THE PROMISE SO REMOTE

28. THE PROMISE SO REMOTE
(The Notion of Something Natural):

'Old Gods are terrible to look at when they weep - all bloated like boiled fish - and one wonders if they ever understand that they have caused their grief' : when looked at that way we are ALL Gods wouldn't you say? - for unalterably sorrow is a handbag into which we stuff ourselves and so many I see with bulging bags and straps about to burst and they themselves almost cannot cope with even the struggle of carrying that bag through the streets - yeah sadness and a gnashing of teeth is all I hear for as Eliot said 'Unreal city/under the brown fog of a winter dawn/a crowd flowed over London Bridge so many/I had not thought death had undone so many/sighs short and infrequent were exhaled/and each man fixed his eyes before his feet' and no matter where that all may have been it is present now too and right before us are the bent and staggered lessees of a doomed time and many wasted lives seeking solace in the comfort of their own communal oneness - battered bent and broken - and the systems which drive them through tunnels are the quite same systems which enclose them in at each end again for they have nowhere to go and nothing to see - having shuttered and blinded everything of possibility ('I see them so alone and helpless/who will be kind to them?') and even right now they have slathered Brooklyn with a bloody brush and closed Manhattan with its foils of stupidity from Newark Bay to Harlem Heights and left in charge the anarchy of pestilence and the looseness of despair and there is nothing more to talk of nor anyone to see for spectral presences stand at each corner and we shake the dust off our horrid feet lest we dare divulge where we've been - ('I wander through each chart'd street/near where the chartered Thames does flow/and mark in every face I meet/marks of weakness marks of woe') - Can we return to Nature ?('No...Enkidu cried/it is a journey that will take away our life!' and then I heard 'why are you worried about death ? only the Gods are immortal anyway and what men do is nothing/so fear is never justified') - ...As when one comes upon a path in woods unvisited by men/one is drawn near the lost and undiscovered in himself... - 'There's always something there and it's either in one hand or the other - just like a clown magician to be hiding everything vital from sight' were the words I remembered Steve Krantz saying and he was an old-time showman with an interest in all things God except that his version of God was Trickster pure and simple and nothing else - every other word out of his mouth was about some way or other that we've been snookered or led into various states of disbelief by different 'Credos' and bodies of religious doctrine and one of his last things was how 'the weather people too are in on the deal' and it's now their part in the scheme to keep people down and disturbed all the time about 'upcoming' storms and weathers which never materialize and in the meantime all of the people with events or parties or picnics or something scheduled for the upcoming weekend or whatever with the predicted bad weather all begin praying and asking God for good weather - which eventually comes when the forecasted junk-weather peters out - and then the stock of 'God' goes way up as a form of trickery really when it is seen merely as a means of affecting the weather with prayer - totally useless foul and stupid motivation but the level to which people have sunk in this regard and then he'd say - 'no matter what you say this whole God thing is a weird sham because if He's really perfect he'd already know everything and how it was going to turn out and that in turn would probably lead to a disinterest in human affairs (which is pretty obvious right now) but if NOT then the infallibility which comes from the factor of chance kind of disengages the idea of God and the 'Perfection' of same from the concept and leaves one with an accidental universe instead - one in which people and events are random and constantly shifting and one day something can be this and another day it can be something else - and that's certainly not a scientific factor nor a confidence-building one and that to me goes on to prove in the long run the variability of whatever this 'God' is and shows a reticence and reservation on this 'God's' part to show itself or make manifest its presence or even consciousness in the world around us - which is NOT to say of course that that presence and consciousness is NOT present (paradoxically) in each and every ONE of us differently and separately yet NOT manifest in the workings of the world itself at-large and therein lies the dilemma of those intent on living a 'GOOD' life - that is : who is watching and how and if not then WHO really cares?' - and upon hearing this even I was silenced into some confused form of confusion - not because of the depth or profundity of what I'd just heard but rather because of some factor of confusion within it - which is I guess a sort-of definition of the word 'befuddlement' - but it made me want to go on nonetheless and so I watched him and started thinking of something some lady writer once said about writing and it too was so vapid even I was surprised to remember it but it went like 'just start out with something even one sentence that's true and that's real and go on from there' and of course I'm sure she wasn't speaking of God when she said this but I was putting the two together now as I watched Krantz (who had once told me his mother was a butcher's daughter who hated meat and that his father was for a time a sparring partner of Tommy Olivia - some third rate middleweight from the 1940's whom I'd never heard of) but I thought of these things in an offhand manner while thinking of what it could possibly mean to a 'God' and why to take either an interest or disinterest in 'human' affairs - the whole subject being so entirely salacious and stupid as to not be worth a dime but it seemed easy within these four walls of stupidity to let Krantz take his shot at glory (or rather his own shot at some middleweight affectation of glory) while pontificating about things we neither should know nor care of - to wit what God has for habits or for breakfast and most especially what HE thinks of anything : He who made storm drains and curbing I suppose and umbrellas and canoes and everything else which started out ONCE as a concept and which mankind has now whittled into some reality or some density within a material world but even I couldn't get up to address this crowd or ask Krantz where he was at mentally mainly because it wasn't my style and who'd a'cared anyway - it was like asking 'where was God on the morning of Hiroshima?' and getting 20 different responses about the 'secret good' of saving so many lives by unleashing fury and killing so many others but 'ending' a war - such conundrums bore me and do seem to go on forever and the prattle I hear sometimes makes me whoozy with shame or doubtful of continued living but HEY WHAT! the world's a place of scoundrels and let's leave it at that.