QUINTE

77. QUINTE:

Of course without a reality none of this is real so I’m sitting explaining to this girl the lifetime of a word saying that it takes like 100 years for a word to get acclimated to the people who speak it and sitting there at the Olde Town Tavern bar where we’re just talking back and forth I use the word ‘upstairs’ as an example because there’s an old very old sign in front of us which announces that the dining room is ‘up stairs’ as two separate words not up the stairs or up-stairs or upstairs as it would be today but instead just up stairs and I mention how words first seeking conjoining are at first put together with a space as up stairs was and some time later after initial use become hyphenated as in up-stairs and then only later much later when they break into the language deeply are they incorporated into it as word unto themselves such as upstairs and that then becomes the lifetime of a word (not life time or life-time) and that leads to varied other things we talk about until then at the very end of the conversation as we are leaving we see that there is a book on the counter nearby in fact a glossy book for children entitled Extinct and Endangered Birds of the World and such a title as that catches our eye and we decide to bring it back to the bar where we’d been sitting instead of leaving just then and we begin paging through it reading the various names and decriptions and habitats Dodo of course to Rycmajikur Maricanus a old genus of Peruvian Mountain Songbird to the Laorfus Bird of western Africa which could sing but not fly instead just broadly leaping from treetop to treetop with a harsh wail a sound which no longer after thousands of years saved it as genetic development of larger bird-eating species bred the familiarity of that noise into their systems and lessened it of all fear and as we were sitting there of a sudden a loud rolling boastful voice interrupted us : “hello! I am Horatio Quinte and glad to make your acquaintances!” he pronounced Quinte quite proudly with a sliding roll on the ‘e’ so as to pronounce an ‘ay’ sound to which I quickly responded (not missing a chance not missing a beat) with “well hello Mr. Quinte how are you today?” thus forming a rhyme of some note myself and then he said “couldn’t help overhearing some of what you said before much true and sharp of you I saw too the thing the thing about compound words was quite accurate actually and did you know that I authored a book once a book entitled “The Start of Mt. Nothing” one of the premises of which was that word ‘nothing’ you see which too started once as ‘no thing’ an obvious assertion wouldn’t you say and then had itself transmogrified into no-thing which is a phrase you can semetimes quite enough see if you peruse old volumes from the 1800’s being a bookstore fanatic myself of the old school back when all the old dusty tall stores along lower Fourth Ave. held many many old books still replete with the archaics of spelling and outlook and usage all gone now all gone pulped and dust you see but anyway the point I was making was that I was able to show quite decisively how in early language all mankind had to first learn to distinguish between appearance proving reality and at the same time the value to attach to a thing not seen which perhaps too became the difference between ‘no thing’ and ‘some thing’ both eventually compounded down to our nothing and something used frequently in apposition to ‘that thing’ which as an object has never been compounded strange wouldn’t you say and oddly enough even in old Latin you can see this as in ‘hoc diem’ which is their equivalent for ‘this day’ which of course English has adapted and mistranslated to ‘today’ a compound word once featured as ‘this-day’ and thisday somehow having turned to ‘today’ and even the very word ‘compound’ can be said to have been a Latinized assemblage of ‘cum poundus’ meaning ‘with pressure’ or ‘with squeezing’ in its day brought over to us in our lazy English variants once again as ‘compound’ apparently without the hyphen so you see there is at work always quite a magic and a distant touch with words as we know them and I would say we ‘complicate’ things sometimes but then that would lead me to ‘cum plicatus’ meaning ‘with many little places’ in Latin and brought to us as ‘cum-plicate’ later on ‘complicate’ meaning to ‘add levels to’.

