PRINCETON

103. PRINCETON:

I am emboldened to write of something over and over again something fallen or brokered by Satan or Stan whichever you’d choose no matter no differential to me or any other lefty lanky centerfield hunk in yon bleachers (whisper whisper: ‘take me out to the ballgame take me out to the crowd’) for as I think of things I think of you and the falling of you and the hammer of you and the stealth bomber necklace of laughter of you the dark KNIGHT of the soul of you amazing Grace herself and we are falling falling ever onward and BULLETIN: ‘you can do three things at once you are doing them already and 1000 eyes turning blue will witness what I say HERE HERE on the banks of the Pola Negri River itself' (now silent as a group the actors prepare their first decline) - we watch the sky ahead of us and realize with grave intent 1. we are spinning in air 2. we are orbiting in great space upon that spinning globe and 3. we are AS ONE all together falling headlong through space and in this single vast great harmony we make our real and tortured world conform RELATIVITY it is and all that it is too but (whisper whisper: ‘listen this is Princeton this is Library Place where the great one lived and it is his theory we’ve consumed’) but so what no matter what the crossing guard said the thief said the truck driver said even the terribly bent old man sitting idly on a bench ‘rrridden the newsapaper son for whetiver it may bring ta me’ and no one followed but thought : ‘damned old rummy may he go to his hell as sober as me.’

TO INFURIATE THE CONVENTIONAL ELDERS

102. TO INFURIATE THE CONVENTIONAL ELDERS:

No matter how one looks at things it is obvious that the dark ages are returning - we view them only reluctantly and without any alternative - as we realize probably too that we have no control (singularly) over any of it no matter what poetry or philosophy or any of the ‘soft’ sciences say (‘a poet AND a warrior – and as a warrior none of the poets can even approach him…’) : wily like Odysseus as impetuous as the Scarlet Pimpernel like Hamlet he pretends to be crazy and like Joan of Arc he comes from nowhere – ardent and innocent – to infuriate the conventional elders like the Athenian rogue Alcibiades he goes over for a time to the enemy side and like Robin Hood he would (were he to) gather a band of outcasts and outlaws in the wilderness and riotously defame slay and change everything he and they could like Lear he is overthrown and betrayed by his offspring .
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These are the things of my remembrance from years of long ago now as I look back and relive everything I have stored : there are dark openings all along Twenty-first Street and in each opening something is happening for it is deepest night and above the street the lit lofts are filled with people everyone doing something all amassed together - art paint music saxophone jazz drugs heroin hemp sculpture madness alcohol everything thrown about and the only overflow as it was seen was in the dimly-lit alleys and alcoves amidst the entrances and freight-locks of each building where in the daytime other trades and crafts flourished until the nighttime came when from the same doorways emerged artists and drunks and jazz-bo’s and boppers and beats saddling to and fro here to there - talking their talk concerning their concerns and the window-starlets at play were to be seen twisting and cavorting while the tall curly-haired men played back and cigarettes dangled in leaping profusion from loosened lips bopping to beat and off-beat and the toiling line of crescendo and melody and counter-poise to music entwined within art and canvas and torso and hind and everything – as it were – was seen to move together as one AND :
(‘Attention is seeing - seeing is an art - as is listening : but one hardly ever listens or sees for everyone is so occupied so busy with the things that have to be done with one’s joys problems and tears and one has no time to see BUT time does not give you sight and time hinders seeing and listening for time is the space for experiencing and experience only dulls the mind and heart AS the mind is filled and the heart has turned away and so there is no seeing…there must be emptiness to see and to listen there must be a quietness.’)….

