'NOT LONG ENOUGH,' THE MINER SAID

316. 'NOT LONG ENOUGH,'  THE MINER SAID:

Mail the picnic card on time and slurp your broth with shuttered lips but never do two things at once for something has to suffer and  -  just as well  -  don't think while you're doing the one for most things will simply recur and all the girls will come home once more for it's a crazy mixed up world and they only want so much  :  lip-smacked Garbo smiles and all those similes of love arms and legs a'kimbo with features entwined and faces together as the world holds on and stops itself to wait  -  'I recall the time I was speaking to the Society of Flagellants and their donor cards all fell onto the floor between courses of two entire meals' : nothing ever came of that stuff anyway  :  'not long enough' the miner said.

I HAVEN'T SET UP FOR TUESDAY YET

315. 'BUT I HAVE FRAGMENTED MY LIFE SO AS TO SEE IT IN PIECES' (I haven't set up for Tuesday yet):

There are so many things I never really wanted but ended up with anyway – but that’s probably the way it is with things like that and it all reminds me of the guy buying two-by-fours in the lumber yard while figuring that with a little planning and some few more purchases of wood he’ll soon have that entire extension to his house completed and yet three months before he wasn’t even sure which end of a hammer was used to hit which size of a nail and nevertheless in just a little time it’s all about finished and over and he’s got no clue what he just did but dangling so high like that over a precipice can make anyone nervous and the only quote really worth uttering is ‘que se rompe la cuerda’ which actually means ‘let the rope break’ by which is MEANT ‘please help me by letting this cruel illusion end and let me see really what it is I have done and what it is that I am walking carefully over (two tiny feet on a thin thin rope) and before I say help let me NOT lose all hope – for letting this end will at least bring me to my senses’ - and it’s like that living this life (for the crap piles up the tasks grow higher and the rivers and bridges are soon either too high or too low for any real passage) but I have fragmented my life so as to see it in pieces and now it appears as if every few days I review BEFORE THEY HAPPEN the things which will occur the next day : I see spiders in their web – centered in the hot Summer’s end and two days later I see the very same spider (illustrated and all) in an article about spiders and their webs in this year’s wet warm season YET I see this life as a work in progress (as in Philip Larkin’s memorable phrase) – ‘smaller and clearer as the years go by’.
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And do then why are you running like a madman past five hundred things I see the eye and the eye is watching and all of this life is nothing but a moment a sieve something leaking high and mighty on down from above - which is only a direction not a time and place - and all the circumstantial evidence leads only to the scrim of the stage : the one dark spot where the ladies linger dressing in their stage robes and commingling with the oasis and the workmen who make the scenery they are about as well and talking to one another sitting and grimacing the twisted faces of the demented the declined the lost and they flail about as well as anyone and the men with scripts are walking onto the scene but just then the stage opens up the orchestra rises on a mechanical platform the lights come on and the walls and the very edges of even the room disappear all is light and gold and everyone rises as one and is swept away : so so yes so so far away I witnessed all that on an oriental stage in my passage and then I re-opened the book to where all the words were gone and missing and someone had scribbled in place instead a large handwritten broken word 'LARA' with no meaning and I never did understand any of that what it meant or why.

SLOW BY MEANING (nyc westside piers, 1968):

314. SLOW BY MEANING:

I was never slow by meaning and as I went along most things fell right into place for me - a rather quick understanding of what I'd see and because of that what is called a 'quick-study' or something like that was often applied to me although the truer meaning of that having something more to do with 'Jack of all trades/Master of none' as that saying went - no one ever spoke that precise phrase but it was always there : someone who knew how to change a tire quickly or lube a chassis or change a plug and all along the westside piers that sort of thing was always needed for there were without fail broken down trucks or old crummy cars having problems and back then it was a different situation : carburetors needed constant attention mixtures and chokes and fuels had to be just right so that these cars and trucks could withstand the brash punishment of start and stop and re-start and go again under load and then without load all of those things together for the case was always thus - nothing was ever knew and all these cheap and battered hulks were really just hanging on often well past their point of value but these old jobbers and truckers would run anything they could and run it until it was plain out and out fried and dead and anything that could be done along the way to keep something running was looked upon as a favorable boon to be taken advantage of : all-night news trucks sagging on their springs and leaky and rusted old lumber trucks and food carts and vegetable or fish wagons all that shiny and leaky stuff would eventually need some attention and there were gasoline puddles and oil traps under most everything - all with seals and gaskets gone and foul seepage dripping down the sides of warm oil pans and engine blocks fuel backups flaming out carburetor tops and mostly always and everywhere the clouds of blue oil smoke plumed - bad piston rings and broken-down adjustments spewing oil and leakage everywhere while miraculously these things still ran and there was always a few dollars a day to be made from scrubbing or fixing or adjusting something - spinning tales of repair and renewal to which no one ever really followed up as long as something was still running or running again and for a long period of cold months that was my prime day job too - stalking these gasoline heaps and seeing what and if anything needed doing and all the while making things us talking fast stealing what I could and pilfering whatever tools were needed to get the task at hand finalized finished and out of the way.

TOMMY AND LENORA (nyc, 1968)

313. TOMMY AND LENORA (nyc,1968):

Tommy and Lenora Vicks were two people I'd gotten to know from down along e12th Street - he was a stage-construction union guy for some of the big uptown theaters and she passed her time waitressing and trying to put together some sort of dance career - which never went anywhere that I saw - and the two of them were pretty normal in all other respects and by the time I met them it was surprising to me to be able to find two NYC people in a close age range who actually did live fairly normal lives from their own nice apartment - flowers and window-sill planters and a decent little garden spot out back nicely furnished rooms and kitchen and all the other amenities I'd normally have thought about for some older uncle or aunt somewhere - but they did this pretty well and I guess really the only thing they'd not acquired was a car - urban New Yorkers took that in stride and never thought twice about it even though it did stand out a bit to me - but Lenora's paradise was 14th Street and all the stuff it offered so that I suppose from that spot most of these things appeared and back in those days it was still the sort of environment where 14th Street yet held some dignity - fairly decent dress and gown and linen shops and dishes and stuff - whereas now it too has degenerated into the usual Chinese junk and imported trinkets sold by immigrants along the way - acres of cheap paper products and detergents indoors and ten dollar shoes and watches outdoors - and the rows and rows of carts and booths which now distract the eye and ear (and nose) were not there : another funny thing about old New York is the fact of the now 'glorified' charm of the old pushcart vendors who sold along every street their wares and fruits vegetables and most anything else in the early days before the establishment of sales taxes department stores and compartments and sections for selling this and that under roof and ceiling - now that same 'once-so-charming' outdoor sales effect has degenerated into trash merchants redundant up and down some streets and certainly any historic 'charm' has long ago been cancelled out : but Lenora partook of all this stuff and from it made a nice place and Tommy - always busy - just came and went as he needed and it was a pleasure to visit them - 311 e12th if I recall - the few times I did but before that Tommy Vicks had gotten into some sort of scrap with the law and had a few precarious months as he put it in jail or Rikers or somewhere sweating it out but he was always the same - direct and strong-willed with a foul-enough mouth used mostly on the job but it was all something he'd say you get used to real fast if you're 'gonn'a survive' and because of his skills he'd built a few really nice shelf-cases and tables in the apartment which added a nice touch but there really never were any books about - they'd load this all up instead with decorative stuff I guess called 'furnishings' or something that she'd get out shopping along the streets and it was nice visually but never meant too much to me to see and I did always rue the lack of books there - one day he came home with a small sculpture as I remember from some production or other - a form made of sticks and wire - some sort of human pose supposed to be evocative of something and he plunked it in the corner on a small pedestal he'd brought - it stayed there a while but the next time I went in it was gone so I never knew what happened : I was never much a theater guy but they always had those little Playbill books laying about too for any of the current productions and they were sometimes fun to see - especially the ads - and Tommy would say he needed them for work and from them he referenced names and titles and locations where he could at any time be sent on a job - made sense to me - and then I learned later also that 'opening night' Playbills or sometimes opening night Playbills signed by a cast member or two were very collectible and considered sometimes quite valuable - the 'opening night' specials were often sealed and stamped in a corner especially to denote their provenance or uniqueness or whatever - anyway I learned later that the root of Tommy's problem had been in forging signatures and falsely sealing and stamping playbills which he and another person had amassed and they'd been selling them as original 'opening nighters' through some form of mail-order or something for the theater crowd - they'd gotten caught and had been charged with forgery and theft-of-services mail fraud and a few other things and for a while it had looked bad (serious enough charges) but after a month or so in jail and after a few hearings they'd been able to buy a good enough lawyer to calm everything down - Tommy's biggest fear was in losing his job and his union card and all that - so that nothing much came of it all after a while - funny and totally unique story to me at the time.

