NOTHING ON BUT HER HONEY

27. SHE HAD NOTHING ON BUT HER HONEY:

They came from some little town called Success and it was a place I could never find again as much as I might try – but of course that was 1937 and in some ways YES that was a long time ago but the place had silver-handled shovels for a guide and trees which only twisted left ever since the farmer named Cotley had bull-dozed some ditch to make a carp-pond - which carp he sold for a profit to some industry-based conglomerate concentrating on fish – but now a lot of that place has just dried out and died and the old wooden sheds are crumbled and gone and only what remains are perhaps three or four of the old houses which used to dot the woods here and there very deep and alone into the woods each was and you see BACK THEN people lived alone and no one had a care or an opinion of their companions or if they did and it wasn’t good they just kept quiet about it or removed it from reference and you see there was more to worry about than stuff like that : whether or not the water was running if the stream stood if the spring hadn’t gone dry if the roof would hold the winter if you had something left to eat for the month - birds deer fish (of course) and every little ground animal there ever was abounded and each eventually too became some sort of food or meat anyway if you couldn’t eat what you were growing any longer and there were really but two SEASONS – the Winter which was nearly always present and seemed to linger with devious intent and the Summer which was really just a deep deep cove of vicious still heat and fetid air which hung around the bogs and waters for bugs and flies to MOST SURELY appreciate and I’d myself walk the old paths which ran in every direction - I’d walk more in glory than toil - even with the bugs around my face and be astounded by the Godly silence and great deep majesty of the forest and the trees - the secretive noises of chipmunks and fur the wind whispering its name through thick trees and it was of a stillness that I could touch and understand and it was something which made you feel singular and exalted on God’s solid land and left alone to one’s own devices nothing else was needed but oneself and the path to Salvation for LORD lord God was everywhere it seemed and every tree too had a message and so many times I’d be able to read messages where I’d never seen them before - on the escarpments and the wounds of tree bark on the twisted broken pieces of limbs left growing on strange stumps EVERYTHING it seemed had something to say some message to impart and that was THAT WAS when I first learned of ‘SIGNIFICATION’ - which of course I later built my entire career around and made my fortune - ‘Signification’ being something no one had ever known of before and it fell to me (after great thought after bouts of lone silence after months and weeks of solid woodsy meditation) to bring this theory forth - and the rest I guess is ‘History’ or you wouldn’t be reading this - and oh by the way that thing about her having nothing on but her honey – that referred to a time back when I was younger and there was a cabin deep in these woods (out now somewhere I can’t find any more – near the double-bent oak and the stream face twisting where once a rock outcropping stood) – anyway her name was ‘Manna’ – named by her mama for some bible-thumping reason back in the chapel we once kept for message-trading and Sunday service (mostly Bible reading or ‘learning’ to read) and they kept bees there too and once the real Summer came I’d find Manna tending bees and doing chores – just like that naked as a Mayfly – and since it was always pleasant to see and she was always tending to bees – I’d say ‘there she is ! with nothing on but her honey!’
-
It was fun living like that - compared to what’s around today : for there are certain myths we live by – things like independence discernment social niceties and that peculiar small-town ethos of ‘place’ of which this nation is so proud - which of course does not simply does not exist any more – not in any way shape or form – and yet the less it is actually prevalent the MORE people seem to pull it out of a hat when necessary (for politics for votes for sentiment and local color) and I suppose in its own way it adds some texture or flavor at least to the little illusionary life they think about as they run for a big-city train or get into their cars each morning to once more ferret their way through a slowly mystifying and stalled mass of traffic and commute AFTER ALL these are ‘Americans’ the ones who live free and unfettered lives amidst abundance liberty riches and a form of ‘personal’ independence mostly it seems dependant on the cable or movie bill they amass (but I digress) in this small-town IDEAL America people are still free to form their own opinions and understandings of things unconnected to the buzzing media streams and nearly-propagandistic enforcements of various norms which – in actuality – strait-jacket them and their works but this imagined streak of liberty and freedom too masks from itself – even in its density – so many falsehoods and variations from the real Liberty which should act as archetype that people gloss over the ‘other’ factors involved which demean and de-solidify this fantasy – things like how many of them actually work off a tax-based payroll in municipal or governmental jobs or its adjuncts how many live off the medical industry and its hype and waste and manufactured false needs how many are ear-deep in debt and mired in another sort of unrecognized poverty and of course how many can not will not make a move without first testing out its acceptance or making sure they won’t look stupid YEAH WELL there’s no ‘Liberty’ in any of that is there ? and just this morning in the small wellspring of fantasy town that I live in I watched as in the early morning of a languid Sunday the Main Street was set up for what was being billed as a ‘Town Fair’ or one of those closed-street expos which turn the roadways into walkways and have them lined with booths banners tents music and food – I watched as slowly the street was transformed : the eager-to-please storefront businesses of course salivated as they arrived upon a day of freely enticed crowds and expanded business volume based upon the accident of location and chamber-of-commerce enforced blather – crowds would come coin would turn sales would most definitely occur – all by the magic of ‘calling’ the name of God (in this case the God of business) and drawing upon the fantasy myth of – once again – ‘small-town’ activity but the myth of course belied itself as I watched not local effects being set-up so much as networks of much wider movements – state-wide causes themed appeals and the usual crafts and hobby bunglers who show up at these things regardless of location week after week somewhere like sales scavengers of ashtray pottery butterfly and tee shirt affluence NOTHING very local there and the only local things I did see were the normal school teams and school causes church groups and political factions and car-club stalwarts seen anywhere else (oh I forgot – I did see one bloviating lead-councilman talking animatedly with a clump of four local policeman and an EMT – talk about ‘local’ insider info!) but nonetheless my point is that the localness of this entire minor industry is really the localness of who you can get to come to your ‘local’ fete - like the bombastic band which I watched setting up with amplifiers name-banners and a van marked with their signature logo and motto - something about ‘street-party entertainers’ – (another Sunday another town) all of this meanwhile as small streams of people began accumulating in their little pools filled with the expectation of pleasure and entertainment and – once more – the mythology of partaking locally in their own Tom Sawyer Huck Finn Becky Thatcher fest of enlivening local adventure (meanwhile the adjacent main roadways were filled with slowed and disgruntled drivers on their ways to wherever else along Rt. 27 or detoured along side-streets sloppy with both pedestrians and gawkers) SO I guess what I am saying is that the mythos of what we live is often overshadowed by how hard the effort is which we put into maintaining the artificiality of that false ethos - we support and propagate to each other in our own ways the illusion of what we are doing while at some other level knowing and understanding full well its artificiality and flimsiness but yet maybe THAT too is the strength of it all - they cut the trees they pave the land they build endless homes they crowd the streets but it is ALL done in the name of closeness local warmth color and communality - something mercurial which the more we try to grab at it disperses itself more and more and thereby eludes both our grasp and its own existence WE LIVE thereby in a dream-world of our making and more power to that I guess ! and one thing's for certain - people who work on the government dole off taxpayer money should be the LAST to crow about independence liberty freedom individualism and all that and those church bells which were tolling (off somewhere in the background) were chiming - I believe - for some other God than the God of Mammon which as I said before was evidently having QUITE the field day on this pleasant Sunday morning and as Salustius said - way back in the 4th century - 'Myths are things which never happened but always are.'

