OF A FILM ON THE WESTERN CAMPAIGN

72. OF A FILM ON THE WESTERN CAMPAIGN:

[THIS piece has been dropped here in honor of Spring and to note the passing of Winter. In addition, it is written to show how the recurrent passage of all things returns us, over and over, to source and origination. The primeval, creative and conceptual 'Life Force'.].......
It is not that which is loved by Man and neither was it ever sought to be and the windward lass yellow-bird harbinger of Spring comes on - one without effort making no affront and reading nothing special as along the horizon the morning sky at new dawn it winces winter-hard and high on the left a new crescent moon lingers ahead or behind of its day no one knows and thick with gray clouds the roseate sky runs its own backdrop of ice and snow and sunlight arising as from this distance all things falling fall only in relation to one another and THEREBY nothing changes and slide-fast steady the sleek cars slip past the woods still unbroken but waiting and the rivulet streams beneath roadways and pipes are well-hid by endless new houses and roads where they’re left blackbirds and errant squirrels everything tired and gone for Winter so if anyone speaks it’s the ‘dawn of a new age’ as the old year disappears in the deepest-stock-trade of morning nearly already exhausted by light and in some expectations we fail while in others we rise to every occasion and aren’t we anyway all less lost than perplexed by now chance and random fissures in the fragmented firmament of everything holy but the bright gentleman in his cloak cries loudly "look nothing is sovereign any more" and the crowd hosannas and the old cars stop dead and the hills where the tractors left them deconstruct themselves back to other days wider times than these with oh so farther better tales to tell "what is all the thundering?" the High Priest says as he looks high skyward too and sees but jets and man-made glints of steel but ‘how high the moon mama?’ the chorus starts singing but it never ends having forgotten an ending and the muzzle-toting cadavers of midnight rise up from their soil and re-ignite old passions and flames in their night while the flugleman standing under a withering flag plays already his piccolo alone to the mighty dirge of marching men and wailing screams of the wives they’ve left behind and the cadence I’ve heard before I know "one-ten from Idaho and twelve-twenty-three from Ohio the boys from Vermont come back we know to their small Connecticut tents" and the plodding march of these opposing camps detest the cold and sit to play cards or idly drink chatter and stumbling through the décor of war they acclaim all they see "ah ‘tis always a wonder the sights these treks bring the landed and lost those high-class palaces with their daughters and sons" and they start laughing stumbling bending and falling and with no other words the dogs arrive frothing with deer and raccoon and every small bit of dead frozen meat they can find in the ravenous craws and dead to the world they roll over to die and Lily Marlene that goddess of Welch steps high to the stage with well-kicking legs and high alto belch singing ‘this’ll be the day when we die and every man will know his job and even the Corporal will try to live past this day in whatever way my boys ONWARD with joy this is my…." and they’ve already covered her over with screams and ten thousand hands of five thousand men each clawing at whatever they want and JUST AS THIS MOVIE ENDS we are awakened by whistles and sirens and booms and barely back out to the street the next film begins yet the building is gone and we’re left high and dry black mud on our boots and no wood for a fire just 30 odd men lost in space and desire and "yesiree Bob" the High Captain says "boys this is for what we’ve been waiting I SAID BOYS! this is for what we’ve been waiting!"

MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES

71. MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES (excerpted accredits too):

Leo Tolstoy was just here and he left without charging a dime or saying a word and it was almost as if he'd seen something spooky something which accelerated his departure and all I can think it was was Greta cutting carrots with her teeth but no matter because in her purple bathrobe she'd have scared most anyone anyway and just about at the same time I received a note from Carlyle saying I'd not be welcomed at his dramatic production but if I wanted to watch here's a free pass-for-one enclosed - and I figured that had to be worth at least twelve dollars but I declined the offer and went on my way or stayed my course (since I wasn't really going anywhere anyway) determined more than ever to be singular solitary and alone and united to nothing but me : and there were a few things people were talking about and stuff I overheard at the exact same time (befuddled as I was by trying to read philosophy between the lines and to learn the ways of all mankind) : be sure to put everything away and do not stay up past some pre-determined hour be neat with your possessions and quiet about your losses and gains both use only a sharpened pencil when you write out lists be sure the lightbulb you are using to read by is adequate for proper illumination and don't leave things behind you'd not want others to see - - and by God that was it and nothing more and then I muttered something to myself about how 'nice it is to arrive somewhere with nothing in hand and just walk out later on - again with nothing in hand' a seemingly perfectly innocuous statement but one fraught - as I saw it - with all truth and possiblity too but moments of clarity are far too few and often only come to the uninitiated anyway.
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'Prove you are alive - prove it!'
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"That warehouse is not burning it's only painted that way to look as if it's burning because flames are the logo of the motorcycle master-builder hot-rodders who work in there - pretty good trick huh" and I thought to myself 'no not really and I never for a moment thought the place was burning - what sort of shithead would go around thinking a 'good' paintjob would confuse such an issue?' and I let it go figuring that's the exact sort of stupid talk that these neandrathals thrive on and their small coterie of rocket-scientists and race-car builders probably really do think it's cool as all get out - this paint-job - but for me it's a big nothing and there really are so many other things to dwell on : ('blurring the boundaries between food and sex - in 1921 Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was accused of using a Coke bottle to rape a virgin - named Virginia Rappe - and Fatty Arbuckle's 'manly equipment' it was said would not do his bidding so he searched the 'fridge for a tool and finally came up with a soda container and whether or not the charges were true the public was more than happy to see him as a perveted overeater so much so that 'Fatso Funster' became 'Blubber-Thighed Anti-Christ' very quickly) but the more I reason this out I find that that story has so many holes in it as to be suspect - the 1920's idea of a 'fridge' is all wrong to me as they'd not really yet become accepted appliances and were actually referred to as iceboxes since actual ICE was put into them in blocks - only much later did the more automated and efficiently electrically-cooled 'refrigerator' become the 'fridge' and was this the first use of a 'Coke' bottle as a sexual 'tool'? or was the shape of it so derived from its use already (any bottle with a thin and graduated neck perhaps) and was that particular folk-use part of the reason such a shape was developed for the popular beverage (which wasn't totally popular yet back then) and does any of this actually make sense could it have been true were there public testimonies and the like or perhaps has all this arisen as folk-tales often do as part of mere popular lore at the expense of someone or something - fat people in general or Fatty Arbuckle in particular - who as I recall reading was in those days of evolving talk-pictures and comedy sketches considered as extra-baggage and old talent leftover and necessary to be gotten out of the way - comedy or sex whichever worked better - and perhaps this instance of local entertainment politics was all the more than meets the eye even back in that day BUT such is sleight of hand such is the ribald rhythm of comedy and solace that we'll never really know.

THE SURVEYOR'S TALE

70. THE SURVEYOR'S TALE - (a story of the 1950's)

Dwight David Eisenhower in the moron sky "things are more like they are now than they ever were before" well yeah all right I go along with that Mr. U2 Francis Gary Powers Overland Express let us measure the land with ropes and chains let us build great highways over everything (an idea apparently stolen from Hitler and left to ride) and the measurement of real estate is what I hear yet THE SURVEYOR’S TALE acquires a tinge of romance for ‘in Europe the idea of private property only came into being by piecemeal amendment of ancient customs and by the gradual nibbling away of the presumed authority of monarchs THOSE WHO laid basic claim to all of the land’ yet those who wandered (here and in Europe) had unaccountably managed to get by for generations without a clear sense of property and so it was for many years yet before that all withered in an onslaught of title and proprietary ownership which somehow said ‘if I own it I own it even if it is YOU who makes it productive’ and such vassalage tied the world up in strings the strings of church and guardianship and legal rights and authority and the great stern placement of ownership and title led to preliminary politics and the raging root war of all things - fought in time (another new concept) over the land-once-sacred-now-profaned BUT that’s how it was and is and even here as I slumber in density through the archaic streets of an old New York bedraggled and rotted by all of the same the right-angled gendarmes of count and command have taken all over the halls and lawns any and all that once was and is no longer - scads of greensward broken and cut tons of steel and glass piled high atop belabored heaps reams and reams of papers and ledgers and green-screens bright lights filled with people crowds knots of purveyors merchants deal-makers bean-counters financiers haulers packers scribes traders janitors scrubs and lawyers too (broke down disheveled heaped and piled in useless tired corners) and the men together seek the rhythm of the deal and the women stand in mirrored lines to smile and sway and the glimmers between them procreate entire races of same over same upon same the two-backed-beast of fame thousands of children rushing forward to holler and play and scream and yet THESE SURVEYORS WALK with chain and line ‘LEGAL NICETY and geometric orderliness so prized by new settlers in the northern colonies’ and the instrument of conquest was the ‘22-yard surveyor’s chain devised in 1607 by a little-known English mathematician named Edmund Gunter and this seemingly arbitrary length is four times a rod (or pole or perch) a medieval linear measure derived from the amount of land a man could work in a day with ten chains making a furlong and 10 square chains to an acre with both units relating to the work done by a team of oxen pulling a plow in a day and more subtly Gunter subdivided his chain into 10 units of 10 links each and established arithmetical rules that helped harmonize the old agricultural units with the beginnings of a decimal system but nonetheless in the end it is after all a pretty odd standard of length yet it remains much with us and Penn Square in Philadelphia – as an early example – is 10 chains on a side while the streets of Salt Lake City are two chains wide and across the country city blocks and suburban plots hide still neat multiples of the old feudal measure and the abrupt right-angle jogs encountered on otherwise straight Midwestern roads are a consequence of trying to fit a plane grid onto a curved surface’ and then they all went back and nothing matched and the surveying was haywire for the whole earth had moved and shape-shifted around them and beneath them all and PRIDE being what it is is just that a pride of considering that things will always be as they are BUT SO MUCH FOR ALL THAT and let’s let yesterday be but the purview of the lined field and the city street wide with wire and limb means nothing if it is not aghast at its very self first and since the matter-man’s first indiscretion the thinking that matter matters and that what is real is tangible and real ALL OF WHICH NOTHING IS but you can’t teach an old bog new pits or an old cog new bits NOR an old dog new tricks so they just keep coming back for more like wasted wounded battle-men weary with the trek "and my good fellow if you can consider this – that we are all arrived here from another place and that asteroids and all other space-born objects continually crash upon us here you will see that none of this measuring paltry man’s summation of his place and cosmos AS THOUGHT BY THE FEEBLE MINDED amounts to anything but busywork for all interpretations constantly change and alter the landscape we live amidst so without saying another word everything OF COURSE will change and continue to change and over and over and over so don’t lose sleep over that at all the world is not what you see it as nor what it seems" and those words seemingly shouted down at me were from Finnelon Pike the mountain-climber whose acquaintance I then shortly made as we talked for nearly another hour about the interpretation of reality as HE saw it mostly (maybe even as he ‘said’ it) but more’s the merrier where the Queen’s concerned so we let it rip crackers soup bowls ale and coffee’s later when the half-hearted stevedores and jim-crackies started coming in to awaken us to morning and he did go on "I do never mean to alarm you but negate nothing so savage as this for you see the true end of the world itself has already happened though we do not know it yet living as we are on BORROWED LIGHT which is all any man needs anyway and the illusion we inhabit is the illusion of being here for but a momentary half-note as in cosmic terms we were obliterated and slowly slowly now turn into and towards other dimensions which shall absorb us slowly and all our time and things with it until we are simply absorbed before the great cataclysm even reaches us and the errant behaviors and things and times and means and men’s ways will begin soon enough to bewilder us but something like things fall apart the center cannot hold or whatever that was will eventually start to come true and the prophets among us will be the ones who can’t see anyway for their eyes shall come slowly re-focused from this and towards that – to all which is about to be commingling and crashing as it is with the place we have now the real the fabric the old illusion replaced by the new but the wisest of us will remain quiet and the dumbest (only I can save myself ) shall talk and blabber knowingly on but when the unspoken assumptions are cleared away then the substance emerges and there’s no BELIEVE ME no prize for that as we strip the onion of the universe or the orange of time away slowly down to nothing but the primal core returned from where comes the essence in ‘essential’ which we’ve been so hung up on for these cheap thousands of mental years but really nothing at all YEARS NOT EXISTING ANYWHERE ELSE and although they did as a concept serve us pretty well it’s all over now baby blew ! blown away like milkweed in a horrible and fierce windstorm of cosmic piercing distant fiery wind" and in such a tour de force I spent a long bit of time myself be all of that as it may.