I'D WANT YOU TO KNOW

312. I'D WANT YOU TO KNOW:

It never had been my contention to avoid the contingencies of life along the streets here where I'd narrowly averted - so many times - catastrophe : the lingering feeling that somehow my number was the next up the aggravating feeling that somewhere there just around that corner lurked the spectral something which would soon have me - engulfed finished and forgotten...there was therefore at all times a feeling of suspicion about me : sunlight daylight evening too.

OH BADGER MY CONTINGENT

311. OH BADGER MY CONTINGENT:

The collected works of everyone are sold by the pound – for if you can do nothing wrong you can do no good – and wagers placed at windows of solace never come due and ALL BETS ARE OFF as the end of this labored world approaches so soon and (“Hey! Charley! you left your napkin behind!) and the words of the long lost explorers are just now found in the Central Park caves and all they translate as is ‘Misunderstanding and all the cars are violet’ and of course no one of the modern era can figure that out so two guys in grass jump from the roof of the glass-tomb of Dendur and they shatter on the icy ground below but high in the sky above us runs the spacecraft crying and lowering itself down with twisted arcs askew it roars out a warning ‘ALL BETS ARE DUE!’ and with that the whole world screams but the screaming makes no sense at all and the doors and windows of everything I see are slightly askew and yes really there is the man in black holding a bible aloft and screaming out : 'repent now for the hour is at hand and God himself returns in a chariot to take away all good men' and then the man sits down and hangs his head and I realize the life has gone out of him and he has turned to nothing but a presence a Being of no substance and knowing I had heard him I at least felt better and across the way two men come out of the doorway talking intensely as they get into a car and the bigger one of the two motions to someone else who then comes over and gets in to drive and they drive away - some late model oversized chariot of their own never knowing where they're headed but heading nonetheless and as the car drives off it is leaking something or leaving anyway a trail of liquid behind and I feel for a moment as in some fairy tale where Hansel and Gretel or someone leaves a trail through the deep forest so to retrace their steps and return but of course that never happens and just like that I realize too that for myself any trail I would leave would lead right back here no matter what else or where I went so why bother and something like a disappearing snow would cover over all my trails and tracks anyway and the enfolding and folding over of time and matter for me always does bring its own singular and far-different results so that by the end my equation is different than all the other equations and my personal math as well - new numbers never learned and colors never seen - but anyway that's how it has always been all this never knowing from where nor from when.
-
It was William Blake who said 'I must create my own system or be enslaved by that of another' - and I guess that's true as far as it goes but enslavement wears many faces and if you think too much about that stuff you're only going to get hurt : spacemen intruders visitors aliens and all that I mean who can speak for what's really going on and memory impaired is most likely the best way to half-remember those things which would be only too startling to realize fully anyway if we could for what really shatters things is the harshness of knowing you are pretty helpless on a stupid clod of rock.
-
I woke up dreaming it had rained and was raining everywhere and every window in the entire realm was open everywhere and no one made a move - there was no one that I saw actually - and all these open windows took in all the rain ever and always and whatever rain fell wound up soaking nothing at all just entering and flooding and overwhelming all the barren and bare and open windows the world over and no matter I thought nothing of it nothing of any of it and just went about my ways as if all was normal and the rain kept falling and that same rain kept coming in and seeping over everything but the world was its own place : all the usual automatic cunning and rotation and moving and marking of things time and place and objects and huge boulders and slabs of minerals and large beautiful crazy gemstones everywhere and all of them suddenly in the rain suddenly having absolutely somehow no value at all : and I looked up skyward and all I saw arrayed silently too was a long line of objects hovering - spacecraft boulders rocks asteroids vehicles whatever - just hovering in place slow lights silently blinking as through all this the rain fell and nothing moved and nothing seemed to care nor any others either and all these objects high and silent in the sky in lines and lines and rows and rows were up there simply and silent just waiting.
-
And from that point it seemed nothing mattered anymore as I walked through the elevated rampway by the porno-pit at the end of Christopher Street some God-awful shithole of a place covered over with XXX graffiti and offers by men to men and women to women and vice versa and the PATH hole for the old Hudson Tubes was spitting out people in groups - all those crazed Jerseyans out for barter and barrage seeking escape on city streets puking over Hudson swarming towards the Village dens of Sheridan and Bleecker and MacDougal and all the rest of the shit and I never knew why any one of them would ever come here and then once they did why they would ever leave but it didn't make a difference they came anyway and it was like an open invitation to something unknown and I'd not know anyway and the filthy sleazeholes of this part of the Village were filled with nothing so much as the mobs of gay and close-to-that the masses of those who clung to each other and boldly tried re-defining the cultural gap as if it mattered but it never did and there was never any gap anyway one is what one is and the rest be damned and that's where pride comes in truly - someone proud enough to keep living is proud enough for pride and the innate good sense and the beauty and poise of any gay man's musculature speaks enough for itself anyway - Christopher Isherwood to Hart Crane to Auden and Ginsberg too and shit I knew them all or feared enough to and kept on my own way : horses like silver and gold and the grand steed of the vegetable man whose cart was pulled slowly by one massive horse the guy with piles of coal on the flat shaped wagon behind him all that I witnessed as they each died away - a time was passing and I knew it I sensed its way : my time once spent doing old things no was good no more for those old things were all gone away and the only thing one could do was learn new things or forget about movement at all : everything I ever did citywise had become outmoded and grown into death : but once all that was over what good was anything left ? all that metal and steel and gold and iron turned to plastic and junk and outlasted crap gone already before it began.

THE WORLD IS A VERY LOST PLACE

310. THE WORLD IS A VERY LOST PLACE:

And I had a butterfly in hand but lost it sending and I had a hummingbird in view but it flew to other nectar and across the twisted bridge I watched you enter some other land and understood immensely what was going on and the high grass managed to hide nothing but the water’s edge as the old station house painted in oranges and blues stood like a hellion on the old abandoned hill and fifty-five broken gravestones gathered and fell as I walked through their debris and kicked at remains while trying to read old words through the never-ending moss but all went for nothing and INSTEAD OF ALL THAT there arose a cloud and a cloud of light transported the bridge and the world around it far back into me and you and without knowing we understood it all but voices crying were still calling out and heard and we gathered INTO OUR HOLY CLOAK everything we could as some Noah on acid of old so TWO BY TWO they went and they came and we went and took them with us and reseeded renewed refound was ALL the world (and a more generous and gentle place too) and before long once more we were standing on the old brick wall and around us everywhere it was falling but for where we were which place withstood the whole entire onslaught and more (and it was then I found your name inscribed amidst the clouds and the masses of heaven arrayed) "but we’re running out of time I’m sure of that" you said as the sky above darkened in early Fall and tried (as it were) to go away but all I said back was "all to black must fade – wouldn’t you agree?" and you nodded (one twice three) and said back "yes but you miss the point for it’s really not the color I’m concerned about" and I understood at that moment most everything else too and watering troughs and brick-stone wells were placed half-miles apart for miles as we traveled but without thinking why we went on and you said "once long ago they had horses for everything and by them they traveled and these were their stops all throughout the day" and we laughed to decide it was all like a gas station would be today - that blemished and that stupid and that prevalent and that overlooked and (in our shrugging) we realized anew that the world is a very lost place and something (found) but not without little value.
　