MESOPOTAMIA

26. MESOPOTAMIA:

[I've never spent an hour isolated in a cage nor a minute under the impression this life was OVER but - even so - there have been many times when I'd much rather have 'been somewhere else' which leads me to : SUMER : and the sands of Mesopotamia themselves now that we've managed to crystallize the sand where once our origins were written and scratched them in clay long lost and forgotten : BUT NOT TODAY there's a heritage of plunder we've never managed to destroy and there are thousands of US crawling those sands right now at the ready with bombs and guns and porno-moustaches and all the rest just slicing through time despoiling the wastes we've left behind - plunder savagry rape murder slaughter and all the rest - and it can ALL be defended if you wish to defend it or you can argue all day and try to relent of it but NO MATTER Jester it ain't saving your life ! because Paradise right here is now paved with the deadly macadam of terror and strife and there's no way around that (as ANYONE can see) first I bomb YOU...then you bomb ME!].

DARK HOURS OF TIME & ADHESION

25. DARK HOURS OF TIME AND ADHESION (Perth Amboy, NJ Waterfront):

And the lazy ones the crazy ones the frazzled ones they always go first and they seldom come back : twenty stories of valor fifty distorted lies of what didn't happen ten thousand epics related as fact to a believing audience of idiots vagrants and fools and little middle-men trying to make money on piss and vinegar and Puerto Rican babes hanging from the Perth Amboy corners of time like so much wattle on a sloppy old neck - they throw out their huge asses and ill-fitting jeans with knit tops five sizes too small for two gigantic overwrought top-heavy tits just ready to swing down and snap off your head and their faces are filled with lint and the dark hours of time and adhesion - mascara lipstick eyewash rouge beauty marks warts bumps pimples and more - none of it matters to Carlos NO MORE - and they're haunting tonight the old waterfront with Amazon parrots on their shoulders and they feed them pretzels and make them sing while the wedding-party guests at the Armory come by for photographs and leave a dollar behind as a way of saying 'thanks for all that' and the guys are still watching (come Monday morning they're milkmen again at the local drive-in dairy) and their tongues five-feet long hang out of their mouths and they drain their malfeasance with carnival bouts of malt liquor and vodka and Bayberry Rum and sooner than later it's over and instead of leaving they'd much rather come.

THE AWKWARD LECTURE

24. THE AWKWARD LECTURE OF RICKY COLLAY:

"Having to say I've done nothing today doesn't make me happy - the clothes stink my socks stick to my feet and I'm tired of taking care of the little things : teeth nails face-washing and all the rest - IN FACT I'm bored with thinking about bored so I walk around looking at cars and people both of them to me about equal in stupidity and design and I like to look at faces as grills of cars and legs as wheels and the overall comportment of a person's walk and swagger as the extended design overlap of some tendentious car somewhere - all ridiculous lines and bulges and lights and chrome but CARS it seems never grow fat (if they are the're made that way) while people just load up and bulge to grossness and then they waddle around with stuff to stretch and cars on the other hand just roll over to the side of the road eventually and just DIE and get carted away while (again on the other hand) for people the whole atrocious arrival of death is a long and painful drawn-out affair with extra attention given to upkeep and elongation of useful time (but I never know WHY!) and just as it is so it goes and sometimes it's not even worth getting up in the morning until - JUST LIKE THAT - one day you don't."

REALLY NOTHING AT ALL

23. REALLY NOTHING AT ALL:

Sometimes it's like in the middle of the night when you're walking through darkness and bumping into things in spite of avoidance and you're not really sure at first what they are but you're protective of parts of your body nonetheless - toes shins knees and all that - and you plod on slowly and treacherously through what once was familiar territory but now is a beleaguered darkened mess threatening you from all angles NONETHELESS you get where you're going and realize it was all familiar territory anyway and you start thinking 'without LIGHT' maybe all living is like that and the arguments ensue when people start debating what LIGHT really is and who it is who's flipping the switch changing the bulbs defining the illumination - whatever - and the ten thousand ways of describing GOD all amount to the same thing in that respect : the right definition of the light : and then you begin realizing that the enclosed space you were in during that darkness was in reality just the one big place in which you exist and the doors and windows out were nothing but equal ways too for light to come in WHEN and if it exists once more and the endless and broken defining of light/dark and all the rest just goes on and on and pretty much - even subconsciously - takes over the moments of your life WELL such were my thoughts as I reflected on my place and what I was doing as time passed and memories flowed : I thought of the guy I knew who blew his brains out in his yard on some sort of stupid whim about desperation and loneliness and sorrow and I saw the pre-figured waste that went with it the absolute uselessness of effort and MOST PROVACATIVELY the certitude of Godlessness by which such a life was lived and finished - and if it's ever easy for anything to have no consequences that was it for anything left - besides the garbage and rubble blood and pain (which was over in his one 'instant' anyway) there's really nothing left but vacant space or a reverse time wherein something once 'was' and now is no more and the entire matter amounts to nothing ('pillow talk among idle gypsies') and the street noises instead veer the mind back into the crowded vaults of Hell or Heaven - whichever men choose to call it - wherein everything is something else and nothing bears any solid meaning but for flux and alteration : SO I determine that I cannot say anything useful and might as well say NOTHING at all.
-
Well it really never did matter much that the direction of the wind was changeable or that the intention of a scribbler was to fill one page after another page or that the Pageboy haircut for women was invented for some perversely sexual purposes having to do with medieval premises of Christian sexual identity or that all the difference in the world can be had by just how the pauses in the word phrase are spoken : 'John Smith has been found' versus 'John Smith (pause) Has Been (pause) Found' : all the difference in the world I'd say : and nonetheless people still walk around smarmy and with a glitter in their eyes yet point out the old Mark Twain pearl about 'the difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between 'lightning' and 'lightning bug'...' blah blah which it is not of course the two concepts being totally different both in nature and in word so how they ever arrived at that little pearl of supposed wisdom meaning anything I'll never know yet still people babble on about it and get away with such 'babble for the rabble' which is at the extreme ends all any of that media-crap stuff is anyway and it's the same as saying 'sometimes when I get tired I'm tired' which means nothing but to say that 'you' (the individual the 'UNIT' the parseable YOU) are tired and aware of being such (self-recognition self-identity being aware OF itself perhaps being the quality which separates US from the Animal Kingdom) and perhaps such reflection can make a ten-o'clock scholar out of every cheap little snit bastard who walks away from home with a bad story and a limp but whatever - I'd never want to have to write THAT reference book.