THIS MEMOIR OF SORTS (God's Own Ledger)

101. THIS MEMOIR OF SORTS (God's Own Ledger):

God's own book his ledger which today would be a computer screen only if the course of reality changes with thought YET to me the wind in the sailship's sails going the other way from speed means more and Henry Hudson's Half Moon would still have purpose even without Columbia's lies and : 'from Eleanor of Aquitaine I rose up sharp to seek my gain' amidst the trials of Inwood Gardens with all its Spanish markings - and that PUMPKIN had no eyes but saw things nonetheless despoiled on every porch and ledge and outside of 35 Perry Street I sought to find my own place standing (all the gardens were closed again for the season and so many dormant things now made me feeling queasy wander off) - and it seemed right then to me as if some voice was saying : 'SUDDENLY we saw him no more - the waters had closed over his head' - and only THAT was my notion of Death.
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Oh Lord what are we here for and what is the meaning of our life?
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"Well swell silly question actually and why so presumptuous to ask - as you are - in a world where no meaning nor answer is going to change anything and outside any entry of a journal sort there's nothing more than conjecture to report - all the silliest of things you hear - 'I am you and you are me and we are all together' the most usual one and another I recall 'I am You is WE are' yes yes that too but fingernails cutting glass are more profound than that can be and the trolley NEWLY entered over land and street across the harbor from Jersey City's broken face to Newark's soiled ass runs straight to Hell if that's what you wish to enter and there are NO passes long enough to escape from that : I once visited myself the old abandoned Essex Prison atop some lonesome nasty hill in Newark's open top amidst all the car shops and tire shops and some railyard or something and it was TOTALLY I mean totally neglected yet it was the absolute ONLY thing around for miles of any beauty and character and in addition to all that IT WAS THE ONLY THING there that had any heritage and history and story and mark BUT NO MATTER the silly bastards all around ignored it totally let it fall to ruin watched it decay while they promenaded the filthy streets themselves with all their awful stuff - booze bottles condoms baseball bats telephones broken bricks and stones - they knew absolutely nothing and were like another race entire - something distant and far and alien and broken and dropped there dumb as shit from some awful other place and TO THEM it's all been turned over - the greed the rapacious demon the very EVIL of the government and the land which everyone oh so very much worships now"
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Heard that once before I thought but couldn't place the voice.
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These men were dispossessed – I could tell that right off – had nothing and probably wished for less and in earlier years may very well have been someone – each of them – families cars careers and perhaps even local reputations for one thing or another but all that right now was gone they were skeletal remnants of a false religion of a God who’d failed them or who they’d failed however one’s proclivities would wish to phrase that - old withered men barely holding on they shuffled together from one place to another for food and the rest and here and there they simply had to LISTEN and whether it was prayer or some communist spiel about equality and brotherhood and all that NO MATTER they did what they had to for food and something to do and as they kept their sanity so by the same effort did they try to keep their place on this earth their appeal their logic their wants and it was difficult for as a man ages a man so realizes how little he knows and they knew even less - not to them the mysteries of the quark or the shadings of some deep astronomy with the philosophies of old for to them all of that was gone as slathered away as some sixth-grade level textbook they’d forgotten long ago and any requisite skills and habits engrained through business or their corporate once-had-beens or whatever it was all gone now and they stood alone as one or alone as alone - food shelter clothing was now their only triune God - so they stretched a hand for something and took in what they got and the very place they lived in was folding : the Bowery was so long over even its memory was laughable and now there was nothing but swarmings of kids and students in style and the fashionably lame pulsing each night from bar to bar and place to place as everything ceded the past away and the present for mortgage and loss - ‘university bastards’ and ‘graduate scum’ I’d heard them called - and the light went down on the bridges and tolls and the drawn-in lodgings were nowhere affable nor welcoming as pictures of some sacred heart and bleeding patron looked down from the cracked and very tired walls "these are the cheapest things I’ve ever seen come through here and the free cigarettes were rolled so thin you could see daylight through them" and the guy saying that was nearby and complaining of everything – the mice in the cereal boxes the scum in the coffee cups the holes in the elbows of the free clothing and what he didn’t know was that I was listening and in addition there were two people with cameras nearby photographing him and his cronies for whatever reason and right there - from the Bowery Mission to the corner of Spring Street and Bowery too - were people lined up for something whether it was a blessing or a blessing in disguise none of it mattered and the old foundry workers (still bent and awkward with arthritis) would have traded places with them for anything and some guy was saying "I only like the stuff that was real that came from real life" and another says "yeah the bible’s supposed to be filled with that stuff" and someone else nearby chuckled and said "bullshit to all that it was written by Disney and it’s mostly unlistenable but shut-up anyway’’ and this entire sing-song babble went on for some time as I realized how childish really these little men were and ME me of all people all half-their-ages of me was here deciding they were wrong and I was to be right and it all came down to me like a thud on the side of my head how awesome the real world was even if it WAS filled with all stupidity and doubt SO WHAT the spirit inside said so what it’s YOUR turn next – meaning me – and with that I swaggered over to the closet and took down a broom and went over to the guy Hank Swales and said "Jesus Christ if you’d ever try shutting up and cleaning up maybe something would get done around here and the place might then at least SEEM a little better to you."