I WAS JUST THERE ON TUESDAY

309. I WAS JUST THERE ON TUESDAY:

I may have taken it all to heart by way too much the way the lemonade frosted the refrigerated glass the way the people were looking in at the Chinese grocer killing a duck and the view from beneath the bridge on East Broadway - the lined up buses to other cities the one-dollar bus to Washington DC the trek to Philadelphia - all of this (beats me!) kept me befuddled and confused as well and I turned to nowhere and saw instead the everywhere of time and place and the old soup kitchen I remembered so well was gone now and in its place two hankering half-boys eating hamburgers and some other westernized piece of toady food all dripping and wet and two drinks on the table they sure were so cute they sure were swell and people in a line waiting for something - more about food and more about where to be than anything else and then I'd lost my wallet I'd lost my place and the old cinder block bar-room I frequented was just then being torn down by a Captain Marvel lookalike just as I blew in and nothing had moved away all the same the very same where the Pilgrims had left their hats the new settlers had simply picked them up and ran : tall buildings finance kingdoms emporiums of doubt and distress the long torrid trail of money the Federal Reserve of the reservation the blooming idiot kids all tattered and torn and then just like that I stopped ! I stopped in at the antiques yard the place where everything salvaged from destroyed buildings was kept and re-sold and displayed and I found wonderful gargoyles and pictures of this and that old bus station counter and signs the ivory-topped coffee table of the centennial Hotel blown through by desert sands and forgotten as well the blinking sign of service and - on the very last shelf I looked - the blind and beautiful picture of you or so I thought a looks-like-someone-I-knew picture of the beautiful girl sitting on a stool and milking what appeared to be a very gentle cow but I left it there it seemed so nice not to disturb what I couldn't understand and the words below : 'Milk us for any information you may need ! boy have we got it in for you' : never could as much as I tried figure out what that meant or from where it may have come and I traveled the land years later still thinking of that little scene.

TOO DAMNED LONG

308. TOO DAMNED LONG:

Not everything that is important can be measured and not everything that can be measured is important Albert Einstein said that and by God if it isn’t true or at least true enough for me to carry it along at least to the degree that I often remember it when presented with some silly fact or statistic about any of a million world-weary causes and prompting efforts at fashioning something either for or against a situation and isn’t that only such an ‘adult’ thing to do having to take sides or force someone to go one way or the other about an issue as if there weren’t anything gray in between or as if no alternatives existed which shaded the issue just a little one way or the other but isn’t it that always what disgruntled cranky adults want ‘certainty’ about everything and ‘don’t disrupt my world it’s running along just fine’ but in whatever case the world is a lonely place and if you’ve got no others around you it can get to feel pretty sad especially if you’re isolated or unpopular in your own beliefs enough as to annoy everyone else and piss others off and then it just becomes the sort of scene where constant carping takes over everything else and no one becomes happy so what then happens ? well they say war or disaster or fire or illness ? or at least I say that and misplaced energy goes into everything else and you wind up with entire energies of industry building rapacious cars and vehicles or countless junk and stupid objects to be consumed and collected and by which to judge others in their having or not having them and in that nervousness you start the endless talk and chatter and gossipy crap that you hear most people on trains and buses and wait-lines going on about like they’ll never ever shut up and it makes for stupid kids on the streets walking around hitting each other and being real loud and being totally without reference to their past or whatever and T. S. Eliot’s Objective Correlative be damned nobody gives a shit about that especially when they don’t know anything else anyway - which is mostly how things are now in a world full of ignorant and stupid scoundrels just going on about themselves - but nobody wants to learn anything anymore for it TAKES TOO DAMN LONG to do so and ‘we want the world and we want it now’ my God how often I’ve heard that crap and the message that comes with it and it’s always the same loud stupid and boorish people doing the same dumb stuff always all the times no matter what (and nothing but worries nothing but worries is the reflex of worrying) and in a way it’s just as important to ‘place’ oneself in the scene of one’s life as it is to live that life for without a knowledge of where you are or to where you’re heading and where from you’ve come then what good is anything else anyway and that is best of all which lends a focus to life and gives a person a particular personality otherwise you’re just a big gray wash of nothingness and anxiety and vagueness so it’s better to be a pointed and hated character than to be bland enough to be loved or liked by everyone and two shades of meaning mean just that - two shades of meaning - so that apparently is what is meant when they say ‘everyone has somewhere to go’ I guess it means that there’s a place for everybody to call home and no matter what else that place is whether it’s decrepit or wealthy it’s at least a place where you can say really say whatever it is what you feel the way things REALLY ARE to you and you can speak your mind and no one’s going to throw you out or take offense and so if that’s my lesson today than there it is and I take it with me even now as I’m walking up the stone steps along the big old New York Public Library building and the two people with the big-ass camera are sitting aside over by themselves carefully scanning the crowd which mingles there in a broad blue sunlight and every once in a while I guess when it seems that someone strikes their fancy the two of them get up and walk over to the person or persons they’ve seen and ask to take a picture NOT JUST any picture but a picture in which the woman - some fancy-assed blond model type with a nice personal bearing and seemingly pretty comfortable with the camera and with beauty too - positions herself next to the one or two people chosen and the fancy-assed camera guy takes a few careful pictures with them and this takes a while because it’s one of those cameras which demand lots of preparation and calculation of light and exposure and f-stop and all that and the woman has yet again to properly situate her striking red scarf and fix her hair and have the guy carefully go over her face and lips and make-up and all so that after a few minutes only then they’re ready to go and in the meantime I’m wondering what the people must think who’ve been asked to be part of this as they simply wait there not knowing what’s coming up or why and I guess they talk about it first for they must have some questions I’d figure about what’s going on and to where the picture’s going and if they too can get one or if they’re being paid for publication or whatever but it never seems to be the way it all just happens and then it’s over and the two photo people go back to their chairs off to the side in the sun and start again to watching all the people go by and the crowd comes and goes getting larger and swifter and smaller and slowing down and two little oriental kids come by with their brother or father or something and he sits down and starts reading a magazine and the two kids wildly take off and start chasing the pigeons every time they land and each landed pigeon is immediately chased back up while the kids scream and make noise and all of a sudden there’s like 30 pigeons all in the air right above our heads and they’re scurrying around and flapping with no place to land because of these kids’ aggressiveness and there’s a big commotion and the kids don’t stop and soon all the fluttering birds are gone just moved away flying into nearby treetops I guess wondering what’s going on but being pigeons before long two by two they’re back on the ground checking things out and it all starts happening again and the father’s oblivious and lost in his magazine and I can see everyone nearby now start getting annoyed at the kids and thankfully eventually someone does say something to the guy and he gets up to round up the kids and off they start walking still making a squeal still causing commotion and isn’t it funny how no kids are annoying if they’re your very own and this was a pretty good example of that I suppose.