DANCING THE DANCE (old 42nd Street)

22. DANCING THE DANCE (old 42nd Street):

'If you've got the smarts to take it off you should take it off to be smart' was the motto over the doorway once at a strip club I went past in the mid-40's off Eighth Ave. and it was back at a time when it was still pretty unusual to see nudity played so publicly - of course all that has now changed and maybe since Oh Calcutta! and all that stuff it has become perfectly normal and acceptable in theater parlance to move the 'show-portion' of the activity towards anything that shows skin - totally naked or otherwise - and in fact just the other day I was sitting at a diner in nearby Newark and adjacent to me in another booth were two people - a film-student sort of guy and a girl of the usual 'art' outlook - and I overheard him matter-of-factly speaking of film as he said "when you're watching a film you WANT to see shit - the reason you're watching is for explosions gunshots or naked people" and he went on from there but I thought it pretty interesting to hear that from one of today's young people working through film as a craft and it all just showed how different everything has become - until today's situation wherein anything goes and goes so much as to have already been brought out as pretty jaded and tired for simple nudity and naked situations to appear - like the old attitude always went 'how much of that can you see and still care?' or something like that but in any case everyday is a first day for someone and you have to consider the reams of thirteen or fourteen year olds or less just starting now to become aware of this stuff on a regular basis - and they become aware of it in lieu of everything else too so eventually it really does stunt their outlook and all but I'm not sure that's any different from the old days when someone just arriving in the Army or something like it would get their first exposure to naked playing cards or girlie magazines (as they were once called) and to view a naked opposite-sex was really once considered a big deal - oh well - that was what made old 42nd street so daring I suppose and what made that motto I opened with so weirdly enticing even in its non-sensical outlook - after all WHAT the hell does it mean? or what is it trying to say anyway? - but the theater world (as was said before) has always been mixed in with the underworld and that of course is where pornography and nudity and such all come together because the best way for anyone especially a girl to get started in the film industry or theater is to be perfectly explicit and open and experimental about her sex-life (and this means guys too whether or not homosexual) and accepting of most any sort of coitus or sex-abuse which comes her way and if that means paying dues by taking off her clothes or submitting to whatever - filmed or not - then so be it for the carnal aspect of the entertainment industry is its means of generating money and first and foremost MONEY is what it's about and it's that which accounts for the massive abundance of its vulgarity abusiveness bad humor and filth and the ways it uses abuse and mockery to depict everyday life and people - IT DEMANDS a distancing of itself from any form of perfection and it does this through peddling a strange form of nervous filth which eventually degenerates the people who either enact it or take part in it or view it until they become no more than ciphers addicted to returning to the scene again and again - thus the money generation and the debased currency of quality and life which is brought forth - and it's like that or was all along the central section of strip bars and porno palaces which once lined both the street and avenues around 42nd where upstairs from many of the establishments there were veritable mills of debauchery - whorehouses captive young girls forced to perform sexually and be filmed doing so pay-for-use rooms for masturbation film-viewing voyeurism peeping or watching and all the rest and an entire INDUSTRY thus formed went from here to California doing same and making money over and above any of the almost self-flaggelant propensities of reformers and law enforcement (read 'pay-offs') to stop it AND in the end (no pun intended) everything failed and everything gave up and even today it has simply moved somewhere else.

THE JINGLE MAN FROM TOFFENETTI'S

21. THE JINGLE MAN FROM TOFFENETTI'S:

He was tall enough for a madrigal singer (I thought) but he moved stiffly as if some mistake in the wiring had thwarted his ability to gracefully connect one effort to another and - as his head was high above everyone else's - he stood out awkwardly as very tall people do and had that somehow alarmed-at-something look in his eyes : he turned and started speaking some gibberish in the doorway - "you're allowed in here for one or two hours at the most the very most and after that of course we'd expect you to be finished and gone so as to free up a table for another set of patrons and I hope you understand this is a business and the idea here - besides service and quality - is to turn tables over and make money - that can't be so hard to understand right?" and we nodded as one - the few of us waiting - and as I stayed around he started again talking specifically to me "I only like intensity and white light and I do have trouble with any of the idleness that most men go by but nothing of this leaves me happy nor gay nor do I find it worth any whimsy for this is all after all a job and nothing more (they've asked me to be 'strange') and you'd never find whimsy in a fire would you ? nor is there much comedy at a funeral but distraction is what people want anyway - we get a lot of theater people AND theater goers at once and the two crowds don't usually mix very well so I must of course too keep my eyes open for trouble and it's trouble only when the lights are down really but as an austere person I guess I know I must deal with it all and entirely and the only real 'underworld' left in Manhattan is the 'Theater' - in actuality it's nothing but a large criminal activity (did you know that?) and money is washed passed and laundered on ridiculous budgets and enormous loss factors in plays and productions that last two or three weeks and are gone...but which leave a trail of both cash and expenses which the insider mind can deal with very well and which criminal connections sniff out like a dog does meat" and then for a moment he turned away and the silence as he stopped talking was just as fearsome as the noise he'd made when talking and I couldn't quite figure out if he was paid to be a raconteur of blarney or perhaps to make stuff up to entertain the crowd or what but he was soon enough back to his post of scanning the meager crowd at the doorway - which doorway as composed of two fashionable doors leathered in some form of red and brass with two large adjoining gold-lined and decorated windows through which some portions of the dining area could be seen (and from which I'd supposed diners too could - if they cared to watch plebeians - view those taunted and belabored souls awaiting entry - some odd form of class warfare pitting the 'in' against the 'out' in a social register comprised of fame digestion and shame all at one time - and I thought to myself 'such are the vagaries of New York' where it seemed at every turn there was always something in front of you to taunt your presence or your very being - the person before you with the six-hundred dollar coat scoffing back (you knew) at your thirty dollar castaway the Rolls or Lincoln nuzzling up against your Nova (so to speak) the trip to Paris up against your recent struggle to view Pennsylvania in person - but one of the seven deadly sins as I recall was (and is I guess) 'envy' so far be it from me to worry on that count and at the same time I've never walked a graveyard yet in which it was listed what apparel the deceased was buried in - so any of that only goes so far - but this guy again (back to the doorway) was making it a habit to scan the crowd and do the occasional turnaround to check behind him as if he was some sort of performance artist himself and actually the only reason I was there was to watch - for I couldn't have cared less about entry or seating or any of that and my closest approximation to the ins and outs of what was going on would have been George Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London' a great book by the way which takes the reader on grand and royal tours of kitchen areas and restaurant staff happenings and conditions in ways that would bleed an eyeball dry - so for me all of this was but one huge joke at the expense of the idiots struggling to get in so as to pay something like $47.95 for a questionable piece of meat and some potatoes to go with it but they wouldn't know - being ensconced as they are in the dead-middle of their own wild and varied fantasies - but this doorman guy I remembered had once told me that long ago he'd been the 'jingle man' as he called it a place along Times Square in the grander old days called 'Toffenetti's' some place long gone and unknown now to me but what he meant by 'jingle man' I'd never gotten from him and really would have liked to know (but this was better) - his name was Gerner (and that was a first name) and the last name sounded like some Saxony royal name or a line of princes who'd been convicted of crimes against the people and beheaded with malice or the kind of name in old Europe which had laws named after it (actually I forget what it was but will here call it 'Mannhein Ober-Mueller') but in reality if he was so proud of himself why would he ever get set up in a position like this - ('doorman par excellance' perhaps) and the kind of 1960's cars parading by gave him away anyhow - he was nothing more than a crack hired hand to deal with the normal debris which New York City produced as well as deal with the stupid dumb marauding sorts of appetites which suburban mental cases in the city for 'theater' produced and it was all a ridiculous scam an endeavor no better than purse-snatching or theft and he probably knew it and he probably was sunk so deep in the muck and crap of stealing or setting people up for being stolen from that the warlords who'd hired him were amazingly happy to have such a gendarme on their side - as I saw it he FRONTED for the Mafia Game which went on within the building and in him they had at the least a first-line of defense against whatever and whomever could be coming in or at them through one of the main entryways - but it was a good living in the old sort of way (no pucker-faced ghetto gangs demanding their own extortion) and he did seem to do it well but you had to be 'inside' this stuff for a really long time before anyone trusted you but once they did you were set up real good - and no one ever asked me about any of that nor offered a career option to me for this sort of thing (not the doorman stuff for I had not the size nor presence for that) but if they'd ever done so I would have jumped at the chance to do some 'insider trading' or back-stage wizardry myself and the way it usually started was you'd be asked to carry a message or take 'this' or 'that' out to the trash or bring a 'package' somewhere and return with something else and that was the first start and if you did that well enough they'd show you the sort of rewards possible so as to whet your primitive appetite for the next level and then they'd ask something else of you another task sometimes involving travel or night hours or another person BUT all the while you KNEW you were being watched and evaluated and checked out for smoothness and reliability and connections and all that and then they'd (of-course) throw sex into it - figuring every man (as they were) was always interested in pussy as a wedge and since most were it always became a reliable factor in pushing the product along and slowly and gradually over time the options would get more and more criminal or outside the ken of regular and licit activity that eventually you knew you were sunk and committed and most of the time it was (hopefully) only 'up' from there and the option of failing was usually death (bullet in the brain East River car accident thrown off a building poison whatever - there were a million ways).

