ALL THE HABITUAL STORIES OF A REAL LANDED GENTRY

160. ALL THE HABITUAL STORIES OF A REAL LANDED GENTRY (nyc 1968):

It always seemed as if you heard the same stories and tales over and over : family matters the cruise the yacht the Rover 2000 the Bentley grandfather's two Matisses dad's oil interests and rail cars and of course Buddy's prep-school record : and though I never got tired of hearing them I did get tired of hearing them - something like slowing down to look at a car-wreck along the roadway or something - there were always a suicide or two a terrible debilitating cancer and long and slow fearsome death in Arizona or something and the 'final' trips to Barbados or Vegas for Hedgwig or someone before he dies : always some gibberish and it used to send me up a wall to think of the money these folk spent Christ! just for lunch three times a day and then there were always the first editions the expensive and framed signatures and historic memos of Civil War people or early old Presidents the African relics the gun collections and the ancient Roman coins in slip-case collection boxes in one of the safes the signed photographs of this or that person and of course the diplomas and certificates attesting to this or that and none of that included the bonds stock notes treasury bills or bank books either - so to these sort of people family business really meant something and with each tick of the clock it all literally grew - when you reach a certain level of wealth amazingly it seems that TIME itself then begins working for you as a slow steady and advanced liberal creep of interest rate advancement and compounding constantly take place in every recess and corner of even the darkest night hours and it all works to your benefit in increasing that wealth and not just 'holding' it (taxman be damned) but at the same time all that money requires more money to pay those who service and keep it and the possessions it brings - so it all becomes a muddy hole and a running situation which gets expensive and I used to think that maybe at some other level we're ALL the same no matter rich or poor because it's all relative then with needs and expenses as the money whether meager or great brings with it itself by its own workings necessary needs (in that sense I was as rich as the richest in that having a dollar brought of itself NO need for another while to them having a dollar probably meant needing another 30 cents or so just to keep it) - funny how all that works yet no one among us really sees it in its relative fashion being as we are each all caught up instead in the getting or the giving of it all.
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Perfidy is a mind's-eye problem and I found that to be just as easy as true - everything's in how we view it and even the supposed definitions of good and bad and evil and right (as you may have noticed) change well over time and flip back and forth over on themselves - we hate the Russians we hate the Germans we hate the Japanese we love the Japanese we find wrong and evil here and later there and then that very same evil is seen as a 'working and positive good' and such flip-flops and changeovers are sequestered and isolated and then brought out again in textbook and assumption after a time to begin all over again their strange ways of counting : and so no one really can claim a prescience nor a lock on to what will be ever or may and because of that perhaps you may as well just go with the flow and most of the many times I had a revelation it was about 'response' to things - I found that there really wasn't a way or a need to respond and that silence is the best response and not everything needs a response nor does one have to have an opinion about everything - there just are certain things you need not take a stance upon need not reflect nor consider - and that became one mark of my own distantly-dawning maturity (it was John Cage too who at one or another of those lectures I'd go to spoke something perfect about responding with the response of a silence which is nothing but a nothing responding - or something like that) and all those terms and names and figments and forms and diagrams and assumptions (as those just above) are false wrong twisted and evil themselves because nothing of that sort of 'being' even exists and those are all man-made-up categories and distinctions and so therefore only is silence appropriate to such a quality of wrongness (all based on false logic in that A never equals A and most certainly never leads to B but these are the things called mystery and the sort of matter most people never touch).

