AS I WAS BUT PASSING

108. AS I WAS BUT PASSING:

A guy was standing outside a bar and I heard him quarreling some with a woman in his company and it all seemed rather funny - what I could hear - 'it's not like Chastity never had a belt you know' and he was a little wobbly and slurring his words too and the look on her face - ghastly as it was - seemed ready to laugh in its perplexity at what was just uttered but all I could make of it was an argument about another girl or another drink or something and the very use of 'Chastity' and 'another belt' overlapped with itself - to me anyway as a passerby - in that a 'belt' in this case could be another stiff drink and at the same time could be referring to the 'belt' in 'chastity belt' or perhaps this Chastity was a person another girl I'd supposed - but no matter because just as quickly as I'd come upon this conversation so too I was past it and it was gone and I left muttering to myself into my coat collar about 'fools gypsies tramps and thieves' but every doorway and window held a clue and I searched them all - winter night blackness old snow clumped at corners little chips of street-ice everywhere and parked cars with windshield glass partially obscured by frozen melt or ice or snow - it was just like that in a haphazard mess of midtown winter and all its virtue couldn't undo whatever negativity was going down and men passed staggering and mumbling too and they leaned on buildings looking for whatever they were seeking high in the skies above or down on the street below : bar-noise the clink of diners eating their food in clusters and the warm odor of every exhaust known to mankind and pushing up and out from sewer subway restaurant fan and grating and MYSELF - without anything - passed on and I thought of Merlin's prediction a long time ago : 'the cubs shall awake and shall roar loud and leaving the woods shall seek their prey within the walls of the city - and among those in their way they shall make great carnage and shall tear out the tongues of bulls' and all that was a long time ago but it held for the present its new meaning for me and a current meaning for the present day - as I walked amongst it all - and I roused from my silence and screamed 'Hic jacet Arturus Rex quondam rexque futurus!' ('here lies Arthur - once and future king!')...and I thought again for solace of Eleanor of Aquitane (who was taught the unwomanly art of reading - both Latin and her own language the 'langue d'oc' [Provencal or Old French of the south] or as it is translated in the Languedoc phrase - the 'language of yes') - which I hoped would become my motto.

THE OLD STAMP SHOP (NYC, 1967)

107. THE OLD STAMP SHOP (NYC, 1967):

First you have to get acclimated and get used to the things around you being copied and mimic'd and you need to undergo the Platonic realization in a way that EVERYTHING is a pale copy of its prime ideal an we live amid shadows and secondaries - things dolefully inadequate and cheesey and that the utmost among all of that is usually the language of people : glib cursory irresponsible without real reference based in nothing but comfort and ease and essentially underscored by LIES and misrepresentations : but so unsettled THAT is the way everything is - I went into the stamp store along Nassau Street one day looking for stamps from old Africa but there wasn't anything there less than twenty dollars and I had but five and the little man behind the glass said to me "you are seeking to find something that probably is not in your range and these types of stamps are now of the old variety and of course no longer being made so the market on them is open-ended and only going up" and I replied "yes I knew that already but hoped to get in early and after all it's only a small scrap of paper really" and he was drinking tea from a clear glass - which made it all look so odd - and he hunched over again as if perhaps I was bothering him and said "look even I have a daughter and she was once little and young but now grown and less passive then ever before - I value her youth and innocence far more now than I do her activism and spirit - and would pay dearly myself to have that back" and although I wasn't sure what point he was making and whether or not it was being directed at me (perhaps 'representing' something to him which endangered his daughter) I replied "nothing doing on that count - and let's forget it" and he nodded and fell back into a leather chair behind the counter and seemed to close his eyes and then I heard "investors in these sorts of things are born not made - it's a given usually that one's father and perhaps his father before that have family wealth and have already collected a large portion of earlier stamps - for that's where the money is - in the accumulation - and if you DO have such collections one or more I'd gladly appraise and purchase from you what's valuable at the valued price and I must tell you I thought from the moment you walked in that you were spec'ing me out for future dealings - coming back and all that with your large family collection" and I laughed "my 'family' as you speak of it actually had trouble buying a seven cent stamp with which to pay bills - all that and nothing more" - the place itself seemed from the nineteenth century - curtained dark and dank with dust and old fabrics everywhere and old tinted glass too on all the counter tops and one side was stamps while it seemed the other side with more inspection and display space tended towards coins and I wondered what the difference was and if one man did both or if it was a shared shop in some way but 'collecting is collecting' I thought to myself and he said "I'm sorry not to be of more help but right now to be truthful I'm deadly tired and was hoping to close up for the day and sleep right here" (motioning to the huge chair he was in) "I get very fatiqued of late and just need my rest moreso than usual - I hope you understand" and I said yes and nodded and backed out saying I'd be back when better opportunities arose.
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And I wondered too about the magnifying glasses on long goose-neck swivels - large glasses which I surmised he moved around at will in order to inspect engraving marks and cancellations and things which authenticated authenticity (and even then it had me the odd redundancy of that phrasing 'authenticate authenticity' and I laughed it off and made a mental note so as to move on) for if there WAS fraud in this line of collecting (as probably in all other lines of collecting too) then this fraud would be detectable to a trained eye like his and I knew somewhere in the city there was an artist who made fraudulent money as artwork - and it was actually pretty good and passable too (if one could pass etched painted and such drawings as these as money) but of course it was done as art and somehow he'd gotten away with it but by this my mind was racing to ideas of what criminal use someone could make of this and the ostensible view of art (Giotto and all his perspective and all that) which at one point was used to 'take people's breath away' in the ancient days before our own form of illustration and image and projection and cinema and all of that reproduction stuff PEOPLE back then were still STARTLED by dioramas and murals and paintings which showed things as they were REAL and vivid enough to arouse and impassion viewers who'd felt as if they'd entered and strange new world just by viewing - but our day has diminished all of that and people are bored and jaded as can be and seek only more and newer and the rest be damned YET that is the onrush I figured that pushes along so much fraud and deceit - because people no longer care nor stop and slow down enough to check validity and such regarding what they view and so it's an 'easier' world to fool but a harsher one at the same time to defraud because THEY NOW KNOW EVERYTHING : (the paradox of the modern day to be sure) : we have gotten rid of mysteries.