POPE - ART MUSIC DANCE BULLSHIT

76. POPE - ART MUSIC DANCE BULLSHIT – ALL WRAPPED IN ONE:

Restaurant names Springsteen and Dylan and entertainment Guatemala Egypt old sky religions living memory in a tree ‘coffee cup’s on the counter jacket’s on the chair paper’s on the doorstep but you’re not there’ [Crap] and everything else whatever’s better than a prayer I said to myself and I noticed too it was raining like the first rain in three or four weeks and the ground and the streets and everything were just eating up the rain gobbling it up in huge draughts and the street was throwing off steam a thin white steam that floated (probably like coffee smoke in that stupid song’s cup) and I said to myself ‘what a fucking monumental waste all this insipid mourning and expressionistic warbling over the dead whether it’s one person or two thousand eight hundred some it doesn’t matter for it’s all the same the dark cloud of death passes and by God let it go' (Poe takes a ‘P’ and becomes Pope - there’s a joke) and Hugo Black did you know was a Ku Klux Klansman before he was a Supreme Court justice and as a nativist he favored separationism a curious doctrine meaning get rid of other inferior races and keep America for ‘Americans’ whatever they were (are) supposed to be or have been and LIBERAL Protestants (I love that root ‘protest’ in there) were convinced that their public schools were neutral with respect to religion (hey Alton you listening?) and as a result they unwittingly ‘imposed a nondenominational Protestanism on New York’s schoolchildren and today such ideas as school vouchers (for instance) may be considered neutral because the vast majority of them are put to use in Protestant Catholic or Jewish schools but what will happen to this fabric when applications start to flood in from religious traditions outside America’s ‘current sacred canopy’ ? will the states willingly cut the checks for tuition at Scientology Hare Krishna or the Nation of Islam schools ?’ CHAIR = Cahiers du cinema and ISLAM = I slam.

And yeah that was that but there’s a lot more too and I’m simply going to beat you all over the head with it ‘Message in a bottle that’s got to come out’ and I’m looking at myself in a mirror not liking what I see but seeing nonetheless what’s there in total and I realize as I age that there’s a lot happening to this old face growing tired and sunken perhaps lined and beat but more importantly it seems bumps and bulges are rising up little marks upon deadening skin blemishes and things I’ve never had before and they make me sad they beat me down they make me know I’m passing like a frightened flight of frenzy running out of time and out of steam but here I stay walking piecemeal between things ‘Pillar to Post and all in between at most it’s the natural order of things’ writing like the sky like that comes out of the sky ‘I felt like a part of me was being ignored’ and underneath the changeable sky we watched the wispy clouds reflect the updraft of evening so that it looked as if some great eddy in the air was drawing everything upwards towards Heaven as a concept and the slowly evolving orange from blue on the evening made contact then with the later depth of night and it opened up the sky to things like stars and the moon and I gazed upward in the middle of mountains ringing me and thought back some years to when I would watch the comet day after day in almost the same location as it swept across the early nighttime sky Hale-Bopp Kahoutek any of those names I’ve already forgotten but all I remembered was the sense of diminishment instead of largesse and feeling not how small WE were stranded on this earth but instead how puny the passing comet was and how little it ennobled or uplifted and how overblown all the astronomical hype had become and it was essentially just a passing slow light in an ordinary sky and I watched it nightly for near a month and only later on realized what it represented more than anything was the immense difference of DISTANCE between our ‘now’ and the present ‘now’ of whatever that comet was for it was so distant that even with its movement it essentially appeared in the same location each night for THERE WAS NO coming or no going based upon its presence and only a trifling vague feeling of something passed me by ‘under the elm trees along with the linden trees under the archway coated in green the fir trees caused silence the winter’s nights idled in bliss dark and open and oh so serene’ but what is it that makes these things happen ? “I don’t know and why you ask that is beyond me I am a songwriter and nothing more and I don’t think it’s easier for me because when I write I usually have to be very drawn or moved to express myself and it’s quite a deep process for me but I feel like I’m learning how to engage with another or writing in a way that’s more accessible to people instead of going off on my own trip” well I don’t know about any of that but the girl who spouted it I’d met in a Starbucks on Astor Place as I was scribbling between walks and she came over to pretend interest and then started talking responding to my question as my way of making small talk mainly since I was tired of listening to her free music and she was sitting there between things with her stupid guitar and she said her name was Beth Hirsch and I figured ‘oh good another Jew genuine folk-fucking singer out on her own like all the rest him her or whatever and that’s probably not even her real name it’s probably Heidi Menklwersch or something I get so sick of these tired-eye Jews pretending their persona makes them what they are and instead I felt like saying yeah I know Dylan and Leonard Cohen too and they both suck dick and make shit up two faggy-assed whiners like all the rest so go on run around with your authentic folk-song queries and hats and shawls and pretend to be what you’re not you know the entertainment industry is filled with you bastards and always has been’ YOU HAS BEEN but I said nothing and she said “I’ve had a lot of time constraints and things that are just now passing away and I feel like I can get better here at what I’m doing and songwriting is something I want very much to advance with and it’s a new part of my life I’m not yet secure with and the last few years have given me a lot of feed for the songs I want to write because inevitably an artist is whatever he or she lives or fantasizes about but it has to be a part of what the artist lives to really touch the heart - can you understand that?” and I nodded and said “yeah okay” and she stayed there drinking her coffee as I turned silent just about ready to spit something back at her but as I realized what was going on I gave up and again started to get really sick over these endless ‘everybody’s got a true song in their heart’ show-business types whether they make it big or not and they get all stuck and caught up in the little shit they construct around themselves and it all turns out to be nothing later on but a bunch of silly and dumb words strung together things of the moment and anyway I always think that once you get it made for yourself there’s nothing you can do wrong any more anyway there’ll always be some other jerk probably another Jew too who’ll be willing to write you up as a ground-breaker genius and read into every other utterance you ever made your connections to the deity and all the world’s wisdom big fucking crap deal and the next thing you know they’re running movements or testifying before Congress or having foundations named for themselves or hanging around Asbury Fucking Woodstock Park New Jersey watching ponies be born on some billion-dollar farm they own from which they get all their small-town earth-bound wisdom COUNT ME OUT because nobody will ever say ‘you’re wrong that’s junk’ and if they could bottle your farts and sell them for money they would but here she went again vain stupid bitch that she was “I got a publishing contract from Polygram/Universal and one of my tunes ‘All You Need’ was used for a German bank commercial which has been running for a while now and so there are royalties and other stuff here and there and although I’m not supporting myself because of these sales I can get with the scene better and just start performing and smiling and maybe making it happen” yeah right I think to myself yeah right.

