gray of whom more in a bit.
-
Marcus Gray was an artist of two left hands - as he put it - he did everything the way he wanted and only knew one way as awkward as a right-handed batter in a left-handed batter's box - but his art had a magic quality of some kind of darkness something between both the shadow and the light of what makes up ordinary life and at the moment I was in his cheap employ to mix pigments and lay out colors (not understanding why - the very idea of an 'artist' having reached the point of needing to have this done FOR him and not doing it himself was still unsettling) and he worked at fiercely odd hours and drank and cavorted too - to such an extent that having my own key allowed me at least somewhere to wait out these blisteringly strange hours - he'd usually arrive very happy or at least drunk past a certain point and with a certain fair aplomb he'd have some wonderful creature draped over his arm - I was glad for a change it wasn't another man my having witnessed enough homosexual artist love as to wish fondly for the female sort - and by the time the light came up I knew she'd be asleep exhausted sated and probably undressed too - all of which made for pleasant atmospheres in spite of low pay : he'd give me a list - 'cerulean' and 'alizarin' and such - denoting which pigments he needed - and by pre-arranged formulas and agreed-on amounts I'd mix and lay out his mounds of color as paint to await his thrashful heaving or his pallet-knife spreading - as eventually he'd blast into his work as a boiler throws its flame - I'd sit back and watch or make sure of coffee and alcohol get hard rolls and pastries when requested and just generally do this or do that - which generously sometimes included (to my great satisfaction) a lickety-split taste of the finery he'd brought home - they always seemed happy and willing to bask in whatever reflected Marcus Gray glory I too could give them and for a mere wee lad ! and egads what glory it was.
I took off with the best of intentions walking sullenly through the darkness of 17th - bleak and forbidding was the night as above me the curious hum of lamp and streetlight thrummed in the air and I'd learned long before that there was really nothing to my mind more mysterious and exciting than the absolute dead depth of the bottom of midnight the lowest point of black nighttime along the streets of a New York City night with everything silent (I'd learned that all that 'city that never sleeps' crap had no real basis in fact other than the ten or twelve monstrous blocks of the seemingly never-ending junk of the entertainment districts where people played until they either dropped or died both being much the same to the vacant mind at play) and dark - loading docks closed up windows barred and even the nighttime attendants of these places visibly reluctant to even peer out until daybreak - those I did see walked gingerly with flashlight and keys or huddled in doorways looking out with coffee and a smoke - it was a confederation of negatives and big dark nothings a huge unfolding mystery awaiting light before it once again could start up re-wind and un-wind and churn itself anew through all the froth of another 'productive' day : of course in all of this I was nothing but a stevedore without value a cipher walking through the pith of the night and as I walked (unending too were the means by which I kept myself awake and hating sleep) I dreamed the curious and fabled dreams of those awake - weird kingdoms of glitter and gold made of froth and ideas which would pass and disappear just as swiftly as they passed - through my mind and right out again - leaving in their wake the jumbled confusion of deja vu and misplaced identities : I watched trucks haul by - those huge multi-wheelers which trailed the waterfront docks and loading areas and I witnessed the silent cloaked movements of the very occasional person walking by me or past me and around me or in the other direction across from me - single units monads within time male or female witnessing their own lives and walking in a fashion towards a destiny of their own - I pulled the mental shades down low on anything I'd not wish to see and eagerly peered hard at other things I'd wish to see - opposites like that somehow meld everything together : what I would have given for a companion or a friend the boon of a lover or the fidelity of someone to keep me well and warm but there was none and as I stewed along on my way I understood that and realized this was but the end-result of all that I'd lived until that moment : the stupidity of being a child way too long the rancid effects of sheltered living and parents and siblings and home and place - all those things which weigh around the neck like a deadly anchor and bespoil all independent days UNLESS one throws them off early and surely - which I swore I'd done : I'd sought to break free and break away and had - by my own final wits - done so and here then was the resultant life : ME once and forever alone walking scabrous city streets learning every dot and every essence of everything I'd see and every new way for me was a new way - I'd figure - for all of Mankind too and that was the manner and the means of what I'd be doing for the rest of my life : I'd turned off 17th and had headed up to 23rd and there was the place I was going - just past the post-midnight coil of ironwork and the steel of the old Chelsea Hotel - 3rd floor left into which location I'd enter and sit at the window waiting for the arrival of my good friend Marcus Gray of whom more in a bit.
-
Marcus Gray was an artist of two left hands - as he put it - he did everything the way he wanted and only knew one way as awkward as a right-handed batter in a left-handed batter's box - but his art had a magic quality of some kind of darkness something between both the shadow and the light of what makes up ordinary life and at the moment I was in his cheap employ to mix pigments and lay out colors (not understanding why - the very idea of an 'artist' having reached the point of needing to have this done FOR him and not doing it himself was still unsettling) and he worked at fiercely odd hours and drank and cavorted too - to such an extent that having my own key allowed me at least somewhere to wait out these blisteringly strange hours - he'd usually arrive very happy or at least drunk past a certain point and with a certain fair aplomb he'd have some wonderful creature draped over his arm - I was glad for a change it wasn't another man my having witnessed enough homosexual artist love as to wish fondly for the female sort - and by the time the light came up I knew she'd be asleep exhausted sated and probably undressed too - all of which made for pleasant atmospheres in spite of low pay : he'd give me a list - 'cerulean' and 'alizarin' and such - denoting which pigments he needed - and by pre-arranged formulas and agreed-on amounts I'd mix and lay out his mounds of color as paint to await his thrashful heaving or his pallet-knife spreading - as eventually he'd blast into his work as a boiler throws its flame - I'd sit back and watch or make sure of coffee and alcohol get hard rolls and pastries when requested and just generally do this or do that - which generously sometimes included (to my great satisfaction) a lickety-split taste of the finery he'd brought home - they always seemed happy and willing to bask in whatever reflected Marcus Gray glory I too could give them and for a mere wee lad ! and egads what glory it was.
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