THE WORLD IS A VERY LOST PLACE

20. 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.

YOU SHALL SEE WHAT IS THERE

19. AND YOU TOO SHALL SEE WHAT IS THERE:

It was once then I said to God “tell me why is that mountain there?” and AMAZINGLY I received a quite unlikely answer in power and smoke to the effect that ‘in ways it is there so are there ways it is not there’ and saying nothing back I merely looked skyward to see everything else disappear except the moment we shared and laughter shook the heavens while all sound ceased and I came back alone without ever retelling the story I’d heard - and then commingled with situation and essence I lived out the rest of my days remembering the fountain and the square and the inner light and the awful mathematics of what we live and the INESSENTIAL motivation became the magic of my life while Winter slowly settled in as I witnessed - trees changing leaf light switching colors nature flung backwards fires on the waters and spiritual beings paddling sideways through our forms and NOTHING ever answered me again like that but still I was happy in my own singular way - and NOW I can verily say back to you ‘take up the time you live make master and control of everything you do stay far outside the ken of man remove yourself from motivation and logic and reason combine your own energy to power a dynamo unknown AND THEN everything will become clear to you AND YOU TOO SHALL SEE WHAT IS THERE ! and I never did attain the heights I expected but found a comfort instead in the simple ‘where I am’ and without effort I comported my words to bring others to some form of fruition and I walked white bridges across paddling brooks and I talked with ghosts in graveyards of fern leaf and moss and I read the old names on the crumbling stones and felt bricks from eras ago and every wall fell as my own feet surpassed them ‘I never thought there would come a time like this when my own testament made more sense than anything around me did and all through the earlier years as I walked with people now gone I once thought of truth as now what is falsehood and lies but they THEY are all gone and I can recite names as they passed and legions of stalwarts and shadows whose faces yet linger like smoke at some tomb but it is as if (climbing that bier) I can see everything that ever was’ – those words were written while once climbing the hill to the top where the old mill was seen in the distance but its water wheel gone was merely idea and the 140 year old iron bridge flaked parts of its rust to the waters below and it shook as it creaked and I stayed with my feet in the spot the most treachery was and I realized (like life on a boxtop of nothing) that everything had its value and everything had its worth but MOST IMPORTANTLY everything had its meaning for being but the ideal state is a moment too late to have any sense in the living.

I ATTENDED THE ROBERTS HEARINGS

18. I ATTENDED THE ROBERTS HEARINGS:

"I'm not going to rage against an immeasurable night or day and I'm not about to come across as insincere either" he said to no one in particular as the entire class (glazed) just sat there wishing for somewhere else and quick "but I'll be damned if I'm going to allow this entire atmosphere to become poisoned by people in a position to know better doing nothing but adding negative emphasis to whatever they hear" and at that someone hooted and the rest laughed and the next thing I knew old man Marshall had transformed the hall into a ghetto of blindness and had a few guys lined up against lockers and doorways and was resoundingly beating on them one at a time with high-glissendo scatter-wail of black rubber which evidently had last seen service in Sudan and just before the police came and arrested him two people had been bludgeoned into unconsciousness and they really didn't move much and a few months later - at a hearing - Marshall claimed temporary insanity due to situations unforseen and they actually let him off with nothing more than 58 hours of community service and although he eventually lost his position at the college it wasn't for that infraction - even though that one malfeascance was merely the beginning of an entire jumble of bad work - and he claimed 'traitors' lurked everywhere and 'the people in positions of power had been taken over by the Devil' and their original selves had been replaced by replicates doing the evil work of the 'other' side and the takeover was complete and no one even realized it and 'every one of the smarmy bastards should have their heads cut off at the neck and just like reptiles and lizards they'll wiggle to survive and probably grow back whatever they'd lost but it's all over now it's all too late and nothing about it matters now anyway for we've lost the universe-at-large and gained for ourselves NOTHING but a hollow hole of despair and deceit to live in' and then (he said) 'we're all too fucked up stupid to understand what's happened to ourselves and to the world around us' and the last I heard after that he was claiming to be Gaugin and had run off to some island somewhere - just east of Sumatra but slightly to the left of Rye New York and the posters he left in the alley were now completely overrun by dominos and mice and the only erstwhile reason anyone would care was so that this would never be allowed to happen to them (or like Ted Willams' severed head - frozen in some separated time of its own) - so the landmark decisions are all still waiting to happen and the hearings were closed with a prayer - (or was that a lick and promise - I really can't recall) - but it was ALL over by sundown and the hangman had already brought the rope for the party.

