PEASANT UNDER GLASS

32. PEASANT UNDER GLASS:

And in such situations as these I would expect to hear things and read things read headlines like "Thousands Starve as Lightning Strikes" or "Mr. Walon Takes Predominant Motives" but instead all there are are noises various noises and not all interesting and they just go on and on around me as I sit negotiating entryways or looking at mirrors or revolving doors and in an insane simulacrum of fortitude and interest I find lonely variations on information and knowledge - things which I find should take precedence over listening to the guy with the race cars talk about his restorations or the girl with horses writing notes about her barn and gazebo and it all grates it grates on me like the sound of an afternoon’s circular saw cutting through wood at an annoying pace of some ten or fifteen seconds per cut followed by silence followed by another cut of seven or ten seconds followed by more silence (the kind of silence that isn’t really silence because it is continually broken and one’s learned expectations of it therefore include further noise) and far lost north within all of that are the people and issues which go with it all of them things making me nervous - the hallowed power light about to go out or the ring-necked pheasant landing on a run or the ancient sickening old joke of Zero Mostel serving ‘peasant under glass’ to startled restaurant guests at The Russian Tea Room with Mostel wearing an apron as if that made all the difference in his stupid flim-flam of a joke or how it is we all read history wrongly even as the light quickly goes down around us and diminishes in our faces as we talk until of a sudden we are facing complete darkness between us and find ourselves talking back to only a dark and shadowed hole from where a voice just came (blind ineptitude two strangers in the dark) and a sickening feeling deep in the stomach which never leaves or the stupid-looking kid in the ice-cream store the kind of kid who appears to be fifteen but in reality is a 35 year old man slightly retarded in loose denim shorts and glasses that enlarge his eyes grotesquely and just to hear his voice is nauseating because he talks like a trumpet swan or like a brain that should have no voice and he’s out on the fringes of Morristown New Jersey somewhere in the richlands of horse-country where people sit about at leisure enjoying their time off and endless white fences are painted and repainted almost constantly so that the wood density and coloration remains perfect slat after slat as the fences perfectly follow the wooded and pastured landscape and cars and carriages are still thrown about and it’s right here where this manchild is let loose and he’s on his own alone in the world and ending up famished at an ice cream store rattling off the flavor combinations he wants to try all piled up on one cone and the guy behind the counter is laughing and building a five-stacked ice cream cone just for the kid every scoop something different and the kid-man-child becomes delirious with joy and expectation immediately ripping into the topmost scoop with his large and over-active teeth and he’s off to see the world ‘Moon River I’m off to see the world there’s such a lot of world to see I taking that last rainbow’s bend my Huckleberry friend Moon River and me…’ and I remember the tall thin man the other one who walked into the corner coffee shop in Denville after parking his new motorcycle outside parking it perfectly just so first and then turning back from a short distance to again stare at it before entering the store and then getting in the line to order and never looking back or out again through the plate glass window instead standing archly straight and stiff and looking only forward and next to him the young staff-girl chatters away on a telephone while she’s on her break in a Starbucks shirt and she’s got her feet up on the table like it was her very own home and no one cares or says a word for the whole world right then is one delicious morsel he waiting and she sitting and the roadway running with cars and shoppers and the police car idling and nothing it seems could go wrong and YES! perfectly relaxed feet belong up on a table I can see the point and there’s something on the wall some quiz-question of the day about Vincent Price in the movie The Tingler and three choices are written for the answer but I knew not any of them so passed on that (I hate movie questions anyway) never having seen any of what it is they’re ever asking about anyway and so out of the loop then I go on and start reading "Ahmedabad India here in the adopted hometown of Mohandas K. Gandhi the great apostle of non-violence Hindu mobs committed acts of unspeakable savagery against Muslims this spring as mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched and young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight then doused with kerosene and set on fire and a pregnant woman’s belly was slit open and her fetus was raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city and the violence raged for days and persisted for more than two months and claimed almost one thousand lives and it was driven by hatred and sparked by a terrible crime : a Muslim mob stoned a train car loaded with activists from the World Hindu Council on Feb. 27 and then set it afire killing 59 people mostly women and children" so that’s the carnage that ends the world that’s the ulterior motive of all religions which is JUSTICE and EQUALITY for all our kind and it engenders so much pride and wonder and fierce nobility that things done in the NAME OF THE LORD whatever Lord it is take on a greater reality than the reality itself it serves so for these reasons and outside of these constraints we must go on.