MAGICS OF LEMOSTER, pt. 1 (nyc, 1967)

307. MAGICS OF LEMOSTER, pt. 1 (nyc, 1967):

A million fashions of bowler hats walking sideways along the water down by the Battery over by the ferry slips, along the waterfront downtown dives : it was all a makeshift dream a twisting of the real a notion made from nothing at all and then while I was standing right there this guy comes over with a wedge-shaped picket and stares straight at me and asks if I'd 'like a fuckin' day's work?' and all I had to do was give him 6 or 7 good hours of labor shoveling debris from the pit of an old basement into nearby waiting trucks and I said OK and we walked on - not knowing what I was doing but figuring thirty-five bucks would be good enough to find out with and we walked over to a row of very old buildings along Water Street or Front Street or whatever it was called and I could see immediately what was going on this old brick building which essentially was falling in on itself had gotten filled within with rubble - straight-out plain old rubble like a bombed-out Berlin apartment or something and the rubble had fallen straight down from the three or four upper floors - walls, doorways, plaster-paste glass wood metal the whole thing and the first thought that came to mind was that this guy was or must be operating on a shoestring because usually this kind of work was done by organized crews of workmen with a bulldozer or two or some sorts of power equipment skimming right over the surfaces but not this : one by one piece by piece makeshift block and hand-held tackle so to speak and nothing but grunt and groan poor-boy prison labor if you think about it really but here I was already hungry like an animal and probably headed for more with so much as nothing in front of me or in me for that matter so I went ahead and this guy gives me an enormous crazy-ass shovel and shows me the procedure they were keeping to - there were a few other guys in pretty much the same operation I was about to enter into - and he says 'just keep yer' face down and shovel but while you're doing so look at whatever you shovel watch out for things that look special we're looking for anything money jewelry coins anything that looks out of th'ordnary - you get it?' and I said yes not figuring for nothing that I'd spend an extra minute looking and as it was hours later nothing had transpired : piles of refuse and junk and heavy carrying and moving things about in fact one large long boring day of labor and as I later found out the old building had been a waterside brothel and tavern grog house hotel of sorts in the old days with legends of treasure and booty hidden within its walls and if any of this was to be found it would have to be there still which of course seemed unseemly more than a hundred years past and since the last squeak of the mattress there or straw-mat or whatever they did their jumping upon back then : nothing as good as the sex trade ever was to bring forth the promises and the magic of love's lost lurid lore leering : and anyway if I'd found a gold-encrusted silver-diamond necklace under wrap and key and lock and bolt anyway you think really I would have told him or anyone else about it?

THE NIGHT RED DARLINGTON DIED

306. THE NIGHT RED DARLINGTON DIED (nyc, 1967):

I wasn't doing much of anything back then except waiting for planes and trains and all the things of that nature which took me nowhere and the lamplit bowels of Lexington Avenue called me forth often enough - all those old stately mansions still piled up before late destruction : the brownstones and the walkups where many interesting people lived until they died and then the real estate interests would swoop in and take nearly a block at a time fronting the avenue and wipe it out and one by one each of those gravely interdicted plots of oldest New York were gone and in the monied filth of the new mid-century real-estate barons replaced everything with junk just as quickly as they could fill it up : defended by hundreds of lawyers and more every word of their mouths was spoken to shut down real life and replace it all with deadened and dreary commerce - apartments and densities piled one atop the other packed with people needing somewhere to live and not caring - thus the transformation began and the age-old sequence of new-world replacement of old-world pride did eventually ring the curtain down on the real Manhattan which once before had been in place - and even for me this was quite obvious but for others it was deadly and Red Darlington was for sure one of those : Red had come in a long time back just after the war in from Oregon or somewhere like that and he was a no-nonsense very gruff painter I'd gotten to know and his loft faced Lexington in the 30's between cars and trucks and big old homes and over its own time it had been used for varied purposes - a piano factory a furniture-storage loft a hat retailer and only by Red's time was its crumbly soiled nature bringing it into its real and perfect use : his wonderful perspective on it has art cans paint and canvas and brushes and everything else that goes with it splattered all about - the right light and where not the right lamps and platforms and work tables and in the far corners each were cots and beds and tables and a small refrigerator and a desk and shelves and chairs - all in some perfect form of hideaway to which I'd attach myself for days at a time - I used to think 'Red takes no prisoners' meaning that he just rolled over and moved on leaving everything behind as he spent weeks at a time toiling over some large-sized canvas the makes of which I often wasn't able to figure out until it was done HE said it was done anyway - zany lines leading to patches of color and deep spots within other colors and along one edge or another the geometric sudden pattern of lines dropped in as a seeming afterthought or a means of finally ending this jagged piece of color puzzle - Red's work only occasionally sold - a few hundred bucks here and few there and yet he managed to stay on always seemed to have enough ready cash to keep it all going and was always happy enough and plenty nice to me too and friends would come and go small parties were held people would hang around and yes things would get done and in his own little personal freight elevator there was always kept a bicycle or two for any of us to use - Red never cared and they seemed always to get returned - and we'd sometimes the two of us together just walk around - getting coffee or some food and he'd be looking at things or grabbing stuff from the gutter and talking about lines and patterns and we'd look along the big shopping streets for things left behind - back in those days one could get rich doing this almost - and long long nights sometimes went into mornings too with art-friends around here and there or forays down into the Village or someone else's pretty much the same loft somewhere else and round and round it went until done : a wonderful and nearly completed circle of intimacies and connections in which everyone ding pretty much the same things knew everyone else involved and there was a small level of perfect competition to see who would finish up best and first and the most right but it little mattered because it was all friendly together in the work of some frame of art some deeper other world I really wanted to become part of and eventually did too and that for me was a satisfaction deeper than anew Cadillac or a house in the country or whatever premise people valued other things by NOT ME I'd never care : separated by need and kept to the distance by the loved of the heart which brings forth goodness these were my times and these were my people and then one day all of a sudden Red was notified of changes - whoever owned this property had decided he'd owned it long enough and it was time for money to take its place and Red was given five months to pack up and get out move off the premises and bring everything else out with him sad to say Red had nowhere else to go and no plans to go anyway for as he said 'this was life the only life I got and the only life I've ever needed and beyond that point I ain't even thinking' and at the end of the fourth month : unbeknownst to everyone and to me too : one night Red just blew his brains out on the loft-studio floor and called it 'Red paints the loft Red'.

LOTHAR'S EVIL KINGDOM

305. LOTHAR'S EVIL KINGDOM (nov. 1967, nyc):

At the readymades where really there was nothing : car tires and truck tires piled together and the countless juices of whatever slips through as rainwater and grease and seepage and toil - all of that stuff below filthy windows through which one could hardly see and I knew that as I knew the forcefield that kept it all going - up above the elevated highway falling apart and crack-crumbling where the vehicles flowed like emanations from Lothar's Evil Kingdom or somesuch drivel by a rabble-rousing fate but within myself I felt nonetheless settled and in one place where I wanted to be and the river-wide smokes of a few fires and factories - the sort of stuff that fouls a river drips its poison into the water uses the water as a runoff stream of filth and vile - they curled over the mad Hoboken horizon far across from me and even though now maybe it's all gone back then back here where I'm speaking off the Vietnam-killer-force incremental dread and all its matter ran on through morning light and afternoon brilliance and the slow shading of dusk like death towards evening - nothing left but loud voices and the enchantments of anger : girls in crystal berets parading from Canal with fatigue-wearing guys as fatigued as their clothing : weaponry on display and all that mad revolution in the air going nowhere and the shouts and slogans of idiots countered by the shouts and slogans of idiots from the other side I paraded Broadway I got dragged to Whitehall I was tortured and taken in and then thrown right back out incendiary 1967 nighttime daytime unreason kill-a-cop torture-a-prisoner wipe the slate clean reasoning the kind the Government would use to make a point but without involvement I walked away from everything unattached and I cared nothing for the makers nor what they made : train tracks lying in wait the daily commuters hoarding their briefcase time struggling lowly over stairways and doorways and stepping over whatever in the way could hinder them and the fine sheeted girls who passed by looked for all the world like young mirrors of lovely time while the men dragged through their muck carrying both their time and the maggot-infested regrets they kept : slime-ridden memories military-cap-wearing soldiers on leave playing something anything along 42nd street bowling lanes and ski-ball outlets walking sideways through the hookers and fags and whores on display while cops twirled their sticks and the maddened black-Muslims hawked their papers and scorched their pavements and in that dark December night it always seemed that - no matter where I was in whatever part of town - what came to the fore was the Lie that all existence was NOTHING more than a Lie shading and wrongly filtering everything we think and do and assume to be and all that's left when the final dawn does finally break is the strange confusing red sky of another morning just waking to be.