JUST LIKE THAT

17. JUST LIKE THAT (Two Hands in a Three-Handed Story) - a Princeton Tale:

I awoke one once upon a winter's day and found myself face to face on Library Place with Albert Einstein - who was walking the street intent on identifying the cars going by - and as he moved along I set in next to him and he said "a bevy of autos each with a name - Pontiac Chrysler and Chevrolet among them - the strangest words in the English language I've heard by far - but more important than all that is the differentiation between them for once that is gone we will have no other and I do foresee that day coming soon - perhaps it's but another portion of my 'Unified Field Theory' setting itself up for operation would you say?" and he turned to look at me smiling as he did so "for there is really no sense in regarding matter and field anyway as two qualities quite distinct from one another because what impresses our senses as matter is really but a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space" and I replied (almost without thinking nor knowing what it was I was saying) "skin from electrons and bone from loneliness" and once I said that we both seemed from that point on quite comfortable with each other "our cells must obey old songs around electrified bodies and fields of yearning and I find myself drawn into myself while drawn to others - and all flesh is nothing but the strength of force" and he stopped just then and looked up as I saw darting up above a red-tailed hawk of some singular variety which was just then swooping hard down upon some hapless black squirrel squirming in a terror of its only very own "and the sadness of nature is what resounds through the night - that sound we hear calling us back through dreams and the horrors of sleep - with every sensation the density of us" and he appeared intent on listening though he never turned again toward me to speak "a plague of grasshoppers" he said "a real plague - one equalling all the sins of a stupid mankind - that is something I worry about for no one really knows any longer what we are doing and once those sins are counted I'm really afraid an equivalence of insects will collect all the food grown in our wickedness and all preserved by dominion of the powerful over the weak" and with that we parted just like that - he going one way and I another - past the red cottage brick wall surrounding some big house along the old Princeton Battlefield Monument - which monument I thought actually overblown and in poor taste IN FACT nothing more than a huge mess of stone signifying nothing more than signification but Princeton was often like that so it really didn't matter to me - strivers and the universal monkey-shiner intellectuals who undertake these things usually do so on their own and within their own small coterie of assumptions and ceremonies - for what would some top-hatted General Washington now make of any of this anyway with meadows and fields dismissed where once his men's own iron bloods flowed like rivulets through a trickle of rum and nothing but highways and roads now sluiced through the ever-present concerns of the men who here died ('and we buried a lot of them just where they lay and with no time for anything but the most cursory of examinations we straightened up their littered bodies and uttered some horrid form of last-death prayers at the site') and today everything there is measured in ruminations over taxes and zonings and little details of the dumb and stupid - Mr. Cadawaller and the secretary of whatever nods his head yet again -- 'it was to strengthen you' but it was RATHER to cause ourselves shame that we did these things and we were supposed to give God at least a signal that we listened and became a more gentle people but we have not and did nothing or maybe (instead) we put up the cross and said 'thank you for that cross' as one with one voice and one last screaming howl and the only note this Einstein fellow ever wrote that I saw was 'Boy : grind the meat - signed Butcher'.

GOD'S OWN COMEDIAN

16. GOD'S OWN COMEDIAN:

Maybe it’s true too that everyone goes through quiet times and their reliquary of them - moments of great words grown high over the hulk of a dangling cathedral’s ruins still rooted in solid ground but falling away imperceptibly piece by piece in a slow wash of time - generations pass and all recognition fades - (well maybe) but eyes that were pearls or fishermen holding flowers - set pieces all - none of that can work in reverse and we can’t relive time which never happened and anyway who’d want to ? and if we did what would be the meaning - it couldn’t be put down to experience – certainly not – and the tedium of trying always outpaces the attainment of success and in the course of one lifetime there are a million things NOT to see as the eye – as keen as it may ever be – glosses over anything not in its scan and this passage this intermittent missing this omission can enfracture the time it is living through and complete itself only in impartial things - like the two girls on the park swings in the evening light – surreptitiously passing a joint back and forth between themselves yet far enough away from anything or anyone so as to be safely distant from any approbation (and I watch them – fifteen minutes later – dazed and wobbly make their way wondrously towards the slide where – in their new haze – they simply and slowly stare at their own actions in review until dark and they’re done) when nightfall covers them like gauze and if there is meaning to the bulk of our days it must be found out somehow – in whatever way we become comfortable with – before those very days end (otherwise - as that crazy man in the fisherman’s hat was heard to exclaim - ‘it’s all one step past tutti-frutti’) and then in some of the same amazement I watch that too as he walks up to a pretty girl who happened to stop (city streets and the like have their effect) and he loudly asks “how are you today!?” and she (with languor) glances his way to say in response “pretty good” at which - without missing so much as a beat - he says “well the first one I can vouch for but the second I’d like to be able to get back to you on!” and I thought to myself : God’s own comedian could be no funnier.

