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.