MY STREETS TOO

304. MY STREETS TOO:

[There was by this time a conclusion made as to the reason and place from which these actions had been taken and the ideological fervor with which they were implemented and various scientific papers and political statements were introduced to the public at large in order to defend the necessary actions and security moves which had to be taken and airports were locked down ports shut building security was made extremely tight vehicles of every sort were stopped and searched at all bridges tunnels and other crossings – this to the great consternation of truckers and shippers everywhere not to mention the huge business underway having to do with travel and import and export and transportation and movement - and in turn other cities implemented by national standards their own measures and people of various profiles were marked for signification and it came to pass that in that time Herod….no just kidding…] months later I recall passing a window still pasted with memorials to the dead and missing and yet it wasn’t just the random haphazard memorials but there were varied organized sites along the way Grand Central and Penn Station for instance each featured kiddie walls or so they seemed where school children in their mock-sham version of art with broad brush school colors and disturbing looking watercolors were set free to let their feelings out with scrawled messages of remembrance and praise and thank you’s to fallen heroes and all that and the bleakly garish and distorted drawings of weepy people fallen buildings crashed planes fiery buildings office workers in flames bent planes lit up flying through the air towards two strange rectangular buildings with people jumping from them and licks of flame running through streets and flower portraits of firemen in flames and wrecked streets and cars and messages to the missing and in one place the Daily News page itself pasted in place with a message of dismay ‘WTC Widow Commits Suicide’ and the little caption stating ‘neighbors said she was deeply troubled and not herself since Sept. 11’ and these broadsheets seemed everywhere to be not worth the effort the vague palliative of energy raising its head from ruin and I asked Kausch what he thought of all that and he said “you know it was Richard Nixon in ’72 who stated that the American people were like children in that you can’t always tell them the truth or the whole story you have to make them accept the lie or the half truth because they don’t know any better and haven’t got the resources to be filled in on and made to grasp or understand what’s really going on and just like children too if you tell them you’re going to do something you’d better well do it for if you don’t they’ll never forget and they’ll simply keep asking for it over and over and all of that message as I see it has a lot to do with what’s going on here you see these idiotic people have to be given their free rein to express their stupid emotions because it’s the only catharsis they’ll get and all the while the authorities will undertake whatever they choose they must do to rid the problem of its essential qualities and whether that means more pure and brutal destruction of the next guy more bombing more slaughter it will be undertaken with reams of our own just-as-stupid-as-kids young men ready and willing to fight and die because they’ve got nothing better in their heads to take their time or thought – there being no education left in this damned nation nothing but a cess-pool of good-feelings and sentiments and entertainment drivel and we’ve reached the point where our values and meanings are made into plot and drama into little weekly crap for people to laugh at – so why do they feature approved kiddie walls for grieving why ? have you ever thought of that ? because it’s harmless and by making childish sentiment out of it they can push it all out of the way and go about their more nasty work – but for me I’ll never sleep another night knowing I’m about to go to sleep without having done my work for that day without knowing that I’ve used my efforts to change and to countenance change through creativity for just like these perpetrators of destruction I too am committed to re-forming and destroying the brute source wild blindness that plagues this land and yes if it takes a gun to do it I can well understand that too for blindness has no eye like blindness and vision alone can surpass what cannot be seen and if this is the formative moment of my old life I’ll accept it and I’ll accept just as the fat beefy man at the bar accepts the sports game on above his head on the TV screen sitting there slobbering drinking yet another Southern Comfort and soda water and he just sits there one after the other and like him I can accept my reality so vast so different so artistic compared to this fat and bleak existence and around me swirls the land of a nation gone bad now burning yet THESE WERE MY STREETS TOO they burned” and you know what you know what I said I said “yeah Kausch I understand and I probably do agree with you there.”

'AMONG THE DEAD'

303. MANIFESTATIONS OF INTENTIONAL COMMINGLING WITH THE POOR AND DESTITUTE : or (‘AMONG THE DEAD’):

1. WE NO LONGER NEED:

'We have already evolved - a few times - to the point where we realize we NO LONGER NEED to exist and we can just imagine that we do - and deal with those eventualities alone and we are all Godhead, each, and our part of that eternal is the activity of a constant creating acting witnessing advancing and processing – which circular motion brings us back to another go-round of what I’ve just said : we are already evolved to the point where we realize we no longer need to exist and we can just imagine that we do and deal with those eventualities……'
-
There no talent worth repeating and nothing that makes any sense ever comes from trying too hard and because of that (it would seem) everyone I once met had a story to tell and they also harbored some false hopes for a future some tired reasonings from the past and in between a bevy of contentious prattle about the present day : however it means my next prize or whatever it may signify is not to be composed of limitations and closed rooms and sealed windows outside of which the light enters from another place - static and warm and still - and I dreamed all that on one night of horrible dread amidst a situation worth nothing except avoidance – the handcuffs were quite heavy heavier than I’d ever thought they would have been and they hung on my arms like leaden weights while I had to watch the pitiful lineup of misfits and stalwart low-lives creeping morosely along the wall until they each were fingerprinted and apprised of their rights and situations me included and then let one-by-one into miserable cells with a single toilet in the center and we sat there for hours while various police creeps came around with clipboards and lists and charts and names and spelled out for each the amount that had been turned in the sickening name of some slimy lawyer type who’d been sent and arrived to ‘represent’ them as if a hearing in the presence of some God itself would suffice for passage to Heaven brought to you only by some articulate greasemonkey attorney possessed of an Esquire alongside his name and dollar signs for fingers and a pointed dagger for a heart - it was all like that and everywhere the same and I said ‘I’m tired of all this just take me out and shoot me’ and then I asked for rope or a knife or something with which I could end it in place and those around me snickered and watched instead the girls go by and they too were in the same situation as we were : wharfside cockroaches caught in the act – stealing fucking soliciting shooting up sleeping in puke taking a shit talking sass or burgling and the rest - yes even girls do that and sometimes harsher too - but there was really nothing about it exceptional Weehawken Street the Westside Highway Jane Charles Mortimer Horatio all those streets with peoples’ names Washington Street the whole bunch of Westside places which back then thrived on crime and destitute actions by destitute people - mattresses piled up in the back of an abandoned truck like a dormitory of sin and swagger with people passed out all hours and seemingly forever but all it was really was someplace where the dead came to pick up their mail and the women inside were apt to be busy and cars which came and went held some Harry or John of no real consequence to anyone there – a set of organs and pipes and place to park whatever you had to park something to get money from and there it was I slept standing up with people like John Halter and Larry Smirk and anyone else who’d come and if someone didn’t have a name someone else gave it to them and all we did was look at the river and watch things come and go – sometimes there’d be a couple of cargo boats or whatever and they’d be loaded with something wrapped and bundled or on pallets and we’d get hired for five or six hours to help unload and being as we weren’t really dockhands or any of that it had to be done quickly and sort of on the sly in case ‘others’ took offense but we mostly managed and sometimes too we’d be able to stash this or that aside so as to pick it up later - sometimes tins of ham or bottles of water or soda or booze bundles of crackers or anything like that but that was the sort of really loose living and easy confederation that was prevalent then and it was fairly easy to get by – I think a lot of that’s gone nowadays in fact probably all of it as everything is secured and guarded and everyone’s on edge and nervous about everything and besides all that hip traffic on the small-scale we knew is finished as everything’s huge and containerized and used with cranes and lifts and on really huge scale and this older-day means of transportation which I’m writing of had disappeared - there was a time too when the Hudson was used for all that agricultural and farm and apple farm transportation on barge or boat and both sides of the lower Hudson here would be filled to teeming with people scurrying about and horse-pulled wagons being loaded with fresh produce and stuff but that too was long ago – a really long time ago in the old Washington Market days which actually had replaced once already the older market piers and stalls still farther downtown along the Westside piers – the old Lebanese section then and the area where once the Twin Towers stood - that’s how many layers of genuflection and color are beneath the streets and avenues of New York City – it was all convenience and commerce and whatever worked worked for a while until it to was superseded or worked out by the next place or thing which worked better or was more convenient and eventually everything was replaced by something else and as a fact now it’s all gone all over and the resultant pile of leftover New York bears little or no semblance of anything of what it once way - all over it’s clean kids now and style and fashion and fag night-club scenes and genteel ethnicity ad it’s all rotten and overpriced too - but no one knows nor gives a damn either.