AS INDIGENOUS AS CAN BE

15. AS INDIGENOUS AS CAN BE:

So much for the Wife of Bath and all the rest (thought I) for without withholding information I couldn’t be asked for anything more and the older woman who walks along beside me – she says to me “have you any idea of the world we’re about to experience?” and I ask (foolishly) “what do you mean?” and she says “these people everywhere – all of them about us – they seem no longer to know anything but instead they just go upon their stupid ways – rudely and without any class – I swear sometimes I think all of the old world has crumbled and fallen around us and there’s really nothing anymore I even care to do” and I nodded an assent but felt enough to reply “you know what – you’re probably making too much of it – they don’t even SEE you let alone set out to disrupt what you’re doing and if it is true that everyone’s fallen apart then the best you can do is stand out from it and shine” and she smiled a little old-lady smile and said “never you mind about that – I can make waves if I have to and I’ve lived right here for fifty-five years and they’re not going to stop me now and I could take a notion someday to just swat someone right up the side of their head as if they were my own son - evidently NO ONE has ever cared about them before and that’s their problem” and I could tell she meant her words and was intent on what she said but also I thought - in the way of so many others - old folks get a mindset wherein they can’t see clearly anymore the modern world around them and they begin living in their own version of a past which no longer fits and I could see that everywhere if I tried - the old guys still wearing hats and cloth coats the women who still insisted upon dressing impeccably for even the smallest of tasks (I’d see them especially walking around alone and singular all across any of the streets and avenues along the upper east 60’s as they seemed each to be survivors – alone and widowed or whatever – having outlasted a mate or a husband and they survived on guile and wits and some bit of family or inherited money still left and the old world had (indeed) fallen all around them and they then wandered (‘lonely as a cloud’?) through whatever left was given to them - porcelain faces overly made up with dresses and pins of another era and colors and posture too) in a world of their own TOTALLY without device and bereft of current meaning yet no one wrote tales of them no exploits of the aged men or tales of the Dowager at ninety - all of that had passed away with the idle thrift of some mid-century graft after World War II and truly (truly) this was rubble and this was trash and a crowd of people alone could make for nothing - no stories no tales no conversation worth repeating at all and it was as if the apocalypse everyone once had been waiting for had actually arrived but no one had noticed - some time ago - and all we had left to live on was rubble and its post-modern woes.

FOR ONE MOMENT : STOP

14. FOR ONE MOMENT - STOP:

We enter another place from the room alongside us - where the door has been propped open and held seemingly by invisible hands - and the voice echoing inside says 'you have brought yourself here - give no credit outside' - and in an instant (as slow and as long as anything else) every device known to man's imagining has been enlisted to expand the sense of place and time we are walking through - and I turn and say "I am glad you are here" but a voice echoes back "no - it is YOU who have just arrived" while outside some carriage goes by with great noise and a sign atop it which reads 'Maelstrom - no committments' but without understanding a thing I realize it is useless to read more than that as just outside my reach pass two troupes of clowns a beggar and a thief and I turn back and say "what sort of place is this?" and am told - in reply - "you will learn soon enough but for now just go on and - for one moment - stop!"

THE VERY SHORT PRAYER OF MARVIN WHEY

13. THE VERY SHORT PRAYER OF MARVIN WHEY:

I have tried to write Paradise : 'do not move - let the wind speak - THAT is Paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made. Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.'

THE BLUE GARDEN

12. THE BLUE GARDEN:

The Blue Garden was like a complete paradise to me - a place wherein everything was shown to be in its perfect light and dimension and I grew to love it although I found after a long period that it was not really a place in the terms I thought it was and that it spliced and displaced the reality which it presented through its lens as if some strange projection of movie film or show was at work - in addition the deeper the interest and the involvement of me the viewer became the more dense became the fabric of what I viewed and even though (as I said) the perfection of everything was paramount and obvious with the Blue Garden it did take on shades and differences of meaning (mostly having to do with time) which acted primarily as the filter of trueness and factuality - everything else tilted towards myth and falsehood.

THE CARRYOVER DOGS FROM YANGSTE STREET

11. THE CARRYOVER DOGS FROM YANGSTE STREET:

The pestilence of yellow fever took over from Peking and the forty wailing women I saw were searching for a wall and IN THE END it all came down to nothing but circumference and the agreement of everyone else to agree to agreeing : and I thought that to be sort of like FAITH itself in all things and how the religious aspects of people otherwise deranged and crazy in their everyday life can be used to give a settled and calming effect to the stupidities they actually live (and of course by that measure too they transfer the craziness of their lives into their religions too – but as Sheriff Calloway said in ‘I’ll Have Another Baby’- ‘that’s another story altogether’).

“Those who think themselves possessed by the gods too often carry messages of rage and destruction rather than love and the gods of the nations have the souls of generals it seems and righteousness far too often wears the face of wrath.”

I have the suspicion that the further along you go the more alone you might become because the people behind get tired too and want to stop along the way and often they’re tempted to call their stopping point the truth – and maybe it in a way is anyway because the truth is just the way reality appears at any given time and the meaning of the moments which we live are all entangled amidst everyone else’s and there really isn’t any compartment for singularity or oneness although we tend to think there is but that’s all part of the crazed illusion we go about living - as is ALL of the society we construct - which is essentially a compendium of Evil and pranks of the Devil which (as I’d just been told) can be traceable to an infiltration of the human fabric by imposters in our guise overturning and influencing all that is done and the systems and logic and transactions by which all of that is done and MORE IMPORTANTLY they have polished it to such a swagger that the very ideas of desirability and fashionable attractiveness have taken over and deep in the reptilian aspects of the old human mind (upon which they prey and through which they do their work) these simple ideas have become more valuable than the presence of realizing the Evil taking place - and the earth is denuded and the world is fouled and any retribution can only be met with the nasty cold stares of ‘correct’ impressions of the mind-control in power…and for a moment I found myself ahead of myself and willing to fly (as I watched the red-faced vultures above me soar) and in each of my palms grew a little flame but it was the flame of righteousness and it burned me not and from each of my eyes there came the golden ray of grace and power which colored the aspects of everything I was seeing and the faceted exchange of all the worlds concurrent before switched each other and I saw all possibilities and all things at once as one and knew the world to be thereby an unending stream of self-created expressions and WE no matter what WE are at play amidst all of them together as at one time we insist and desist we travel; and remain we take part and we stay aloof - and all by that do we learn and experience the mixture and ‘lesson learning’ catches (once more) up with itself and the pounding hoofbeat of the ancient surf could still be heard right here by me now in places where no water has hit in thousands of years and even in these highlands I knew and sensed that once the sea was above and the firmament which grew only gradually pulled back for all which ONCE was and all things return to themselves but a consciousness of the return taking place and the fiery fevered power of all creation (which we aptly name GOD) is more correctly and in essence us and all that we undertake and GOD is among us as we are among GOD and that God is the source-self from which we emanate – free of space and time – into this reality and the focus personality we know as US focuses in this life but is also composed of other Aspects and parts of the source self that are latent within the psyche though alive in other realities and these form the basic structure of the psyche from which the focus personality emerges and these ‘Prime Aspects’ if composed to make a harmonious working relationship result in a well-balanced focus personality – one that is REASONABLY happy healthy and creative and all of these Aspects merge into Earth Aspects or earthly versions of the prime Aspects and they show their existence as our own characteristics and tendencies - the raw psychic materials from which we form the self we know and they act too as models and psychic patterns that can operate as indicators of progress or fulfillment and we also interpret their ‘MESSAGES’ through our current beliefs about ourselves and the world.


GET THIS:

“Enough is as good as a feast / Possessions possess / Why grab possessions like thieves or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men? / You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy / The things that are ours cannot be given away or taken away or lost – we break our hearts all of us trying to keep things that do not belong to us – and to which we have no right.”

WHILE IN THE KITCHEN.....

