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'.