I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG

302. I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG:

When I’m happy I’m sappy and there are no eyes just a series of mouths – either of these statements leads me to the belief that I indeed have reached certain conclusions which are specifically perfect and most generally CORRECT but the problem I have is forgetting all the rest of the little things – things I should be remembering – that would make everything perfect and not merely CORRECT and I want to subsist on nothing but black coffee and endless air and I want to find a series of books and do nothing but read them and I wish for nothing else to ever interfere with things and I certainly don’t wish to mix it up with outside concerns and whoever or whatever controls my water controls me formaldehyde fluoride arsenic entered into water at will but any some series of images BLACK DARK AND HOLLOW like a film-noir kiss secreted somewhere between a wood-paneled wall and a telephone booth in the low semi-dark and the heated slow sound of coffee brewing and liquor flowing and food on plates and all of that together the wild hum of live loud music and the uninterrupted solace of people and things Lara Tara or Dara the new girl hanging around learning to serve learning to talk Margaret Bourke White herself once arrived to this place and started to laugh just laugh with her Speed-Master in her hand and the actor guy Jared Orrish jumping up on the stool and emitting a loud barf sound and declaiming “Oh Jesus I’ve forgotten my lines!! How humiliating can this be?” and falling drunk to the floor flat out clunking his elbow and then his head on the way down and I even I seem to awake right then from some stupor dream-like haze and I begin thinking about the packets of Turkish money in my hands small gold packets with circular tops heavily etched with designs and ancient symbols and the guy walks up to me this fellow named Napoleon and simply staring straight ahead he says “hello” with a lilting effeminate voice the kind which makes you think right
off of queer distant party queens living in a country heartbroken yet cultivated and “EVERYTHING is thought with the testicles” the guy said and I nodded and thought to myself ‘my country ‘tis of thee I sing queer bastard’ but I let it go figuring instead that homotextuals consult Marx like homosexuals cruise parks and their poems start ideologies and their country is a bomb and VOILA ! here we are again at point zero ground zero whatever it is and I remember the guy the other guy walking the street alongside me saying he was from Arizona where “there’s Tucson to every story” and suddenly everybody was laughing and the two old women who were walking very slowly stopped and turned and said quite simply “young man do you know that we are proudly heterosexual?” and seeing as I most certainly did not know that I acted surprised but they laughed it all off as Fourth of July fireworks started blattering away in the hundred degree heat amidst leagues of people and fire and tongues of flame and people alone or in clumps drinking beer along the street holding pizza slices which wilted and they all were leaning slowly on the old rugged bar at Pete’s with everybody talking and nobody saying a word “so that’s what it was like and suddenly Lazarus rose up laughing and as he looked back I could see his cloak was torn but then I realized worse than torn it was simply rotting off his body in the massive stinking sullen heat but he’d only been dead for what a few days ? I couldn’t even remember that and he turned around in place as if his entire body was right then made of jelly but some sickening rotting dripping gel of death RE-RISEN unto life” and then the room got silent but just for a moment and nothing was said in that moment but I could still hear the distant roar of thunder and firecrackers like of old were chopping the air nighttime circles and huge round heads of glistening color things which passed as quickly as they began but no one seemed to notice anyway and I began reading posters on the wall: ‘Peter Adams: a Few of the Legends Portraits of Another Day Tamara Lischka Figuratively Speaking’ and the picture at the top the picture with the brown ink caption said ‘I was visiting some family in North Dakota a few years ago when I discovered an old school house which had been abandoned but was still equipped with the desks and piano and books that were once the center of the lives of so many children…’ it went on but rhapsodies are one thing I hate so even I passed on that semblance of profundity as it was presented with the heavy intention of meaning and depth and I instead rose up to stretch and then noticed the midnight parade of revelers passing me by and going past the window strolling past the doors arm in arm with each other was every imaginable creature and pretension of creature one could ever find but all together as one so sweet and so refined and ‘whir’ slowly the old fan moved about and its blades seemed to break the space between the wall and the portraits of boats and people nearby they all together seemed to be viewed in some miraculous stop-action time of make peace and thatchery William and all that and a voice to the side of me said “you spend a lot of time listening don’t you?” and I whirred about and said “why yes yes I do and what do you make of that my lovely fucking where-you-been stranger for that’s the joy of exploring which is better than the joy of death isn’t it or was that perhaps the joy of depth I can’t recall but even if I did I couldn’t tell between them but hell then this is the place YOU SEE I knew about this place the Odd Fellow Hall and I went to Shullsburg primarily to photograph the hall and I went to talk to the man who was the head of the lodge and he also ran the creamery in town so I went to the creamery and I started to talk to any number of people about where to go in a small town such as that in order to find the non-Wal-Mart things around to photograph and he took me to the lodge but even then you see I felt funny saying Wal-Mart for it made no sense to me thinking instead I should be saying W. T. Grant or Kresge or Woolworth or something but I was suddenly afraid no one would know what I meant and wasn’t that a funny feeling?”

ENAMORED OF THE LAMPPOST

301. ENAMORED OF THE LAMPPOST (nyc, 1967):

I took a solid object and made it disappear : any object it could have been anything but yes in this case it was a stern black sky it was a glass-fronted old building it was a donut it was two slabs of meat - my life was like that it the point I'm here covering and I'd stay alert to anything usable every cast-off piece of debris every off-cut piece of wood (I wanted to coat everything found in the thickest layer of clear gloss epoxy I could find and I spent endless hours putting together a museum of my own - a collection of hundreds of weird found objects coated in thick gloss - screwdrivers small rocks a windshield wiper a book nuts and bolts twisted pieces of metal a single leather glove someone's broken eyeglasses (my one real wish to be able to find a glass eye) pieces of bone an old cup - I could go on and probably the list could be endless because this crap was all around me and all that I lived amidst was beckoning so I took) - and hunger was always near thirst for sure although it was easy to slake with water or coffee but other times the body was just searching for something other than those liquids which is how oftentimes I'd end up in any of the small bars and taverns scattered everywhere getting one beer which always was able to lead into someone else getting for me another and another - talk was the currency I used and all those crazy tales you've maybe read hereabouts by me or any of those stories that make the rounds everywhere - those cranked-out barroom loudmouth adventures well they're all true believe you me - and any streetside tavern around here had its share and my friend Jim Tomberg back then too he was a big drinker and always left things around and all those tunes without a composing book I ended up drinking (it was just like playing another man's instrument it was and he never cared) - hell we was oftentimes so sloshed anyway he never knew and he was just as glad as anything just to have me around to drag him home or make sure he at least stayed standing while he talked - for he did have a preference it seemed to fall over dead-drunk and continue talking and not just talking but demanding an audience that would listen to him and stay attentive and - shit well yeah - care! - which of course no one ever really did it was all a game and this room-to-room jumping around always brought with it the specifics of the situation every situation being different Jim would nearly die just pass out dead drunk and then awake a little bit later for some more and strangely enough to and opposite of what you'd think this somehow always brought out the woman in a woman to love and nurture and take care of old Jim and he'd thereby (I noticed) get more'n his share of the ladies - which I could never figure out but never cared either - and many a night was the wee-time early hours that we'd awake and there'd be one or sometimes even two other naked female bodies bundled around and no one would ever really remember where they'd come from or who got where and how but it never minded and that went for me too and Jim would say 'well if they're good for somethin' they're good for something' - life was like that sometimes in the places we'd go places like east 7th street where some of these girls seemed to live or uptown a wee bit up along 14th or 17th or 21st streets where many of these people ended up it always seemed having these great big expansive half-industrial places in which they lived and did their work too - big photo places rooms of easels and art and lighting couches and fabrics stools and set-ups and it always turned out somehow to be in some form of magazine photo or small-scale art or film projects whatever I never really knew and there was always music and props around and down below there were freight elevators with maybe a garment or a trucking company with garage space and loft-storage for all these goods and Spanish guys always hanging around leering or looking just funny-stupid all the same and it all came down to just being a real strange and busy form of some proto-industrial daytime work the sort of which I never did get to the bottom of but as I reported a few times before it sometimes often got me day-work when I needed it a cash 15 or 20 bucks at the end of a day of hauling something or dropping off a truckload of this or that - dresses coats wood metal bales boxes into places like waterfront Queens and Long Island City right across the Queensboro Bridge (I learned real quick that just because it said Long Island City it didn't mean no big-long traffic trip way out to Long Island somewhere - it was all real close and nearby and still called Long Island City somewise) and Jim he liked to work with big pieces of metal and steel like I said so we'd oftentimes be going off to some scrap yard or another out in Brooklyn or such and be coming back with these big hunks of metal - oft'imes just about to heavy to lug - but we'd squeeze on the subways with them and walk them around and then he'd get them down to the Studio School sculpture pit and get to work starting all his cutting and welding and sometimes for a few days that would be all he did and the place would be a'blaze with his fires and torch-smells and all that and he'd start getting as drunk as all get out and stumbling around and all but still making his stuff and then the finishing work too - the cleaning and polishing and stuff well I'd get all involved in that - while of course doing my own work upstairs some too - oil paints cutting and stretching canvas gesso-priming things working on some paintings one or two at a time hanging around thinking and cleaning brushes and getting (purloined) tubes of paint from here or there and staying busy way enough with my own stuff too sometimes right through the nights and just sometimes going across the ways and over one stairwell to take out a big portfolio size artbooks and page through it reading on the vacant art school library carpeted floor until I fell asleep and sometimes I'd only wake up when Mr. Rush the morning janitor would wake me up with his noise or his voice too - he never minded and we got on just fine and then I'd have to go down and see what had become of Jim - sometimes sleeping in a corner or a crevice there or sometimes (I could tell) just passed out from drink hours ago and just fallen where he fell and was - never moved a muscle just stayed and slept and maybe I'd wake him maybe I wouldn't depending on how things looked and how I felt and nothing was ever said - we'd just start all over and do another few days of the same and old Jim I always felt old Jim he was always an adventure to be with in and of himself.