PRIDE'S LANCER

100. PRIDE'S LANCER:

"You have to protect your edges - James Dean once said 'the giant sequoia tree in its beginning is very small inside but its bark is very large the bark is a foot thick but doesn't get any bigger and that bark is there to allow the inside to grow - an actor is like that' and every time you do an emotional scene you're exposing yourself and the second the scene's over you have to shut it back down and put your bark back on for if you walk around without it you're just a wounded tree - you're going to die because there's just too much stuff coming into you -- you need to go back deep into your emotional inner life - allow them to 'see' it and then close back up and in that way it is SO TO SPEAK that your ABSENCE is ESSENTIAL your not being there after you expose yourself is just as important as is your presence for [face it] the basic premise of everything is a mental construct a 'something' we have made to be and custom-suited to our needs and imaginings and wants and when anyone comes right down to it THAT's exactly how we live and not any other way : I of course don't like to use actors as paragons for quoting but this one in its redundancy is two-deep (being ABOUT James Dean but being related to me by Dennis Hopper) and of course as the artist I am always curious and inquisitive and ran down the name thinking of any connection with Edward Hopper but found there was none (Absence Essential again)" and this was Edward Aldridge Rutherford speaking to me at the far end of the oily food counter at Eleney's Grille a 13th Street sit-down place frequented often as much by regulars as by transients whom I'd never see again but Rutherford to be sure was the former - he in fact lived there like air stayed in a balloon and besides that his loft was upstairs - a light airy place given to colored coatings and calendar-girl pin-ups over-painted in metallics and washed with certain jewel-encrusted glitters and things and he was known for bringing them up in full color to large poster-board sizes and then exhibiting them bathed in colored light and sometimes coursed through with clear-lines of water-filled tubing colored that too and it all made for some form of startling effect especially the more garishly pornographic ones but nothing I'd ever really call art yet the stuff sold like ten-pins and he wasn't badly off at all because of it and there'd always be someone meeting him there at the counter to talk and then go upstairs to look and/or buy usually both but Rutherford was a cad too and had a way it seemed with young beautiful women who somehow thought that if they gave him attention and convinced him it was the attention he'd deserved they get a deal on a piece and a piece of him too - so he was always sleeping with someone and living to tell abut it - but as he said 'fuck was never part of my story and I don't screw and talk at the same time so if you want to know about it someday you'll just have to read my book' and then he'd go on about how only people who owned his paintings would be allowed to read his book and in this fashion he just went on ad nauseum and the entire sales pitch was unflattering to say the least - to him if NOT to ART itself (and I told him that and he'd said 'fuck YOU and fuck ART too - and if he's got a sister well then we'll fuck her also') but that was just the kind of guy he was : never rode if he could walk but never walked if he could ride - which was kind of the way he'd explained his philosophy to me and it all was a never-ending panoply of going to the dogs and calling it the races and never coming home with anything but a winning ticket ('30 to 1' were his best odds to play I'd heard him say) and if every man has his numbers than Rutherford owned the court - I'd once told him to slow down and more carefully separate what he was trying to say from what he meant to get across but he was unable to grasp the difference between any of that so I just gave it up and he always said it was 'time to leave Manhattan' complaining how it was too expensive and he couldn't live any longer in the style he wanted and even the paint cost three dollars more there than anywhere else and he 'once drove a taxi in New Brunswick New Jersey when there was such a place and before it was taken over by corporate goons and greedy political types who ruined everything and bulldozed the entire place to erect some socialist-concentration-camp-corporate-town run by Nazis and peopled by low-lives and third-worlders when there was a third-world and rotten spoiled shit kids pretending to attend school at Rutgers but puking and screwing their brains out instead' and I never contradicted him on anything because THERE he was in NYC again and not listening to anything I said anyway and I'm willing to show any man the doorway but they first have to know what a door is and at that point I cannot help them nor would I if I could (and I'd told him that too) but all that was many years ago and he'd never really learned anything new so talking to him was like talking