THE BODY DOUBLE AT CARSTEN'S GROVE

99. THE BODY DOUBLE AT CARSTEN'S GROVE:

I was not the only one to take notice but I became the one with the burden of seeing and it stayed with me wherever I went so that I had no choice but to look at things with the eye of an artist and I'd find myself staring at people's faces as they passed or lingered and I'd look at eyes and cheeks and shapes and noses brows foreheads colors and hair postures and expressions EVERYTHING that I could see and I'd watch closely most often without the person realizing what was happening or even knowing what I was doing but each and every person to me became a part of the catalogue of that which I was living and I'd imagine structural bones beneath faces and like some Michelangelo in a different era I'd watch for hands and musculature and grimaces and it all could have been in one great notebook of my own - the looks the stares the leers the idle composures the men staring out towards the water while smoking or crouched along a sidewalk by some loading dock or other and the women passing by along the streets in frenzied high-fashion aspects of each other one after the other craning this way or that for something - shop windows lights displays - and the sculpted forms of the cars going along each intent on moving solid form and color and people staring and watching and the beleaguered drivers awaiting passage the jams the stops the clumps of autos and trucks and taxis doing nothing holding people scattering crowds the winds and windows the roving bunches the reflections on glass of all which passes and I'd want it all to stop TIME to stop and the entire meaningless thing to change over but all it ever did in its own silence was go on and on and everything that aged did die and everything new arose and whatever came forth grew into something else and over and over through it all I watched out from some window of my own making looking at one thing and looking at another and everything together as one.

SO MUCH CAN BE DIFFERENT

98. SO MUCH CAN BE DIFFERENT:

You may have no market value you may mean nothing to anyone else BUT TO YOU it is all that matters - all your terms and conditions are nothing to the great ONE within you still and fighting hard so as not to be buried and if you can just live your life and experience all that comes your way SO MUCH CAN BE DIFFERENT : ride that train and wonder and observe everything passing by and watch what alters see what changes and how it goes and let it pass by you watching while you surmise meanings and images and the renderings of time and energy and all its make-up of site and place and the tall buildings which rise and fall will call your name running and the sunlight will cleanse and the rainwater will drench and the words will echo over block and brick and glass and steel and the elongated smokes of moment and time will rise and twist and swirl across the waters while you watch the river bend and whirl and the ferries atop the waves and within the waves and through the waves will swaddle dream and expectation but whatever comes will come to be that which was coming and NO MORE IS ASKED OF ANY MAN ! do you see?
[‘And leaning in together we each beheld so much and understood much more - in some vague shading of light and object where everything – it seemed – melded together.’]

ABSOLUTES

97. ABSOLUTES:

I’ve learned the signatures of time and all its fine oases the places where sunlight hangs and the others where water and land meet where stories intermingle with facts and truths and even where lies go home to roost and every story with its untoward line towards meeting places off and weeks at a time lost and eight months IN FACT off and the only person standing up is the one who came too late but what could the chances be of only having ONE excess person it’s almost astronomical the odds and then did I hear him say what did I hear him say it was something about the absolutes of value and constitutions but what are the limits of anything I find myself asking myself and it reminds me of the idea I used to have as I’d listen to school science teachers and the like start talking about the MOON how its main problems are those of absolutes in that one side is always dark and the other side is always light one side facing earth always and the other side never facing earth and one side being too cold and the other being too hot by extremes and even if all or any of that was false information or the made up folderol of stupid school-teaching I always thought nonetheless why there had to be only extremes why since if the moon itself was round there were not gradual areas where these things happened where the extremes of hot and cold would be bearable for some hundreds of miles where instead of black or white light there had to be an area where GRADUALLY the two extremes met and everything was lit gray - a most acceptable alternative I thought not unlike a grave but passably acceptable November or December day here on this fair globe itself - but none of these ideas were ever broached so for whatever reason I guess none of that ever became part of the overall patter of the day -TOO BAD ! - maybe but in any case all these years later apparently with all the secrets we’ve learned about things and travels to distant places no one yet says a word about whatever is a version of ‘absolute’ today instead we just seem to run back and forth back and forth blustering and threatening and then destroying whatever good there can be but part of that always is the problem of ‘absolutes’ again and as much as I even hate to say it I’m absolutely sure there’s too much of everything right now just too much but nonetheless like some drawing-room patter between cigar’d heads and martini’d hands there no forward progress ever to be made as people only talk to other versions of themselves until that silk-worm fantasy of the mad-man with an exploding bomb plops right smack-dab into the middle of that room and things go POW! as things absolutely are wont to do…

