A NEW WORD FROM MR. DAEDALUS

120. A NEW WORD FROM MR. DAEDALUS:

- ALL OF THIS WAY TO HEAR MY PALE WORDS (Toynebee's April Gazette):

"['Some people go to school to get strong some to get weak and it makes a big difference for the rest of your life which of those two options you select - if either - because the structure you're about to build gets built around that' - so said Mr. Daedalus on the fifth day of the week and if there was never anything else to balance the wheel there was always an incessant jabbing with the sword of one thing or another - a poke in the ribs for good measure and a look up the young girls' dresses too if it became possible : a long week in the mountains with a stablemate of Jeffrey Kahn and all they ever did was talk about girls and tits and how to make out in the back of a car 'some say that foreign cars are too small for that and you know man it's been PROVEN that a Renault 4CV is by far too small to have sex in' but of course trying to tell that to 50,000 citizens of France would get you nowhere but laughed out to dimanche and beyond and the only thing that works is comedy - one joke after the other - just like the mime who plays endlessly over and over in Central Park - one or the other mime anyway they're all so much alike - all you can do is shrug and laugh it off while parlaying some inoffensive smirk into a circus act of wonder and awe and even if they DO mean to be tragic like some stupid clown it's always one way or the other you're going to feel something for what they've done and I myself have seen people in groups of ten and more huddled around these crazy fools laughing or crying together - they actually react to all this play-acting stuff open-air bullshit in the park and I always figure the way they hand out holidays nowadays there will soon be a National Open-Air Bullshit in the Park Day and it'll be made into a 3-day weekend too just you watch and see - that's how strong these fucking unions are especially the teachers' union and the municipal workers' unions and all that crap they want time off for pissing for Christ's good sake and they want double-time for that no less but it's like that wherever you go - people with their hands out wanting this or that demanding something from someone else just like extortion or whatever it would be called in an any other context but for this for this they claim to teach your kids or take your garbage away or arrange your government paperwork and so much more but every union master living like a king on a hilltop estate somewhere has done all that with stolen money and the bribe-graft-corruption of lucrative double-dealing and falsehoods and lies but that's always been called GOVERNANCE and so what else and every so often they say they 'let you vote' yeah well so what here put your fucking hand down my pants and vote for this how's that why don't 'cha and the whole fucking liberal world's a slime-hole of cum and corruption so what else can we do - take your clothes off and lay flat down you flea-bag two-fisted cum-guzzling whore (that's the way you might as well talk to the world and to every freaking person in it) AfuckingMen!']" - and so said Mr. Daedalus on the fifth day of the week and I noticed too that he had a brown stained charcoal/sepia portrait of himself pasted to the wall and it looked so old and yellowed that I'd not have been able to place a date upon it if I had to but I was sure it had come down through the centuries and I figured just as much that he was probably three hundred years old himself and in his fifteenth consecutive lifetime or something talk about reincarnation and karmic effect and all that he was putting out some great lessons to the world if anyone would listen but it was worse than deafness this stupidity I sensed and the reflected glaze of frozen eyes in window panes just seemed to be as immaterial and dead to me as stories of the flood or any other ancient tale no one wishes to prove or believe in anymore and no matter how many times it dawned on people that they may have been here before and may have been responsible themselves for all the fossils of the past they still took no note of anything other than the end of their capricious noses : bridgeweed catdump horseplop bullshit all together one two three : and listen to the pundits talk about the pundits if that's what you want to do but I've got better things than that to do and I intend to do them and I'll build me a parakeet bridge by the Sermon on the Mount and cross over to the other side LA DE DA to you ('consider the lilies of the field - how they are poisoned and mowed and shackled and killed - and then look at your fallen brothers all dead on the field and counted as yield and corpses and death') AH the manuverability of wartime and all that IT brings - blood on the cots and death in the springs and I waited a long time for him to come out and I said back to him "sir what did you want to do by your words and to whom you addressed what you said?" and he replied "my sovereign my soldier my legal my son I wish not for anything and I'm sorry you've come ALL OF THIS WAY to hear my pale words - for nothing was meant nor nothing deserved" and I figured if that was considered humility today it was good enough for me so we both sat down together at the outdoor cafe and had coffee and wine and tea and more and all he could do was to keep me from crying and keep himself from trying to placate the ornery crowd which had built - arriving en masse like some privy lord's possee - and soon enough someone else popped up (a reporter she said for 'Toynebee's April Gazette' and she asked us both if we "preferred to forget or to dwell on philosophy's horrors " and "was the twentieth century worse than this?" and then he stood up this Mr. Daedalus fellow and coughing up blood gave a long-winded speech about captives and cavaliers and the difference of each from the other but all that was over before I realized a thing and then he sat down and HE started to sing 'I want an old-fashioned kitchen where I can sit by the well and look out the meadow and see clear to Hell - it's not that much I'm asking and my father had more but I sure would be willing to take it I'm sure - and the wind in the meadow may whisper my name but I'll pretend I don't hear it if it's all the same' - and with the end of that wonderful tune he stood up to bend and the whole place applauded as he sat down again.
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I found out the Death Maiden wears gloves and strangles the living slowly and every graveyard across the land has a place or two dedicated to her - though they may call it anything else they choose 'Comfort Grove' 'Way of the Manger' 'Palace of Violet Roses' whatever they choose - even 'Chapel of Heavenly Rest' - but they're all the same in being a place for people LIVING people to sit and dwell upon the dead - those they've put in the ground before them and marked the spots with bits of granite engraved with names and dates and there's always the Hands of Mary to comfort them some flickering candle of light a few rays of golden sunlight breaking through the clouds a long hilltop vista with a Heavenly City off in the distance but NO MATTER it's always the same and whereas in the old days a cow may have grazed on the graveyard lee or some sheep chipping hard on the grass kept it low nowadays by contrast there's the miserly drone of a drumming tractor to tear up the earth and pull out a hole - and into that hole's where they drop the departed and fill it back up and tap it down hard and the widow or kin or family or brother comes by now and then to think of what was : nothing but sadness and she always wears gloves.