So then sometime after that I heard the doves cooing over the kitchen pantry by the old back porch – a place I seldom went anymore (I thought to myself and wondered why) and that made me think of the old house we once owned out in the country where the bathroom (added later on I suppose after the outhouse was discontinued for use) was in the kitchen – a small room actually right next to the stove – and how certain visitors always used to be bothered by that or somehow found it not to their liking and were often put off by the idea or reality that the kitchen - place of food and cooking and eating - had to be adjacent like that to the bathroom - where the final results of all that cooking and food were later deposited - and its smells and sounds and all of that but to us who lived there it never made much of a difference because in the context of actually LIVING a life there no one really ever was IN the bathroom in conjunction with the times the KITCHEN was in use for kitchen or eating purposes and it just seemed to work out that way but to an outsider stumbling in I guess the mental overload of that conjunction set bells off in their heads and made for all sorts of unreasonable and squeamish complaints and this was a big kitchen mind you not a small cramped quarters and the distance involved – even if it was offensive – was a comfortable distance BUT it just goes to show you how REGARDLESS of reality the mind runs off with certain ideas and develops them all on its own - and alongside the ‘sound’ of the doves cooing (from what I imagine would have been called their ‘dovecote’) I also heard the stricter sound of crickets making that inimical cricket sound which somehow went together well with the darkness of the hot night and the heavy richness of everything which was around me right there - the old pear trees now ripe with their hanging fruit the bees which were in their turn attracted to the fruit and its rotting syrupy sweetness on the ground the intermittent sound of some midnight bird - everything in its own way complete and filled with a sense of its BEING and even I felt (for that moment) sublime and self-satisfied too feeling in my own words once quoted back to me from afar as if "I fell with the stars from the stars’ lofty perch" and knowing exactly by that what I meant (for it was whole it was entire it pervaded my being like all air and water).

For a web begun – God sends thread.

UNDERSTANDING WHICH SURPASSETH ALL

10. UNDERSTANDING WHICH SURPASSETH ALL:

(Along the Palisades)

Time did seem to have gone away – and it passed – and I felt perhaps as if I were dead or willing to be anyway and something like the feeling of radio waves in window shops or waxen elixirs running down sorrowful streets took over my feelings as I instead watched the sky and realized that BEFORE MY EYES were passing the souls of the countless others who’d been here before and I wondered at that moment if there was any energy left for anything worthwhile or if even that chance encounter with ‘meaning’ was worthless and the one response I kept to was the responsiveness of silence and I saw the grass that had died beneath me in the long haggard dry days which – desert-like – had just been passing if that grass like every other soul and person and being had died and withered for some value unknown to me and NO MATTER at that moment I was unsure still what even I was experiencing and how anything of this had occurred but as I watched out I saw people walking and sparring in groups and the sightseeing guides of the razor-sharp day were looking out over cliffs moribund with rock and the flight of vulture falcon eagle and hawk and the passage of air was the passage of wing and as opposed to THEM was myself – completely listless and totally without energy and willing to die and be forgotten and done at that moment yet complete and fulfilled and needing nothing more for the ‘understanding which surpasseth all’ had certainly arrived and been here and came and left and if FULFILLMENT such as that couldn’t do me now then it never would and I did not want to be here nor did I want to be anywhere else - neither Libya China Chad or Maine to spread a few about - and in some singular silence of mime and pathos and fevered haunt and the want of meaning my very SOUL itself flew outward from me to join all the rest : the strange little man in corduroy the girl pushing the wheelchair the two old people sitting on plastic chairs drinking lemonade while they read the children learning to listen the people with dogs AND the dogs with people EACH in their way became themselves and the laughter I heard and nothing was any longer a language nor a reason nor a meaning nor a fault - for ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL to their excess and in their richness they each did overflow.

“Do you have a voice?” someone asked “yes I have a voice but I will not speak it” and they asked “do you have a will?” and I responded “yes but I choose not to use it” and they went away from me trailing some remnant of light (a light I’d not seen this way before) and I stood up to stand back and shouted out “everything that I have I will willingly impart to you too!”
and a voice echoed back : “you need not for to each man are ALL things given if ONLY they can see them.”

I have seen that what it all comes down to is fate.

THE LEGIONS OF THE CONVINCED

9. THE LEGIONS OF THE CONVINCED:

But what does any of it mean what does anything mean? - flowers grow out of garbage cans and tall buildings fall after being meant to stand for ages and window boxes filled with pretty flowers sag and tumble down while both the rich and the poor alike DIE together though in their so different ways - so even in the middle ring of the middle ring of the middle circus tent there is loss and sadness and the awareness of death (a DEATH by the way even Gilgamesh himself could not avert and OH if the works of man could talk!) and if you want to sing of the song ON HIGH then go right ahead (I’ll let you) and prattle every verse you wish but WATCH watch the middle prairie ladies in their denim and gingham and floral-print dresses watch them gather for praise and with their praise condemn everything they find not praiseworthy SO perhaps the senseless rule the day the ones without thought seek to control the thought and the vast myriad allegiances of the many are in hock to the EVIL and the dead and the forsakers of all things righteous YET STILL THEY GO ON like gangs of blood-letting minions of darkness and drinkers of spirits and those who spit wine back into the cup after tasting its flavor for blood for the world the world is RULED (the crippled preacher man was saying from his chair) “by evidences of evil at every turn and by the legions of the convinced who worship at his altar.”

THE WHOLE WORLD SCREAMS

8. THE WHOLE WORLD SCREAMS:

I’m sitting around reading Genesis like it was a pinball wallet and stumbling over words I’ve seen a thousand times and nothing comes to the fore making any sense but I hear the voices of stronger men than I am and I realize (along with that) I really cannot see it’s only a thought it’s all a premise everything’s illusion - even the liquid world we think we see - and arriving at that point I know that outside of me there are people crowding everywhere and voices crossing over one another in a bad equilibrium of justice and assumption and the nature of the very beast itself is to gloss over truth and falsehood BOTH TOGETHER - for there are really no diagrams there to which we can turn – and kids are running backwards for candy and soda while their parents make eyes at the moon and each other and I’m finding myself (once more alienated alone aggravated atrocious and angry) at one weird level where the highway pilots whiz by with dollars floating before them and (“OK OK it IS the modern world”) and 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 glass 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.

TASKS FOR THE TASKMASTER TOO

7. TASKS FOR THE TASKMASTER TOO:

Try to remember a poetry lesson for girls - 'she simulacrum simply shed sadness for sorrow' - or something like that and then go on without searching any more - seek to find the meaning of anything connected to force and its outlay : the carnivores at the circus the left-handed people at the state fair the fortune teller whose hair was on fire and the children who watched in awe - remember your first lesson in homemaking : chocolate cake with grandma directing - and the little fire started by mistake with the paper towel on the back burner while some variety show played on the television in the other room - heed the lessons and tell no one anything else.