THE WOODSHED LESSON

96. THE WOODSHED LESSON:

The woodshed lesson is one I never forgot and the sequence of events leading to it is perhaps unclear but I think I still remember much else having to do with it - which was after all one of those life-edifying small claims to information that one always thinks fondly upon and in this case what makes it so touching is the location for it was still again another of those cold dark damp days along the waterfront by the fish market at the lower east corner of Manhattan where I’d somehow ended up with time to spare and a few bucks too at least enough for coffee and something simple to eat and as I sat there (yes it seemed too like I’d done it a hundred times before) I was daydreaming while looking out at the harbor and in front of that to my eyes to worksheds wherein the fish guys worked my eyes were caught by a lone figure in a slicker and rubber boots slowly making his way over from the shed towards the area where I sat and sure enough before long this fellow sat himself down a few seats over from me and morosely garnered the attention of a soup bowl and a cup of coffee and I surmised (correctly all as it turned out) that he was a worker from the nearby fish market operation this day engaged in sorting and throwing various fish varieties from the boats as they were brought in actually boat AND truckload freshly caught and in need of sorting and scaling (curiously meaning weighing and not ‘scaling’ or scraping as you’d think) and all he was doing at this point was working hard in the early hours to set the fish market up for a day’s commercial shopping - this ‘shopping’ of course meaning the walk-in trade of citizens and landsmen as they perused the market as it was and all of the other ‘commercial trade’ customers had already come through for the truly early-morning pre-dawn was their time the restaurant buyers and purveyors and suppliers who’d always get first catch and usually bought in volume by weight and not in any way by ‘single’ fish as the regular shoppers did ANYWAY this was all said and related to me eventually by this fellow who did eventually come around to talking to me or at least responding to my idle and probably somewhat annoying chatter and questioning but he was nice enough about it all and I sat there as he consumed his soup and coffee and the next thing I knew there I was in the long middle of his discourse on ‘Cod’ as a breed of fish in need of new attention and he was quite knowledgeable and helpful on the point and quite ready too to lend his information out to a budding fish-fool like me and here’s how it went : "well let me tell you a few things from what I’ve learned over the years for this long arc of the fish-trade has greatly changed and some time back it was when the actual downward spiral began even after the dirtying of the waters had ended (‘you see things is a lot cleaner now really’) but that never really affected the fish none you see it was rather something that affected the ‘people’ the ones with the mouths that talk for they could SEE the dirty and foul waters and therefore they interpreted all that as they thought they saw fit to do but in actuality what I’ve done has always pretty much been the same without much change or dying out but the one point I’m making here goes back to my favorite fish my pet project my idea of ‘gentility’ amongst the fish-world and that my man that one word is ‘COD’ for cod is a fish deserving a story of its own and it’s a fish that is disappearing too - the deep gray waters of Denmark stretching to the horizon and through the gull-festooned towns there - for there’s but a finite number of fish in the sea odd as it seems and funny and the appetite for seafood is eventually to ruin it all in places like the North Sea the cod stock is about done which means not enough fish necessary to repopulate the over fished region and cod are so depleted that science isn’t even really sure any longer of the population dynamics but it’s at the lowest level ever and way below what’s been considered minimum for species propagation and all fish are running low as it’s the last food source still hunted on a large scale in the wild and I been in the fish industry for many a year but I’ve never heard or seen it like this like it is now especially for cod which is a really meaningful fish for so much of the world and it once was known as ‘beef of the sea’ as the most popular food fish and a driving force in the growth of the global economy and COD are easy to catch - thanks to a lethargic swimming style - and have the whitest flesh of all white-fleshed fish and the meat is low in fat high in protein and easily filleted and of course the low fat content makes it easy to cure and historically that made it the perfect fish for marine provisions and international trade before the invention of refrigeration in fact the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established precisely to make money by selling cod to England and it was once so abundant that off the northeastern coast of America the Italian explorer John Cabot reported catching them in buckets in 1497 but after 500 years of intensive fishing and the repeated warnings of demise or endangerment the cod started to suddenly begin disappearing more than a decade ago and by the mid-90’s all trouble was a’foot - which is about from where my main interest and trouble over the species started - and even with a fishing ban of sorts they’ve still never recovered (they’ve fiddled with quotas and sizes and changed the sizes of the net holes to let the younger fish through and free to propagate more) and part of the problem is the usual one of trade-offs and the refusal of ‘mankind’ to cease its work because NO ONE wants their local economy devastated and little towns and fishing ports all across the North Sea fight these limitations bitterly for in their local economies there’s just nothing else and nothing to replace the cod trade and they fight against the restrictive quotas and the shortening of the fishing season - which has already been shortened there from 10 months to 5 months but people are still scared and unsettled and interestingly enough - and this is where America comes in - demand for cod rose substantially in the early 1900’s after Clarence Birdseye developed his method for freezing food and the fish industry began filleting fish by machine and then in 1962 the owner of a McDonald’s franchise in Cincinnati invented the Filet-O-Fish sandwich for Catholics who did not eat meat on Friday and demand for cod surged again and TODAY it is eaten in almost every country of the world so to meet that demand the competing Danish and Scottish fishing fleets use nets that drag across the seabed and can sweep a mile or more of water free of fish in a matter of hours ! now don’t get me totally wrong there are still places where cod remain yet plentiful - around Iceland and the Barents Sea but the rest of the world’s major stocks are thinning rapidly or already depleted - and there were days back around the early 1900’s when fishermen could still catch man-sized 200 pound cod but such old fish are rare these days and another problem nowadays is the under-reporting of catches which is a chronic violation everywhere and it tries to control both the quantity of the fish caught and - much more ephemeral - the length of ‘time’ that fishermen can spend fishing which is a much more cerebral and intrusive imposition and one for which old salts like myself and others have no understanding but anyway I ain’t been in the at-sea business for a couple of years now and most of my time is spent on land mostly right here just dealing with the dead-end the other end of the business ‘selling to the folks’ as it’s called and yeah sometimes I do almost hate it but I’ve got enough salt and briny in my bones and blood to last me a few more years anyway right like this and maybe just maybe towards the end at some other time I’ll go back to the waters even if it’s just to die out there and request being thrown overboard a dead-man’s stiff and happy ceremony my last dunk so to speak but for right now this works and it’s even sometimes interesting to me especially when I start talking like this and the I hear some land-locked hotshots talking back to me about legalities and the ramifications of law at sea and the rules and protections of international law and all that SUCH rubbish such as it is and like I said before people themselves they just don’t know really don’t they just think somehow the fish come to them and are there’s to behold by God and the Heavens or whatever they’ll start on about ‘anything less than a total ban may leave the fish and cod population vulnerable to nature’s periodic environmental shocks like changes in water temperature or a sudden drop in the food supply’ and really they don’t know what they’re talking about they just want their filet-o-fish or their fish sticks fish and chips fried fish sandwiches and all the rest and the little they know isn’t worth even the knowing because what they don’t know is all what they don’t see - like ‘capelin’ (do you know what that is?) it’s a tiny fish eaten by cod and it’s found in ever-dwindling numbers and the lack of capelin hurts the cods’ fertility when its numbers are already reduced - but they don’t know that they just don’t even know that exists as a problem BUT I just listen and talk talk and listen and then go on about my way" and with that he was finished and he arose with a smile edging too on seriousness and extended his hand - a roughened hand still coarse but also wet and cold and in fact very fish-like - and we shook and he bade a fond farewell as he walked off and I watched him walking away heading back pretty much to the same area across the roadway from which he’d come.