ALEXANDER DE KALB - THE FINAL MEDICINE MAN

159. ALEXANDER DeKALB – the Final Medicine Man:

I saw five meager men at the license plate mill and they were tuning up for war as such men often will - and no one said a word yet I already knew what was coming because I’d seen the rehearsals at the Center Stage Equilibrium Transitory Nature Theatre and so had heard most of the banter which passed for dialogue : BUT I listened anyway - “We’ve given everything away and we’ve got nothing left this whole country’s been turned over to wastrels and fools with no value nor education and we’re left to walk around in lands of our own abandonment and believe you me Charlie if I had my way about it there’d be a few dead bodies over this one floating in the Jameson River for sure” and this other guy simply nodded as he was blowing his nose with a large white handkerchief which seemed to suit him well (for he reserved nothing of his character once his face was hidden) and then he said “haven’t you anything for anyone left – you sound like the most cantankerous of fools” and that was the end of the dialogue as I heard it for they had already left the room and only the Director was there sitting with a Coca-Cola and two aspirins trying to figure out what else to do and he was writing what he said as he spoke the words aloud (but nothing seemed to work he grumbled and muttered and seemed to cross things out) ‘life’s a betrayal everything’s wrong the barnyard and the alley alike conceal thieves and latent killers together the warmest of folk are the coldest at heart death’s an infraction and disappointment has no brothers…’ and I figured (sincerely) that there HAD to be something more so I got up and went over and said (myself) “hey buddy don’t you know this is all lies and bullshit and whatever you’re trying to do it’s a bunch of crap and if you expect someone to listen and fall for this at the same time you’re crazier than I am for misplaced faith is no faith at all DO YOU understand that my fellow?” and then I remembered what I’d last seen in the memory palace myself - it was Father Alexander the Theatrical Fag in a ’61 Ford Galaxie driving down some Rubric Lane like a Maestro of Might with a cigarette dangling from his lips and a thick-lipped Allen Ginsberg smile beaming across his face while Belinda the Surreptitious Maid kept the entire dinner table waiting and HE pulled over and leaned to the passenger window and started talking back at me - “whatever you do it has to be real and the words really should flow between people even the small talk and the banter it should all at least come together as if people did really wish to listen to it and just getting ponderous for the sake of that alone is not worth much and also NEVER EVER do any of this at stage rear for it ALL must be brought up to the closest to the front of the stage as you can get for that is only when people focus on character and letter - each word of the speaker - make it all happen at the very proscenium edge if you can FOCUS THEIR EYES AND ATTENTION you understand that?”

and THE CAR COMPANY QUESTION:

And then one last thought struck me from 1961 : how is it and why that the Ford Motor Company decided to make a car they called the Ford Galaxie (which he was driving) and not the Ford Galaxy which would have been the proper way instead - but perhaps I was merely dreaming.

A SHORT BOOK OF LONG STORIES

158. A SHORT BOOK OF LONG STORIES:

Sometimes I think it's all in how you can answer the question 'are you in love with the world?' that designates how we get along and go about our daily occurrences and I know that for myself in many a day the answer for that would have been some sullen form of 'no' but that then there are other days altogether different when that same query would have raised a resounding 'yes' without any further thought and that's the situation wherein I'd actually like to be spending the bulk of my time because it makes all the other things move along much more freely and happily - it's like suddenly being liberated from a cramped and stuffy room all cluttered and falling down with things and being brought out instead into some more airy and freely-lit space wherein each item is placed carefully and separately and the resultant feeling overall is then of much more order and clarity - there's a spatial difference somehow which reflects itself back upon the quality of that same space - and it's NOT that I'm ever a big fan of ORDER if it's just for order itself (I'm not) but instead I mean the order-through-grace which comes when correct things just correctly fall into place and the soul somehow knows it - in some ways an interesting corollary with which to exemplify this is when they build those big scenic highways along the bluffs and ridges atop or alongside rivers - this happens now in lots of places across the country - and you know as you're passing that this is all engineered and cleared and laid out and paved with the most rigorous and strict line and angle but at the same time the enfusing force of openness and nature that it brings forth belies the paradox of what it is - you simply 'feel' what's happening and what's passing in spite of the fact of all the industrial awe behind it and the (sometimes) laborious work and force which went into its construction and it's a form of tastelessness too akin to being a cop or saying that 'God' is unnecessary or mentioning 'God' in all his malfeasance and then having the audacity to hold it all against Him - all that and nothing more (but nothing less either) - and ask yourself about these things sometime too : anyway WHICH would you rather have ? a short book of long stories or a long book of short stories ? and either way the answer is yours and becomes your world.