to the past anyway - time capsule wrong nostalgia Henny Youngman Lenny Bruce and all the rest - for speaking of 'mental constructs' nothing is what it was meant to be anyway and that was that forever and he was back then when I'd met him living at 199 New Street in New Brunswick way up on the top floor and we'd go out on the summer roof and sit there in the evenings until late night watching the NYC trains run in and out of the old station and the buzzword then was that it was just 'cool' to be so serene and he had a small rental studio there and we'd go in and work some music together and listen back to what we'd recorded and then one night way after hours he said he'd found a way to break into Douglass College the Music Hall and we did that and turned the lights on too and the interior studio of that place back then was brand new and we'd just let it go using their pianos and plugging into their electricity and he'd rip into some guitar chords real loud and I'd play along with keyboard accompaniment and we'd stay until nearly dawn when we'd manage our way out and walk back to New Street all buzzed up - past the little dairy that was across the way right there from 199 and the guys would be loading the milk trucks and we'd listen to their voices like there were more songs to be sung and the oaths and calls back and forth and the trucks would roll out as we'd make our way back up the rickety stairs and back up to the roof to watch the same sun rise that we'd earlier seen set and it was all good and felt all perfectly right and this New Brunswick existed perfectly too and that was then but now it was all gone and he stayed until that day came and that's when he moved out to NYC and got the painter's loft he always wanted and that's how he got here and how I got here too - waiting to meet him and talk over the old days - and his mind was always somewhere and we'd just go back and forth and the people coming and going never knew what hit them and a few girls we'd know the local kinds the denizens of these places too they'd hang around and smile and play right back and it went always like that - all his theory notwithstanding and the time had arrived for him and I'd assumed it always was going to anyway and when it did it seemed or appeared he was ready too ready willing and able for anything and anyone of it all and then one day INEXPLICABLY to me he just walked out went upstairs and blew his brains out dead like some old peat moss slathering along the dewey ground - 'ancient dirt' like they'd say - and once he was gone he was never replaced but a million times I'd ask myself I'd say 'did I ever see it coming?' and I could never answer yes or no to that very real question because everything remained a blur and now for sure for him ABSENCE was essential and so it became but this was before all that - and he'd said - "no matter what anyone would have said this Dean guy Jimmy would smile in that awkward way of his and play perfectly the uncomfortable 14-year old he became famous for that wry expression that funny little speechifying that talk that walk that PRESENCE and he'd learned all that pretty well for it never mattered to him neither where he was or from where he'd come it was always to where he was 'going' that counted and we'd often go over to Romeo's and just sit there eating something and he'd watch the street and just looking out he'd start muttering and making talk for all the people he'd see walking by giving them words to say as if they were talking to him and he'd answer back and it always went pretty good but he was never really THERE you see even then ABSENCE ESSENTIAL mattered much and we'd joke and laugh and make one-liners of what we'd see and the entire street was a big stage some huge rehearsal hall for his mind and brain clicking and working hand in hand and he had the craft part of it down pat 'just to give'em all whatever they want and to wear the role like a sleeve on a shirt' he'd say and it was natural he had that innate manner that theatrical charm of a gentle man that twist of a homosexual nightmare that mothering quality that somehow everyone loved and he'd take it and give it but it seemed to me just that he'd never play TOUGH and I'd say to him 'Jimmy you gotta' learn TOUGH that's what they really want they want a smack in the face they want to be pushed' and he'd grin back and say 'yeah yeah well that I am I'm giving them tough but in another way a way they've never seen' and I never got that exactly but he did and he went far with it and then BOOM! just like that it was all over - some sad day in a happy mystery - and I never did see him really after he left town - he was just up and coming and then just like that UP and gone" and if I ever needed a lesson in James Dean I suppose I could have gotten it from Rutherford anytime - 'cept now he too is gone - but my tragedy is I never did and those paintings or whatever you know really they made me sick - I just thought they were awful and he didn't know where he was going - and maybe I was right after all.