THEY MERELY TRAVEL ON

69. THEY MERELY TRAVEL ON:

For a farther other language he is writing in there is no reason or occlusion to be determined and just like endless people lined up for something free there are eyes and noses seeking to come to it and that is acceptable but needs a reason AND BY THAT I see the men lined up in two’s along the downtown mission for their feeding their 2pm free-food talkfest and they are lined morosely looking back at me who used to be with them (so long now so seemingly very long ago Bowery-days long-lost days of other times) and I merely looked back at them and said "was once when I fed so many of you and now you must fend for yourselves" and that having to do with the five or six turkeys and clothing I’ve given to that mission over the last few years YET I think ‘how many other men who leave a previous life return like this quite accidentally to the scene of so much of that previous life and then are face to face with that change that loss that leaving?’ and with that I almost shuddered to think of these men one after the other all forlorn and sodden and across the street nearer to me is a man warily waiting for us to pass by so that he can privately pee on the side of the truck he is using as a block to prevent people seeing him from doing what he must do and so I pass along not to interrupt him nor delay him and it is all the same for I know HIS story and HIS and HIS and determined to be different none really are but the slow dead light of failure and loss and passion takes its toll on so many of them and all we can do is help them then live within that loss and keep on and go on and maintain a certain minimal composure at least and (I daresay) then isn’t that why we feed them at all ? it has nothing to do with salvation or Jesus or the cross though we’d like to think it does but NO for that is only the motivation of the other side - those inside who are doing it - for they have made up the charade of their own meanings and outside there the men whom they are feeding and aiding know nothing of those other motivations THEY MERELY TRAVEL ON and in that BY THAT traveling they forge the very world they’ll live in for time and rehash their own arguments and re-do their experiments and castigate themselves for this or that until just maybe UNTIL that one day arises when they’ve had enough and are found to themselves willing to break free in whatever and from whatever way they can to go on and step forward and become another man one not known before and all it really takes is a certain form of gumption and (as I know it) a loss of fear of being ridiculed and separate and alone and for once all that’s out of the way no one nowhere anybody would ever make a difference before and like some audience with oneself so much of the interview’s success is contingent upon so much of which questions are asked.