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.