MOST OF EVERYTHING IS CRAP (NJ TURNPIKE, 1967)

106. MOST OF EVERYTHING IS CRAP (NJ TURNPIKE, 1967):

The bus would take the New Jersey Turnpike whenever it left Port Authority and back then most of it still undeveloped was a hell-hole of pristine natural marshes and marshgrasses cut into here and there by warehousing truck depots refinery and power plants and all amidst this were the junked or junky remnants of old pig-farmer's houses and farms and junked cars and trucks and tractors and falling-over outbuildings which had basically all given up life sometime back in the 1940's but still lingered and no matter how much the NJ Turnpike is sung about or bragged about or romanticized over it was then and is to this day nothing but a filthy pipeline of crap careening over a vastly deadened landscape which gets no and never got any respect and any fool-hole poet or writer or songsmith who tries to convince you otherwise is a lying asshole no account jerk and the land has always been rapaciously devoured and these people are the very types who will relegate glory to a horse's hind end if there was money offered to them to do so - which of course there always is - and the political rapists and dumb-ass bureaucrats who do this all should be shot BUT nonetheless the turnpike bus traffic was quick atrocious and solitary and that alone had a lot to be said for itself and back in those days the terminal at the Port Authority NYC end was another foul pit of filth and debauchery - narrow gates for each bus marked by destination and the crowds therein jostling and pushing with peasant-skirted hippie girls from Cranford and Allentown stumbling around dazed and scruffy-bearded guys looking for deals and drug-peddlers and narcos and narcs and the cops seemed oblivious to everything except something they were TOLD about so the negative image of the shadow-world within was always able to be gotten around and the pin-ball addicts of real-life escapades and keno-players skeet-ball addicts peepshow creeps they all stood around making water and throwing up and everyone else had to walk through all that everytime everyday and it was a different world for sure than now NO plastic everything was metal NO COLOR everything was some shade of station-green and there weren't any real nutritious places to eat just the usual crap-melange of donut ham coffee and ice cream junkers ready to sell you whatever shit would get you through it all and compared to it all even the Pennsylvania Station train service was far closer to paradise in its way (new-found ruination destruction and wreckage of the old Penn Station) than this ever could be but nuns and priests rabbis and criminals doctors and scabs they all took the ride when and if they had to TRAVELING AMERICA crazy America SLEEP-DEPRIVED America cadaverous indulgent fiery fierce violent stupid dumb distracted obscure KNOW-NOTHING America.

