AN AMAZING AND INSTANT REGARD

117. AN AMAZING AND INSTANT REGARD:

I often set myself off alone and singularly to basically disappear or at least remain invisible to any who might know me and in that manner very many of the best things were done and came forth - anonymity as a great gift - it seemed like some grand ancient Mitzvah of giving parlayed to a gift of presence turned into the legendary and more grand gift of total and sincere ANONYMITY : I wanted no thing and no one and had neither (thankfully) to badger or belabor me with the shadings of opinion truth judgment or choice : I walked in masked as a masked man walks and the great trains of my mind ran on time and the boarders all had passes wherein the travel was free and swift and far and no mishaps ever occurred - I became a SYMBOLIST with the symbol of my own lighthouse acting as a charm on rippled waters and when I entered other realms of experience I often thought it rare and rare again and if ever the long knives came out I'd be ready for the slaughter for I knew as good as anything else that words were the key to whichever infrastructure I'd find and beneath every action of all mankind there was a story and a distortion and a huge pile of words to find - somewhere in my foggy memory even NOW are things I barely recollect but the after-images and shadows of these things linger on and I somehow KNOW they must have occurred or been there but the distant unconscious fog of my memory allows me to remember so very little - YES there was a record store somewhere in which I worked for a few days or a week or so - something on Bleecker or McDougal somewhere and this record store became a goldmine for Andy Bonamo and myself - him for cash transactions and me for the occasional record pilfered and if so then so it was as I recall easy and smooth and delectable at times the richness of choice and the flavor of freedom we enjoyed (he's gone I'm not and know not how or why) and other times in some strange daze I remember walking past hundreds of windows - each an apartment each a room and not being able to tell between the lights if what I saw was a fish tank or a television or whatever source the jumping light may have had (for here and there fish tanks abounded and actually could be seen from the street : the slow foppy notion of tired fish trailing slowly through turgid water - something like life I thought something like life) and in those winsome moments of unhinged walking the very lights of the sky were in my hand the very pulse of the planets and the depths of the moon and its light amidst the shadows and planes of surface Earth - this descendant place this ante-room to something this outage of another past - I walked in secret profusion rich and filled and overflowing with everything somehow right and appropriate and secure and solid - and I walked amidst men who knew nothing of me as I knew nothing of them.