SO THAT I MAY BE (My Ritual Payment)

157. SO THAT I MAY BE (My Ritual Payment):

My ritual payment is something inexplicable - it hangs down from trees and runs with the water in gutters and eaves - and there are no words about it which would do justice to what it brings forth - today I went to Stephen Crane's gravesite (the 'fifth' stone) a simple grave and an almost afterthought as of someone added in uncomfortably at the last moment of need - no applause no mourning no special place for a simple dead writer beneath the Reverend's obelisk at the family site but it brought me feelings of true worth and value - near to Parkhurst and Trehune and Ebelong simple neighbors each and I recalled reading the Crane biography by John Berryman which spoke of the gravesite on the border of Elizabeth and Newark and the way the family plot with its obelisk and inscriptions had almost simply excluded Stephen who was rather later added in place as the 'fifth stone' which is essentially all it is - a small block set in the ground as the fifth and last block and it bears the inscription SFC with periods for punctuation and by it at least he's included in the family site but the entire graveyard there called 'Evergreen Cemetery' and still active in its way has lost a lot of the 19th century appointments like the metal-post fencing which once went around many of the family sites - these are all gone now and only the holes or some posts here and there still remain - much of the grandeur thereby of the more 'august' look and feel of the old cemetery is gone and at the other end too the place is filled up with Gypsy graves in all their ostentatious decoration and bravado-of-inscription with all the odd Romany names and the ubiquitous Miller names they often adopted here and Evergreen Cemetery with only a moment's concentration can still be seen and felt as it once was and the presence of Stephen Crane's bones there too only adds joyously to this wild delirium of death whether old or crazed or famed as it may be and it was and always has been all enough to comfort me as I think and walk the paths and odd also it is that right there within three miles of each other are cemeteries holding the remains of writers of whom I've become over time endeared - here Stephen Crane and his family and story together and just a bit up the road also at Newark's edge and just beneath the old Anheuser-Busch brewery and sign are the remains of Allen Ginsberg too - in his family plot of sorts - a much different place and environment but the same in the end - and these two places hold for me the simple keys to search and finish to the working ends of all things for here were men of words ensconced in their tired places and at ease at least within their own deaths - having done their works and having left their words behind them - they live on and these are but their bones and these their places all of which I can accept and revel in and visit and muse on whenever I like - and I guess that's all that matters as for me these little sleeves of place and time are perfectly suitable for the way I wish to continue living as I simply WALK amidst things - going on my ways singularly and silently too - mainly because no other people matter : the ancient Sanskrit simply refer to 'God' (as we now know it) as 'THAT' in their attempt at referencing an all-inclusive and unspeakable entity but I must admit to the awkwardness of 'THAT' as a reference - instead as I walk and proceed I like to thing of the way the Gnostics made the same reference : 'The Shadow of the Turning' - a much better attempt (I've also seen 'The Great Void/The Force/The Supreme Self/The Whole/The Creator/The Light/The Higher Power/Jehovah/Allah/Shiva/Brahma/Vishnu and Zeus) but in trying to reach for an adequate response to 'naming' such a thing I also realize ALL inadequacies in trying to describe something indescribable and - more importantly - I recognize too (and obviously) that it is most certainly OUR NEED along which forces this situation - for certainly there would be NO NEED on this 'God's' part for a name to possess or refer or properly 'hold' Him - so I don't spend any inordinate amount of time dwelling upon nomenclature and instead I just look up or around and about me to see the real world as vibrant and unspeakable too and vibrating lively with whatever possibility and promise any idea of NAMING could have - no comparison for sure - and really I don't need this 'entity' to possess much of anything now as I seek not POWER or FORCE or MIRACLE or REGULARITY in any of the sense familiar to Mankind in the old whirlwind God in a burning bush fiery-force sort of thing as it seems in these days and ages all of that is gone and long vacant and any premise-of-a-promise of a GOD working VISIBLY within the world is over as a concept - otherwise I WOULD EXPECT a fiery cloud this day right now indeed - but OH HOW that would screw things up for so many people and therefore (maybe) a 'kind' God deigns not to step in and upset so many : in fact TRUE WISDOM gives the only possible answer and says only one thing - 'do nothing' - (or perhaps in the prescient words of an old song - 'do nothing 'till you hear from me') - BUT DON'T stay up waiting...and for that matter I don't actually know why it is I'm thinking of these things in such a world as we have here - things ringed with roads and highways and cars and trucks and the most un-natural of houses homes and living conditions and everything made paltry by poor-quality people and a life-speed of no sense at all and amidst all of that here I am sensing something ancient and old and ragged and towering slow and trees and high grasses with monuments and markers where horse-paths used to be and old wagons pulling dumpy freight and boxes and lumber - and even the dead in those same wagons - the horse-drawn dead the famed and the fabulous who wouldn't know a thing about it and it's all together about me at all times and making me think and appreciate and enter other realms and ideas of places and time AS IF just as if I could travel at-will anywhere I want but anyway MAYBE it's something else entirely within me - 'Om Namah Shivaya' meaning (in silence) 'I honor the divinity that resides within me'.