BEFORE MY EYES

105. BEFORE MY EYES:

Time did seem to have gone away – and it passed – and I felt perhaps as if I were dead or willing to be anyway and something like the feeling of radio waves in window shops or waxen elixirs running down sorrowful streets took over my feelings as I instead watched the sky and realized that BEFORE MY EYES were passing the souls of the countless others who’d been here before and I wondered at that moment if there was any energy left for anything worthwhile or if even that chance encounter with ‘meaning’ was worthless and the one response I kept to was the responsiveness of silence and I saw the grass that had died beneath me in the long haggard dry days which – desert-like – had just been passing if that grass like every other soul and person and being had died and withered for some value unknown to me and NO MATTER at that moment I was unsure still what even I was experiencing and how anything of this had occurred but as I watched out I saw people walking and sparring in groups and the sightseeing guides of the razor-sharp day were looking out over cliffs moribund with rock and the flight of vulture falcon eagle and hawk and the passage of air was the passage of wing and as opposed to THEM was myself – completely listless and totally without energy and willing to die and be forgotten and done at that moment yet complete and fulfilled and needing nothing more for the ‘understanding which surpasseth all’ had certainly arrived and been here and came and left and if FULFILLMENT such as that couldn’t do me now then it never would and I did not want to be here nor did I want to be anywhere else - neither Libya China Chad or Maine to spread a few about - and in some singular silence of mime and pathos and fevered haunt and the want of meaning my very SOUL itself flew outward from me to join all the rest : the strange little man in corduroy the girl pushing the wheelchair the two old people sitting on plastic chairs drinking lemonade while they read the children learning to listen the people with dogs AND the dogs with people EACH in their way became themselves and the laughter I heard and nothing was any longer a language nor a reason nor a meaning nor a fault - for ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL to their excess and in their richness they each did overflow.
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“Do you have a voice?” someone asked “yes I have a voice but I will not speak it” and they asked “do you have a will?” and I responded “yes but I choose not to use it” and they went away from me trailing some remnant of light (a light I’d not seen this way before) and I stood up to stand back and shouted out “everything that I have I will willingly impart to you too!”
and a voice echoed back : “you need not for to each man are ALL things given if ONLY they can see them.”
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I have seen that what it all comes down to is fate.

WITHIN THE CONFINES OF WHAT IS MEMORY

104. WITHIN THE CONFINES OF WHAT IS MEMORY:

I have just returned home from a walk in the sky – the dark sky at night the black sky at night the one on high the one with the stars the stars which seem still to be hanging just as they did fifty-five years ago perhaps right over the house I lived in then the relative same spot in the relative same sky and the suspended moments of dipper and lance those strange skeletal dots in the sky above they watch and wash and waver the arms of MANKIND all below now just as they did then ‘AND WITHIN THE CONFINES OF WHAT IS MEMORY we still stand forth as witness witness to the earth below and all those little concerns that go with it’ and today the chapel still stands whether here or somewhere in London fair - still stands as witness – administered no longer by ‘John of good memory’ as it was in the twelfth century yet managed just as well perhaps IF MEMORY SERVES and so I look at the sky with wonder and find myself thinking back to something something fair and so different and faraway like light before it was discovered or travel before it was defined and I imagine yet again this effusive and sorrowful dialogue with the God of the skies above me as if present and there this very moment and the great voice back speaks stilly the vague response addled as it is by some strange appropriation of every old seafarer of England’s veiny old shore and in those words of questioning I recognize amidst the great night sky’s silence the uncertainty and pluck of every man who’s ever lived and in the responsive voice of God itself I hear perhaps something more missing today than ever then ["but sir to where are we headed the men wish to know for just today it was they saw yet another series of shooting stars on the deepening nighttime sky and well sir they are right now scared but are you not ? but to where are we headed ? and just as in the fair city we left on the banks of the Thames so long ago are still waiting for us those we wish to see again for as they are fleshy and fat and grown voracious upon the appetite for food and people so by contrast a’sea like this we are grown sad and lonely thin and sorrowful and beneath these changed and starry skies so many days after days decrease our appetite for anything more and sir the men wish to know to where are we headed kind?"] and in space high above me I see nothing but the echoes and the memory of all this in passing - so distant so vague and so gone - and thereby in closing this winter night’s tale of darkness I glean only this to say from some broad and booming voice of God in skies above: "…To get to sleep in latitudes called upper is difficult at first for Englishmen. It’s like being sent to bed before your supper for playing darts with father’s fountain-pen or like returning after orgies when your breath’s like luggage and you realize you’ve been more confidential than was wise."