EVERYTHING FIRST HAS TO BE SORTED

300. EVERYTHING FIRST HAS TO BE SORTED:

You must first make order out of the dilemma separating everything as it need be separated - realizing firstly that all things are not alike and they each bear different burdens of their own in carrying the load of the greater will and without language you must learn to speak and within bounds you must un-learn boundaries - for there are none past that point at which things become impossible without solution BUT the main thing is study : study and observation where there is nothing else except the absolute dedication to that alone and that allows you to see and to proclaim the world as YOU see it - untarnished and without anyone else's burdens put upon it AND you must get beyond definitions and beyond categories and past the point where simple arguments keep everything bounded sour and small ('Man gave names to the animals and by their type and form he separated all things only after he was introduced initially to all that is by the God who presented it all to him') and my own order right there and then was in walking along 44th Street and watching what I thought was the distant surge of barge and river but only later turned out to be some huge piece of dredging equipment which was pounding the East River floor (which equipment I only understood as I got up to it) and walking then uptown and out towards the land's edge I was able to sit and observe what was before me and I spent some good ten minutes or more simply cataloging in my mind all that I saw - thinking such an exercise would clear up my head and facilitate something else for me - and it became more and more obvious as I did so that the world is itself filled at every instant with such a myriad of things which are constantly undergoing change and movement and alteration that the utter futility of keeping up with all of it is very soon apparent ('evening came and the morning followed') but what most interested me there (as usual) were the comings and goings of the people who frequented the small eastside park - the elderly gents in their white socks and polished shoes the women whose slow arms were held by maids or nurses or people hired for the specific purposes of tending and accompanying them and the occasional child whether silent or screeching finding joy or delight in something and the driver the courier the walker the chef any and all of them out and about taking their minutes of calm to rest on themselves and absorb the world around them - whatever it be - and amidst all this there remained such a quiet solace and a quiet sadness and the two somehow conjoined for me to acknowledge nothing but the futility and the eventual passing of all things ALL things except the stories they are graced with and the tales we graft upon the stories and then the personal witness we each give to the entirety of all that - and that is the LIFE which we eventually pass from and bury and leave traces along behind - perhaps traces of the what or the who we once were but most certainly (if we've had any) our works and that I supposed is what I was seeking in all that I did THE WORKS of man and the works of mankind where they ever may have worked together - but I found it hard to think of pleasantries and beauty as I thought of these words instead : 'cursed be the ground because of you and in toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life and thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you as you eat the plants of the field and by the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat until you return to the ground from which you were taken FOR you are dirt and to dirt you shall return' but I thought too that most people must have generally lived their lives putting all that out of mind and finding instead the small pleasantries which make living bearable between people for by any other means (certainly if we stayed mindful of that) life itself would perhaps be unbearable but no one listened and no one answered anyway and as I watched even I knew then that those around me had lived out their time and had passed their meaningful years in some subservience to something perhaps which they now reflected upon lonesome savaged sad or solid and in their last years I knew they'd want completion - and I watched their transparent skin turning again to white bones and their staggered shaking hands grasping air and hope and lung and I noticed their frail bodies with the addresses of (already) some other place being imprinted and I understood again that all life is but translation unto ourselves of the unutterable and the nefarious untranslatable form we carry within and the completion of life is the completion of that form which then bears its own markings and meanings and instructions which soon supersede us by far and we are gone leaving but the faded imprint of that newer form behind as memory and image and magical thought in the minds of everyone left - and like clay ('the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life and so man became a living being') we build with all that is left of others malleable pliant yet stern and strong too - and I looked about me too and saw a hundred other places and the steamboats and the factories and the asylum halls and the parkside trees smokestacks and statues and realized again that all this was mute and but a testament to the workings of man beneath the blue sky above and as hard as I sought meaning - perhaps it could be found everywhere or perhaps I'd find it nowhere - as long as I sought it I was still alive and the power which powers time to pass was rolling by as I sat there and witness to nothing I was witness to all and I began humming or singing or reciting back to myself a something I once had known - a mad jumble of words from somewhere - : 'the whole thing might not in the end be the only solution - but at this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts and it slides down this anticipation of itself already full-fledged a lightning existence that has come into our own' but I could no longer meditate just as I could no longer dance for all the pangs of belief and expectation had left me and I was utterly barren and alone worth nothing at that moment except the stretching life of regret absence and nothing more with which to suit myself but I remembered instead the old red brick doorways wherein I once huddled confined to the night and fighting cold air and seeking comfort and shelter without again words and the only respite from the worlds of hunger and cold were the momentary delights of someone anyone giving something away - be it a nickel a penny a bowl of cheap soup or some thrown-over coffee without even a name - but those days long past seemed rejected as well in memory and now camouflaged in some jacket of fog and made denser by anguish and sorrow and want all over again as I looked out on some other stingy world - one made of nothing now but the meager modern day and one moving along without even the thought of any of what once may have been AS WE ALL each and one died singly alone and together making no matter of the act or no matter of the destination and the old river roiled and rolled spinning past me like some decided jackpot of some decided winner who'd taken it all and I knew that such it would be and so never stop - and I sat there DEJECTED and most decidedly in shock just thinking of what may have been.

