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.