2 WAYS - LIKE COUNTRY - BATTLE LINE ROAD

75. 2 WAYS - LIKE COUNTRY - BATTLE LINE ROAD:

It was in the course of dreaming that I awoke from dreaming I was awake that I realized I'd just been dreaming everything - and there was butter in the cup and all the ice had melted and two terriers were to my right both lapping at the bowl while someone named David Kane was blowing a piccolo sounding like a soldier from some very old war and there was a rag tied around his head and another bloody rag around the top of one arm and although I couldn't place any of that I accepted what I saw (not questioning authority is often engrained) and he said he was from Delaware - which I'd already known - and then I realized who he was (an old room-mate from seminary school) and I soon understood why he was there : he'd brought me a selection of old photos he'd taken from the parade field where the marshalls lined up and he'd been rehearsing some part in a skit about war and then - as he broke down telling me - he'd forgotten how to get out of the character he was playing and now couldn't get out but I extended my hand and pulled him back to THIS and we looked at those photos together : commingling memories as it were and trying to understand how far LIFE had gone on and then he started talking once again about something (whatever anything all I heard) - "good grub on Guatemala Avenue" he said and I replied "where the hell is that?" and he replied "somewhere in San Francisco I think but really I've forgotten or never knew" and I told him to "put the book down or forget to be pretending and get on with this entire silly matter" to which he replied "'Is she an Egyptian dancer?...in the first blue hours will she destroy herself like deceased flowers...before the brilliant expanse where we feel the enormously flourishing town exhale?' - that's Rimbaud did you know?" and I couldn't tink of anything to say but muttered "'to think that drinking wasn't even on my mind?' - that's Rimbaud too - the last line of 'Larme' a stupidly weird poem which also has the line 'as I was I would have made a miserable sign for a hotel' - which has always struck me as a mishmash of modern lingo in a poem where it never did fit in" and as that much really was true I at least felt we were getting somewhere.

LET HIM DRINK ONWARD TO HEAVEN

74. 'LET HIM DRINK ONWARD TO HEAVEN':