MIKVAH (nyc, 1970)

299. MIKVAH (nyc, 1970):

It's a difficult thing to realize Murder is murder but when organized and undertaken correctly it's called policy or foreign policy or even statesmanship or warfare and even Machiavelli wrote about it right nicely and as seen for the good and seen all on a larger scale than the ordinary undertakings of ordinary life but try to explain that to anyone on death row try to say that to a murder victim's kin and see how far it takes you - leaky boat on an embroiled sea for sure - so putting that aside I never faced off the issue but just went on my way never really thinking more than a bit about it and I spent hours along the old Hudson waterfront - the old one before it was cleaned up - fish-shacks truck sheds piles of tires metal heaps old buses and wagons splattered around with the crumbling highway overhead and people by definition only people in a daze - slobbering walking sleeping dying and every medicinal herb this side of Cochise you'd ever heard of - that river that place and space was really all I had right then and the profusely curative powers of that river became something for me like a wash a bath something to redeem all my sins something that ran concurrent with and alongside of everything never talking back never judging never pointing a riverboat finger towards anything but just running ice-jamming splashing slashing and that was my first city companion the first I remember anyway : late night mid-night shadow play dark stage of my dreams and peoples my hideout and deliverance and there I felt as if I LIVED! bestride all things - only years later of course did Death itself become a style be seen as a style and a made-up way of living and dealing with things and in fact entire industries now have grown around it - entertainment and music and the rest essentially worshipping at the altar of Death and its sidekick Money and all their negativity and mayhem - but that too is for others to say not for me ('haven't I said before 'I don't judge' but hey I don't lie either') and for purposes of and in order to be right to not pre-judge the doer to not drown in my own dumb human pulses I walked straight along an observant path as if I'd have willingly walked upon the water had I been able - to watch both what sank and what stayed afloat next to me - the steady river flows while things come and go seemingly at will or at times and choosings of their own and the time I'm here writing about wasn't yet overtly concerned with all that drivel we now know as 'living': these were days of a certain compunction when people still had the roles and the rituals of expected behaviors and the ways of how things were supposed to be and all that being still in place ran things and coalesced everywhere into concepts and rituals strong enough still to put society correctly in its box but long after that but not so long it all began falling apart and there was just nothing to be done putting it back together - it shambled and collapsed the way things happen when bad weather rolls in big time bad weather to spoil the picnic and blow all the tablecloths tables food AND the ants too away it was just like that and whatever did become left of this older society was then only to be found around the edges HOWEVER (and ran ran the river still ran) the time here I'm talking about was still a time when the fragments of the old society were still about : grandparents and toddlers together a few generations of people yet able to tolerate not so much each other as much as each other's concepts - which were not yet each self-canceling and confining and suffocating to the point of cultural clash turning violent even among family and everyone you'd meet you just knew came from a storyline of folks deeper and more stolid than your (my) own - I'd come from a wreck a fragmented nervousness amidst which I lived and had been brought up - a scowling boil-pot of issues and intrigue and petty jealousies and angers which had by then already taken their weird toll on my psyche and from which I wanted nothing so much as divorce and distance - great heaves of distance - to displace my past with some sort of bold new future and I guess like so many others before me ('wash me oh wash me in your eternal waters!') and my own new and more fantastic lineage : it was to be found in ones and alone on the streets of New York City part of nothing and certainly not American - in a patterned way of living that sought to be almost European in its unconnectedness to anything tawdry and 'new world' - the mess Americans had made of their land was almost pathetic and here in Manhattan there was no giving attention to any of that 'historical' stuff nothing of the past as it was simply all rolled over torn down rebuilt paved over hidden ignored disrespected and destroyed on a daily basis - unlike the hinterlands where the 'new' simply gets set up in places where 'nothing' (so to speak) had been before here in NYC everything that went up first took down any connection to the past - witness 52nd Street (I note how it is 'dry' land a land which changes everything) witness the financial district witness any of the once-discreet and countrified lanes and avenues of the past - the carriage racetracks the caves and hovels the shanty villages even the hills and rises - everything had been leveled and destroyed and taken dawn to a poor common denominator and a level at which people could be more comfortable in their distance BUT that was another entire group of people (all those movers and shakers) from what I was living with and the avenues of my growth were to be (hopefully) along the oldest and most shadowed lanes and alleys of the real past that I could find - which endeavor did really mean I was the loneliest man in the city and a complete solitary : but besides all that I was paired right now downtown with a bunch of characters on their own and rightful indignants with each their own tales and stories from Judy Tenenbaum to Andy Bonamo to Billy Grosbard at this point but three of my lone posse yet I spent my own time in pieces everywhere - I would often sit in places seemingly odd to wait out the cold or to nod on a bench and by odd I guess I mean 'open-churches' like St. Francis Xavier and another one somewhere in midtown then - - the Little Church Around the Corner which had been set up somehow a long time back for show-business people (or at least I was told) and in which location there was an odd little priest fellow who often tried to coax me in and take me under his wing as it were (euphemisms here abound all among these people) and the book he was always peddling to me and which I did eventually spend idle time reading was 'At Play In the Fields of the Lord' a 1965 Peter Matthiessen title which this Father Janowski had somehow taken to heart in his way to use as reason and being of his 'mission' to bring forth some form of vital and active God to the streets and I listened and nodded and I read too as asked noting carefully Lewis Moon and Martin Quarrier both and making comparisons in the work and activities of these two with the Brazilian Amazonian Indians whom I transferred to the street-class primitives of my days and all that sacred versus profane stuff that balancing of two worlds that exploitation of one thing by the older that endless ballet of the new supplanting the old - it all was mirrored for me in this book the causes and the conflicts the quarrels and the dilemmas and between myself and Father Janowski there ensued many long conversations in this vein - me trying to get at his approach to spreading the word and he trying to fathom my entry and my point of view into the world and tracing the path of it from the world I'd left : seminary days boy-to-man crap and all that and all of this too had a sort of 'show-business' edge to it with him as did most everything (in the way now which is much more open and accepted in this time and which I only now can see again as that endless dance of homosexual craving from him towards me - completely in the dark about what was happening as usual) - and who were the outsiders and who were the primitives in his telling of the book I never did get to the bottom of but we had many a strong discussion over topics from it and I actually liked the issue itself always having had an interest in the 'leftist' idea of the labor-priest movement (not quite the same but close) which would have been a street-level mission to engage the flock - so to speak - among the usual dockworker and truckman class of people the congregation least expected to conform but I dropped that idea too as I saw it had already been done to death - all those waterfront movies and worker-priests meddling among the other classes - in fact an entire stupid movie had been made of it (On the Waterfront) and within that naive and dumb movie was all the scenery I ever needed with which to find reason to displace any yearnings I may once have had to be that way : one of the most-hated characters I ever held was that ridiculous priest figure in that movie played to its paradoxical catatonic hilt by the feverish and naively childlike forced optimism of whomever it was who played that character (Karl Malden) and all the blubbering naivete regarding personal responsibility to credos and believes and rightness and that priest guy I knew never really did a thing in his life that was worthwhile just walking around all the time emoting and dramatizing and sermonizing before his stupid parishioners local Hoboken idiots ensconced in fortress-church as if it was mother's apron strings all over again and the only thing about that movie that mattered probably was the walk-in-the-park scene with the bum who recognizes Brando's character and then the very ultra-cool but dark and onerous fiddling with the little white glove and putting it on his hand that Brando does with the Eva St. Marie character's glove - strikingly tough scene that for me in some way always reflected the real dichotomy of any issue - the while to gentleness versus the stupid bumbling will to reality upon which we must all hit our foreheads sometimes if not all the time : and you just knew that if Kazan meant what he'd set out to say he'd have blown that church sky-high with all those people in it but some sort of stupid reticence somehow kept him from that step - until the final and melodramatic fight scene when we are led to believe finally that violence - even if taken for the sake of movement and plot-advancing and (in this case) closing - that violence does in and of itself serve and end and a use and a purposes one way or the other go figure it out for yourself : but how to explain something like this to yet another stupid gay fag theater priest guy hanging around dank church halls lighting candles and playing at afternoons of holiness (after all is not the picture of understanding first a mental association everywhere?) and so I decided rather just let me be and never went back again - even never revisiting until just recently and just now that At Play in the Fields of the Lord book thing and anyway I've learned since then that once you make friends with inauthenticity it's usually here to stay - you can't shake someone's fakery someone's fantasy the glib falsehood associated with made-up life-stories and situations that don't exist but yet let's face it the entire world is a fantasy a chimera a vivid picture made up to supplant image with a certain form of moving reality which we can alter as it moves along and all that is the story-line which we live : no more authentic than that is what I tell you to be 'ooh-wee' as they say.