EXCELSIOR WAS SUCH A BORE

95. EXCELSIOR WAS SUCH A BORE:

I’m stuck in the dark distant city once more but I’m walking out of it this time - past and along old wooded lanes which EXIST of course no more and which are but remnants of something which once was and the old stone buildings are all around me – nothing modern nothing sleek – just all brown stone with windows into which above me here and there I can see and it’s all arranged as if some form of campus was once here a PERHAPS church community or something of that nature and what’s left are huge buildings adrift in the very middle of a much larger city which has grown up around them and whatever new uses can be made of these places are somehow being made and I see occasionally people within - people who are using space as warehouse or office or studio or design and the one in particular I enter or am brought to has literally hundreds of clocks of all sizes and sorts upon the walls and design sheets of other clock installations and designs to be made and it’s quite large and very wide and is covered in a gracious and almost luxury-ridden layout of rich design and wealthy use and as I am there I am aware of myself THERE too which of course takes me back way back somehow to that ‘self-consciousness’ again about awareness of what I am doing but no matter I am just as soon involved in talking to the very skinny woman who’s running things and her equally skinny assistant both women and both fashionable but way too bony and thin to make sense of and their attire and their raiment leaves much to be desired – almost as if they’d been consumed by their work and were flattening out their time and effort for nothing but whatever achievement they’d decided would be their goals and it made no sense to me as I didn’t share their thinking at all and right then I decide instead to let it all go and in attempting to return to my real place I realize I have none and there is none and I am befuddled but left there in seemingly another place and another world and with all of that I see there’s really nothing for me to do but remain and so I do and acclimating myself as best I can I walk off into the woods - woods which have now seemingly appeared where before I thought a city was and the endless ramp of streets has turned back somehow to the wild forests of another time and the trees are dense and only intermittently are there buildings and structures thrown up in the middle of clearings and amidst great trees and I realize in another way that this is the dream-center of a great city before it was anything and it is all – at this point – promise and possibility and without any parameters its formation was possible in any direction and in any manner befitting growth or whatever and so it is that here I am SLIDING as it were between time and some gracious path of something else (but alas the letdown comes when all the real at last intrudes again) - and sugaring any maple wherever it may be that skill itself is lost and piling up the million leafs of Fall wherever they may fall that skill itself is lost and befitting tall skyscrapers ever higher that skill is lost and singing harmonic songs beneath the open sky EVEN THAT skill is lost and instead I am perched about recovering something of time and force and energy on this dimensional plane of light and the heavy weight I feel is the gravity which encompasses me and all I see (‘and whatever harm the WICKED may do the harm of the GOOD is the worst!’).