You are sometimes left with a pile of nothing and it’s that kind of nothing which drives you forward keeps you going even under the black night of the sky wherein you can no longer see anything yet of which you dream myriad countless depth of field stars as thick as paste and feathery light in the sky and you wake up remembering the vivid sensation of galaxy and stars and planets and constellations fat and rich over your head but then note the real situation which is you’re lucky over Manhattan to see a hundred feeble stars trying to shine only that and nothing more buy WHY is that it’s because there’s no conscious reason in such a place to have a sky having already sundered most all connections with the cosmos having agreed to put all that aside and erect the physical constellation instead of cold hard object and there it is in that which people live worried more about parking than darkening worried more about right than light for ‘there is no sense in the senselessness of space’ like these existential and curvy ants trying anything once - and ex-Presidents shave in Harlem sinks while the ghost of Adam Clayton Powell stinks and his brethren linger at the soda counter Rosa Parks and Sharpton Al dissemble wherever they can find a bus to sit in for it’s all that simple battered ruined broken bare ruined choirs count those fires catch the liars and even the political do-gooders fish in waters filled with acid-etch instead of good old H2O they say Al Gore rented a car in Buffalo and drove to Chappaqua and got there at 3:30a.m. for nothing but a long talk the rest of the night a long talk [that ain’t much] over coffee and biscuits and beer and wine a long long talk over 911 and what to do now that the buildings are gone politicize the capital since we can’t The Capitol so they sat around till daybreak and went their separate ways but nothing in the world changed except maybe the level in the gas tank and did he did he return the car I want to know and a head full of ideas driving me insane don’t stop thinking about tomorrow Tennessee Waltz JFK’s favorite tune Al private joke Linkletter Lenny Bruce discovering cancer at the YMHA uptown branch sacrilegious associates international Knights of Pythias high exalted masons Doctor Doolittle raging bull fight fire with fire Alice doesn’t live here anymore amazing grace ding dong the witch is dead the wicked witch the witch is dead ! and this leads to that and that to this so listen up class this is Shostakovich again for sure writing music for Uncle Joe who’s taking the fifth OR AT LEAST DRINKING IT “chattering monkeys dangling from their poles and children whirling in their roundabouts THE STONE EATER the man who eats fire the mighty mother and her Son who brings the Smithfield Muses to the ear of the Kings OH STRANGERS of all ages the quick dance of colors the LIGHTS AND FORMS TO BABEL DIN” what the voracious city devours it must eventually disgorge in rubbish and excrement so isn’t that why GOD gave us rivers ? ‘no more my young man for we are far too many and too much chemistry passes and the rivers already are foul’d and choke’d and clog’d with all that human passes and flows but what can we do about it anyway think back not so far long ago when the wooden bridge over Canal Street drew hundreds an hour drawing water and horses along their way would stop to slumber and drink and snooze and nary an errant Injun ever stopped who didn’t recall those wonderful days of old and then the stuffy Englishman Sir Al of Goreham Woods once Earl of Clinton with high nose high comes to see and spitting out Latinate phrases as quickly departs “anything sordidum (dirty) or morbum (distressed) should be forbidden within these Utopian walls for are we not building a space a place of refuse and grace yet you are having it turned to a conundrum of mire and filth and disease things I cannot abide – excrement dropped anywhere and everywhere even within the houses like some London of old a vat of deteriorating health alas horse dung cesspools strewn with the offal of butchers and wooden chips and kitchen refuse rotting foul Pissing Lane Dunghill Lane Puddle Dock all leading then to Pater Noster Lane so bad we were glad to say a prayer there like some dank and dark encumbered London of old you have ruin’t too this fair’y new land”’ and at that I noticed the tapping rat black and rich and oversized going right for his leg but we moved him before he’d be bit the dumb arse SO UNCLUTTER ME BOYS WITH THE SHITS OF THESE STREETS AND LET ME DRINK ONWARD TO HEAVEN! - (they sing back it is heard: ‘let him drink onward to Heaven.’)

THE FELLOW FROM NINEVAH

73. THE FELLOW FROM NINEVAH:

And just reading about the Civil War can make me confused and powerless where a couple of guys are reading a map of the Middle East looking for Afghanistan instead of Iraq and mixing up locations between the two with the map lines melding and all the borders merging and I turn and say "Ambrose Bierce said ‘war is God’s way of teaching mankind geography’ and they shrug and suddenly there arises the old biblical stories from some guy’s mouth and a Tigris and Euphrates reference about millet and grain with shared ideas of cuneiform and ciphers and utensils and law and the great sand beast amidst the royal ponds and swamps and sands where beautiful oases arose and everyone was blessed and happy but it’s all as much a lie as any other and what’s left instead today are layers upon layers of oil and slime and fossil and greed and so many missed chances to operate correctly or at least KILL the beasts and the evil marauders who ruin things like this but in any case here I am in the falling snow as deep as any devil myself in bad tidings walking along sideways in the wind narrowly defeating both myself and the weather trying to kill me or reach me and I walk along the old closed shopfronts with their winded glass rippling and buckling in the wintry winds and the gusts shake it seems absolutely everything road lights sway trees in horror twist white snow blazing sideways roars past in a noise and fury and slowly the local accumulations matter – coating doors and glass and monuments and fixtures and cars as they sit and somehow coming in with the cold is the horror of discomfort but the fellow from Ninevah pipes up to say it’s ‘more than all that’ no matter what I think the sand can outdo the snow and the heat can batter the cold but from either perspective I cannot understand a thing.