THE PALE DRIPPING COIL OF LOVE

156. THE PALE DRIPPING COIL OF LOVE:

Oh Duke Mantee I am fiddling with your visual memory and see nothing but two faces staring back into each other inviting deep looks strangely apart shared eyes shared arms like lovers and the outlandish greens of nature and the whole entire outer world apart together we all are in it one by one the entranced fragments of legs and feet and the pale dripping coil of love OH the pale dripping coil of love whatever it may be and where…

THE END OF ENCHANTMENT IS THE BEGINNING OF USELESSNESS

155. THE END OF ENCHANTMENT IS THE BEGINNING OF USELESSNESS:

Well that's my ending - I suppose - and everything I could have taken from that time and episode I guess I did and life goes on and here I am 4th stool from the left counter by the window West 13th Street and all its fellows rolling by like some diorama of intensity with actors all playing their parts and no James Dean no more no Dennis Hopper no Actor's Studio bullshit none of that just the lame and the ugly as real as they are - staggering by or limping and pulling carts or nothing at all the old world resounds and the fevered new light of this one trying to replace that one and a few trucks slide into loading bays - the backwards and the sideways of cargo skid and package the Puerto Ricans and the black guys yelling back and forth like the fountains of some stupid Rome and the east Asians and Indians with their fabric shops and quality bullshit jewelry and nickel-plated crap and plastic and this and that radios blaring suitcases of sunglasses and scarves and wraps hats and umbrellas pretzel-carts the errant horse guy pulling some twisted wagon painted red white and blue the magazine truck with nowhere to go the few girls venturing out all powdered and sweet for something and from something else the coffee shop with three benches along the glass the school nearby for lacksadaisical kids the mothers who won't leave and the fathers who never stay - somehow it all works out and I listen to the clink of ceramic coffee cups smashing into each other near the wash-sink while the waitress with the pencil divides up some small green check where three men have been eating hatless in their business suits and the world is aplomb the squiggles are all set the days roll into each other - pushing one out of the way of the other and ten thousand people speak but nothing is said for time has its lock on the windows and doors and there's really no appreciation of anything at all - the now the then nor any of the moments we share - and I realize it all somehow again and over again and understand how it all must continue and time just goes on with or without whomever you're with and 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' if they still say that but I never heard of 'fonder' it should probably be 'more fond' but Rutherford would know that but he's gone and no matter because he'd say it however he wanted to anyway - rightly wrongly or in between - and the day he died I went up in the room with two cops and a forensics guy to show them how he kept his stuff and because I knew him well they asked me questions and the only thing we found - out of place and odd - was this note he'd somehow left addressed to me : '...I mean everybody lives in the same nightmare they just react to it in different ways and at different times yet the news is always bad and you have to live with that - it was the same in Plato's day - and what you're looking at is a human being which is essentially an experiment that failed and it's an evolutionary leap that's probably not going to work and unfortunately it knows it's not going to work but that's part of the appeal like some Frankenstein's monster - you know the look in the monster's eyes that says it knows it's hideous and deformed and is a creature who is going to throw little girls into the river but who would LIKE to be better - and that's pretty much us and all we do is move forward because there isn't any backward for us and there's no earlier state we can return to the genie's out of this bottle for sure and faraway and anyway the WORST people always end up on top in any group of humans the kind of tribal primitive creatures who crawl over the others to get to that top (some sickening valueless heap which only they value anyway) and they're the ones then that call the shots - throwing garbage out the window shitting in any corner of the field they choose befouling the land and choking the common good - and any organism like that is irretrievably bound to end up fucked-up and the history of human art and the history of human pain is all about this and with people coming up with crap like 'the lesson of history is that nobody learns the lesson of history' yeah well bullcrap to that and I'm done and a hail and a salvation to you all ! I leave you with this note and stick it up your ass for all I care for what we've got is apes with power drills still thinking like savages but savages with technology and we can't deal with the consequences of what we've discovered and we're the species from Hell on a tear and a rampage and there's nothing but blackness and fear and death ahead and I'll see you wherever we go but it's got to be a damned sight better than this and I'm rather looking forward to the journey itself.'