CASH CARRY OR RETURN THE PACKAGE

6. CASH CARRY OR RETURN THE PACKAGE:

I never knew where I was going so I never got where I went – and there’s not too much wrong with that for at least you can’t make a grievous mistake since you’ve got nothing planned and like the man who built his house at the very edge of the highway – you can’t complain when suddenly there’s a car in your living room.

I DO NOT SPEAK TO MANKIND

5. I DO NOT SPEAK TO MANKIND:

Police cars were trolling the cemetery’s edge and someone was pointing to the rear of their car as another police car – stopped – had an officer alight from it to begin writing a report - some damage entity had arisen between two cars and the narrow berth of clash and doom – averted once more – had left instead a crease and piece of broken glass at the back of one car and there was nothing else to go by except some overnight reports of what people had seen or didn’t and no one (they’d decided) had seen a thing and couldn’t tell if it was this car which had inflicted such damage while parking perhaps or overnight vandalism unnoticed before - and neither of the options was present for anyone to say so the cop began writing and the car’s owner swore to wait for the arrival of that ‘other’ driver who may have parked too hard and hit the car (‘but then why would he stop and park’ I heard the girl start saying ‘I’d have gone away quick before anyone noticed’) – so such circumstantial evidence meaning nothing at all had accumulated between the living while I instead was seated magnificently in St. Peter’s Cemetery just watching the living world go by - not a word nor a hankering for anything else but the sunlight above me which crept through the trees and that grave iron fence - old and black - which ran across the way surrounding me and keeping even my thoughts inside the area where I sat - behind me the harbor where the ancient man had been (he’d simply gotten up and slowly cobbled his steps away – towards something else some other goal some silence again) and as is said ‘on that day even the dead shall arise and come forth’ so maybe I was already there – but where they’d want to go I would not know and what soil here – if it opened for them – would call them welcome amidst the strangely living I reasoned not but yet I knew that EVEN FOR AN INSTANT if those cops beheld the rising of the dead they’d sure have bigger problems on their hands than who crinkled the fine gent’s solid fender and whence the glass but cops don’t think like that (hey they’ve got the gun and they twist the time to whatever is their liking) :

[‘When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them BUT when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself contrast with so huge a body he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness – for the same equality which renders him independent of each of his fellow-citizens – taken severally – exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number.’]

I frequented that establishment once too (me and Alexis DeTocqueville back when he was young and ready) but I have traveled alone for a good many miles and witnessed only newsstands and taxis worthwhile and inside each of them I found – in one way or another – a very worthless man : someone willing to serve and be meagerly paid someone willing to squander great benefits of time and hour someone wasting away and filled with countless broken dreams which have – long already – lost their language to speak or report and that becomes soon enough the MOST tragic aspect of life as I can see it – the wasted and squandered form of the broken and the bent the men without aid and the women of no resource the minds gone and rotted the limbs without use the bent feet and broken legs as ALL THINGS COMMINGLED return to time and destiny and nothing more and they want you to visit them they want you to talk but the pain - so obscure - is as deadly as fire and more painful to feel than wire cutting through some tortured flesh but that’s EVEN now the way life runs - mine yours and all - and the secrets of the flesh are constabulatory in nature and harbor many secrets in every quiet berth - for there is nothing to see but the unseen and everything else is hidden and the graveyard in fact right here around me - as old and proud as it wishes to be (is in fact one of the very oldest but why?) for flesh only forms around a rock and the old rocking dead are useless and gone – and but ONCE I would wish to be announced ‘HE IS HERE! and has arrived’ but there should be no reaction but the silence of desert and sea and I would stand tall and declaim : ‘with free will and wisdom then men may see the pitfalls of the democratic ages that stretch before them and than rather than submit to these pitfalls – the most extreme of which is the subversion of freedom by the tyranny of the majority – they may choose instead a wiser path – the path of freedom AND democracy’ : and I’d be cheered for nothing and declaimed useless and crazy and (truth be told) I’d think those words just as worthless as anything else for they carry nothing of the spiritual comport and the comfort of the saved but merely a materialistic envy of getting things done better and more soundly for the good of something called ALL (nothing I’D WANT TO BE INCLUDED IN).

NO MATTER THE LION'S SHARE

4. NO MATTER THE LION'S SHARE:

I'm sure you'd agree ! I'm not going to go on and on belaboring an old point but I can safely say that unless you look all this up on your own you'll not be exposed to any of it - the name of ONE book to help you along is 'Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race' by Janet Smith/Michael Geismar : that was the book I was reading with my coffee as the Russians previously mentioned came in and then left - all fittingly a'propos of time and place (for there's a wonderful introduction too in this book which (1962) covers the old 'Cold War' and the Soviet attitude and publicity towards Mark Twain and his American censorship because of these matters) and the entire consenseus - looked at in the long view - is that societal attitudes are shaped by the formed reactions or lacks of reactions and directions by the reigning staus-quo the 'leaders' at the top who distill and formulate the points of view and overall societal intellect they seek - Illumanti versions of self-preservation - and in this case (to be sure) they had and have done their work (or as the book says) - they have managed to delete from public reference any and all of Mark Twain's 'dark' side and instead have him publically portrayed as the great artist portraying all the innocent illusions of an American boyhood : nothing could be farther from the truth yet that is what we have been presented with - NO MATTER the lion's share of falsehood goes in wishing for the truth to be faced.

THE THUDDING SILENCE

3. THE THUDDING SILENCE:

And then I looked up and said : “why have you done this to me ? you have taken off both my hands and shackled my arms and now I cannot even erase the slate clean so as to start anew" and had there been reason to answer something surely I would have but instead I saw straight before me the oldest man I’ve ever witnessed sitting on the bench nearby and his head was down and he moved not a muscle NOTHING stirred as if he were dead and I watched for his face to turn my way or some movement of his arm or anything to show me life but the gray suit and the old fedora simply remained motionless and near his side was a cane which moved not and nothing showed life at all and the seat he was on - I knew - had been recently sat upon so that was not un-recent but still he made no motion and I thought of the aged and wondered of them and their ways and thought of myself in that situation : would I welcome death itself and await the respite of the thoughts of it instead ? would it speak to me and keep my ears and mind busy or would I be ambling solitary without a chance to exchange thoughts with DEATH itself and all its minions and before him was the harbor and the bay and a few boats were rocking as the water swayed - cargo ships and tugboats and tankers sliding grimly by with that strange silence of commerce on water and there was nothing to do but watch and wait (just as HE was doing too!) and all I heard was that thudding silence for TIME the erstwhile enemy DOTH not speak to us.